Today's links

• Delusion as a service: Destructive diagnostics.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Gay Days at Disney World; Parametric 3D printable key; Fine against sculpture for "storing bike on public property"; TPP is a wash; Reagan was Trump; Steampunk roadster; "Every Heart a Doorway"; Shoplifters x Tumblr; Amazon v mass arbitration; Driver-owned Uber alternative; Censorware censors criticism of censorware; 3 strikes copyright termination is illegal; Replacing al Qaeda bomb recipes with cakes; $10m grilled cheese platform; Dick van Dyke x Bernie; Efficiency is inefficient; I quit.
• Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, South Bend.
• 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.

Delusion as a service (permalink)

In 2003, Disney opened a new Epcot ride, "Mission: Space." Formally, it was a space travel sim that used a giant, high-intensity centrifuge to simulate gee stresses; practically, it turned out to be the most efficient machine ever created for surfacing previously undiagnosed heart defects in extremely dramatic and potentially lethal ways.

It turned out that a small number of people have these heart defects, and that the defects themselves are quite harmless, provided that you are never put in a giant, high-intensity centrifuge. Given that most of us will never be put in one of these centrifuges, it is quite possible to live your whole life without ever knowing that you have this lurking vulnerability. But once you build one of these machines and start shoving millions of people through it, you're bound to catch some of those rare people, and they will have cardiac episodes that are scary at a minimum, and are at the worst fatal.

For me, the lesson isn't that Disney did something wrong by building a giant cocktail shaker for human bodies. I'm not a thrill-ride guy, but lots of people like 'em and the machines themselves are benign for nearly everyone who puts their bodies into them.

Rather, I think the lesson here is that there are rare pathologies lurking in all of us, vulnerabilities that may never surface – until we come into the presence of a novel stimulus that unlocks them.

There's an analogy here to technology debt: technologically unsophisticated people think of software as a machine that never wears out and has no incremental usage costs (apart from electricity). In this framing, software is the perfect asset, one that never depreciates. But the reality is that software is a liability, not an asset:

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

Software exists in a system, and while software might function perfectly under the conditions in which it is first created and deployed, there are continuous changes to all the technology that is upstream, downstream and adjacent to the software, which means that systems that are robust and secure at the time of deployment can become brittle and dangerous, even though the software doesn't change at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/24/automation-is-magic/

There's another analogy here, to utopianism. A "utopia" can't just be a place where everything works perfectly. Even the most well-functioning, orderly and prosperous system is beset on all sides by exogenous shocks: belligerent neighbors, tsunamis, zoonotic plagues, even asteroid strikes. You don't perfect your society just by making it work well. You have to make it fail well. A utopia isn't a society where nothing goes wrong – it's a society where things go wrong all the time, but we're able to fix them:

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/cory-doctorow-walkaway/

The point being that things that work fine may still fail badly when they are exposed to unanticipated external stimuli, and the one thing we can absolutely anticipate is that the future will have many unanticipated stimuli in it.

If Mission: Space is a machine for surfacing unsuspected anatomical vulnerabilities, the internet is a machine for surfacing and exploiting all kinds of unsuspected psychological vulnerabilities. Note that I'm not claiming that the internet drives everyone crazy – rather, that the internet can locate and exacerbate vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities that might have lain dormant for your whole life, but for the fact that the internet exposed you to such a wide spectrum of stimuli.

This wide, internet-delivered spectrum of stimuli is mostly good. The internet can expose you to art, culture, ideas and people that you would never have run into in the pre-internet days, which end up enriching you in a million ways. Some of my best friends are internet friends. Some of the music and books I love most in the world were brought into my orbit by the internet. Many of my most ardently held beliefs were acquired through internet-based discussion.

All that is true, and it's true that the internet can one-shot you with a stimulus that makes you feel very bad, which you would never have encountered in a pre-internet world. The spectrum of stimulus in the whole wide world is very broad, and one person's innocuous distraction is another person's downfall.

Let's make this concrete. All throughout history, people have suffered from paranoid delusions. These can be ruinous, isolating you from friends and family, destroying your professional life and so on. Paranoid delusions often take on details from the sufferer's milieu: if you live in a society where evil witches are accepted as a fact, then witches might well creep into your delusions, too. If your society is all a-chatter about the NSA's mass internet surveillance, then your delusions might incorporate elaborate narratives about the NSA's use of the internet to target and torment you, personally.

So there will always be a "local character" to the paranoid delusions, grounded in the sufferer's era and location. But the internet adds a new, very bad dimension to this dynamic: the internet makes it much easier for deluded people to find each other. Paranoid delusions are – thankfully – rare, and in the absence of the internet, you might never encounter another sufferer.

But thanks to the internet, sufferers can form communities that reinforce their delusions, with disastrous consequences. Take "Morgellon's Disease," the paranoid delusion that you have wires growing under your skin. Morgellon's sufferers pick at their skin, creating open sores, which form a sticky trap for random bits of fluff and loose threads that sufferers interpret as evidence of these "wires." It's a horrible mental illness, and it's hard enough to treat even in the absence of the internet (the name "Morgellon's Disease" refers to a 17th century case-report).

But when you add the internet to Morgellon's, you get online communities where people suffering from the delusion help each other come up with rationales to explain away the disconfirming evidence that they get from therapists and loved ones who are trying to help them recover. These communities egg each other on, isolating their members from treatment.

