Today's links

• Comrade Trump: Burning down the American empire to save it.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: MPAA's threat-based 'education'; Cuehack; Heinlein on GWB; AT&T v the internet; British tax-havens v HMG; What is neoliberalism?; Newspaper landlords; Watch-part motorcycle; Tax havens bad; Buscemi's eyes; Sesame Street on lead poisoning.
• Upcoming appearances: San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• 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.

Comrade Trump (permalink)

There aren't a lot of things I agree with Mark Carney about, but there's one area where he and I are in total accord: the old, US-dominated, "rules-based international order" was total bullshit:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

Unlike Carney, I never pretended to like that old order, and indeed, I spent my entire life fighting against it – literally, all the way back to childhood, organizing other children to march against Canada's participation in America's nuclear weapons programs:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/in/photolist-2pFS5kt

All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I'm living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better.

Take Trump's tariff policy. Back during Trump I, he decided that Americans couldn't buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to Sinophobic Cold War 2.0 freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that had helped him buy his way into office.

This was really bad for America, of course, but those solar panels had to go somewhere. Mostly, they ended up in Pakistan, dumped there at such a massive discount that the country solarized virtually overnight. Pakistani solar installers learned their trade from Tiktok videos set to Tamil film soundtracks, and unwired the country so thoroughly that today, the national power company is in danger of going bust because no one buys their electricity from the grid anymore. Pakistani bridal dowries now routinely include four panels, an inverter and a battery:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-countries

This is an inversion of the normal order of things, in which rich countries get all the good stuff first, and poor countries like Pakistan get scraps after we've gorged ourselves. Think of vaccine apartheid, in which monsters like Howard Dean insisted that we had to prevent countries in the global south from making their own covid vaccines, because poor brown people are too stupid and primitive to run a pharma manufacturing operation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

But, thanks to Comrade Trump, Pakistan was first in line to become the world's solar capital. The country's LNG terminal – built with Chinese Belt-and-Road money – is now a stranded asset, because no one there needs gas.

That's gas whose supply has been choked off in the Strait of Epstein…which brings me to Trump's foreign policy and its impact on the global energy shift. Transitory energy shortages have small effects: when your energy bill goes up for a while (because of extreme weather, say), it makes you angry and sad and might result in an electoral loss for whatever politician presided over the price hike. But when you get genuine, prolonged shortages – the sort that are accompanied by rationing – you make permanent changes.

Rationing is so psychologically scarring that it induces people to make long-delayed investments that result in permanent changes to their consumption habits. Maybe you've known for a long time that an induction top would be better for your indoor air quality and your cooking than the gas range you have now, but you don't want to buy a whole new appliance and pay for an electrician to run a high-wattage line in expensive conduit from your breaker panel to your kitchen.

But if you're an Indian restaurateur who can no longer get any cooking gas – because it's being rationed for household use – then you are going out to buy whatever induction top you can lay hands on. Maybe it's a cheap, low-powered single burner one that plugs into your existing electrics, or maybe you're splashing out and swapping out your whole gas appliance. Whichever it is, you are no longer interested in your chef's insistence that real cooking gets done over gas. If your chef can't cook on an induction top, your chef will need to find employment elsewhere.

This is going on all over the world right now, as people buy EVs (and pay to have chargers installed at home – maybe getting a twofer on their conduit runs with two high power lines run through the same conduit infrastructure). In Australia – where the last shipment of gas for the foreseeable came into port last week – people are calling their local EV dealers and offering to buy whatever car is on the lot, sight unseen.

Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, a series of dollar-related crises caused the country to ban imports of internal combustion engines altogether (oil and gas are denominated in dollars, which means you can only get oil if you first sell stuff to Americans or others who'll pay in dollars). The country's fleet of noisy, dirty motorbikes is being swiftly replaced by ebikes that get eight miles to the penny:

https://www.ecofinagency.com/news-industry/0810-49366-ethiopia-expands-vehicle-import-ban-to-trucks-pushing-electric-transport

Ebikes are insanely great technology. Cheap, rugged and reliable, they're basically bicycles that abolish hills. Once you've gotten accustomed to an ebike – maybe you've invested in a folding helmet and a raincoat – you'll never go back. The advantages of an ebike commute over a car commute are legion, but my favorite little pleasure is the ability to easily make a stop at a nice coffee shop halfway between home and work, rather than being stuck buying shitty chain coffee near the office.

Four years ago, another mad emperor, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine – and in so doing, catapulted Europe's energy transition into the Gretacene, with unimaginable defeats for the fossil fuel lobby. Not just subsidies for the clean energy transition, but also policy shifts in areas that had been deadlocked for a decade, like approvals for balcony solar, which is transforming the continent. Even the UK, one of the oil industry's most reliable vassal states, is now greenlighting balcony solar:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-in-solar-available-within-months

This may not sound like much, but the UK is a country whose politics is composed of 50% hatred of migrants and trans people, and 50% incredibly stupid planning battles. Great Britain is a magical land where your neighbors can ask the government to prevent you from installing double-glazing on the grounds that it will change the "historic character" of their neighborhood of terraced Victorian homes.

I once lost a fight to get permission to put a little glass greenhouse on my balcony on the grounds that it would "alter the facade" of the undistinguished low-rise 1960s industrial building I live on top of. The fact that HMG is going to tell your facade-obsessed neighbors to fuck off all the way into the sun so that you can hang solar panels off your balcony is nothing short of a miracle.

