Online survey research, a fundamental method for data collection in many scientific studies, is facing an existential threat because of large language models, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The author of the paper, associate professor of government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research Lab Sean Westwood, created an AI tool he calls "an autonomous synthetic respondent,” which can answer survey questions and “demonstrated a near-flawless ability to bypass the full range” of “state-of-the-art” methods for detecting bots. 

According to the paper, the AI agent evaded detection 99.8 percent of the time.

"We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people," Westwood said in a press release. "With survey data tainted by bots, AI can poison the entire knowledge ecosystem.”

Survey research relies on attention check questions (ACQs), behavioral flags, and response pattern analysis to detect inattentive humans or automated bots. Westwood said these methods are now obsolete after his AI agent bypassed the full range of standard ACQs and other detection methods outlined in prominent papers, including one paper designed to detect AI responses. The AI agent also successfully avoided “reverse shibboleth” questions designed to detect nonhuman actors by presenting tasks that an LLM could complete easily, but are nearly impossible for a human. 

“Once the reasoning engine decides on a response, the first layer executes the action with a focus on human mimicry,” the paper, titled “The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research,” says. “To evade automated detection, it simulates realistic reading times calibrated to the persona’s education level, generates human-like mouse movements, and types open-ended responses keystroke by-keystroke, complete with plausible typos and corrections. The system is also designed to accommodate tools for bypassing antibot measures like reCAPTCHA, a common barrier for automated systems.”

The AI, according to the paper, is able to model “a coherent demographic persona,” meaning that in theory someone could sway any online research survey to produce any result they want based on an AI-generated demographic. And it would not take that many fake answers to impact survey results. As the press release for the paper notes, for the seven major national polls before the 2024 election, adding as few as 10 to 52 fake AI responses would have flipped the predicted outcome. Generating these responses would also be incredibly cheap at five cents each. According to the paper, human respondents typically earn $1.50 for completing a survey.

Westwood’s AI agent is a model-agnostic program built in Python, meaning it can be deployed with APIs from big AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, but can also be hosted locally with open-weight models like LLama. The paper used OpenAI’s o4-mini in its testing, but some tasks were also completed with DeepSeek R1, Mistral Large, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Grok3, Gemini 2.5 Preview, and others, to prove the method works with various LLMs. The agent is given one prompt of about 500 words which tells it what kind of persona to emulate and to answer questions like a human. 

The paper says that there are several ways researchers can deal with the threat of AI agents corrupting survey data, but they come with trade-offs. For example, researchers could do more identity validation on survey participants, but this raises privacy concerns. Meanwhile, the paper says, researchers should be more transparent about how they collect survey data and consider more controlled methods for recruiting participants, like address-based sampling or voter files.

“Ensuring the continued validity of polling and social science research will require exploring and innovating research designs that are resilient to the challenges of an era defined by rapidly evolving artificial intelligence,” the paper said.

Today's links

• The games industry's self-induced traumatic brain injury: Amnesia is video games' default state.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Sony DRM nonpology; Misprinted prefab houses; Canada's repair law can't be fixed; BNL's USB-stick release; Pornoscanners vs pleats; The Internet will always suck.
• 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.

The games industry's self-induced traumatic brain injury (permalink)

Words have power. In 1991, I read "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling," the transcript of Bruce Sterling's keynote speech for that year's Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA, and within a year, I'd dropped out of university to become a programmer:

https://bruces.medium.com/the-wonderful-power-of-storytelling-by-bruce-sterling-1991-9d2846c2c5df

Bruce's speech wasn't the only reason I dropped out, but it's certainly been the most durable, and I frequently return to it in my mind as I navigate the difficult and turbulent waters of art and technology. In particular, I've had much cause to ponder Sterling's ideas about the very weird way that game developers relate to their art-form's history:

My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I’m in direct competition with Homer and Euripides. I mean, these guys aren’t in the SFWA, but their product is still taking up valuable rack-space. You guys on the other hand get to reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field. This is your advantage and your glory. This is also your curse. It’s a terrible kind of curse really…