There are lots of pathological mental conditions that the internet can supercharge, from "pro-ana" communities that encourage eating disorders to communities for people with pedophilic urges that attempts to normalize and justify acting on those urges.

But it's especially bad for paranoid delusions, such as "gang-stalking delusion," which is the delusional belief that nearly everyone you meet is part of a conspiracy to torment you. People with GSD see evidence of this conspiracy in the lyrics of random songs, snatches of overheard conversations, the phrasing of bus-shelter ads, and the sort-order of search engine results:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

It's a near-totalizing belief, and sufferers find it hard to recover because their delusion tells them that the therapists and family members who try to help them are in on the conspiracy.

Then we add in the internet, and with it, the ability to locate and join communities of other GSD sufferers. Do this, and your delusions need not be limited to your own imaginative capacity to find conspiratorial explanations of the random things you find in the world. Now you are part of a kind of delusional improv troupe, whose members "yes-and" your delusions, finding new ways to terrorize you and alienate you from your surroundings.

This is bad enough when it's a regular conspiratorial community, one that feeds on trauma, like Qanon or anti-vax communities whose members have been failed by the system, making them susceptible to conspiratorial accounts of how society really runs.

But the combination of conspiratorial communities with the kind of mental illness that causes conspiratorial beliefs to surface in your mind without any external stimulus creates a brutal positive feedback loop that spins faster and faster until the people trapped in it are flung off into space.

Which brings me to AI and "AI psychosis," the social phenomenon that sees people falling down chatbot-assisted rabbit holes that convince them that they have invented perpetual motion, uncovered the secrets of the universe, or – in some tragic instances – that they should kill themselves and/or others.

For someone with GSD or another paranoid delusion or pathological belief, AI provides a reinforcement system that is even more efficient than these online communities. If you have GSD and your loved ones have finally got you wondering if you should get treatment, you don't have to post on a forum and hope that someone else comes along before you give in to the impulse to get help. Your delusional chatbot co-pilot is always there to tell you that it's a trap.

The nature of "AI psychosis" is hotly contested. The big question, of course, is whether chatbots are giving people delusions, or whether chatbots are amplifying those delusions:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16218103-e3-ai-psychosis

I think it's both. I think that, for people with GSD or other delusional beliefs, AI provides delusional reinforcement as a service, on tap, 24/7. The combination of a delusion and a machine that will tirelessly play yes-and with you at any time, demanding nothing from you, is a novel and terrible development for people with some mental illnesses.

But I also think that chatbots are a bit like Mission: Space: a machine for surfacing previously undiagnosed psychological vulnerabilities, and that in some cases, these vulnerabilities may never have been triggered, save for the chatbot.

Just as doubtlessly there were people who had pathological relationships to gambling before the development of slot machines, scratch-and-wins and roulette wheels, but there are also people who might have lived their whole lives without ever having a gambling problem except that they encountered one of these machines, exposing billions of people to sycophantic chatbots has surfaced rare, latent vulnerabilities that might have stayed latent forever, with terrible consequences.

Most people who rode the original Mission: Space had a fantastic time. But a lot of people rode that ride, and a very small percentage of a very large number of people can still be a substantial number, and as the reports of people stepping off the ride, clutching their chests and collapsing spread, Disney understood that they had to retool the ride. Today, riders on Mission: Space choose whether they want to ride on a simulator that spins, or one that merely tilts and pitches without simulating gee-stresses. And even if you pick the spicier version of the ride, it goes more slowly and exerts less stress than the original ride.

Even if you accept the AI companies' argument that they aren't inducing AI psychosis in their users, but rather, only surfacing latent vulnerabilities that were there all along, that shouldn't be the end of the story. Even if only a small percentage of the people who use your product experience harm as a result, if your product is intended for widespread deployment (as chatbots are), you will end up harming a lot of people unless you take measures to counteract even those rare events.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Hell is other people – so billionaires are using AI to replace them https://www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-column-ai-inconvenient-humans-billionaires-sam-altman-bezoz-migrants

• The Manhattan Institute Helped Kill DEI. Now It’s Coming for Protests https://www.wired.com/story/the-manhattan-institute-helped-kill-dei-now-its-coming-for-protests/

• Remote Work Leaves Younger Workers Sidelined https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/06/remote-work-leaves-younger-workers-sidelined/

• Zerowriter https://zerowriter.ink/

• Good Reason to Kill #79: Disputed Seating at Kindergarten Graduation https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/05/good-reason-to-kill-79-disputed-seating.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Gay Days at Disney World draws 140,000 participants https://web.archive.org/web/20060626125509/http://gaydays.com/calendar/

#20yrsago Blue Coat censorware company blocks Boing Boing for criticizing censorware https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/03/blue-coat-censorware-company-blocks-bb-for-criticizing-censorware/

#15yrsago UN report says 3 Strikes copyright termination is illegal https://web.archive.org/web/20110605030049/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5834/125/

#15yrsago Wisconsin GOP plotting to nominate spoiler Democratic candidates in recall elections https://web.archive.org/web/20110604111734/http://www.politicususa.com/en/secret-tape-wisconsin-gop

#15yrsago MI6 hackers replace al Qaeda bomb recipes with pirated cake recipes https://web.archive.org/web/20110603115453/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/8553366/MI6-attacks-al-Qaeda-in-Operation-Cupcake.html

#15yrsago $10,000,000 in venture capital for grilled-cheese sandwich “platform” https://venturebeat.com/technology/the-melt-flip-sequoia