Comrade Putin's contribution to oil-soaked Britain's energy transition can't be overstated. Thanks to "free market" policies that sent energy prices soaring after the Ukraine invasion, Brits installed so much solar (despite the existing impediments to solarization) that now the government is begging us to use more energy this summer, because the grid can't absorb all those lovely free electrons:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/14/uk-households-power-renewables-soar

The UK is on a glide-path to adopting the Australian plan. Australia also benefited from Trump I's solar embargo, receiving a ton of cheap solar that would otherwise have ended up in America. Now Australia has so much solar that they're giving away electricity, with three free hours of unlimited energy every day. Stick your dishwasher, clothes-dryer and EV charger on a timer, invest in a battery or two, and fill your boots:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/free-electricity-like-at-no-cost

(Maybe at this point you're thinking dark thoughts about critical minerals and such. That's not the problem you think it is and it's getting better every day. To take just one example, lithium batteries are about to be replaced with sodium batteries. Sodium is the world's sixth-most abundant element:)

https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/china-puts-a-sodium-ion-battery-into-an-ev-for-the-first-time-it-can-drive-248-miles-on-a-single-charge

The Strait of Epstein crisis is going to do more to accelerate permanent, unidirectional migration away from fossil fuels to cleantech than decades of environmental activism. Cleantech is so much better than fossil fuels – cheaper, more reliable, cleaner – that anyone who tries it becomes an instant convert. That's why the fossil fuel industry has been so insistent that no one get to try it!

To take just one example here: Texas ranchers have been solarizing, thanks to the state's bizarre "free market" energy system that sees energy prices spiking so high during cold snaps that you literally have to choose between freezing to death and going bankrupt. Solar is great for agriculture, especially in climate-ravaged Texas, where it provides crucial shade for crops and livestock, while substantially reducing soil evaporation, resulting in substantial irrigation savings.

When the oil-captured Texas legislature introduced a bill to force electric companies to add one watt of fossil power for every watt of solar that their customers installed, furious ranchers from blood red Republican rural districts flooded their town hall meetings, decrying the plan as "DEI for fossil fuels." The bill died:

https://austinfreepress.org/renewables-are-now-the-costco-of-energy-production-bill-mckibben-says/

This is the template for the long-foreseeable future. Thanks to Trump's stupid, bloody, unforgivable war of choice in the Gulf, the world is going to install unimaginable amounts of cleantech. They are going to throw away their water heaters, motorbikes, furnaces and cars and replace them with all-electric versions. They're going to cover their roofs and balconies with panels. The battery industry will experience a sustained boom. The fortunes that fossil fuel companies are reaping from the current shortage is their last windfall.

The writing is on the wall. Trump opened Alaska for drilling and the oil companies noped out because they couldn't find a bank that would loan them the money needed to get started. Then it happened again in Venezuela. This de-fossilizing was already the direction of travel, the only question was the pace at which the transition would proceed – and Comrade Trump has just stomped all over the (liquid natural) gas pedal.

Energy is just one realm where Trump is doing praxis. One of the most exciting developments that Trumpismo's incontinent belligerence has induced is the global technology transition.

For decades, the only people pointing out the dangers of using America's cash-grabbing, privacy invading defective tech exports were digital rights hippies like me, and our victories were modest and far between. Despite the Snowden revelations, despite the tech industry's prolific snood-cocking at EU privacy regulators and Canadian lawmakers, we all just carried on using these incredibly dangerous, steadily enshittifying Big Tech products. We even run our governments and structurally important companies off Big Tech. We let US tech companies update (that is, downgrade) the software on our cars and tractors, our pacemakers and ventilators, our power plants and telephone switches.

There's lots of reasons for this. For one thing, ripping out and replacing all that software and firmware is a prodigious challenge, as is building the data-centers to host it for every "digitally sovereign" country. Add to that the complexity of successfully migrating data, edit histories, archives and identities and you're looking at a very big lift. So long as the American tech bosses kept their enshittificatory gambits to a measured, slow flow, they could keep the pain beneath the threshold where it was worth us boiling frogs leaping out of their pot.

But the most important force defending American internet hegemony was free trade: specifically, the US forced all of its trading partners to adopt "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to modify US tech exports. That means that you can't go into business selling your neighbors the tools to use generic ink or an independent app store, much less make a fortune exporting those tools to the rest of the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/#mere-ornaments

Enter Comrade Trump. When Trump started weaponizing US tech platforms to take away the working files, email accounts and cloud calendars of judges who pissed him off (by sentencing Bolsonaro to prison, and by swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu), he put the whole world on notice that he could shut down their governments, judiciaries or companies at the click of a mouse:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge

And of course, he's whacked the whole world with tariffs that violate the trade agreements that imposed the anticircumvention obligations that protect America's defective tech exports. Now there's no longer any reason to keep those laws on the books. Happy Liberation Day, everyone! The post-American internet is at hand:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

But Trump has even more praxis up his spraytan-stained sleeves. Trump is succeeding where Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC failed: he's making the case for Democrats to defenestrate their useless, sellout, Epstein-poisoned leaders. All across the country, radical Dems and avowed socialists are sweeping primaries and elections, as voters realize that Blue No Matter Who will doom them to eternal torment in the Manchin-Synematic Universe:

https://prospect.org/2026/02/11/progressive-win-new-jersey-anti-ice-organizing-mejia/

Fury over Trumpismo is pushing even the most useless Democratic leaders to sign up for billionaire taxes:

https://jacobin.com/2026/04/zohran-tax-rich-hochul-nyc

Thanks to Comrade Trump, the median Democratic voter will no longer be satisfied with Kente cloth photo-ops and little ping-pong paddles stenciled with "down with this sort of thing":

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ping-pong-paddles-to-a-gun-fight/

Thanks to Trump, we might see criminal prosecutions – and a primary challenge for any Dem that gets in the way of a serious, Nuremberg-style reckoning with Trumpismo and its gangsters:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification

Look, all things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid-burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. Let's take the wins.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Stop New York's Attack on 3D Printing https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/stop-new-yorks-attack-3d-printing

• Make It Myself https://xkcd.com/3233/

• Mind the Gap https://www.butthistime.com/p/mind-the-gap?hide_intro_popup=true

• Billionaire Blues https://harpers.org/archive/2026/05/billionaire-blues-thomas-frank/

