The shortlist for this year’s Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition has arrived. After deliberating for a total of 20 hours on Zoom, 22 judges evaluated a record-breaking 12,557 photographs and consolidated its most promising contenders. Capturing the diversity of wildlife and nature landscapes across 11 unique categories, each photo highlights stunning close-up, micro, and macro perspectives.

CUPOTY’s Top 100 photos are yet to be selected from this collection in January 2026. Find the entire shortlist on the contest’s website, and in the meantime, follow Instagram for updates. Can’t get enough of these extreme close-ups? Immerse yourself in images from past cycles of the contest.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Close-Up Photographer of the Year Celebrates Minuscule Marvels and Delicate Details appeared first on Colossal.

Today's links

• The internet was made for privacy: And unmade by regulators.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Materialist conspiratorialism; TSA ball-fondlers; Anonymous to dox 1,000 Klansmen; Amazon hates private property; The Great Firewall of Cameron.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The internet was made for privacy (permalink)

While "tech exceptionalism" can be a grave sin (as with the "move fast and break things" ethos that wrecked so much of our world, especially its labor markets), there are ways in which tech is truly exceptional, in the sense of bringing forth capabilities and affordances that have never existed before, in all of human history.

One obvious way in which tech is exceptional: its flexibility. Digital computers are "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machines," which means that they are engines capable of computing every valid program. They are truly general purpose. We have many other general purpose machines, of course, but they are simple things, like wheels. Computers are unique in that they are both complex and universal, and every computer can run every program. Just as we don't know how to make knives that only cut in beneficial ways, we also don't know how to make computers that only run desirable programs.

Every computer can run every program, including ones that the user doesn't want (viruses), or that the manufacturer doesn't want (ad-blockers). No one knows how to make a computer that is almost Turing-complete. There's no such thing as "Turing-complete minus one." We can't make a computer that only runs the programs the manufacturer has authorized – all we can do is criminalize the act modifying your own computer to do what you tell it to, even if the manufacturer objects:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

I've devoted a lot of my life to exploring the policy implications of this amazing fact, but that's not the only amazing, exceptional thing about technology. There's at least one other way in which modern digital technology has produced something that is genuinely, civilizationally novel: encryption.

Encryption – scrambling data so that it can only be read by its intended recipient – is an age-old project for both the authorities (who used ciphers to keep their secrets safe since the time of the Caesars) and for those who would overthrow them (revolutionary movements have always used codes to protect themselves from the authorities they sought to dethrone).

But WWII ushered in a new era, in which encryption (and attempts to break it) went digital, as Alan Turing and the codebreakers of Bletchley Park turned themselves to a computer-aided mathematics of scrambling and descrambling. In the decades that followed, a modern form of encryption emerged, one that was powerful beyond the wildest dreams of the Caesars and their revolutionary adversaries.

Modern, computerized encryption can scramble data to the point where it is literally unscramblable by an unauthorized party. In the eyeblink moment between you pressing the camera button on your phone and the resulting image being saved to its mass storage, the bits that make up that image are scrambled so thoroughly that even if every hydrogen atom in the universe were made into a computer, and even if all those computers were put to work guessing at the key, we would run out of time and universe before we ran out of keys.

Even futuristic, experimental technologies like quantum computing that may revolutionize codebreaking are also revolutionizing scrambling itself:

https://signal.org/blog/pqxdh/

The history of encryption is seriously fraught. Until the early 1990s, the NSA classed working encryption as a munition and banned civilian access to a whole branch of mathematics. It wasn't until Cindy Cohn – then a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, now its executive director – convinced a court that the First Amendment protected the right to publish computer code, that we were all able to gain access to this essential technology, which today safeguards your messages, files, banking transactions, and the software updates for your car's brakes, your pacemaker, and the informatics on airplanes. Cohn has announced her retirement from EFF in 2026, and while she will be sorely missed, we do have her memoir, Privacy's Defender, to look forward to:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/

The legalization of encryption was a starting gun for the internet itself, as true information security entered the picture and pervaded every part of service design. Every security crisis, every scandal (e.g. Snowden), jolted the effort to encrypt the internet forward, and in this way, much of the internet lurched into a state we can call "encrypted by default."