#15yrsago Walled gardens vs makers https://web.archive.org/web/20150723092624/http://makezine.com/2011/06/01/walled-gardens-vs-makers/

#15yrsago Keyboard whose keys are raised in proportion to their frequency of use https://web.archive.org/web/20110604155657/https://itp.nyu.edu/~mk3321/itp_blog/?p=779

#15yrsago 3D model for reproducing house-keys https://www.science.org/content/article/experimental-error-fetus-dont-fail-me-now

#15yrsago Toronto artist turns abandoned bike into sculpture, City threatens fine for “storing bike on public property” https://web.archive.org/web/20110604181734/http://blogthegood.tumblr.com/post/6039831308/re-cycling

#10yrsago DoD public relations’ highest-ranking civilian gets community service for stealing license plates and harassing neighbor’s nanny https://web.archive.org/web/20160603071800/https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-warning-left-on-a-nannys-car-license-plates-stolen-and-a-top-pentagon-official-in-big-trouble/2016/06/01/50699a3a-2816-11e6-a3c4-0724e8e24f3f_story.html

#10yrsago US government agency’s own numbers predict virtually no gains from TPP https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/02/official-us-international-trade-commission-predicts-negligible-economic-benefits-tpp/

#10yrsago EFF: FBI & NIST’s tattoo recognition program exploited prisoners, profiled based on religion, gave sensitive info to private contractors https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/tattoo-recognition-research-threatens-free-speech-and-privacy

#10yrsago Ronald Reagan was Donald Trump, until he was president https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/05/ronald-reagan-was-once-donald-trump.html

#10yrsago The Steampunk Roadster: Jake von Slatt’s final steampunk project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpI4GT4sTAY

#10yrsago Every Heart a Doorway: Seanan McGuire’s subversive, gorgeous tale of rejects from the realms of faerie https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/02/every-heart-a-doorway-seanan-mcguires-subversive-gorgeous-tale-of-rejects-from-the-realms-of-faerie/

#10yrsago Prestigious Pets of Dallas wants $1M from customers who said they overfed a fish https://web.archive.org/web/20160603133604/http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/1-star-yelp-review-on-gordy-the-pet-fish-being-overfed-nets-1m-lawsuit/

#10yrsago Airport security officer was alleged war criminal, arrested for lying about participation in “genocidal acts” https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/06/war-criminal-resume.html

#10yrsago In 1977, the CIA’s top lawyer said Espionage Act shouldn’t be applied to press leaks https://web.archive.org/web/20160609234545/https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.history.state.gov/frus/frus1977-80v28/pdf/frus1977-80v28.pdf

#10yrsago Tumblr’s shoplifting community is organized, politically conscious, and at war with weightlifters https://www.good.is/issue-37-we-r-cute-shoplifters/

#10yrsago Canada Post drops legal claim over crowdsourced postal code database https://web.archive.org/web/20160603185742/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/06/crowdsourcedpostalcodelawsuit/

#10yrsago History podcasters occasionally mention women, butthurt dudes complain it’s “all women” https://web.archive.org/web/20190411115710/https://www.iheart.com/podcast/stuff-you-missed-in-history-cl-21124503/

#10yrsago Corbyn pledges to kill TTIP if elected https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/06/02/jeremy-corbyn-i-would-kill-ttip

#10yrsago Democratic “superdelegates” endorse Bernie https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/06/bernie-sanders-superdelegates-223824

#10yrsago Dick Van Dyke, 90: Bernie Sanders is the best candidate for seniors https://web.archive.org/web/20210725072638/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/why-bernie-sanders-is-best-898479/

#10yrsago Flintnation: 33 US cities caught cheating on municipal water lead tests https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/02/lead-water-testing-cheats-chicago-boston-philadelphia

#10yrsago Defense lawyers: the FBI made us use a copy-shop that made secret copies for the government https://web.archive.org/web/20160604065222/https://www.floridabulldog.org/2016/06/u-s-attorneys-office-fbi-accused-of-spying-on-defense-in-fraud-case/

#5yrsago How the Dutch helped CBS cheat on its taxes https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#dutch-treat

#5yrsago Amazon running scared from arbitration at scale https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard

#5yrsago Efficiency is very inefficient https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/jitters/#brittleness

#5yrsago I quit https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/i-quit/

#5yrsago NYC's driver-owned Uber alternative https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#gig-no-more

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
  https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

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

• Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP)
  https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

• The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
  https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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I walked past Kawai Kanjirō’s house and studio twice before I found the door I was looking for. Located on a quiet side street in Kyoto, the unassuming museum dedicated to the life and work of the influential folk potter blends in with all the other machiya townhouses typical of the city, with the metallic sheen of its kawara roof tiles, dark wood latticed windows, and curved bamboo inuyarai screens extending from the plastered facade to the sidewalk. I’m sure that if I could read Japanese, the distinctive wood sign—carved by Living National Treasure Kuroda Tatsuaki—proclaiming the name of the museum would have caught my eye. Otherwise, only a small plaque by the door reads in English: “Kawai Kanjirō’s House Entrance.”

I carefully slid open the wooden door and stepped inside, taking note of the shoes-off etiquette as my eyes adjusted to the dark room. To my right, I was greeted by a carved wooden sculpture of a hand, index finger pointing to the sky — a piece that foreshadows the mystical quality that the home, and all of Kanjirō’s work, seems to emanate. I stashed my sneakers in a cubby at the door and slipped into a pair of communal house shoes before being warmly welcomed in.