• What, Exactly, Is a Fair Wage? https://prospect.org/2026/04/17/fair-wage-standard-arindrajit-dube-book-review/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago The MPAA 'educates the public' with threatening letters https://web.archive.org/web/20120318060108/http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-255961.html&tag=tp_pr

#25yrsago Cuehack for the :CueCat https://web.archive.org/web/20010803172853/http://www.rtmark.com/cuejack/

#25yrsago Microsoft Technical Support vs The Psychic Friends Network https://web.archive.org/web/20010410171616/http://www.bmug.org/news/articles/MSvsPF.html

#20yrsago The novel Heinlein would have written about GW Bush’s America https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/17/the-novel-heinlein-would-have-written-about-gw-bushs-america/

#20yrsago Hilarious hijinx with security guards who hate building-photographers https://thomashawk.com/2006/04/photographing-architecture-is-not.html

#20yrsago Hundreds ask Smithsonian not to sell out to Showtime https://web.archive.org/web/20060420031124/https://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1554385

#20yrsago How AT&T wants to turn the Internet into mere TV https://web.archive.org/web/20060620095643/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/04/17/toll/index_np.html

#20yrsago NOLA mayoral candidate doctors Disneyland photo – again https://web.archive.org/web/20060422010054/https://www.wonkette.com/politics/new-orleans/kimberly-williamson-butler-continues-to-astound-us-167923.php

#20yrsago Where He-Man came from https://web.archive.org/web/20060423061651/https://thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000500.php

#20yrsago FBI demand chance to censor muckracking journo’s papers https://web.archive.org/web/20060421045340/https://www.chronicle.com/free/2006/04/2006041801n.htm

#15yrsago Ethiopia’s “newspaper landlords” rent the want-ads by the minute https://www.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/04/19/newspaper.rental.ethiopia/index.html

#15yrsago It’s people like us what makes trouble: the pernicious influence of immigrants in the UK. https://web.archive.org/web/20080314013819/http://feorag.newsvine.com/_news/2008/03/10/1356131-the-pernicious-influence-of-immigrants-in-the-uk

#15yrsago China’s “Jasmine Revolution”: anonymous out-of-country bloggers troll the politburo https://web.archive.org/web/20110412063347/http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/04/the-jasmine-revolution.html

#15yrsago Motorcycles made from watch parts https://www.deviantart.com/dkart71/art/Motorcycles-out-of-watch-parts-18a-204941090

#15yrsago Steve Buscemi’s Eyes: the printable mask https://eyesuckink.blogspot.com/2011/04/free-home-version-of-steve-buscemis.html

#15yrsago Privacy, Facebook, politics and kids https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2011/apr/18/cory-doctorow-networking-technologies-video?CMP=twt_fd

#15yrsago NZ MP votes for anti-piracy law hours after tweeting about her love of pirated music https://torrentfreak.com/kiwi-mp-called-out-as-pirate-after-passing-anti-piracy-law-110415/

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright trolls never had the right to sue, have their asses handed to them by the EFF https://web.archive.org/web/20110418001051/http://paidcontent.org/article/419-righthavens-secret-contract-is-revealedwill-its-strategy-collapse/

#15yrsago TSA considers being upset at screening procedures to be an indicator of terrorist intentions https://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/04/15/tsa.screeners.complain/

#10yrsago The saga of Ian Bogost’s pressure-washer https://bogostpressurewasherstatus.tumblr.com/

#10yrsago Heads of UK’s tax havens to Her Majesty’s Government: go fuck yourself https://web.archive.org/web/20160411112631/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tax-haven-corporate-tax-avoidance-uk-ministers-humiliated-after-cayman-bvi-british-virgin-islands-a6974956.html

#10yrsago George Clooney’s neighbor threw a $27/plate Sanders fundraiser to counter Clooney’s $33K/head Hillary event https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/sanders-supporters-shower-clinton-motorcade-1-bills-n557191

#10yrsago What is neoliberalism? https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks

#10yrsago No, tax-havens aren’t good for society (duh) https://web.archive.org/web/20160602053124/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-tax-havens/2016/04/15/76d001d2-0255-11e6-b823-707c79ce3504_story.html

#10yrsago John Oliver and the cast of Sesame Street on lead poisoning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUizvEjR-0U

#10yrsago Supreme Court sends Authors Guild packing, won’t hear Google Books case https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/fair-use-prevails-as-supreme-court-rejects-google-books-copyright-case/

#10yrsago Four years later, Popehat’s favorite con-artist is indicted https://web.archive.org/web/20160419031946/https://popehat.com/2016/04/18/anatomy-of-a-scam-investigation-chapter-14-the-indictment/

#10yrsago Hacking Team supplied cyber-weapons to corrupt Latin American governments for human rights abuses https://www.derechosdigitales.org/wp-content/uploads/malware-para-la-vigilancia.pdf

#10yrsago High profits mean capitalism is cooked https://www.promarket.org/2016/04/16/are-we-all-rent-seeking-investors/

#10yrsago A look back at the D&D moral panic https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-set-off-a-moral-panic.html

#10yrsago Petition to reassign head of Canada Post to deliver letters at $500k/year https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/help-canada-post-ceo-deepak-chopra-keep-his-job

#1yrago Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

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, 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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Today's links

• Georgia's voting technology blunder: It's possible for Dominion machines to suck, but not in the way that Tucker Carlson says they do.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: GWB's illegal iPod; McDonald's breakfast sandwich fanfic; Technofeudal debt; "The Everything Box"; $100m deli.
• Upcoming appearances: Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• 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.

Georgia's voting technology blunder (permalink)

Nearly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of Bush v Gore, I got involved in a bunch of ugly tech policy fights over voting machines. The hanging chad debacle in Florida prompted Congress to appropriate funds for states to purchase new touchscreen voting machines based on a robust, open standard. The problem was, those machines didn't exist.

The voting machine industry in those days was already very consolidated (it's far more consolidated today). They went shopping for a standards body that would publish a spec for a "standard" voting machine that could soak up those federal dollars in time for the 2004 election. The only taker was the IEEE, who unwisely offered to serve as host for this impossible rush job.

