Log in
Today's links
- A world without people: AI is a promise to wire the boss's toy steering wheel directly into the company's drive-train.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: Adding exclusive rights make economies weaker; Bloggers after the collapse; Why the media can't figure out Wikipedia; Who are these sf legends?; Anne Frank is in the public domain; Hollywood's MP in Canada; Piketty on Piketty; Vanilla ISIS; India throws out Facebook's astroturf emails; Google unionizes; "The Data Detective"; Breaking Apple ][+ DRM.
- Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
A world without people (permalink)
To be a billionaire is to be a solipsist – to secretly believe that (most) other people don't really exist – otherwise, how could you live with the knowledge that your farcical wealth and power springs from the agony you have inflicted on whole populations?
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs
This is what it means for Elon Musk to dismiss the people who disagree with him as "NPCs"; in some important sense, he doesn't think other people exist. It's a very ketamine-coded way to move through the world:
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/on-elon-musk-and-npcs
Solipsism is a very difficult belief to maintain. No matter how sociopathic you are, there's always going to be a part of you that craves the approval, love and attention of others. That craving is a nagging reminder that other people do, in fact, exist. This creates the very weird insistence on the part of the ultra-rich that they are actually philanthropists. Thus, the very weird spectacle of corporate raiders – responsible for tens of thousands of job losses – describing themselves as "job creators," and funding whole economic subdisciplines dedicated to shoring up this absurd claim ("The search for a superior moral justification for selfishness" -JK Galbraith):
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mason.html
Trying to squeeze this claim through an ever-narrowing credibility aperture forces it into some extremely weird shapes. Take "Effective Altruism," the belief that you should make as much money as possible by working in the most exploitative and destructive fields you can find, in order to fund a program to improve the lives of 53 trillion hypothetical artificial people who will come into existence in 10,000 years:
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cause-profile-long-run-future
Effective Altruism, "job creators" (and other claims to billionaireism as a force for good in the world) show just how much work it takes to maintain the belief that other people don't exist. The ruling classes are haunted by this knowledge, and as more and more wealth accumulates in the hands of fewer and fewer people, those eminently guillotineable plutes need to perform increasingly complex mental gymnastics to keep from confronting the reality of other people.
Corporate bosses have near-total control over the lives of their workers, who might number in the hundreds of thousands. But they also know, in their secret hearts, that they don't really control their businesses. If Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stops showing up for work, the company will continue to hum along, not missing a beat. But if all of Amazon's drivers or warehouse workers walk off the job, the company will grind to a halt. If they never come back, the company might never be able to restart, unable to recover the process knowledge that walks out the door with them:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance
Andy Jassy wants to think that he's in Amazon's driver's seat, but is haunted by the undeniable reality that Amazon is really in the hands of its lowest-paid, most abused workers. Andy Jassy isn't driving Amazon – he's stuck in the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering-wheel toy.
Enter AI.
AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete
Your boss is an easy mark for these AI swindlers, because your boss dreams of a world without workers, because that's a world where bosses are driving the bus.
The Hollywood writers' strike was precipitated by studio bosses' fantasy of a world without writers – a world where studio bosses don't have to be satisfied with giving harebrained notes to writers who don't bother to disguise their contempt for their bosses' shitty ideas. In a world of AI scripts, the boss decides what kind of movie to make, and a chatbot shits out a script to order, without ever telling the boss that the idea stinks.
The fact that this is an unshootable turkey of a script is of secondary importance. The most important thing is the boss's all-consuming need to avoid ego-shattering conflicts with people who actually know how to do things, who gain power thanks to that knowledge, and who use that power to imply (or state outright) that you're a fucking dunce.
Same goes for the Hollywood actors' strike, and the continued project of cloning actors in software and puppeteering them via chatbot: it's the fantasy of a movie without actors, actors who tell you that the scenario you've spun is an incoherent mess, who insist that their expertise in an art you don't understand and can't perform yourself entitles them to challenge your ideas.
AI is solipsism, the fantasy of a world without people.
Bosses keep pushing the idea that AI can replace doctors and (especially) nurses. Health bosses – increasingly likely to be a giant private equity fund – want to cut care in order to direct more money to the hospital's shareholders. They want to stop paying exterminators and allow their hospitals to fill up with thousands of bats:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house
They want to stop paying for clean needles at dialysis clinics and transmit blood-borne chronic illnesses to immunocompromised, sick patients:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-dirty-business-of-clean-blood
They want to use algorithmic death panels to eject sick patients from their beds before they can sit up, walk or, you know, survive:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca
The problem is that nurses and doctors are professionals, and that means – by definition – that they follow a professional code of ethics that requires them to refuse their bosses' orders when those orders are bad for patients.