But even as this privacy-preserving technology was perfected and made ubiquitous, something weird and contradictory happened: mass surveillance also took off online. The ad-tech industry – and its handmaidens, the data-broker industry – rigged the game so that our private activities were only encrypted in such a way as to defend their privacy, but not ours. Our data is encrypted in transit to the servers we interact with, and when it is at rest on those servers' mass storage devices, but it is not encrypted in a way that prevents companies from data-mining it, or decrypting it and selling it on or giving it away or combining it with surveillance data purchased or traded from others.

This isn't an inevitability: it's a choice. The ubiquity of surveillance in the age of encryption is a policy choice. The reason companies don't encrypt our data so that they can't use it against us is because they don't have to. Congress hasn't updated American consumer privacy law since 1988, when they passed a law that prohibits video store clerks from disclosing our VHS rentals:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

Why hasn't Congress updated our privacy rights since Die Hard was in theaters? Because American cops and spies love commercial internet surveillance. Tech companies and data brokers are a source of fine-grained, off-the-books, warrantless surveillance data that the American state is totally dependent on. There is no difference between "commercial surveillance" and "government surveillance" – they are a fused symbiote and neither could survive without the other:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

Governments have hated encryption since the Clinton era, and have been attempting to subvert it since computers came in beige boxes and modems screamed in agony every time you tried to look at the internet:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/clipper-chips-birthday-looking-back-22-years-key-escrow-failures

It's no mystery why we don't have federal bans on facial recognition – if we did, ICE wouldn't be able to nonconsensually, warrantlessly steal your face and store it for 15 years (at least):

https://www.404media.co/you-cant-refuse-to-be-scanned-by-ices-facial-recognition-app-dhs-document-says/

Why did the EU allow Ireland to facilitate mass surveillance for a decade after the GDPR's passage? Because European authorities also hate encryption and say that it is a "totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu-eu-it-still-must-be-stopped-0

The internet could be the most privacy-preserving communications medium in history. Instead, it has ushered in an era of nightmarish surveillance. This isn't a technology problem. It's a policy problem. Criminals spy on us online because our governments wanted to spy on us online, so they let corporations spy on us online.

Imagine what the internet would look like today if, in its early regulatory moments, our elected representatives had demanded privacy, rather than trying to ban it. Sure, some corporations would have spied on us anyway, and criminals would have done their best to compromise our privacy, but criminals and rogue firms wouldn't have been able to attract capital to engage in conduct that was likely to give rise to massive fines and criminal prosecutions for violating the privacy laws Congress never bothered to write for us.

Think of it this way: sure, there are e-commerce sites that are just scams, that take your money and never ship you goods. Those sites don't have IPOs, they're not listed on stock exchanges, and they get shut down or blocked. They exist in the shadows, not in the light. Imagine if that was the kind of commercial surveillance industry we'd gotten: marginal, shadowy, illegal, forever on the run. There would still have been some bad privacy invasions, but these would have been crimes, not Harvard Business Review case-studies:

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=51748

(And before you email me about that one time Paypal closed your account and kept your money or Ebay wouldn't give you a refund, sure, that's right, those things suck, and the companies should face penalties for them, but their business model isn't stealing money from their customers; but Google and Meta and Apple's business model is 100% stealing data from their customers.)

Instead of treating data theft the way we treat monetary theft, we're now increasingly treating monetary theft like data theft. The legislative formalization of cryptocurrency will now allow companies to steal your money with the same blissful lack of consequence as Google faced for stealing your private information:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-89/

We're rounding the corner on a decade since the beginning of the fight against Big Tech, and the efforts to cut it down to size. These keep foundering on the political economy of crushing an all-powerful monopolist – namely, that it is all-powerful.