Once the voting machine reps were around a table at IEEE – largely sheltered from antitrust scrutiny thanks to the broad latitude enjoyed by firms engaged in standardization, which is otherwise uncomfortably close to collusion – they admitted what everyone already knew: there was zero chance they were going to develop a new standard in time for the election.

Instead, they decided they were going to publish a "descriptive standard." Rather than designing a new standard, they'd write down the specs of their own products – the same products that were considered so defective they needed to be replaced before the election – and call that the standard.

That was my first encounter with this issue as an activist. I had just started at EFF and a lot of our supporters were IEEE members, who were appalled to see their professional association being used to launder this incredibly politically salient, technically incoherent scam. We got a ton of IEEE members to write to the board, who shut down the standards committee and kicked the voting machine companies to the curb.

The voting machine companies weren't done, though. Diebold – one of the leaders in the cartel – knew that its voting machines were defective. They'd crash, lose their vote-counts and malfunction in other ways that were equally damaging to election integrity.

This was an alarming piece of news, but perhaps just as alarming is the way it came to light. A Diebold employee described this situation in a memo that was subsequently hacked and dumped by parties unknown. That memo, along with the accompanying tranche of extremely alarming revelations about Diebold's voting machine division, was the subject of one of the first mass-censorship copyright campaigns in internet history.

Diebold didn't dispute the veracity of these damning revelations: rather, it claimed that since the memos detailing its gross democracy-endangering misconduct had been prepared by an employee, that they were therefore works-made-for-hire whose copyright was held by Diebold, and thus anyone who reproduced the memo was infringing on the company's copyright.

Under Section 512 of the then-new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Diebold was empowered to send "takedown notices" to the web hosting providers whose users had posted the memos, and if the web hosts didn't remove the content "expeditiously," they would be jointly liable for any eventual copyright damages, which are statutorily set at $150,000 per infringement.

Every web host folded. No one wanted to take the risk of tens of millions of dollars in statutory damages.

(Incidentally: anyone who tells you that "online safety" requires us to make online platforms liable for their users' speech needs to explain how this wouldn't empower every crooked company whose dirty laundry had ended up online wouldn't just do what Diebold did. It's not technically insanity to do the same thing over again in expectation of a different outcome, but it is awfully stupid and reckless.)

That might have been the end of things, except for the kids at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Two students, Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, were outraged by Diebold and they had accounts on Swarthmore's webserver. So they uploaded thousands of copies of the leaked memos, but linked to just one of them from a page about the leak. As soon as that copy was deleted by Swarthmore's webmasters in response to a DMCA takedown from Diebold, the students updated the link to point to another copy. And another. And another.

That's where EFF got involved. We repped the Online Policy Group, whose page linking to the Swarthmore resources was taken down by a Diebold notice. We won. The memos became a matter of public record. The Swarthmore kids started a nationwide network called "Students for Free Culture." It was pretty danged cool.

That wasn't the end of the Diebold story, though. Diebold was and is a very diversified conglomerate that made a lot of tabulating machines: ATMs, cash-registers, medical monitoring devices…and voting machines. Every one of these machines produced a paper-tape of its tabulations as an audit trail that could be used to reconstruct its calculations if it crashed…except the voting machines. The voting machines that kept crashing, and whose crashes presented a serious risk to the legitimacy of US elections in the wake of the worst electoral crisis in the country's history.

Diebold's stated reason for this was that adding a paper tape was haaaard (even though all its other machines had paper audit tapes). Not only was this a very unconvincing excuse, it was downright alarming in light of the promise of Walden O’Dell (Diebold CEO and prominent Bush fundraiser) to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president":

https://fairvote.org/diebold-partisanship-and-public-interest-elections/

Now, to be clear, I don't think that O'Dell was going to steal the election for Bush (that's the Supreme Court's job). Rather, he was just a loudmouth asshole CEO who supported the (up to that point) worst president in American history, and who also made garbage products that were not fit for purpose.

In the decades since, voting machines have been the subject of lots of scrutiny by the information security community, because they suck. Time after time, the most sphincter-puckering defects in widely used machines have come to light:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/05/11/report-claims-very-serious-diebold-voting-machine-flaws/

The hits just kept on coming:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061007120655/http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=1

At Defcon, the amazing Matt Blaze has presided over the Voting Village, where it's an annual tradition for hackers to probe voting machines. This exercise has produced a string of terrifying revelations that precisely described how these machines suck:

https://www.votingvillage.org/cfp

Pretty much everyone I knew thought that voting machines were garbage technology…right up to the moment that the My Pillow guy, Tucker Carlson, and a whole menagerie of conspiratorial Trumpland mutants started peddling a bizarre story about how Hugo Chavez colluded with the Canadian voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems (who bought Diebold's voting machine business when they finally dumped the division) to rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden. They told so many outlandish lies about this that Fox ended up paying Dominion $787.5 million to settle the case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems#Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox_News_Network

That's when something very weird happened. A bunch of people who had been skeptical of voting machines since the Brooks Brothers Riot suddenly became history's most ardent defenders of those same garbage voting machines. The cartel of voting machine companies – who had a long track record of using bullshit legal threats to silence their (mostly progressive) critics – were drafted into The Resistance(TM), and anyone who thought voting machines were trash was dismissed as a crazy person who has been totally mypillowpilled:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210203113531/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-election-steal-conspiracy-flaws/

There's a name for this: it's called "schismogenesis": when one group of people define themselves in opposition to someone else. If the other team does X, then your team has to oppose X, even if you all liked X until a couple minutes ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

This schismogenic reversal persists to this very day. Every time Trump promotes another election denier to his cabinet, a federal agency, or a judgeship, the idea that voting machines are garbage becomes more Stop the Steal-coded, even though voting machines are, objectively, garbage.