The same goes for shrinks of all kinds – psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and counselors. They are legally and professionally required to put patients' mental health ahead of commercial imperatives. That's a big problem for any boss who wants to swap out in-person counseling for dial-a-doc shrink-on-demand services delivered via videoconference that serve up a new therapist every time the patient dials in, chasing the lowest wages around the country or the globe. The mania for "AI therapists" isn't driven by efficiency or by our societal mental health crisis – it's driven by the fantasy of mental health counseling without counselors (who insist on minimum standards for patient care):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc
Capitalism is a single-criterion optimization: it organizes itself around the accumulation of capital, to the exclusion of all other criteria:
This means that capitalism is forever locked in a conflict with professionalism, since professionalism is a system that upholds a code of conduct before all other priorities, including the capital accumulation. Professional ethics are, quite simply, bad for business.
That's why bosses fantasize so furiously about pushing AI into professional situations – it's the fantasy of a profession without professionals. AI schoolteachers mean "education without educators," which means that there's no organized group of trained and trusted professionals telling you that chatbot slop, high-stakes testing, and standardized curriculum will fail students. This is true no matter how much money you stand to make by replacing the skilled craft process of teaching with automation.
Professions are infamously resistant to automation, unlike, say, manufacturing. This means that the cost of professional services steadily increases, relative to the cost of manufactured goods.
The labor, energy, materials and time it took to travel from New York to Vienna have plummeted since the 18th century – but the number of hours it takes a Viennese string quartet to perform Mozart's String Quartet No 1 is the same today as it was in 1773 – about half an hour.
The cost of producing a chalkboard has crashed over the past two centuries – but the number of hours it takes a math teacher to show a classroom full of ten year olds how to do long division has hardly budged.
The cost of producing a scalpel is lower today than at any time in history, but the duration of an appendectomy has only decreased a little over the past century.
Economists have a name for this: they call it "cost disease." The fact that automation makes professional services (proportionally) more expensive over time isn't an indictment of professionalism, it's a testament to the power of automation for manufacturing. Bosses (should) know this, but they constantly bemoan the cost of professional services, as though the numerator (teaching, healthcare, screenwriting) is going up, when it's actually a shrinking denominator (automated manufacturing processes) that's increasing the price.
The AI fantasy is a fantasy of dismantling the professions and replacing them with pliable chatbots who can be optimized for profits and thus cure cost disease for once and for all, and if that comes at the expense of the value that society derives from professional activities, that's a small price to pay for finally clearing the most stubborn barrier to capital accumulation.
Last year, Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE fired or forced out a critical mass of government scientists, even as they gutted funding to research programs at the country's universities. You'd think that this would be a barrier to making scientific breakthroughs in America, but not according to Trump. He's promised that America will produce annual "moonshot"-scale breakthroughs, without scientists, by asking a chatbot to shit out paradigm-shattering scientific leaps on demand:
The problem is that while AIs can shit out sentences that seem to qualify as scientific breakthroughs, they can't actually do science. Take Google's claim that its Deepmind product had advanced material science by 800 years, "discovering 2.2 million structures." It turns out that these "discoveries" are useless – in that they constitute trivial variations on known materials, and/or have no uses, and/or can only exist at absolute zero:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643
But the fact that a chatbot can't do science isn't important to Trump – or at least, not as important as all the other things a chatbot won't do. A chatbot won't tell Trump not to stare at an eclipse. A chatbot won't tell Trump not to inject bleach. A chatbot won't tell Trump that trans people exist. A chatbot won't tell Trump that the climate emergency is real. A chatbot will agree with Trump when he says that offshore wind kills whales and that Tylenol causes autism.
For Trump, the fantasy of science without scientists is more important than whether any science happens.
America needs science, but for Trump – a billionaire solipsist – America is a country populated by people who mostly don't really exist.
That's true of tech bosses, too. After all, they were the original suckers for Effective Altruism and the fantasy of a world without people. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg announced that the average person has three friends, but wants 15 friends, and that he would solve this with chatbots?
