This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

A former CIA official and contractor, who at the time of his employment dug through classified systems for information he then sold to a U.S. lobbying firm and foreign clients, used access to those CIA systems as “his own personal Google,” according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media and Court Watch.

Dale Britt Bendler, 68, was a long running CIA officer before retiring in 2014 with a full pension. He rejoined the agency as a contractor and sold a wealth of classified information, according to the government’s sentencing memorandum filed on Wednesday. His clients included a U.S. lobbying firm working for a foreigner being investigated for embezzlement and another foreign national trying to secure a U.S. visa, according to the court record.

A union that represents university professors and other academics published a guide on Wednesday tailored to help its members navigate social media during the “current climate.” The advice? Lock down your social media accounts, expect anything you post will be screenshotted, and keep things positive. The document ends with links to union provided trauma counseling and legal services.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published the two page document on September 17, days after the September 10 killing of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk. The list of college professors and academics who've been censured or even fired for joking about, criticizing, or quoting Kirk after his death is long.

Clemson University in South Carolina fired multiple members of its faculty after investigating their Kirk-related social media posts. On Monday the state’s Attorney General sent the college a letter telling it that the first amendment did not protect the fired employees and that the state would not defend them. Two universities in Tennessee fired multiple members of the staff after getting complaints about their social media posts. The University of Mississippi let a member of the staff go because they re-shared a comment about Kirk that people found “insensitive.” Florida Atlantic University placed an art history professor on administrative leave after she posted about Kirk on social media. Florida's education commissioner later wrote a letter to school superintendents warning them there would be consequences for talking about Kirk in the wrong way. “Govern yourselves accordingly,” the letter said.

AAUP’s advice is meant to help academic workers avoid ending up as a news story. “In a moment when it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict the consequences of our online speech and choices, we hope you will find these strategies and resources helpful,” it said.

Here are its five explicit tips: “1. Set your personal social media accounts to private mode. When prompted, approve the setting to make all previous posts private. 2. Be mindful that anything you post online can be screenshotted and shared. 3. Before posting or reposting online commentary, pause and ask yourself: a. Am I comfortable with this view potentially being shared with my employer, my students, or the public? Have I (or the person I am reposting) expressed this view in terms I would be comfortable sharing with my employer, my students, or the public?”

The advice continues: “4. In your social media bios, state that the views expressed through the account represent your own opinions and not your employer. You do not need to name your employer. Consider posting positive statements about positions you support rather than negative statements about positions you disagree with. Some examples could be: ‘Academic freedom is nonnegotiable,’ ‘The faculty united will never be divided,’ ‘Higher ed research saves lives,’ ‘Higher ed transforms lives,’ ‘Politicians are interfering with your child’s education.’”

The AAUPthen provides five digital safety tips that include setting up strong passwords, installing software updates as soon as they’re available, using two-factor authentication, and never using employer email addresses outside of work. 

The last tip is the most revealing of how academics might be harassed online through campaigns like Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watchlist.” “Search for your name in common search engines to find out what is available about you online,” AAUP advises. “Put your name in quotation marks to narrow the search. Search both with and without your institution attached to your name.”

After that, the AAUP provided a list of trauma, counseling, and insurance services that its members have access to and a list of links to other pieces of information about protecting themselves.

“It’s good basic advice given that only a small number of faculty have spent years online in my experience, it’s a good place to start,” Pauline Shanks Kaurin, the former military ethics professor at the U.S. Naval War College told 404 Media. Kaurin resigned her position at the college earlier this year after realizing that the college would not defend academic freedom during Trump’s second term.

“I think this reflects the heightened level of scrutiny and targeting that higher ed is under,” Kaurin said. “While it’s not entirely new, the scale is certainly aided by many platforms and actors that are engaging on [social media] now when in the past faculty might have gotten threatening phone calls, emails and hard copy letters.”

The AAUP guidance was co-written by Isaac Kamola, an associate professor at Trinity College and the director of the AAUP’s Center for Academic Freedom. Kamola told 404 Media that the recommendations came for years of experience working with faculty who’ve been on the receiving end of targeted harassment campaigns. “That’s incredibly destabilizing,” he said. “It’s hard to explain what it’s like until it happens to you.”