Which is bad. It's bad because we are going into another election season where the stakes are – incredibly – even higher than Bush v Gore, and electoral authorities and state legislatures are making the world's most unforced errors in their voting machine procurement decisions, and if you've conditioned yourself to reflexively dismiss voting machine criticisms as conspiratorial nonsense, then you are part of the problem.

Just because some voting machine criticism is conspiratorial nonsense, it doesn't follow that voting machines are good, nor does it follow that every voting machine critic is a swivel-eyed loon or ratfucking Roger Stone protege.

Take, for example, Princeton's Andrew Appel, a computer scientist who's been publishing well-informed, well-documented warnings about defects in voting machines for years and years. Appel's latest is an alarming note about Georgia's new plan to "tabulate" ballots using OCR software:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/04/10/ballot-tabulation-by-uploading-scanned-images-for-ocr-is-quite-insecure/

The Georgia legislature has wisely banned the use of QR codes on the paper ballots generated by touchscreen voting machines. We have, at long last, progressed to the point where we use "ballot marking devices" (BMDs) that produce a paper record that can be hand-counted. The problem is that voters barely ever glance at these paper ballots before dropping them in the box to make sure the choices they made on the touchscreen are correctly reflected on the ballot – only 7% of voters carefully inspect their ballots!

This problem is greatly exacerbated if these ballot papers are tabulated by a machine that reads a QR code or barcode, rather than interpreting the human-readable information on the ballot. People are even less likely to pull out their phones and scan the QR code to ensure it matches the words on the paper. That means that a BMD could output different choices in the QR code than it prints in the human-readable part – and the Dominion BMD machines they use in Georgia run outdated software that's super-hackable:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/02/24/georgia-still-using-tragicomically-insecure-voting-system/

So Georgia's state leg passed Senate Bill 189, which establishes that "The text portion of the paper ballot marked and printed by the electronic ballot marker indicating the elector’s selection shall constitute the official ballot and shall constitute the official vote for purposes of vote tabulation." In other words, you can't count by scanning QR codes, you have to actually interpret the human-readable text on these ballots.

These machines still suck, to be clear (the fact that they don't suck for the mypillovian reasons that Tucker Carlson believes doesn't mean they're good) – but thanks to SB189, they are way less dangerous to democracy than they might be.

But not if Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger gets his way. Raffensperger is another guy who was drafted into The Resistance(TM) after he refused to commit election fraud for Trump, but he's also not good. He can still be terrible in other ways – and he is.

Raffensperger has announced his plan to circumvent the Georgia legislature by using Dominion ICX touchscreens to produce ballots with QR codes, which will then be tabulated in Dominion ICP scanners – but then he's going to "verify" the tabulation by running those same ballots through optical character recognition (OCR) software.

As Appel points out, this is the same stupid plan that Raffensperger tried in 2024, where he called the OCR step an "audit" of the QR tabulation. Back then, he grabbed 200dpi "ballot image files" from the Dominion BMDs and ran them through OCR software run by a company called Enhanced Voting. Appel sums up the fundamental incoherence of this approach.

First, the BMDs are super-hackable, so we don't trust them to print the same info in the QR code as they print in the human-readable text (which no one looks at anyway). If we don't trust them to print accurate info in the QR code, then why would we trust them to accurately generate that 200dpi QR code that's generated for the audit? As Appel writes, "it would be fairly easy for an unsophisticated attacker to alter ballot-image files–just replace the ballots they don’t like with copies of the ones they do like."

Then there's the step where these files are zipped up and transferred to the outside vendor for the audit – a step that Raffensperger has not explained. And even if the files make it to the outside contractor safely, that contractor could "change the inputs (ballot images) or outputs (tabulations)."

So this is very bad. Voting machines suck. Raffensperger sucks.

And here's the stupidest part: as Appel explains, there is a much more secure way to do this, and it's very cheap:

Just use their existing Dominion ICP (polling-place) scanners to count preprinted, hand-marked optical-scan "bubble ballots" that the voter has marked with a pen.

This is what other states are doing. As Appel writes, "This doesn’t even require a software upgrade of any kind. Although it would be a fine idea to install a software upgrade that addresses known security vulnerabilities in the ICX and ICP, the ICP can count hand-marked ballots with or without the upgrade."

This is a purely unforced error, in other words. As such, it's part of a series of shitty vote-tech choices that politicians and officials have been making since Bush v Gore. Truly, we live in the stupidest timeline.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Announcing EFF's Public Resource Fellowship https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/announcing-effs-public-resource-fellowship

• Wrench – Side Table A by Iyo Hasegawa https://adorno.design/pieces/wrench-side-table-a/

• BOOM: Ticketmaster GUILTY of Monopolization https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-ticketmaster-guilty-of-monopolization

• I Was an Enthusiastic Early Adopter of AI Scribes. Here’s Why I Stopped https://benngooch.substack.com/p/i-was-an-enthusiastic-early-adopter

• Mayhem’s Legacy: Why MetaBrainz Matters More Than Ever, and Why We’re Looking for Someone to Lead It https://compassmapandkey.com/2026/04/18/mayhems-legacy-why-metabrainz-matters-more-than-ever-and-why-were-looking-for-someone-to-lead-it/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago GW Bush’s iPod contains “illegal” (according to RIAA) music https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/16/gw-bushs-ipod-contains-illegal-according-to-riaa-music/

#20yrsago Fan fiction community for McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches https://web.archive.org/web/20120112221730/https://mcgriddlefanfic.livejournal.com/profile/

#10yrsago High tech/high debt: the feudal future of technology makes us all into lesser lessors https://web.archive.org/web/20160415150308/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/rental-company-control/478365/

#10yrsago Three pieces of statistical “bullshit” about the UK EU referendum https://timharford.com/2016/04/three-pieces-of-brexit-bullshit/

#10yrsago Southwest Air kicks Muslim woman off plane for switching seats https://web.archive.org/web/20160416041342/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslim-woman-kicked-off-plane-as-flight-attendant-said-she-did-not-feel-comfortable-with-the-a6986661.html