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/mark-zuckerberg-on-ai-friendships_l_681a4bf3e4b0c2b15d96851d
Sure, we all dunked on him for being such an unlikable fucking Martian that he doesn't understand what a "friend" is. But I don't think that's what's actually going on there: it's not that Zuck doesn't understand what friends are; it's that he treats your friendships as problems to be solved.
Your friends' behavior determines how much money Zuck can make. When your friends arrange their interactions with you in a way that increases how much time you spend on his platforms, Zuckerberg maximizes the number of ads he gets to show you and thus how much money he can make. The fact that your friends stubbornly refuse to help him maximize his capital accumulation is a problem, and the solution to that problem is chatbots, which can be instructed to relate to you in ways that are optimized for increasing Zuck's wealth.
For Zuck, chatbots are a fantasy of a social network without socializing.
It's not just users that tech bosses fantasize about replacing with AI, though – they really want to get rid of coders. Computer programmers aren't (formally) a profession, but they are quite powerful, and have a cultural norm of criticizing their bosses' stupid ideas:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/
Tech bosses are completely dependent on coders, who know how to do things they don't know how to do, and aren't shy about letting them know it. That's why tech bosses are so quick to equate "writing code" with "software engineering" (the latter being a discipline that requires consideration of upstream, downstream and adjacent processes while prioritizing legibility and maintainability by future generations of engineers). A chatbot can produce software routines that perform some well-scoped task, but one thing they can't do is maintain the wide, deep "context window" at the heart of software engineering – a linear increase in a chatbot's context window results in a geometric increase in the amount of computation the chatbot has to perform:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda
But the fact that chatbots will produce technical debt at scale is less important to tech bosses than the fact that a chatbot will do what you tell it without giving the boss any lip. For tech bosses, chatbots are the fantasy of a coding shop without any coders.
This is a bad joke, literally. When I worked in a shop, we used to sarcastically say, "Retail would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers." We were unknowingly reprising Brecht, whose "Die Lösung" contains the immortal line, "Would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?"
Billionaires don't see the humor. For them, AI is a chance to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the firm's drive-train, and make movies without writers or actors, factories without workers, hospitals without nurses, schools without teachers, science without scientists, code shops without coders, social media without socializing, and yes, even retail without the fucking customers.
Billionaires love the idea of "Universal Basic Income." For them, this is the apotheosis of the AI fantasy of a world without people. In this fantasy, the boss's toy steering wheel is steering the firm. Business consists of a boss and a computer that turns the boss's ideas into products. Who will consume these products? You will, thanks to UBI – the government will continue to exist in this fantasy, but for the sole purpose of creating new money and dispersing it to you, so that you can turn it over to billionaires who singlehandedly direct all of society's functions.
Billionaires love UBI for the same reason they love charter schools. In the AI UBI fantasy, everyone who's not a billionaire has been replaced with a chatbot, and our only job is to receive government vouchers that we hand over to billionaire grifters who run the institutions that used to be under democratic control. We no longer vote with our ballots – only with our wallets, and in the wallet election, we only get the ballots that billionaires decide we deserve, and can only direct them between choices that are as meaningless as "Mac vs Windows" or "Coke vs Pepsi."
A world optimized for capital accumulation.
It's a world without people.