…A lot of our art aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants to be digital… But our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us. They’re like a cognitive load. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we have to artificially invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is the real explanation for the triumph of compact disks…

…The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you’ve amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down…

…By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it take up disk-space in your head…

…I’ve noticed though that computer game designers don’t look much to the past. All their idealized classics tend to be in reverse, they’re projected into the future. When you’re a game designer and you’re waxing very creative and arty, you tend to measure your work by stuff that doesn’t exist yet…

… I can see that it’s very seductive, but at the same time I can’t help but see that the ground is crumbling under your feet. Every time a platform vanishes it’s like a little cultural apocalypse…

…I can imagine a time when all the current platforms might vanish, and then what the hell becomes of your entire mode of expression?

Even by the high standards of a Bruce Sterling keynote, this is a very good one, and Sterling does that amazing thing where he's iterating different ways of making this point, examining it from every angle, and it makes it hard ro excerpt it for an article like this. I mean, you should just go and read the whole thing and then come back, honestly:

https://bruces.medium.com/the-wonderful-power-of-storytelling-by-bruce-sterling-1991-9d2846c2c5df

But the reason I quote those specific excerpts above is because of what they say about the strange terror and exhilaration of working without history, of inhabiting a world shorn of all object permanence. This was a very live question in those days. In 1993, Wired's Jargon Watch column ran a definition for "Pickling":

Archiving a working model of a computer to read data stored in that computer's format. Apple Computer has pickled a shrink-wrapped Apple II in a vault so that it can read Apple II software, perhaps in the not-too-distant future.

https://www.wired.com/1993/05/jargon-watch-12/

In 1996, Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive, with the mission to save every version of every web-page, ever, forever. Today, the Archive holds more than a trillion pages:

https://blog.archive.org/trillion/

Digital media are paradoxical: on the one hand, nothing is easier to copy than bits. That's all a computer does, after all: copy things. What's more mass storage gets cheaper and faster and smaller every year, on a curve that puts Moore's Law to shame.

After dropping out of university, I got a job programming multimedia CD ROMs for The Voyager Company, and they sent me my first 1GB drive, which was the size of a toaster, weighed 3lbs and cost $4,000.

30 years later, I've just upgraded my laptop's SDD from 2TB to 4TB: it cost less than $300, and is both the size and weight of a stick of gum. It's 4,000 times larger, at least 10,000 times faster, is 98% lighter, and cost 97% less.

We can store a hell of a lot of data for not very much money. And at that price, we can back it up to hell and back: I rotate two backup drives at home, keeping one off-site and swapping them weekly; I also have another drive I travel with and do a daily backup on. Parts of my data are also backed up online to various cloud systems that are, themselves, also backed up.

And while drives do fail, drives that are attached to computers that people use every day tend to fail gracefully in that their material defects typically make themselves felt over time, giving ample warning (at least for attentive users) that it's time to replace them.

Given the spectacular improvements in mass storage, there's also no problem migrating data from one system to the next. Back in the 1990s, I stored a ton of my data offline and near-line, on fragile media like floppies, Zip cartridges and DAT cassettes. I pretty much never conducted a full inventory of these disks, checking to see if they were working, much less transferring them to new media. That meant that at every turn, there was the possibility that the media would have rotted; and with every generation, there was the possibility that I wouldn't be able to source a working drive that was capable of reading the old media.

But somewhere in there, storage got too cheap to meter. I transferred all those floppies – including some Apple ][+ formatted 5.25" disks I'd had since the early 1980s – to a hard drive, which was subsequently transferred to a bigger hard drive (which, paradoxically, was much smaller!) and thence to another bigger (and smaller) drive and so on, up to the 4TB drive that's presently about 7mm beneath my fingers as I type these words.

This data may not be immortal, but it's certainly a lot more loss-resistant than any comparable tranche of data in human history.