#10yrsago China’s Internet censors order ban on video of toddler threatening brutal cops https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/04/minitrue-4/

#10yrsago Tiny South Pacific island to lose free/universal Internet lifeline https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/299017/niue-to-get-better-internet-service-at-a-cost

#10yrsago The Everything Box: demonological comedy from Richard “Sandman Slim” Kadrey https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/16/the-everything-box-demonological-comedy-from-richard-sandman-slim-kadrey/

#5yrsago People's Choice Communications https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#charter-hires-scabs

#5yrsago "Anti-voter-suppression" companies are lobbying to kill HR1 https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#tissue-thin

#5yrsago $100m deli made $35k in 2019/20 https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#hometown

#5yrsago Mass-action lawsuit against Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#sue-facebook

#1yrago Trump fought the law and Trump won https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/16/weaponized-admin-incompetence/#kill-all-the-lawyers

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Los Angeles: LA Times Festival of Books, Apr 19
  https://www.latimes.com/events/festival-of-books

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

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, 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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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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Today's links

• Tiktokification shall set us free: Zuck keeps accidentally freeing his hostages.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: B2B Trotsky; Public service games; NZ 3 strikes rule; Snowden, vocalist; Obama says money compromised him; Bullshit treescrapers; Tesla's odometer heist.
• Upcoming appearances: Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Barcelona, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• 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.

Tiktokification shall set us free (permalink)

Mark Zuckerberg has a problem with your friends: they're the reason you signed up to use his platform, but they stubbornly refuse to organize your socialization to "maximize engagement." Every time you and your friends wrap up a social interaction and log off, Zuckerberg loses revenue.

After all, by definition, you and your friends have a lot of shared context. You probably feel mostly the same way about most things. You probably mostly consume the same kind of media. You probably mostly consume the same kinds of news. You and your friends make each other's lives better in lots of ways, but typically not by surprising one another. On a typical day, no friend of yours is going to absolutely floor you with a novel thought or finding that sparks hours of furious conversation and argumentation.

And speaking of argumentation: you and your friends probably don't argue that much – I mean, sure, you'll have "friendly disagreements" (again, by definition), but if there's a friend who sparks furious, frustrating, irresistible feuds that drag on and on, chances are that person won't be your friend anymore.

Facebook experienced sustained, meteoric growth by letting people connect with their friends, but Zuckerberg quickly came to understand that his path to revenue maximization ran through nonconsensually cramming strangers' posts into your eyeballs, in the hopes that you would lose yourself in long, pointless arguments.

But that, too, hit a limit. Most of us don't like having our limbic systems tormented by strangers. As anyone who is sick to the back teeth of just hearing the word "Trump" can attest, living in a trollocracy is exhausting.

Enter Tiktok. Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don't make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you "engaged" with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you'd stare at the longest with a "heating tool" that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn't give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those "content creators" are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms' owners and executives. They may be more "engaging" than your friends, but they're also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What's a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is "AI creators." An "AI creator" is like a "creator" in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a "creator," it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform's shareholders and executives. It's the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

But there's a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms' single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so "sticky." The platforms don't "hack your dopamine loops" – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can't even agree on what board-game you're going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it's time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends' unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

The key word here is fungible. A feed composed of things posted by people you have a personal connection to is non-fungible: it cannot be swapped for a feed of things posted by strangers. Your friends fulfill a very specific purpose in your life that strangers – even extremely cool strangers – cannot match.

On the other hand: one feed of algorithmically selected, entertaining amateur dramatics is broadly equivalent to any other feed of algorithmically selected amateur dramatics. That goes double for feeds whose performers are "multi-homing" on more than one platform – whether you see the extremely charming and interesting Vlog Brothers in a Youtube feed, a Tiktok feed or an Insta feed makes no difference (to you – but it matters a lot to the platform bosses). That goes quintuple for feeds composed of AI slop, which is literally the most interchangeable video that modern science is capable of producing.

All of which is to say: the platforms are deliberately feeding their most important commercial assets into a shredder, in a fit of pique over your friends' unwillingness to act like chatbots. Every day and in every way, the platforms are making it easier to leave them for some rival's service, chasing the billionaire solipsist's dream of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/17/live-by-the-swordlive-by-the-sword/#unfriending-tom

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Keep Android Open https://keepandroidopen.org/cta/

• Here comes the sun: New bill would let New Yorkers hang solar panels from windows https://gothamist.com/news/here-comes-the-sun-new-bill-would-let-new-yorkers-hang-solar-panels-from-windows

• The OTW is Recruiting for Legal Committee Paralegals, Legal Committee Trademark Specialists, and Policy & Abuse Volunteers https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-otw-is-recruiting-for-legal-committee-paralegals-legal-committee-trademark-specialists-and-policy-abuse-volunteers/

• Tech Giants and Giant Slayers: The case for Digital Sovereignty and the Digital Commons https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/tech-giants-and-giant-slayers-the-case-for-digital-sovereignty-and-the-digital-commons/

• What We’re Reading https://link.newyorker.com/view/5be9ea0f3f92a404690229b0qwzpk.245v/8abef04b

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Leon Trotsky, B2B visionary https://web.archive.org/web/20020211212222/http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1935/1935-ame.htm

#20yrsago What would a BBC “public service game” look like? https://web.archive.org/web/20060417123908/http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2006/04/on_public_servi.html

#15yrsago New Zealand’s 3-strikes rule can go into effect in September https://legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2010/119/en/latest/#DLM3331800

#15yrsago Lawsuit: DRM spied on me, gathered my personal info, sent it to copyright enforcers who called me with $150,000 legal threat https://www.techdirt.com/2011/04/14/drm-accused-sending-personal-info-to-help-with-licensing-shakedown/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden provides vocals on a beautiful new Jean-Michel Jarre composition https://web.archive.org/web/20190415045927/https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/edward-snowdens-new-job-electronic-music-vocalist-184650/

#10yrsago Uber and Lyft don’t cover their cost of capital and rely on desperate workers https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the-problems-of-uber-and-lyft/?