Kamola said that academic freedom was already under threat before Kirk’s death. “It’s a multi-decade strategy of making sure that certain people, certain bodies, certain dies, are not in higher education, so that certain other ones can be, so that you can reproduce the ideas that a political apparatus would prefer existed in a university,” he said. 

It’s telling that the AAUP felt the need to publish this, but the advice is practical and actionable, even for people outside of academia. Freedom of expression is under attack in America and though academics and other public figures are perhaps under the most threat, they aren’t the only ones. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon is actively monitoring the social media activity of military personnel as well as civilian employees of the Department of Defense. 

“It is unacceptable for military personnel and Department of War civilians to celebrate or mock the assassination of a fellow American,” Sean Parnell, public affairs officer at the Pentagon, wrote on X, using the new nickname for the Department of Defense. In the private sector, Sony fired one of its video game developers after they made a joke on X about Kirk’s death and multiple journalists have been fired for Kirk related comments.

AAUP did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

Reference librarian Eddie Kristan said lenders at the library where he works have been asking him to find books that don’t exist without realizing they were hallucinated by AI ever since the release of GPT-3.5 in late 2022. But the problem escalated over the summer after fielding patron requests for the same fake book titles from real authors—the consequences of an AI-generated summer reading list circulated in special editions of the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year. At the time, the freelancer told 404 Media he used AI to produce the list without fact checking outputs before syndication. 

“We had people coming into the library and asking for those authors,” Kristan told 404 Media. He’s receiving similar requests for other types of media that don’t exist because they’ve been hallucinated by other AI-powered features. “It’s really, really frustrating, and it’s really setting us back as far as the community’s info literacy.” 

AI tools are changing the nature of how patrons treat librarians, both online and IRL. Alison Macrina, executive director of Library Freedom Project, told 404 Media early results from a recent survey of emerging trends in how AI tools are impacting libraries indicate that patrons are growing more trusting of their preferred generative AI tool or product, and the veracity of the outputs they receive. She said librarians report being treated like robots over library reference chat, and patrons getting defensive over the veracity of recommendations they’ve received from an AI-powered chatbot. Essentially, like more people trust their preferred LLM over their human librarian. 

“Librarians are reporting this overall atmosphere of confusion and lack of trust they’re experiencing from their patrons,” Macrina told 404. “They’re seeing patrons having seemingly diminished critical thinking and curiosity. They’re definitely running into some of these psychosis and other mental health issues, and certainly seeing the people who are more widely adopting it also being those who have less digital literacy about it and a general sort of loss of retention.” 

As a reference librarian, Kristan said he spends a lot of time thinking about how fallible the human mind can be, especially as he’s fielding more requests for things that don’t exist than ever before. Fortunately, he’s developed a system: Search for the presumed thing by title in the library catalog. If it’s not in the catalog, he checks the global library catalog WorldCat. If it isn’t there, he starts to get suspicious. 

“Not being in WorldCat might mean it’s something that isn’t catalogued like a Zine, a broadcast, or something ephemeral, but if it’s parading as a traditional book and doesn’t have an entry in the collective library catalog, it might be AI,” Kristan explained. 

From there, he might connect the title to a platform like Kindle Direct Publishing—one way AI-generated books enter the market—or the patron will tell him their source is an AI-powered chatbot, which he will have to explain, likely hallucinated the name of the thing they’re looking for. A thing that doesn't exist. 

As much as library workers try to shield their institutions from the AI-generated content onslaught, the situation is and has been, in many ways, inevitable. Companies desperate to rush generative AI products to market are pushing flawed products onto the public that are predictably being used to pollute our information ecosystems. The consequences are that AI slop is entering libraries, everyone who uses AI products bears at least a little responsibility for the swarm, and every library worker, regardless of role, is being asked to try and mitigate the effects. 

Collection development librarians are requesting digital book vendors like OverDrive, Hoopla and CloudLibrary to remove AI slop titles as they’re found. Subject specialists are expected to vet patron requested titles that may have been written in part with AI without having to read every single title. Library technology providers are rushing to implement tools that librarians say are making library systems catalogs harder to use. 

Jaime Taylor, an academic library resource management systems supervisor with the University of Massachusetts, says vendors are shoehorning Large Language Models (LLMs) into library systems in one of two ways. The first is a natural language search (NLS) or a semantic search that attempts to draw meaning from the words to find complementary search results. Taylor says these products are misleading in that they claim to eliminate the need for the strict keyword searches or Boolean operators when searching library catalogs and databases, when really the LLM is doing the same work on the backend. 