You can't tax Big Tech:

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2025/06/canada-rescinds-digital-services-tax-to-advance-broader-trade-negotiations-with-the-united-states.html

You can't break it up:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-judge-lets-google-get-away-with

Donald Trump has made it clear that he'd rather let Putin annex Brussels than allow the EU to fine tech companies:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/tech/google-eu-antitrust-fine-adtech

Breakups, taxes and fines are all forms of redistribution, which seek to address the harms of monopoly after the monopoly has been formed. The failure to make privacy protections as inviolable as financial protections is a missed opportunity for predistribution. Bans on data collection, mining, and sale would have prevented these monopolies from forming in the first place. Predistribution is far more effective than redistribution:

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/predistribution-welfare-state-inequality-class

It's amazing to realize that the privacy-invading internet has somehow beaten the encrypted internet. It's crazy that the only entity that will promise to encrypt your data beyond the reach of a data broker, an ad-tech giant, or a government is a ransomware criminal, who will also encrypt your data beyond your reach:

https://www.wired.com/story/state-of-ransomware-2024/

It didn't have to be this way. This wasn't a technology failure. It wasn't a commercial failure. It was a policy failure. Since the 1990s, whenever push came to shove, governments decided that they would rather preserve their ability to spy on us than keep us safe from private spying.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Animal Costumes from the 1862 Fairytale Ball of the Jung-München Artist’s Association https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/maskenfest/

• New physical attacks are quickly diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/new-physical-attacks-are-quickly-diluting-secure-enclave-defenses-from-nvidia-amd-and-intel/

• If Musk was broke, he’d just be another asshole with bad ideas https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/if-musk-was-broke-he-d-just-be-another-asshole-with-bad-ideas-cory-doctorow-20251023-p5n4u6.html

• FCC Republicans force prisoners and families to pay more for phone calls https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/fcc-republicans-force-prisoners-and-families-to-pay-more-for-phone-calls/

• norecognition https://github.com/hevnsnt/norecognition

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Baen Books to launch online sf mag edited by Eric Flint https://web.archive.org/web/20060702073036/http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/?id=33090

#15yrsago Dirty debt collectors frightened victims with fake “sheriffs,” “courtroom,” “judges” https://web.archive.org/web/20101106001140/https://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/r/25569199/detail.html

#15yrsago TSA demands testicular fondling as an alternative to naked scanners https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/for-the-first-time-the-tsa-meets-resistance/65390/

#15yrsago Brain-imaging and neurorealism: what does it mean to “feel something” in your brain? https://www.badscience.net/2010/10/neuro-realism/

#15yrsago Animaniacs vs Newt Gingrich — the lost episode https://www2.cruzio.com/~keeper/UAdearmr.html

#15yrsago Canada’s telcoms regulator gives bloated, throttling incumbent the keys to the kingdom https://web.archive.org/web/20101031090505/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/globe-on-technology/crtc-ruling-handcuffs-competitive-market-teksavvy/article1778211/

#15yrsago Rent-seeking in the 21st century: where eBay, free software, Foxconn and the MPAA come from https://web.archive.org/web/20101102151059/http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/10/points-of-control-rent-extract.html

#10yrsago Patent trolls: The Eastern District of Texas must die so that we all may live https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/its-time-federal-circuit-shut-down-eastern-district-texas

#10yrsago Anonymous threatens to dump real names of 1,000 KKK members https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/anonymous-hackers-threaten-release-names-ku-klux-klan-members-n453246

#10yrsago UK govt: no crypto back doors, just repeal the laws of mathematics https://betanews.com/2015/10/28/uk-government-says-app-developers-wont-be-forced-to-implement-backdoors/

#10yrsago David Cameron promises law to force ISPs to censor a secret blacklist https://web.archive.org/web/20151029155602/http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-10/28/cameron-porn-filter-law-net-neutrality

#10yrsago EU Parliament votes to drop criminal charges and grant asylum to Snowden https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/29/edward-snowden-eu-parliament-vote-extradition

#10yrsago Thanks to the meth wars, cold medicine’s effective ingredient isn’t https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2015/10/26/the-popular-over-the-counter-cold-medicine-that-science-says-doesnt-work/

#10yrsago UK police & spies will have warrantless access to your browsing history https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11964655/Police-to-be-granted-powers-to-view-your-internet-history.html