Data isn't the whole story, of course. To use the data, you have to be able to open it in a program. There, too, the problems of yesteryear have all but vanished. First came the interoperable programs, which reverse-engineered these file formats so they could be read and written with increasing fidelity to the programs they were created in:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

But then came the emulators and APIs that could simply run the old programs on new hardware. After all, computers are always getting much faster, which means that simulating a computer that's just a few years old on modern hardware is pretty trivial. Indeed, you can simulate multiple instances of the computer I wrote CD ROMs for Voyager on inside a browser window…on your phone:

https://infinitemac.org/1996/System%207.5.3

Which meant that, for quite some time, Bruce's prophecy of games living in an eternal ahistorical now, an art form whose earlier works are all but inaccessible, was dead wrong. Between emulators (MAME) and API reimplementations (WINE), a gigantic amount of gaming history has been brought back and preserved.

What's more, there's a market for this stuff. Companies like Good Old Games have gone into business licensing and reviving the games people love. But it keeps getting harder, because of a mix of "Digital Rights Management" (the "copy-protection" that games companies pursue with a virulence that borders on mania) and the difficulty of tracking down rightsholders:

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/just-in-case-you-thought-reviving-dead-games-seemed-easy-enough-gog-had-to-hire-a-private-investigator-to-find-an-ip-holder-living-off-the-grid-for-its-preservation-program/

And doing this stuff without permission is a fraught business, because the big games companies hate games preservation and wage vicious war on their own biggest fans to stamp it out:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/21/wrecking-ball/#ssbm

Which means that the games preservation effort is coming full circle, back to Bruce Sterling's 1991 description of "the ground crumbling under your feet"; of an endless series of "little cultural apocalypses."

It doesn't have to be this way. The decades since Bruce's talk proved that games can and should be preserved, that artists and their audiences need to continue to access these works even if the companies that make them would rather "reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field" and not have to be "in direct competition with Homer and Euripides."

The "Stop Killing Games" consumer movement is trying to save the library that games publishers have been trying to burn down since the 1990s:

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

They're currently hoping to get games preservation built into the new EU "Digital Fairness" Act:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act

It's a good tactical goal. After all, it's manifestly "unfair" to charge you money for a game and then take the game away later, whether that's because you don't want to pay to keep the servers on (or let someone else run them), or because you don't want the old game to exist in order to coerce your customers into buying a new one.

Or both.

No matter the reason, there is nothing good about the games industry's decades-long project of erasing its own past. It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game developers, and it's bad for games. No art form can exist in a permanent, atemporal now, with its history erased as quickly as it's created.

(Image: Erica Fischer, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The EU has let US tech giants run riot. Diluting our data law will only entrench their power https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/12/eu-gdpr-data-law-us-tech-giants-digital

• chud atlantis https://www.tumblr.com/mcmansionhell/800217589248819200/chud-atlantis

• Copyright Winter is Coming (to Wikipedia?) https://authorsalliance.substack.com/p/copyright-winter-is-coming-to-wikipedia

• Lina Khan Stays Remarkably on Message on ‘The Adam Friedland Show’ https://gizmodo.com/lina-khan-stays-remarkably-on-message-on-the-adam-friedland-show-2000685642

• CSI Fall 2025 Catalog https://csi.asu.edu/catalog-fall-2025/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago 5000 music cylinders digitized and posted https://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/

#20yrsago Girl who didn’t do homework put on street with WILL WORK FOR FOOD sign https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/16/AR2005111601926.html

#20yrsago Sony rootkit roundup, part II https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/16/sony-rootkit-roundup-part-ii/

#20yrsago Sony CDs banned in the workplace https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/16/sony-cds-banned-in-the-workplace/

#20yrsago Sony waits 3 DAYS to withdraw dangerous “uninstaller” for its rootkit https://web.archive.org/web/20051124053710/https://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/uninstall.html

#20yrsago Student folds paper 12 times! https://web.archive.org/web/20051102085038/https://www.pomonahistorical.org/12times.htm

#20yrsago Barenaked Ladies release album on USB stick https://web.archive.org/web/20051124234734/http://www.bnlmusic.com/news/default.asp