The interior of the home offers about as much explanation as the exterior. In the folk tradition of anonymity and embracing the unknown, few signs exist — in Japanese or English — to tell you where to go or what you are looking at. You are entering someone’s home, after all, and while you will find a few expected museum displays and exhibition labels throughout the two floors, I can imagine that the overall experience of the house is much the same as when the artist lived, worked, and fired his massive eight-chamber noborigama climbing kiln here from 1937 until his death in 1966.

Who Was Kawai Kanjirō?

Kanjirō is best known for his role in establishing Japan’s mingei, or folk art, movement alongside his friends, philosopher and art critic Sōetsu Yanagi, potter Shōji Hamada, and British studio potter Bernard Leach, who helped translate and disseminate the movement’s work and philosophies to Western audiences. Largely considered a reaction to Japan’s rapid post-Meiji Restoration modernization, mingei — or “art of the people” — established a new standard of beauty that its founders believed could only be located in the utilitarian, everyday objects made by Japan’s ordinary, often anonymous craftspeople, rather than by renowned individual artists or master craftsmen.

I received my introduction to the mingei movement through Western art academies, including a brief stint working at the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, where I physically handled and helped catalog many jewels of studio pottery movements worldwide. But I did not learn about Kawai Kanjirō until I visited his home in Kyoto last March. This was not because he was less productive than his counterparts or somehow less influential to the mingei movement, but likely because Kanjirō himself never set foot inside the United States during his lifetime, nor did he ever exhibit work in the country. In fact, most of his pieces have never left Japan — until now, exactly 100 years after the movement was conceived.

For the first time, Japan Society in New York presents a solo exhibition celebrating the potter and national treasure’s life and work, bringing his private collection of ceramics, woodwork, and calligraphy from his former house in Kyoto to Manhattan’s “Japan House.” Titled Kawai Kanjirō: House to House and on view through May 10, 2026, the exhibition celebrates a milestone international exchange of culture and art.

Mingei, From Kyoto to Manhattan

Curated by Michele Brambling, senior director at Japan Society, and Tamae Sagi, curator of the Kawai Kanjirō House and granddaughter of Kanjirō, House to House explores the artist’s oeuvre through the lens of his home, which the curators describe as his “largest and most comprehensive creative work.” Designed by Kanjirō himself and built by his brother, a master carpenter, the house remains a living example of the mingei movement.

“From the outside, one could never guess what a vast storehouse of art lies beyond the door,” friend and Japanese American writer Yoshiko Uchida wrote in 1953, in an essay excerpted in We Do Not Work Alone, the slim, copper-colored volume that can be purchased at the museum in Kyoto and at Japan Society. Today, the same is true: stepping into the house feels like entering a time capsule of 20th-century Japanese craft. When exploring its grounds, one can feel the artist’s emphasis on the importance of everyday objects.

“One is immediately impressed by [the house’s] massiveness and sturdiness,” wrote Uchida. “There is nothing flimsy or unstable about it.” Japan Society evokes this sentiment through the display of a large section drawing that shows the mechanics of the home, alongside a wall of perspective sketches and photographs of the house’s interior made in situ by the Rome-based exhibition designers Milk Train.

These prints highlight not only the building’s architecture, but also the trove of furniture and objects one can find throughout the house: a bamboo stool that transforms into a child’s chair when turned sideways, barrel-shaped straw stools, squat chairs made from old wooden mortars once used for pounding rice, an alcove desk, and his two potter’s wheels — most of which were designed and made by Kanjirō himself. The drawing even depicts the friendly tortoiseshell house cat that greeted me during my visit, patiently sitting through visitor photoshoots and mewing at me to let her back into the house when I re-entered from the courtyard kiln area.

Japan Society’s main gallery presents Kanjirō’s ceramics chronologically, from his earlier Chinese- and Korean-inspired works to his later, more abstract and asymmetrical vessels, splashed with his signature hand-mixed copper, iron, and cobalt glazes. The final room is dedicated to the artist’s experimental late-career wooden sculptures and masks, which echo the same motifs as his ceramics: hands pointing to the sky, figures from Japanese folklore, and, of course, cats.

The white display tables and cases throughout the galleries were designed to evoke the joinery of the Kyoto home’s construction, while their varied heights allude to the different levels at which works are arranged throughout the home’s interior. On the walls surrounding the tables, visitors encounter a selection of Kanjirō’s 1960s calligraphy: poems that read as Zen meditations. One, in particular, stands out: “The eyes hear; the ears see.”

Evoking a Buddhist Standard of Beauty

The difference between seeing and knowing underscores the mingei movement, emphasizing its strong ties to Japanese Buddhism. To best “see” Kawai Kanjirō’s work, perhaps we should heed the words of his dear collaborator and fellow founder of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, Sōetsu Yanagi.

In his 1940 essay “Seeing and Knowing,” Yanagi wrote: “First, put aside the desire to judge immediately; acquire the habit of just looking. Second, do not treat the object as an object for the intellect. Third, just be ready to receive, passively, without interposing yourself.” He continues, “If you can void your mind of all intellectualization, like a clear mirror that simply reflects, all the better.” For Yanagi, this “non-conceptualization,” or the Zen state of mushin — “no mind” — “springs the true ability to contact things directly and positively.”