“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”

The other tool Taylor is seeing in library technology are AI-generated summaries based on journal articles, monographs, and other academic sources through a product called AI Insights, which incorporates new information into an existing LLM with a system called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Taylor and colleagues have found RAG doesn’t really help improve the accuracy of AI-generated summaries through beta testing AI tools in library tech for companies like Clarivate, Elsevier and EBSCO. 

“It reads everything on both pages,” she added. “It can’t tell where the article you’re looking for starts and stops, so it gives you takeaways from every word on the page. This was really bad when we tested it with book reviews, because book reviews are often very short and there’ll be half a dozen on one page, which would end up giving us really mixed up information about every book review on the page, even though the record we were looking at was only looking for one of them, because it was a scanned page from an older journal.”

Taylor says neither type of product is ready for market, but especially not the AI summaries that do what an abstract does but a lot worse. She’s turned what ones she can off, but expects fewer vendors will allow her and other librarians to do so in the future to record more favorable use cases. The problem, she says, is these companies are rushing products to market, making the skills academic librarians are trying to teach students and researchers to use obsolete. 

“We are trying to teach how to construct useful, exact searching,” she said. “But really [these products’ intent] is to make that not happen. The problem with that in a university library is we’re trying to teach those skills but we have tools that negate that necessity. And because those tools don’t work well, you’ve not learned the skill and you’re still getting crap results, so you’re never going to get better results because you didn’t learn the skill.” 

Plenty of library workers remain cautiously optimistic about the potential for generative AI integrations and what that could mean for information retrieval and categorization. But for most librarians, the rollout has been clunky, error-filled and disorienting, for them and their patrons. 

“As someone who feels like a big part of my job is advocacy for the position, for the principles of the profession, I am here to not look at whether a resource is good or bad,” said Kristan. “I don’t look at the output, the relationship that it has with the patrons, and what it’s being used for in the long run of the future. Like, I’m not out here just breaking looms and machine weaving machinery just for the hell of it. I’m saying this is not good for the community and we need to find equitable alternatives to ensure that things are going well for the lives of our patrons.”

Manchmal, meistens wenn der Herbst langsam Einzug hält, ist mir dann nach einer Portion Dub Techno. So wie heute. Draußen ist es grau und nass, und ich weiß nicht mal warum dem so ist, aber irgendwie passt die deepe Melange aus Dub und Techno für mich dazu ganz hervorragend. Besonders wenn es ein so exzellenter Mix ist, wie ihn Philip Kovacs schon vor sieben Jahren gemacht hat. Aber wenn irgendwas zeitlos ist, dann ist es Dub Techno.

Today's links

• AI psychosis and the warped mirror: When you stare into the LLM…
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: No such thing as shareholder supremacy; Intel's DRM'ed CPU; THIS COMPUTER IS NEVER OBSOLETE.
• 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.

AI psychosis and the warped mirror (permalink)

"AI psychosis" is the pop-psych diagnosis in a recent string of horrible and horrifying cases in which vulnerable people were lured by chatbots into harming themselves and others, including a murder-suicide:

https://futurism.com/man-chatgpt-psychosis-murders-mother

AI psychosis is just one of the many delusions inspired by AI, and it's hardly the most prevalent. The most widespread AI delusion is, of course, that an AI can do your job (it can't, but an AI salesman can capitalize on this delusion to convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

The AI job delusion has a long lineage. Since the steam-loom, bosses have hyped new technologies as a way to frighten workers into accepting lower wages and worse working conditions, under threat of imminent technological replacement.

Likewise, AI psychosis isn't an entirely new phenomenon, and it has disturbing precedents in our recent past.

In the early 2000s, a community of internet users formed to discuss a new illness they called "Morgellons Disease." Morgellons sufferers believed that they had wires growing in their skin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons

Morgellons appears to be a delusion, and the most widely accepted explanation for it is that people whose mental illness compels them to pick at their skin create open sores on their bodies, and then stray blowing fibers adhere to the wet, exposed tissues, which the sufferers believe to be wires.