#20yrsago Latest Sony news: 100% of CDs with rootkits, mainstream condemnation, retailers angry https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/15/latest-sony-news-100-of-cds-with-rootkits-mainstream-condemnation-retailers-angry/

#20yrsago Sony disavows lockware patent https://web.archive.org/web/20051126133522/https://www.playfuls.com/news_3827.html

#20yrsago Sony infects more than 500k networks, including military and govt https://web.archive.org/web/20051231222014/http://www.doxpara.com/?q=/node/1129

#20yrsago Sony’s spyware “remover” creates huge security hole https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/11/15/sonys-web-based-uninstaller-opens-big-security-hole-sony-recall-discs/

#20yrsago Sony issues non-apology for compromising your PC https://web.archive.org/web/20051124053248/http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/

#20yrsago Sory Electronics: Will Sony make amends for infecting our computers? https://web.archive.org/web/20051124203930/http://soryelectronics.com/

#15yrsago UK gov’t wants to legalize racial profiling https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/nov/15/stop-and-search-equality-commission

#15yrsago Canadian writers’ group issues FUD warnings about new copyright bill https://web.archive.org/web/20101117004549/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5445/125/

#15yrsago Misprinted prefab houses https://zeitguised.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/concrete-misplots/

#15yrsago WWI-era photos of people pretending to be patriotic pixels https://web.archive.org/web/20101124060200/https://www.hammergallery.com/images/peoplepictures/people

#15yrsago Steampunk bandwidth gauge https://web.archive.org/web/20101118071250/https://blog.skytee.com/2010/11/torrentmeter-a-steampunk-bandwidth-meter/

#15yrsago UK gov’t apologizes for decades of secret nuclear power industry corpse-mutilation https://web.archive.org/web/20101119171708/http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE6AF4CT20101116

#15yrsago Understanding COICA, America’s horrific proposed net-censorship bill https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/case-against-coica

#15yrsago London cops shut down anti-police website; mirrors spring up all over the net https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/nov/16/web-advice-students-avoid-arrest

#15yrsago TSA tee: “We get to touch your junk” https://web.archive.org/web/20101119090103/http://skreened.com/oped/junk-search

#15yrsago Indie Band Survival Guide: soup-to-nuts, no-BS manual for 21st century artistic life https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/16/indie-band-survival-guide-soup-to-nuts-no-bs-manual-for-21st-century-artistic-life/

#15yrsago New aviation risk: pleats https://web.archive.org/web/20101118015618/http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20101116-31209.html

#10yrsago How scientists trick themselves (and how they can prevent it) https://www.nature.com/articles/526182a

#10yrsago Is Batman’s evidence admissible in court? https://lawandthemultiverse.com/2015/11/16/batman-constitution-how-gotham-da-convict-criminals/

#10yrsago Hello From the Magic Tavern: hilarious, addictive improv podcast https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/16/hello-from-the-magic-tavern-hilarious-addictive-improv-podcast/

#10yrsago The Internet will always suck https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-the-internet-will-always-suck/

#10yrsago How terrorists trick Western governments into doing their work for them https://web.archive.org/web/20151119044939/http://gawker.com/terrorism-works-1678049997

#5yrsago Youtube-dl is back https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/16/pill-mills/#yt-dl

#5yrsago HHS to pharma: stop bribing writing docs https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/16/pill-mills/#oig

#5yrsago The Attack Surface Lectures https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/16/pill-mills/#asl

#1yrago Canada's ground-breaking, hamstrung repair and interop laws https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Downstream IRL with Zack Polanski, Ash Sarkar, and Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Virtual: Enshittification at the Internet Archive, Nov 21
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-enshittification-tickets-1839608451399

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Toronto: Jailbreaking Canada (OCAD U), Nov 27
  https://www.ocadu.ca/events-and-exhibitions/jailbreaking-canada

• San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1
  https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel (Peoples & Things)
  https://newbooksnetwork.com/cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it

• Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now, with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkYxMQJ9c94

• Working it out: Job security in the AI era (Web Summit)
  https://websummit.com/summaries/lis25/working-it-out-job-security-in-the-ai-era/

• How to dis-Enshittify the world (Blood In the Machine)
  https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-to-dis-enshittify-the-world-with

• Reimagining Digital Public Infrastructure (Attention: Govern Or Be Governed)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JuXDfDtBY

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 (the-bezzle.org).