#10yrsago NM judge believes daily prison rape is a fit punishment for nearly all defendants https://web.archive.org/web/20151030003120/http://www.ijreview.com/2015/10/458319-judge-calls-18-year-old-a-b-but-shes-only-trying-to-help/

#10yrsago Charity with US Characteristics: how our oligarchs buy their way out of criticism https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Robert-Reich/2015/0408/How-the-Koch-brothers-and-the-super-rich-are-buying-their-way-out-of-criticism

#10yrsago Christ, what an asshole. https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/30/christ-what-an-asshole-2/

#5yrsago Facebook loses users, makes more money https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/30/rigged-game/#tails-you-lose

#5yrsago Sue your medical bully https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/29/victim-complex/#i-object

#5yrsago Violent cops' deadly victim complex https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/29/victim-complex/#marsys-law

#5yrsago Amazon says only corporations own property https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/29/victim-complex/#digital-feudalism

#1yrago Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

#1yrago AI's "human in the loop" isn't https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/#is-also-a-human-in-the-loop

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: Peoples and Things with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel, Nov 3
  https://www.youtube.com/live/WjFvGPLpskk

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

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

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

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc

• Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg

• Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
  https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable

• The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
  https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/

• Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Dimly lit and awash in Huluween’s colorcast, fear lives not just on screen but in the body. Shoulders rise. Breath shortens. Fists clench as the show’s score tightens its hold. It’s that liminal instant between the jump scare and the exhale that the EDGEOFYØR Seat seeks to embody.

Created in collaboration with Disney+ and Hulu, San Francisco–based furniture studio Fyrn has reimagined its iconic Mariposa Chair into something at once skeletal and strikingly alive. Dubbed the EDGEOFYØR Seat, the conceptual piece strips away nearly 80 percent of its original form, leaving only the essential structure – an exaggerated act of subtraction that mirrors the stripping away of composure by fear.

“When the Disney+ team described that lean-in moment during a scary movie – when your whole body tenses and you can’t look away – we knew exactly what to build,” says Fyrn co-founder David Charne. “The EDGEOFYØR Seat is the furniture equivalent of a jump scare: use at your own risk.”

Fyrn has built its reputation on craftsmanship and integrity – its work defined by clean geometry, visible joinery, and American ingenuity. But for this project, the studio ventured into the emotional ergonomics of fear. The result is a piece that challenges the very premise of comfort, inviting the sitter to participate in a delicate balance between familiarity and disquiet.

The chair’s slight silhouette, rendered in solid wood and finished in charcoal black, is accented with Fyrn’s patented Copper Bronze brackets, a nod to the precision and engineering that ground all of its designs. And yet, with its seat all but gone, what remains feels less like a place to rest and more like a sculptural embodiment of anticipation.

“We wanted to make something unmistakably Fyrn – honest in its materials and construction – but also something that makes you look twice. A chair, but no seat,” Charne adds.

That gesture, an intentional withholding, creates a kind of psychological charge. The sitter becomes acutely aware of their body, of balance and weight, and the subtle choreography of restraint. Fear becomes spatial with its own architectural implications.

Working alongside Disney+ and their creative agency Callen, Fyrn’s team translated cinematic tension into physical form, visual metaphor into visceral design. The collaboration, which launches as part of Huluween, was conceived as a tongue-in-cheek homage to the immersive nature of horror.

“Huluween on Disney+ delivers the kind of scares that keep you on the edge of your seat – so we carved away the rest,” says Zack Jerome, VP of Brand and Marketing Strategy at Disney+. The statement, half in jest, articulates the spirit of the piece: a meeting of craft and narrative where wit becomes a design language.

Very limited in run, the EDGEOFYØR Seat is not meant to be mass-produced or even necessarily used. It is, rather, a meditation on what design can provoke. It turns an idiom – “on the edge of your seat” – into a physical truth, compressing metaphor into material form.