#10yrsago Treescrapers are bullshit https://99percentinvisible.org/article/renderings-vs-reality-rise-tree-covered-skyscrapers/

#10yrsago Before and After Mexico: a Bruce Sterling story about the eco-pocalypse https://bruces.medium.com/before-and-after-mexico-f3371c346c8a#.33e9poqnx

#10yrsago Barack Obama: Taking money from 1 percenters compromised my politics https://web.archive.org/web/20160415201709/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/15/barack-obama-never-said-money-wasnt-corrupting-in-fact-he-said-the-opposite/

#1yrago Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/#more-like-edison-amirite

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Los Angeles: LA Times Festival of Books, Apr 19
  https://www.latimes.com/events/festival-of-books

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

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, 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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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

Today's links

• A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers: We're already being turned into paperclips.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Every pirate ebook on the internet; Sun's "Open DRM"; Untranslatable words; Let's encrypt is encrypting; Boots ruined by hedge fund; Brussels terrorists' opsec; Copyrighted Klingon; Murder Offsets.
• Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers (permalink)

Lest anyone accuse me of bargaining in bad faith here, let me start with this admission: I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence. I think worrying about what we'll do if AI becomes intelligent is at best a distraction and at worst a cynical marketing ploy:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

Now, that said: among some of the "AI doomers," I recognize kindred spirits. I, too, worry about technologies controlled by corporations that have grown so powerful that they defy regulation. I worry about how those technologies are used against us, and about how the corporations that make them are fusing with authoritarian states to create a totalitarian nightmare. I worry that technology is used to spy on and immiserate workers.

I just don't think we need AI to do those things. I think we should already be worried about those things.

Last week, I had a version of this discussion in front of several hundred people at the Bronfman Lecture in Montreal, where I appeared with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (co-winner of the Turing Prize for his work creating the "deep learning" techniques powering today's AI surge), on a panel moderated by CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed:

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

It's safe to say that Bengio and I mostly disagree about AI. He's running an initiative called "Lawzero," whose goal is to create an international AI consortium that produces AI as a "digital public good" that is designed to be open, auditable, transparent and safe:

http://lawzero.org

Bengio said he'd started Lawzero because he was convinced that AI was going to get a lot more powerful, and, in the absence of some public-spirited version of AI, we would be subject to all kinds of manipulation and surveillance, and that the resulting chaos would present a civilizational risk.

Now, as I've stated (and as I said onstage) I am not worried about any of this. I am worried about AI, though. I'm worried a fast-talking AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job (the salesman will be pushing on an open door, since if there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers).

I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. I'm worried that when that happens, the chatbots that badly do the jobs of the people who were fired because of the AI salesman will go away, and nothing and no one will do those jobs. I'm worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs

I worry that the workers who did those jobs will be scattered to the four winds, retrained or "discouraged" or retired, and that the priceless process knowledge they developed over generations will be wiped out and we will have to rebuild it amidst the economic and political chaos of the burst AI bubble:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

In short, I worry that AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into our civilization's walls, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

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

But Bengio disagrees. He's very smart, and very accomplished, and he's very certain that AI is about to become "superhuman" and do horrible things to us if we don't get a handle on it. Several times at our events, he insisted that the existence of this possibility made it wildly irresponsible not to take measures to mitigate this risk.

Though I didn't say so at the time, this struck me as an AI-inflected version of Pascal's wager:

A rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God… if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

Smarter people than me have been poking holes in Pascal's wager for more than 350 years. But when it comes to this modern Pascal's AI Wager, I have my own objection: how do you know when you've lost?

As of this moment, the human race has lit more than $1.4t on fire to immanentize this eschaton, and it remains stubbornly disimmanentized. How much more do we need to spend before we're certain that god isn't lurking in the word-guessing program? Sam Altman says it'll take another $2-3t – call it six months' worth of all US federal spending. If we do that and we still haven't met god, are we done? Can we call it a day?

Not according to Elon Musk. Musk says we need to deconstruct the solar system and build a Dyson sphere out of all the planets to completely encase the sun, so we can harvest every photon it emits to power our word-guessing programs:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/elons-next-big-swing-dyson-sphere-satellites-that-harness-the-suns-power

So let's say we do that and we still haven't met god – are we done? I don't see why we would be. After all, Musk's contention isn't that our sun emits one eschaton's worth of immanentizing particles. Musk just thinks that we need a lot of these sunbeams to coax god into our plane of existence. If one sun won't do it, perhaps two? Or two hundred? Or two thousand? Once we've committed the entire human species to this god-bothering project to the extent of putting two kilosuns into harness, wouldn't we be nuts to stop there? What if god is lurking in the two thousand and first sun? Making god out of algorithms is like spelling "banana" – easy to start, hard to stop.

But as Bengio and I got into it together on stage at the Montreal Centre, it occurred to me that maybe there was some common ground between us. After all, when someone starts talking about "humane technology" that respects our privacy and works for people rather than their bosses, my ears grow points. Throw in the phrase "international digital public goods" and you've got my undivided attention.

Because there's a sense in which Bengio and I are worried about exactly the same thing. I'm terrified that our planet has been colonized by artificial lifeforms that we constructed, but which have slipped our control. I'm terrified that these lifeforms corrupt our knowledge-creation process, making it impossible for us to know what's true and what isn't. I'm terrified that these lifeforms have conquered our apparatus of state – our legislatures, agencies and courts – and so that these public bodies work against the public and for our colonizing alien overlords.