(Image: Matti Blume, CC BY-SA 4.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Necrosecurity https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/opan-2020-0104/html
-
'Tis the Season to Ensh*ttify the ACM Digital Library https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~tpkelly/grinch.html
-
US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack https://www.wired.com/story/us-trade-dominance-will-begin-to-crack/
-
How Screen-Time Limits Fail and What Matters More https://www.owenkellogg.com/p/how-screen-time-limits-fail-and-what?hide_intro_popup=true
-
KdK (Kinetik der Kontinua) part 1: Introduction https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/kdk-kinetik-der-kontinua-part-1-introduction
Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian Member of Parliament https://web.archive.org/web/20060217022615/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1060
#20yrsago IKEA stores make great babysitters, soup-kitchens https://web.archive.org/web/20061107014101/http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,392850,00.html
#20yrsago Deaf geek mods implant-firmware so he can enjoy music again https://web.archive.org/web/20060110053839/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/bolero_pr.html
#20yrsago Study: Best place to advertise to teens is in-game https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/04/study-best-place-to-advertise-to-teens-is-in-game/
#20yrsago Misbehavior in Second Life game punished by exile to “the corn field” https://web.archive.org/web/20060209002925/http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/hidden_virtual_world_prison_revealed/
#20yrsago Florida may sue Sony, too https://web.archive.org/web/20060109130626/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004292.php
#20yrsago CEO of Neuros to Congress: If you plug the A-Hole, we’re out of biz https://web.archive.org/web/20060106045933/https://open.neurostechnology.com/files/dtcsa.html
#20yrsago Click-fraud explained https://web.archive.org/web/20060103050629/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/fraud_pr.html
#20yrsago Canadian MP imports US’s worst copyright AND dirty campaign financing https://web.archive.org/web/20060624204919/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1058&Itemid=89&nsub=
#20yrsago EU study: more exclusive rights = worse economy https://www.ft.com/content/99610a50-7bb2-11da-ab8e-0000779e2340
#20yrsago Online fundraiser for mom being sued by the RIAA https://web.archive.org/web/20060604021749/http://www.p2pnet.net/goliath/
#20yrsago Sf story: Internet collapses, bloggers become homeless https://web.archive.org/web/20060105051729/https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2006/pdf0602.htm
#20yrsago Weinberger: Why the media can’t get Wikipedia right https://web.archive.org/web/20060104032042/https://hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-dec29-05.html#wikipedia
#10yrsago Switching to Linux, saying goodbye to Apple and Microsoft https://medium.com/backchannel/i-moved-to-linux-and-it-s-even-better-than-i-expected-9f2dcac3f8fb#.3vhxku71i
#10yrsago Understand: The esoteric criminal sentencing that mobilized Oregon’s Cowliphate https://web.archive.org/web/20220621233456/https://www.popehat.com/2016/01/04/what-happened-in-the-hammond-sentencing-in-oregon-a-lawsplainer/
#10yrsago Thomas Piketty on Thomas Piketty https://crookedtimber.org/2016/01/04/capital-predistribution-and-redistribution/
#10yrsago TPP vs Canada: a parade of horribles https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/01/the-trouble-with-the-tpp-day-1-u-s-blocks-balancing-objectives/
#10yrsago Vanilla ISIS needs snacks https://web.archive.org/web/20160222182431/https://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/oregon-terrorists-dont-plan-siege-very-well-put-out-plea-for-snacks-and-supplies–ZJglh9sRjx
#10yrsago T-Mobile’s “Binge On” is just throttling for all video https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles-bingeon-optimization-just-throttling-applies
#10yrsago Help identify the science fiction legends in these thrift-scored pix of the 1956 Worldcon https://www.flickr.com/photos/slomuse/sets/72157662390340119
#10yrsago India’s telcoms regulator says it will ignore Facebook’s astroturf army https://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/Consultation-paper-is-not-an-opinion-poll-TRAI-chairman/article60523944.ece
#10yrsago Anne Frank’s diary is in the public domain; editors aren’t co-authors https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/1/10698254/anne-frank-diary-free-download-copyright-dispute
#10yrsago Armed domestic terrorists take over federal building, but it’s OK, they’re white https://web.archive.org/web/20060103094308/https://www.opb.org/
#10yrsago Paypal rolls out the welcome mat for hackers https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/2016-reality-lazy-authentication-still-the-norm/
#10yrsago Hong Kong’s dissident publishing workers are disappearing, possibly kidnapped to mainland https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/01/03/hong-kong-unsettled-strange-case-missing-booksellers/78226448/
#10yrsago Breaking the DRM on the 1982 Apple ][+ port of Burger Time https://ia801207.us.archive.org/14/items/BurgerTime4amCrack/BurgerTime
#5yrsago The Data Detective https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford
#5yrsago Google's unionizing https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#awu
#5yrsago Ad-tech is a bezzle https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 -
Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ -
Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/ -
Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/
Recent appearances (permalink)
- A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (39c3)
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet -
Enshittification with Plutopia
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/ -
"can't make Big Tech better; make them less powerful" (Get Subversive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1EzM9_6eLE -
The Enshitification Life Cycle with David Dayen (Organized Money)
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2412334/episodes/18399894 -
Enshittificaition on The Last Show With David Cooper:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-last-show-with-david-c-31145360/episode/cory-doctorow-enshttification-december-16-2025-313385767
Latest books (permalink)
- "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
-
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ -
"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)
- "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
-
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
-
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
-
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. 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.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
How to get Pluralistic:
Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
https://pluralistic.net/plura-list
Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
Medium (no ads, paywalled):
Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
ISSN: 3066-764X
.jpg){kind=link}