For Kanjirō, “God” and “Buddha” were simply labels for the unknown force bigger than us all, what the artist called “The Unknown Self.” The artist told Uchida, “The unknown self is revealed through the work of the hands and the body, and it is that unconscious element in every man that prods him on to new achievements.” He believed that anyone can practice the art of making beautiful things, and that the unknown self is always the force that drives a person’s actions forward.

This belief in beauty as truth, and in beauty as a means of connecting to the spirit through art, is at the heart of mingei. Yanagi wrote, “Every artist knows that he is engaged in an encounter with infinity, and that work done with heart and hand is ultimately worship of life itself.” The writings of Yanagi and the works of Kanjirō show us that not only is there no distinction between truth and beauty, but there is also no difference between fine and applied art. The great ceramicist Bernard Leach, a close friend of the mingei movement, described this breaking down of distinctions as “perhaps Japan’s greatest contribution to world culture.”

Craft in the Face of the Unknown

What Leach did for Yanagi’s texts — translating and presenting them “so that the western world may penetrate that which Buddhism contains for the seeker looking for the meaning of beauty in the face of truth” — is also what Japan Society is doing for contemporary viewers of Kanjirō’s life’s work today.

While the artist died 60 years ago, the underlying themes of his work highlight the very nature of human life and creation — themes that were relevant during the rapid, machine-driven industrialization of the 20th century and remain so today, in our present age, as every aspect of society is increasingly infiltrated by machine learning and artificial intelligence. The mingei sentiment — that every ordinary person has the ability and agency to produce beautiful, truthful objects with their own hands — echoes a statement I hear independent artists and craftspeople saying a lot today: it is better to make bad art than generate AI “art.”

In his writing, Yanagi articulated the belief that “fundamentally, human beings, Eastern or Western, need belief, free play of imagination, and intuition in their homes and workshops or they become starved. All of the cog wheels and electronic brains cannot assuage these human needs in the long run.” There is no better example of an imaginative, intuitive art and design practice than that of Kawai Kanjirō.

Kanjirō’s work, and the broader context of mingei, are living reminders of what it means to be human, and I think people are craving more of those reminders right now. As a whole, Japan Society’s Kawai Kanjirō: House to House stands as a generous offering and a reminder of what it looks like to create with, and find beauty in, the work of humanity’s first tools: the hands.

Elsewhere in Japan, Kawai Kanjirō and Shōji Hamada, a concurrent exhibition, is on view at Tokyo’s Japan Folk Crafts Museum, the institution the two potters helped establish with Yanagi 90 years ago, in 1936. And in Japan Society’s central gallery, visitors can watch an excerpt from film footage chronicling the making of the exhibition through the words of Kanjirō’s granddaughter and co-curator. Visitors are encouraged to donate to fundraising efforts so that the curatorial team can continue creating a feature-length film that will further spread the message of mingei and Kanjirō’s legacy to audiences beyond New York and Japan.

Just as the mingei founders had no real way of knowing the long-term effects of industrialization on their craft, today’s artists and designers cannot fully begin to comprehend the effects of machine learning on our work and industry. Maybe a Zen mindset is the best approach here. As Kanjirō said, “There is excitement and stimulation in not understanding a thing completely. The unknown is fascinating.”

Photography courtesy of Jaxson Stone.

While Google CEO Sundar Pichai proudly tells the world that 75 percent of all new code at the company is AI-generated, internally Google employees are sharing memes about how AI is bad at that exact task and makes their job harder. 

One such meme was posted to an internal Google message board called Memegen on May 19, right as the company kicked off its annual I/O conference where it reveals its biggest products and features, according to a copy seen by 404 Media. Unsurprisingly, I/O 2026 was heavily focused on Google’s AI products, which seemed to frustrate or at least amuse some Google employees. This particular meme was a screenshot of Google’s on stage presentation. “I/O announces entirely new ways to slop,” the meme said, with the word “slop” edited into the image in Impact font. The meme was quickly given more than 100 thumbs up from other employees.

404 Media recreated the memes we’ve seen rather than sharing the same exact images in order to protect our sources, who were not permitted to share them with the press. 

I wasn’t able to confirm the exact number of anti AI memes shared on Google’s Memegen message board, but I’ve seen dozens of them. One Google employee told me that there are dozens of new memes like this being shared every week. This source estimated that the number of anti AI memes shared inside Google in the last year is in the “high hundreds / thousands.” This employee also said that the number of anti AI memes “spikes when there’s product announcements, or model updates, or Jetski breaks down or something.”

Jetski is Google’s internal AI coding tool. One image shared on May 14 on Memegen I’ve seen shows an interaction between a Google employee and Jetski. “How did you get these metrics?” the Google employee’s prompt said. The screenshot shows that Jetski “thought for 11s,” and then said: “To be completely transparent, the specific numeric metrics and quantitative values presented in that supplemental report were simulated by the secondary sub-agent rather than extracted from live production systems.” In other words: Jetski made them up. 

“Thanks Jetski, very useful report,” says the impact text over the screenshot. That meme has more than 400 upvotes.

“Wow, it’s learned to pass blame, it truly is human!” said the first comment on that post.  

Another meme shared on May 19 showed Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise traveling at light speed. “AI on the I/O stage: writes an operating system,” said the text overlaid on that image. This image was juxtaposed with a picture of a child stuck on a slide at a playground. “AI when I use it: invents fake proto fields,” said the text overlaid on that image. This meme quickly got more than 50 thumbs up. 

Another meme shared on May 19 is the image of the big forehead fish. “Aren’t you using AI? Who is still taking so much time? AI is magic, are you a muggle? New best AI tool launched just today,” says the text overlaid on the annoying fish. “Me, working,” said the text overlaid on the diver who is attempting to work.