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

The video game industry has had a turbulent few years. The pandemic made people play more and caused a small boom, which then subsided, resulting in wave after wave of massive layoffs. Microsoft, one of the major console manufacturers, is shifting its strategy for Xbox as the company shifts its focus to AI. And now, Electronic Arts, once a load-bearing publisher for the industry with brands like The Sims and Madden, is going private via a leveraged buyout in a deal involving Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Jared Kushner. 

Video games are more popular than ever, but many of the biggest companies in the business seem like they are struggling to adapt and convert that popularity into stability and sustainability. To try and understand what the hell is going on, this week we have a conversation between Emanuel and Jason Schreier, who reports about video games for Bloomberg and one of the best journalists on this beat. 

Jason helps us unpack why Microsoft is now aiming for higher-than-average profit margins at Xbox and why the company is seemingly bowing out of the console business despite a massive acquisition spree. We also talk about what the EA deal tells us about other game publishers, and what all these problems tell us about changing player habits and the future of big budget video games. 

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. 

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• Microsoft Pushes Xbox Division to Hit Higher Profit Margins
• EA's Deal to Go Private Could Be Good for Investors, Bad for Employees
• EA Buyout Highlights Gaming Struggles as Growth Slows
• The Video-Game Industry Has a Problem: There Are Too Many Games

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently invited staff to demos of an app that lets officers instantly scan a license plate, adding it to a database of billions of records that shows where else that vehicle has been spotted around the country, according to internal agency material viewed by 404 Media. That data can then be combined with other information such as driver license data, credit header data, marriage records, vehicle ownership, and voter registrations, the material shows.

The capability is powered by both Motorola Solutions and Thomson Reuters, the massive data broker and media conglomerate, which besides running the Reuters news service, also sells masses of personal data to private industry and government agencies. The material notes that the capabilities allow for predicting where a car may travel in the future, and also can collect face scans for facial recognition. 

The material shows that ICE continues to buy or source a wealth of personal and sensitive information as part of its mass deportation effort, from medical insurance claims data, to smartphone location data, to housing and labor data. The app, called Mobile Companion, is a tool designed to be used in real time by ICE officials in the field, similar to its facial recognition app but for finding more information about vehicles.

The tool “includes a feature that enables your phone to function as a license plate recognition camera. This capability allows ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations] officers to quickly identify and process license plate information,” a message sent to all ERO staff, and viewed by 404 Media, reads. The mobile app also integrates with a desktop application called Vehicle Manager, which is “designed to assist ERO personnel in searching, analyzing, and managing license plate data to support a wide range of operations across ERO.”

The material sent to ERO personnel shows both Motorola and Thomson Reuters are involved in the capability. Thomson Reuters has previously faced criticism for selling data to ICE during the first Trump administration, when the government was forcibly separating families at the border.

Motorola, through two acquired companies called Vigilant Solutions and Digital Recognition Network (DRN), has license plate reading cameras spread all across the U.S. Vigilant cameras are either installed at a fixed location or placed in a police officer’s roaming patrol vehicle, which constantly scan vehicles they drive past. DRN’s tech is much the same, but its scans are crowdsourced by hundreds of repo men who have the cameras installed in their vehicles. Motorola says it has “billions” of detections.

That data then feeds into Motorola’s product that customers can run their own searches against, allowing them to see where a vehicle previously was “and determine where it may be located in the future,” according to Motorola marketing material available online. “Convoy Analysis” is a tool that “helps identify vehicles traveling together,” according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report which looked at various license plate reader tools available on the market.

The Mobile Companion app lets users contribute to that dataset while on the move, according to other marketing material available online. Users can get push notifications when the Motorola surveillance network detects a hot listed vehicle (meaning a specific license plate or vehicle law enforcement is looking for), and can look at license plate results in a specific location across time, to see what other vehicles had been there. The mobile app is also capable of capturing faces and uploading them to the Vigilant FaceSearch gallery, which is the company’s facial recognition tool.