The success of this collaboration lies in how it activates the body as part of the viewing experience. In traditional furniture design, comfort is paramount; in the EDGEOFYØR Seat, comfort is precisely what’s withheld. What results is an awareness that borders not on empathy, but a reflection of what happens when horror narratives enter the nervous system.

Somewhere between sculpture and satire, the EDGEOFYØR Seat reminds us that good design can make us feel before we even understand why. It’s a study in restraint and reaction, a haunted object for the season that celebrates both.

“Some of the best and worst design is evocative,” Fyrn reflected. “At the extremes, the feelings are overt, but even subtle design can subconsciously affect our emotional state. The EDGEOFYØR Seat just takes that truth to its limit.”

Though born from playfulness, the collaboration carries a resonance that lingers. It speaks to the endurance of stories, and of objects, that stay with us long after the lights come back on. In a world where furniture is often reduced to utility, Fyrn’s latest experiment reclaims it as a medium for emotion – a stage for the invisible drama of the body in space. The EDGEOFYØR Seat doesn’t invite you to sit. It dares you to.

To see this and other furnishings by the brand, visit fyrn.com.

Photography provided by Walt Disney Studios.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Anyone who can figure out how to cram phi in there gets about 1.6 internet points.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Of course they'll never realize, but in your heart you'll have the linguistic upper hand.

Game studio Electronic Arts has been showing signs of trouble for a while now. They’re in profit, but the line is going down. The second quarter of 2025 shows net income of $201 million, down from $280 million in the second quarter of 2024. Year on year, it’s down nearly 10%. [EA, PDF]

And EA is furiously laying off staff — about 300 just this year, after 670 last year. [GamesIndustry.biz]

How does a company get out of this sort of spiral? Well, you know the answer. EA’s been going all-in on AI!

In 2024, EA unveiled the exciting new tool “Imagination to Creation”! Well, they made a video of what it’ll totally be like when it exists. You type in a prompt and it’ll generate a whole game! Allegedly. Prompts like “make it more epic.” [YouTube]

The very biggest, most epic idea the executives can think of is “make a maze of cardboard boxes.” These are the sort of insightful minds we need leading a game studio.

Business Insider has a story on EA’s troubles getting the workers to take on AI. This story is the sort of thing Ed Zitron calls “boss erotica” — where you write some fawning bilge that tells the bosses: yes sir, you were right about everything, it’s those workers who suck. [BI, archive]

EA executives have spent the past year pushing AI internally as hard as possible. AI slop concept art! AI slop coding! AI slop management coaching! Yes, really — an AI slop generator is coaching your boss on how to talk to peons like you.

EA’s internal tool, ReefGPT, is a hallucination machine. The workers are forced to use it, and then spend time cleaning up its mess.

The bosses also want staff to train ReefGPT on their own work, so they can get fired in the next round of layoffs. The Business Insider article laments that workers might not want to do that, and suggests strategies to force them into it. I told you, this is boss erotica.

EA just got bought out by a private equity consortium led by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump. The buyers have put in $36 billion of their own money, and the rest is loading down EA — not the buyers, but the company — with $20 billion in debt, over a third of the entire value of the company. [press release]

Net income of $1.1 billion a year is not going to pay off $20 billion of debt. They can dip into the $7.3 billion annual revenue for a while. But everything will have to change radically at EA. Then it dies anyway.

The way these deals end is the company goes broke from the crippling load of debt, and the buyers walk away from the bankrupt shell. Now, you might think that sounds a bit parasitical.

The buyers are betting that the magic of even more AI can cut costs. Which costs? Well, you know. Costs! If they knew how game dev works they’d be game devs, not finance parasites.

The buyers are looking to the magical version of AI: [FT, archive]

some believe the technology may soon be able to go much further in creating more realistic and responsive characters, or adapting storylines to players’ personal preferences.

Kushner announced he “grew up playing their games,” so I’m sure it’ll all be very competent and well arranged.

The paying customers — remember them? It’s useful to have some! — despise AI slop. Gamers go feral at the slightest hint of AI slop text or pictures in a game. To the point that EA had to warn about it as a business risk in their SEC filings.

But who needs customers? We’ve got fabulous private equity deals!

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