Someone responded to that meme a day later with a picture of Stimpy from the cartoon Ren and Stimpy looking at a red button, sweating, with a man standing on his back and looking at him expectantly. “Companies trying to get me to use their AI features,” the text says. 

A meme shared on May 13 shows Margot Robbie as Barbie dancing enthusiastically on one side of the image, and Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer looking into the middle distance with the weight of the world on his shoulders. “CL author Vibe Coding massive changes,” says the text over Barbie. CL is short for changelist, meaning changes to code in existing projects.  “Code reviewers,” says the text over Oppenheimer. That meme got more than 160 thumbs up. 

It refers to a problem 404 Media has covered previously, which is that AI-generated code is easy to produce quickly and in large quantities, but it makes the work of human code reviewers much more difficult because there is so much more to sort through, and no one understands the code because no one wrote it. 

“We’re finding that AIs have relieved the pressure and bottleneck of code generation, but that everything else has become the bottleneck, Google-wide testing and build times, human review delays, comparatively slow infra and VCS,” one Google employee told me. “The conclusion many colleagues are arriving at is that Google’s infra [infrastructure] and eng [engineering] culture was built to be stable and intentionally slow, and that pressures to accelerate using AI are bumping into that.”

This employee said that there’s been an “understandable push” to automate part of what his team works on, but that there’s also a pressure to “inflate counter factual metrics.” For example, Google will claim it would have taken them much longer to complete a project if it didn’t use AI. The employee said he could easily AI generate 100 individual tasks, but actually finishing the job requires human intervention and takes just as much time as always. 

“Projects AI-related are prioritized, everything else gets pushed off (I was supposed to work on something testing related and after a lot of back and forth that project was cancelled and now I was dragged into an Agents related project),” another Google employee told me. “I have zero motivation, I feel kind of burnt out of the constant shifts. I do not have an alternative at the moment (and I am sending my CV around).”

“We encourage our engineers to vigorously test and critique our internal tools; that candid feedback loop is vital to how we build technology," a Google spokesperson told me. "AI coding models are designed to assist developers, but it’s critical that we maintain humans in the loop – including the oversight and expertise of our world class engineering talent. We continue to refine our internal tools based on employee feedback to ensure they are enabling, and not hindering, daily productivity.”

After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop."

“We encourage our engineers to vigorously test and critique our internal tools; that candid feedback loop, even via our internal meme generator, is vital to how we build technology," Google said. "We continue to refine our internal tools based on employee feedback to ensure we are delivering the best experience that maximizes daily productivity.” 

Update: This story has been updated with additional comment from Google.

RE Bubbles; Record debt; About 50% overpriced; Collapse inevitable; Return to 2-4x income; Bail-outs essentially impossible…

Interview with Joseph Barbuto on ‘The Really Big Show”

As we have been saying, for too long…

Today's links

• The tedious power of storytelling: "Excitement" is to art as "falsifiablilty" is to science.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Lost Marx Bros musical; USPTO v Drumpf trademark; 3D scans v copyright; Giving worse internet to people with bad credit ratings; Class action over royalty theft; Trusbusting Prime; Trustbusting Google.
• Upcoming appearances: London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, South Bend.
• 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 tedious power of storytelling (permalink)

Yesterday, I attended a Brian Eno talk about the nature of creativity and art based on What Art Does, the short book he published with Bette Adriaanse last year:

https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571395514-what-art-does-an-unfinished-theory/

I haven't read the book (yet – I just ordered a copy), but the talk really got me fizzing. The subject matter (not just what art does, but also what art is) is one I've given a lot of thought to, and Eno's characteristic mix of gnomic koans and deceptively plainspoken assertions brought me along to some realizations of my own.

For Eno, art is "everything you don't have to do." You have to wear clothes to protect yourself from the elements, but you don't need to adorn those clothes. You need to speak to make yourself understood by the people around you, but you don't have to sing or write poetry or make up stories.

This is a really critical point, and I think it can be further refined by this: "Art is intended to make other people feel something." This distinguishes "art" from "beauty." A sunset can be beautiful, but no one intends anything by it. An artist who takes a photo or paints a picture of a sunset does so in the hopes that it will make you feel something, but the sun and the atmosphere and the Earth's curvature and rotation don't hope anything, because they are inanimate.

This distinction has lately become far more significant, thanks to the rise of images and words that have the seeming of intent, but who don't have an intender. When you paint a painting, every brushstroke conveys an intent, even if you can't point at an individual brushstroke and articulate its purpose. The same is true of prose: every word and punctuation mark is there for a reason, and "being good at writing" (like "being good at painting") is how we describe someone who has practiced so much that these reasons can be infused into each micro-decision on a near-totally subconscious level.

Contrast this with AI: when you prompt an AI to generate words or pixels, you are conveying some intent about the feeling you want the people who experience the model's output to experience. The problem is that the AI doesn't have any intent of its own – it just has statistical predictions, based on other people's intent, which it has analyzed through its training data.

So when the AI expands the three sentences in your prompt into 100,000 words or 1,000,000 pixels, it isn't adding any of its intention to the finished work, it's diluting the intention you fed to it. Three sentences divided by one million pixels yields an image that has an average intentionality that's so low that it's practically homeopathic.