The material sent to ICE says users can further enhance their investigations by combining Motorola’s license plate reader network with Thomson Reuters’ data. “Thomson Reuters CLEAR combines comprehensive public and proprietary data with nationwide license plate data from Motorola Solutions’ secure shared data network to help take vehicle-involved investigations to a more precise level,” the material says. 

CLEAR is Thomson Reuters’ primary analysis product, which combines data from across public records and the web. That can include details on phone numbers, addresses, associates, and social media activity, according to a video on Thomson Reuters’ website. A document on Thomson Reuters’ website says CLEAR also contains driver license data, credit header data from Experian (which is the personal information, such as addresses, at the top of a credit report), marriage records, vehicle registrations, voter registrations, and much more.

In an email, a Thomson Reuters spokesperson said “Mobile Companion has no relation to CLEAR,” despite the material explaining in detail how users can enrich Motorola’s license plate data with CLEAR’s. The spokesperson added “There is no data in Mobile Companion that requires a search warrant to access.” Motorola did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

On its website, Thomson Reuters markets CLEAR as a tool that has saved an abducted baby, identified a wanted man, and caught a sexual predator. The marketing makes no mention of its tech being specifically used by ICE’s deportation arm. 

Thomson Reuters continues to sign multimillion dollar contracts with ICE. In May, for example, ICE paid the company nearly $5 million for access to “license plate reader data to enhance investigations for potential arrest, seizure, and forfeiture,” according to public procurement records.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to a request for comment.

Hello everyone, sorry to go so long without posting something. I caught covid in August and it’s taken me months to start feeling relatively back to normal. I am still struggling with fatigue and some neurological problems, so thank you for your patience!

It is rare that the McMansion ever approaches the mythical, though it is, of coursed, steeped in its own mythology – of bootstrapism, castle doctrine and, importantly, a total commitment to individualism. No one bereft of a sense of personal mythos would build some of the houses I’ve posted about on this site throughout the years.

However, rarely do those houses sincerely believe their own myths, express them so utterly. Often, there’s a bit of cheek involved in all those Corinthian columns, even among the knockoff Rolex set. Whenever one does swallow the (blue) kool aid, well, it’s very important to me. And so, from the forgotten underwater past of the greater Houston suburbs, I bring you: Chud Atlantis

(it is always more fun to quote the front bit of that Shelley poem, because the second bit has been misappropriated by Reddit.)

Atlantic in size (8 bedrooms, 9 baths, 10,000+ square feet), and in price ($2.8 million), Chud Atlantis is proof that, for better or for worse, we used to build things in this country. (Just kidding, this house was built, astonishingly enough, in 2023.) Its existence is baffling to me not only because it is anachronistic (it belongs in the Bad 70s) but because it is Texan. This house is, in the fullest sense of the word, a transplant. Orlando is that way.

(Shall we enter, then, the eye-watery depths?)

It’s important that you understand that the most significant thing about this house is that it is blue. In an age of gray supremacy, it is nice to know that tacky can still come in more unconventional shades. No one prior to this has ever looked at a piece of dyed marble and thought: I need to make this my entire personality. Not even in the 80s!

Like many McMansion owners, these do not know how to decorate. One can only presume that the furniture involved is so heavy that staging also wasn’t an option. This makes the house a historical document because from this point onward such rooms will henceforth be yassified with AI.

this kitchen begs for a concept food. it begs for ‘gold leaf hamburger.’

I’m not entirely convinced that the Rococo period was ugly, but its imitators commit crimes unerringly and without fail. Furniture like this sits in a room like a big glob of meat. Instead of saying 'i’m rich’ what it actually communicates is: 'i’m heavy.’

I don’t know how you can make so much money and yet have everything you do look like the bootleg Chanel rugs they sell outside of the subway. Like, can’t you buy the real thing, dawg?