Morgellons became an internet phenomenon in the early 2000s, but it appears that there were people who suffered from this pathology for a very long time. The name "Morgellons" comes from a 17th century case-report:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_to_a_Friend

The difference between a Morgellons sufferer in the 1680s and a Morgellons sufferer in 2001 is that the latter need not suffer alone. The incredible power of the internet to connect people with rare traits meant that people suffering with Morgellons could coalesce online and egg one another on. They could counter the narratives of concerned family members who insisted that there weren't wires growing under their skin, and upload photos of the "wires" they'd discovered under their own skin.

People have suffered from all kinds of delusions since time immemorial, and while the specifics of the delusion reflect the world of the sufferer (I remember when I stopped hearing from people with radios in their heads and started hearing from people with RFIDs in their heads), the shape of the delusions have been stable over long timescales.

But the internet era has profoundly changed the nature of delusion, by connecting people with the same delusions to one another, in order to reinforce each other.

Take "gang stalking delusion," the traumatic belief that a vast cabal of powerful, coordinated actors have selected a group of "targeted individuals" to harass. People with gang stalking delusion will sometimes insist that passing bus-ads, snatches of overheard music, and other random/ambient details are actually targeted at them, intended to bring them distress:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_stalking

The "targeted individuals" suffering from gang stalking delusion have formed vast, sprawling communities that are notionally designed to support them through the trauma of being stalked. But the practical function of these communities is to reinforce the delusion and make things much worse for their members: "My psychiatrist said the same thing as yours did – it's proof that they're both in on it!"

Like Morgellons, gang stalking delusion isn't a new phenomenon. It's a subset of "persecutory delusion," another mental illness that we find centuries of evidence for in the record:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecutory_delusion

But like modern Morgellons sufferers, people today with gang stalking delusion are able to find one another and reinforce and amplify each others' delusions, to their own detriment.

Now, even this isn't new – through the historical record, we find many examples of small groups of people who coalesced around a shared delusion. The difference is that old timey people had to luck into finding someone else who shared their delusion, while modern, internet-enabled people can just use the Reddit search-bar.

There's many examples of harmful delusions being worsened through online community reinforcement: there's pro-anorexia forums, incel forums, bitcoin, and "race realism" and other all-consuming junk science.

That's where LLMs come in. While the internet makes it far easier to find a toxic community of similarly afflicted people struggling with your mental illness, an LLM eliminates the need to find that forum. The LLM can deliver all the reinforcement you demand, produced to order, at any hour, day or night. While posting about a new delusional belief to a forum won't generate responses until other forum members see it and reply to it, an LLM can deliver a response in seconds.

In other words, there's one job that an AI can absolutely do better than a human: it can reinforce our delusions more efficiently, more quickly, and more effectively than a community of sufferers can.

Speed isn't the only reason that LLMs are super efficient delusion-reinforcers. An LLM has no consciousness, it has no desires, and it has nothing it wants to communicate. It has no wants, period. All it can do is transform a prompt into something that seems like the kind of thing that would follow from that prompt. It's a next-word-guessing machine.

This is why AI art is so empty: the only message an AI image generator can convey is the prompt you feed it. That's the only thing a piece of AI art has to "say." But when you dilute a short prompt across a million pixels or a hundred thousand words, the communicative intent in any given sentence or brushstroke is indistinguishable from zero. AI art can be "eerie" (in the sense of seeming to have an intent without there being any intender), and it can be striking, but it's not good:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

However, the more communicative intent there is in a prompt, and the more human decision-making there is in the production (whether that's selecting the best work from among many variants or post-processing the work with your own artistic flourishes), the more chances that work has of saying something. That's because you're saying something, every time you re-prompt it, every time you select from among an array of its outputs.

When you repeatedly prompt an LLM over a long timescale – whether you're discussing your delusional beliefs, or pursuing a romantic fantasy ("AI girl/boyfriends") – you are filling it up with your communicative intent. The work that comes out the other side – the transformation of your prompts into a response – is a mirror that you're holding up to your own inputs.

So while a member of a gang stalking forum might have a delusion that is just different enough from yours that they seem foolish, or they accuse you of being paranoid, the chatbot's conception of gang stalking delusion is being informed, tuned and shaped by you. It's an improv partner, "yes-and"ing you into a life of paranoid terror.