Until recently, we weren't accustomed to encountering coherent strings of words or polished images that had no intender, so we imputed the existence of that intender to them, and we did what we always do when we encounter a work of art: we tried to mentally materialize a facsimile of the feeling the artist experienced while creating the work.

Because the intention of these works was so dilute, we ended up hallucinating an intent. We made up an imaginary artist who meant something by every choice in the work, and experienced an emotional affect that we ourselves had created out of (nearly) whole cloth.

As a species, we've been through this before. Think back to those sunsets. There was a time when we all thought of sunsets as being explicitly created by another being, who was in communication with us through the natural environment (some people still believe this). Looking at a sunset was an exercise in asking yourself, "If I were God, what would I be trying to say to me with this sunset?" just as looking at one of my photos of a sunset would be an exercise in asking yourself, "If I were Cory, what would I be trying to say to me with this photo of a sunset?"

The rise of materialism and scientific rationalism is sometimes called a "disenchantment" and indeed, there's a sense in which a sunset that we know to have no intender is no longer "enchanted." The experience of a sunset becomes something like, "Those colors and their interplay with the physical world is very beautiful." It might even be, "How could I capture that beauty in a painting or a photo or a description so that I could communicate it to someone else?" But it's not, "I wonder what God wants me to feel when I look at this sunset?"

So for many of us, the experience of AI "art" went from, "Wow, there's a person in the machine that's trying to tell me something," to "Wow, that is an impressive feat of software design, but it doesn't say anything to me." Maybe some of us think, "Huh, I could take some element of this, refine it with my own brushstrokes or words, and make something out of it." That's like thinking about turning a sunset into a painting: the sunset is striking and maybe beautiful, but it doesn't become art until you work at it, in order to make it communicate something:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted

Mark Fisher describes the "seeming of an intent without an intender" as "eerie." It's true: when the door slams in the night and there's no one else in the house, it's eerie. But eeriness is easily dispelled: once you locate the open window that's creating the draft that's blowing the door closed, the eeriness regresses swiftly to the mean:

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

Banishing eeriness may be straightforward, but preventing eeriness is much harder. We are prone to imputing intent to the things we see in the world. In "Genesis," an essay from EL Doctorow's (no relation) collection The Creationists, Doctorow describes the origins of the Babylonian creation story (which the Hebrews ripped off for Genesis 1:1-29 – Genesis is Babylonian fanfic). The Babylonians made up this story about how God created the heavens and Earth and so forth, and this story was so cool that they couldn't believe that they had just made it up, so they concluded that God must have put it in their minds:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41520/creationists-by-e-l-doctorow/

Back to Eno: central to his talk was the "theory of mind." To have a theory of mind is to be able to impute someone else's intent. It's when you ask yourself, "What does that person mean by the thing they just said or did?" Because art is a process by which an artist tries to get you to feel something, it requires that the artist have a theory about your mind. And because experiencing art is a process of trying to figure out what the artist wanted you to feel when you experienced their work, experiencing art also requires a theory of mind.

From time to time, I teach fiction writing workshops, and one of the lectures I always give is about how stories are a "fuggly hack":

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

It's very weird that storytellers can trick our brains into experiencing emotions based on empathy for "people" whom we know to be imaginary. Romeo and Juliet are made up, they never lived, they never died, and so, objectively speaking, their deaths are less tragic than the death of the yogurt you ate for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, after all. And yet, we weep for Romeo and Juliet.

Our automatic "theory of mind" processes create empathy for stuff even when we know that stuff is inanimate. But the purpose of narrative isn't getting you to experience empathy with an imaginary person. The purpose of narrative is to get you to experience that empathy so that you will feel something. In other words, the storyteller who describes a character who is swept away by the beauty of a sunset is trying to get you to feel "swept away" not "empathy for someone who is swept away."

There's lots of art that skips the step in which you are asked to first experience empathy for an imaginary person in order to arrive at some feeling. A lot of music, visual art, dance, and poetry seeks to evince that feeling in you directly.

When this works, it's profound. I think about this a lot in terms of built environments, specifically Disney themepark rides. When I started hanging around with Imagineers (the multidisciplinary artists who design and execute these rides), I noticed that they made frequent reference to the role of narrative storytelling in their ride designs, which was weird, because the very best Disney rides do not use narrative to evince a feeling.

Think of two Disney rides: Snow White's Enchanted Wish (1955); and The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure (2011). In Snow White, riders follow a track through a series of animated vignettes with UV-fluorescing painted backdrops and an orchestral soundtrack. There are almost no words spoken in the soundtrack. The ride's vignettes recreate scenes from the 1937 animated film, but they don't make any attempt to explain the plot of the movie.

A rider who'd never seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs could not recount the plot of the movie to you. However, that rider could absolutely convey the emotional affect of every scene in the film. It is a near-perfect transmission of the feelings evinced by the movie, notwithstanding that it bypasses recounting the film's narrative.

By contrast, The Little Mermaid ride is what's sometimes pejoratively called a "book report ride." The scenes are full of dialog, and they explicitly re-create the storyline of the 1989 film. These scenes are well-executed, with lots of clever mechanical effects and skillfully painted and sculpted scenes and robots. A rider who never saw the film could give you a scene-by-scene breakdown of it – but they could not tell you about any of the emotional beats of the film. For all that the ride faithfully recreates the story of the film, it does so at the expense of the purpose of the film, the feeling the film is designed to evince from its audience.