This may also be the first house whose broad aesthetic is executed by way of direct to consumer printing. The FedExification of art. Or something like that. After all, the internet loves a neologism more than it loves its elaboration.

“What should we put here to fill out this room” all-time bad answer.

Anyway, without further ado, the back:

The suburban mind yearns for the miniature golf course. The suburban mind yearns for water while it all dries up.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) By the way: new subscribers can buy a year of McMansion Hell for just $12!

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! McMansion Hell stocks, much like mortgage-backed securities only ever go up! For non-architecture stuff I also have a substack where I write about things like the ring cycle and going to the eye doctor.

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that reached back through time, flooded the zone, counted the stars, scored science goals, and topped it all off with a ten-course meal.

First, scientists make a major breakthrough thanks to a very cute mammoth mummy. Then: the climate case for busy beavers; how to reconnect with 3,000 estranged siblings; this is your brain on football; and last, what Queen Elizabeth II had for lunch on February 20, 1957.

 As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. 

The long afterlife of Yuka the mammoth

Mármol Sánchez, Emilio et al. “Ancient RNA expression profiles from the extinct woolly mammoth.” Cell.

Scientists have sequenced RNA—a key ingredient of life as we know it—from the remains of a mammoth that lived 39,000 years ago during the Pleistocene “Ice Age” period, making it by far the oldest RNA on record. 

The previous record holder for oldest RNA was sourced from a puppy that lived in Siberia 14,300 years ago. The new study has now pushed that timeline back by an extraordinary 25,000 years, opening a new window into ancient genetics and revealing a surprise about a famous mammoth mummy called Yuka. 

“Ancient DNA has revolutionized the study of extinct and extant organisms that lived up to 2 million years ago, enabling the reconstruction of genomes from multiple extinct species, as well as the ecosystems where they once thrived,” said researchers led by Emilio Mármol Sánchez of the Globe Institute in Copenhagen, who completed the study while at Stockholm University.

“However, current DNA sequencing techniques alone cannot directly provide insights into tissue identity, gene expression dynamics, or transcriptional regulation, as these are encoded in the RNA fraction.”

“Here, we report transcriptional profiles from 10 late Pleistocene woolly mammoths,” the team continued. “One of these, dated to be ∼39,000 years old, yielded sufficient detail to recover…the oldest ancient RNA sequences recorded to date.”

DNA, the double-stranded “blueprint” molecule that stores genetic information, is far sturdier than RNA, which is why it can be traced back for millions of years instead of thousands. Single-stranded RNA, a “messenger” molecule that carries out the orders of DNA, is more fragile and rare in the paleontological record.

In addition to proving that RNA can survive much longer than previously known, the team discovered that Yuka—the mammoth that died 39,000 years ago—has been misgendered for years (yes, I realize gender is a social construct that does not apply to extremely dead mammoths, but mis-sexed just doesn’t have the same ring). 

Yuka was originally deemed female according to a 2021 study that observed the “presence of skin folds in the genital area compatible with labia vulvae structures in modern elephants and the absence of male-specific muscle structures.” Mármol Sánchez and his colleagues have now overturned this anatomical judgement by probing the genetic remnants of Yuka’s Y chromosome.

In fact, as I write this on Thursday, November 13—a day before the embargo on this study lifts on Friday—Yuka is still listed as female on Wikipedia. 

Just a day until you can live your truth, buddy.

In other news…

Leave it to beavers 

Burgher, Jesse A. S. et al. “Beaver-related restoration and freshwater climate resilience across western North America.” Restoration Ecology.

Every era has a champion; in our warming world, eager beavers may rise to claim this lofty title. 

These enterprising rodents are textbook “ecosystem engineers” that reshape environments with sturdy dams that create biodiverse havens that are resistant to climate change. To better assess the role of beavers in the climate crisis, researchers reviewed the reported behavioral beaver-related restoration (BRR) projects across North America. 

“Climate change is projected to impact streamflow patterns in western North America, reducing aquatic habitat quantity and quality and harming native species, but BRR has the potential to ameliorate some of these impacts,” said researchers led by Jesse A. S. Burgher of Washington State University. 