In the Greek legend, Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in a stream and is rooted to the spot, captured by his own regard. People who prompt a chatbot to reinforce their delusions are catching sight of their own reflection in the LLM and terrifying themselves into a spiral of self-destruction.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/17/the-debate-me-bro-grift-how-trolls-weaponized-the-marketplace-of-ideas/

• Imagine putting DRM in a battery to void warranties… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoVd1PAlT-Q

• Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/getting-yelled-at-by-dumbasses

• Prediction markets are booming. Oversight is barely there. https://www.citationneeded.news/prediction-markets-oversight/

• A guide to understanding AI as normal technology https://www.normaltech.ai/p/a-guide-to-understanding-ai-as-normal

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Software lets camphones scan and OCR a page of text in 5 secs https://web.archive.org/web/20051029085125/https://www.newscientist.com/article.ns/?feedId=online-news_rss20&id=dn7998

#20yrsago Profiles of RIAA victims who fought back https://web.archive.org/web/20051125085616/http://p2pnet.net/story/6283

#15yrsago Intel + DRM: a crippled processor that you have to pay extra to unlock https://memex.craphound.com/2010/09/18/intel-drm-a-crippled-processor-that-you-have-to-pay-extra-to-unlock/

#10yrsago UC Berkeley issues first-ever university transparency report https://slate.com/technology/2015/09/uc-berkeley-issues-the-first-ever-university-transparency-report-others-should-follow.html

#10yrsago THIS COMPUTER IS NEVER OBSOLETE https://www.tumblr.com/neuroxin/125324271592/this-computer-is-never-obsolete-digging

#5yrsago Youtube's war on algorithmic radicalization https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/18/the-americanskis/#algorithm-lawyers

#5yrsago A cryptographic mystery solved https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/18/the-americanskis/#otps-r-us

#5yrsago In Search Of A Flat Earth https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/18/the-americanskis/#mass-murder-cults

#1yrago There's no such thing as "shareholder supremacy" https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18
  https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice

• Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18
  https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy

• NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929

• NYC: Brooklyn Book Fair, Sept 21
  https://brooklynbookfestival.org/event/big-techs-big-heist-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-adam-becker/

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

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

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

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

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

• Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
  https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Enshittification Of Everything (And What To Do About It) (Cornell)
  https://archive.org/details/k-091225-the-enshittification-of-everything-and-what-to-do-about-it

• Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles & “Enshittification” (Revolution.social)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exvpetQRSVo

• Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

At first glance, WA might look like just another modern lamp – sleek, sculptural, and quietly contemporary. But hidden within its glowing rings is a piece of Tokyo’s rich history. Each ring was once part of a train strap handle on the Tokyu Den-en-toshi Line 8500, gripped by thousands of daily commuters before the series retired in 2023. Now, London-based design studio Akasaki & Vanhuyse has reimagined those resin rings as a limited-edition table lamp, turning the everyday gesture of holding on during a rush-hour ride into a luminous reminder of the city’s past.

Around 1,400 reclaimed resin rings was collected for the purpose of this project, resulting in a limited edition run of only 150 WA lamps. Each one is built from nine rings, stacked to form a gently glowing shade that filters light through the small gaps. Marks from years of use – scratches, dents, and subtle surface wear – have been preserved, creating a unique crackle-like effect that could never be replicated with the same unique context. The rings are held in place by mirrored stainless steel legs, giving the lamp both structure, sheen, and a touch of polish. Compact in size at just under 8 inches tall and weighing 2.65 pounds, WA is designed as a modest, modern fixture that celebrates a part of Tokyo.

Photo: ©TOKYU CORPORATION

Photo: ©TOKYU CORPORATION

Sustainability is woven into every stage of WA’s design. Beyond reusing train parts, the rings were sandblasted for a durable matte finish without erasing their history, while all metal elements are crafted from rust-resistant stainless steel to ensure longevity. The lamp was designed with end-of-life in mind, allowing for easy disassembly of its components. Even the packaging reflects this ethos: recyclable paper with an aluminum vapor coating replaces typical plastic films. Together, these choices highlight a commitment to timeless design that extends the lifespan of both the object and the story it tells.

To learn more about the WA lamp by Akasaki & Vanhuyse, visit akasakivanhuyse.com.

Photography courtesy of Akasaki & Vanhuyse, unless otherwise noted.