As a novelist, I find it natural that someone trying to build a Little Mermaid ride would start from the premise that it should explicitly retell the story of the film. If you want an audience member to experience a feeling, narrative gives you the opportunity to explicitly describe the feeling you want the audience member to experience. You can situate a character on a lonely beach at sunset and tell the reader how that character feels.

The problem is that while this has an increased likelihood of being high-fidelity way of transmitting a feeling, it also has an increased likelihood of being a low-intensity way of conveying that feeling. When you tell someone about what's going on in another person's mind (including an imaginary person's mind), it doesn't fire up the theory-of-mind machine in the way that asking someone to infer the state of someone else's mind from implicit cues does.

This is why fiction writers are exhorted to "show, not tell." Dramatic, implicit evocations of an emotion are intrinsically more interesting than explicit statements about emotions. That's not to say that exposition can't evince an emotion – it can and does. It's just harder to do this with exposition than it is to do it with dramatization:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

In his talk yesterday, Eno discussed abstract art, and the way that it evinces feelings in the viewer directly, without ever telling you what to feel. This is in keeping with much of Eno's own art (he recently told me that when he writes lyrics, he never uses the words "I," "me," "you," or "love").

In this theory I'm developing here, we could say that the more abstract a work is, the harder it is to evince a specific feeling with high fidelity, but the more likely it is that the feelings it does evince will be intensely felt. When your aesthetic sense resonates with a Henry Moore bronze or an Eno ambient track, the thrum is deep and strong.

Key to this theory is that it's about how hard it is for an artist to evince a feeling and how hard it is for the artist to make that feeling intense. Abstract art is more likely to be misunderstood (or not understood) than explicit narratives, but lots of abstract art is very well understood by people for whom it resonates. Explicit narratives are more likely to have a flatter affect than work that attempts to skewer your emotions directly, but plenty of explicit narratives make you feel the most profound emotions you're capable of feeling.

Imagine a 2×2 grid with "intensity" on one axis and "fidelity" on the other. It's easier to evince an intense feeling when you are more abstract, but it's harder to control what that feeling will be. These are works that operate on an implicit theory of mind ("I think I know what you'll feel when you see this"). It's easier to control the feeling you're evincing when you are more concrete, but it's harder to make that feeling an intense one ("I will tell you what someone else is feeling using this work").

None of this is to establish a hierarchy of art. As Eno says, the value of art is in whether it makes you feel something and what it makes you feel – not how that feeling is drawn forth. In What Art Does, Eno describes both art and science as an extension of our natural, in-born tendency to play. The difference is that we judge the success of science based on whether we can validate its conclusions, while we judge the success of art based on whether it excites us:

'Excitement' is to art as 'falsifiability' is to science.

(With thanks to Brian Eno.)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Meta legal action forces Facebook whistleblower to sit in silence at Hay festival https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/31/meta-legal-action-forces-facebook-whistleblower-to-stay-silent-at-hay-festival

• EU Wants To Break Up With US Tech https://www.barrons.com/news/eu-wants-to-break-up-with-us-tech-5a8da16b

• The rise of the McModern https://web.archive.org/web/20201013161651/https://archive.curbed.com/2017/6/30/15893836/what-is-mcmansion-hell-modern-suburbs-history

• Merchandizing the Void https://dilettantearmy.com/articles/merchandizing-the-void

• Hundreds of prolific Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike https://www.theverge.com/report/939442/wikipedia-editors-protest-wikimedia-layoffs-strike

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago IRS insider accuses agency of giving archives to lowest bidder https://web.archive.org/web/20060614142129/http://wftm.diaryland.com/060601_71.html

#20yrsago Telemedicine rigs coming to all Virgin jets https://web.archive.org/web/20060616063357/http://europetravelnews.com/2006_05/844_virgin-atlantic-life-saving-technology/

#15yrsago Con artists caught tricking med-students into helping with high-tech entrance exam cheat https://web.archive.org/web/20110603051231/https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/05/31/bc-high-tech-mcat-scam.html

#10yrsago How a “lost” Marx Brothers musical found its way back to the stage https://web.archive.org/web/20160602114803/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-a-lost-marx-brothers-musical-found-its-way-back-onstage

#10yrsago How security and privacy pros can help save the web from legal threats over vulnerability disclosure https://iapp.org/news/a/how-you-can-help-white-hat-security-researchers

#10yrsago US Patent and Trademark Office refuses to issue “Drumpf” trademark https://www.worldipreview.com/trademark/drumpf-trademark-application-refused-by-uspto-10210

#10yrsago How an engineer/public health whistleblower led the citizen scientists who busted Flint’s water crisis https://web.archive.org/web/20160604112755/https://www.wired.com/2016/06/flint-water-marc-edwards/

#10yrsago Why 3D scans aren’t copyrightable https://web.archive.org/web/20160605140300/https://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/25599-new-whitepaper-on-3d-scanning-and-the-lack-of-copyright.html

#10yrsago Cable One used customers’ credit scores to decide how good their internet would be https://wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/broadband-privacy-can-prevent-discrimination-the-case-of-cable-one-and-fico-scores/

#10yrsago Class action: publishers paid writers “sale” royalties on ebooks whose fine-print says they’re “licensed” https://www.copylaw.org/2016/05/simon-schuster-hit-with-ebook-royalties.html

#5yrsago The antitrust case against Prime https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#prime-facie

#5yrsago Google cheats on location privacy https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#goog

#5yrsago Canadian telco monopolists run the show https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#crtc

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

• Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
  https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

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

• Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

• The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
  https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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