The team reports “substantial evidence that BRR increases climate resiliency…by reducing summer water temperatures, increasing water storage, and enhancing floodplain connectivity” while also creating “fire-resistant habitat patches.” 

So go forth and get busy, beavers! May we survive this crisis in part through the skin of your teeth.

One big happy stellar family

Boyle, Andrew W. et al. “Lost Sisters Found: TESS and Gaia Reveal a Dissolving Pleiades Complex.” The Astrophysical Journal.

Visible from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the Pleiades is the most widely recognized and culturally significant star cluster in the night sky. While this asterism is defined by a handful of especially radiant stars, known as the Seven Sisters, scientists have now tracked down thousands of other stellar siblings born from the same clutch scattered across some 2,000 light years.

“We find that the Pleiades constitutes the bound core of a much larger, coeval structure” and “we refer to this structure as the Greater Pleiades Complex,” said researchers led by Andrew W. Boyle of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “On the basis of uniform ages, coherent space velocities, detailed elemental abundances, and traceback histories, we conclude that most stars in this complex originated from the same giant molecular cloud.” 

The work “further cements the Pleiades as a cornerstone of stellar astrophysics” and adds new allure to a cluster that first exploded into the skies during the Cretaceous age. (For more on the Pleiades, check out this piece I wrote earlier this year about the deep roots of its lore).

Getting inside your head(er)

Zamorano, Francisco et al. “Brain Mechanisms across the Spectrum of Engagement in Football Fans: A Functional Neuroimaging Study.” Radiology.

Scientists have peered into a place I would never dare to visit—the minds of football fans during high-stakes plays. To tap into the neural side of fanaticism, researchers enlisted 60 healthy male fans from the ages of 20 to 45 to witness dozens of goal sequences from matches involving their favorite teams, rival teams, and “neutral” teams while their brains were scanned by an fMRI machine. 

The participants were rated according to a “Football Supporters Fanaticism Scale (FSFS)” with criteria like “violent thought and/or action tendencies” and “institutional belonging and/or identification.” The scale divided the group up into 38 casual spectators, 19 committed fans, and four deranged fanatics (adjectives are mine for flourish).

“Our key findings revealed that scoring against rivals activated the reward system…while conceding to rivals triggered the mentalization network and inhibited the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC)”—a region responsible for cognitive control and decision-making—said researchers led by Francisco Zamorano of the Universidad San Sebastián in Chile. “Higher Football Supporters Fanaticism Scale scores correlated with reduced dACC activation during defeats, suggesting impaired emotional regulation in highly engaged fans.”

In other words, it is now scientifically confirmed that football fanatics are Messi bitches who love drama. 

Diplomacy served up fresh

Cabral, Óscar et al “Power for dinner. Culinary diplomacy and geopolitical aspects in Portuguese diplomatic tables (1910-2023).”

We’ll close, as all things should, with a century of fine Portuguese dining. In yet another edition of “yes, this can be a job,” researchers collected 457 menus served at various diplomatic meals in Portugal from 1910 to 2023 to probe “how Portuguese gastronomic culture has been leveraged as a culinary diplomacy and geopolitical rapprochement strategy.” 

As a lover of both food and geopolitical bureaucracy, this study really hit the spot. Highlights include a 1957 “regional lunch” for Queen Elizabeth II that aimed to channel “Portugality” through dishes like lobster and fruit tarts from the cities of Peniche and Alcobaça. The study is also filled with amazing asides like “the inclusion of imperial ice cream in the European Free Trade Association official luncheon (ID45, 1960) seems to transmit a sense of geopolitical greatness and vast governing capacity.” Ice cream just tastes so much better when it’s a symbol of international power. 

The team also unearthed a possible faux pas: Indian president Ramaswamy Venkataraman, a vegetarian who was raised Hindu, was served roast beef in 1990. In a footnote, Cabral and his colleagues concluded that “further investigation is deemed necessary to understand the context of ‘roast beef’ service to the Indian President in 1990.” Talk about juicy gossip!

 Thanks for reading! See you next week.