The difference is, the artificial lifeforms that worry me aren't hypothetical – they're here today, amongst us, endangering the very survival of our species. These artificial lifeforms are called "limited liability corporations" and they are a concrete, imminent risk to the human race:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration

What's more, challenging these artificial lifeforms will require us to build massive, "international, digital public goods": a post-American internet of free/open, auditable, transparent, enshittification-resistant platforms and firmware for every purpose and device currently in service:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

And even after we've built that massive, international, digital public good, we'll still face the challenge of migrating all of our systems and loved ones out of the enshitternet of defective, spying, controlling American tech exports:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

Every moment that we remain stuck in the enshitternet is a moment of existential risk. At the click of a mouse, Trump could order John Deere to switch off all the tractors in your country:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

He doesn't need tanks to steal Greenland. He can just shut off Denmark's access to American platforms like Office365, iOS and Android and brick the whole damned country. It would be another Strait of Hormuz, but instead of oil and fertilizer, he'd control the flow of Lego, Ozempic and deliciously strong black licorice:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ottawa

These aren't risks that could develop in the future. They're the risks we're confronted with today and frankly, they're fucking terrifying.

So here's my side-bet on Pascal's Wager. If you think we need to build "international digital public goods" to head off the future risk of a colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeform, then let us agree that the prototype for that project is the "international digital public goods" we need right now to usher in the post-American internet and save ourselves from the colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeforms that have already got their blood-funnels jammed down our throats.

Once we defeat those alien invaders, we may find that all the people who are trying to summon the evil god have lost the wherewithal to do so, and your crisis will have been averted. But if that's not the case and the evil god still looms on our horizon, then I will make it my business to help you mobilize the legions of skilled international digital public goods producers who are still flush from their victory over the limited liability corporation, and together, we will fight the evil god you swear is in our future.

I think that's a pretty solid offer.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• A Hole in the ‘Open-and-Shut’ Case Against Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin? https://prospect.org/2026/04/15/hole-in-open-and-shut-case-against-charlie-kirks-alleged-assassin-tyler-robinson/

• WORSE ON PURPOSE https://www.worseonpurpose.com/

• How Viktor Orbán Bankrolled the Network Around Reform UK https://bylinetimes.com/2026/04/14/exposed-how-viktor-orban-bankrolled-the-network-around-reform-uk/

• Two Visions https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/two-visions

• Caught in the Crackdown: As Arrests at Anti-ICE Protests Piled Up, Prosecutions Crumbled https://www.propublica.org/article/caught-in-crackdown-ice-cbp-doj-trump-arrests-convictions

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Every pirate ebook on the internet https://web.archive.org/web/20010724030402/https://citizen513.cjb.net/

#20yrsago Retired generals diss Donald Rumsfeld https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007432.html#007432

#20yrsago How to break HDCP https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/04/14/making-and-breaking-hdcp-handshakes/

#20yrsago How Sun’s “open DRM” dooms them and all they touch https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/14/how-suns-open-drm-dooms-them-and-all-they-touch/

#20yrsago Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/

#15yrsago Scientific management’s unscientific grounding: the Management Myth https://web.archive.org/web/20120823212827/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/

#15yrsago 216 “untranslatable” emotional words from non-English languages https://www.drtimlomas.com/lexicography/cm4mi/lexicography#!lexicography/cm4mi

#10yrsago New York public employees union will vote on pulling out of hedge funds https://web.archive.org/web/20160414230326/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-13/nyc-pension-weighs-liquidating-1-5-billion-hedge-fund-portfolio

#10yrsago Panama’s public prosecutor says he can’t find any evidence of Mossack-Fonseca’s lawbreaking https://web.archive.org/web/20160419165306/https://www.thejournal.ie/mossack-fonseca-prosecution-2714795-Apr2016/?utm_source=twitter_self

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders responds to CEOs of Verizon and GE: “I welcome their contempt” https://web.archive.org/web/20160415165051/https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-verizon-contempt-2016-4

#10yrsago Let’s Encrypt is actually encrypting the whole Web https://www.wired.com/2016/04/scheme-encrypt-entire-web-actually-working/

#10yrsago City of San Francisco tells man he can’t live in wooden box in friend’s living room https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/13/san-francisco-new-home-rented-box-illegal?CMP=tmb_gu

#10yrsago How the UK’s biggest pharmacy chain went from family-run public service to debt-laden hedge-fund disaster https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/13/how-boots-went-rogue

#10yrsago Ohio newspaper chain owner says his papers don’t publish articles about LGBTQ people https://ideatrash.net/2016/04/the-owner-of-four-town-papers-in-ohio.html

#10yrsago How British journalists talk about people they’re not allowed to talk about https://web.archive.org/web/20160414152933/https://popbitch.com/home/2016/03/31/up-the-injunction/

#10yrsago Brussels terrorists kept their plans in an unencrypted folder called “TARGET” https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/14/brussels-terrorist-laptop-included-details-planned-attack-unencrypted-folder-titled-target/

#10yrsago Ron Wyden vows to filibuster anti-cryptography bill https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/14/burr-feinstein-officially-release-anti-encryption-bill-as-wyden-promises-to-filibuster-it/

#10yrsago Paramount wants to kill a fan-film by claiming copyright on the Klingon language https://torrentfreak.com/paramount-we-do-own-the-klingon-language-and-warships-160414/

#5yrsago Murder Offsets https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

#5yrsago The FCC wants your broadband measurements https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#fly-my-pretties

#1yrago Machina economicus https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16
  https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

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, 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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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

Today's links

• Rights for robots: Not everything deserves moral consideration.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 7 years under the DMCA; NOLA mayoral candidate x New Orleans Square; Kettling is illegal; AOL won't deliver critical emails; Chris Ware x Charlie Brown; Mossack Fonseca raided; Corporate lobbying budget is greater than Senate and House; Corbyn overpays taxes; What IP means; Bill Gates v humanity; "Jackpot."
• Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
• 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.

Rights for robots (permalink)

The Rights of Nature movement uses a bold tactic to preserve our habitable Earth: it seeks to extend (pseudo) personhood to things like watersheds, forests and other ecosystems, as well as nonhuman species, in hopes of creating legal "standing" to ask the courts for protection:

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

What do watersheds, forests and nonhuman species need protection from? That turns out to be a very interesting question, because the most common adversary in a Rights of Nature case is another pseudo-person: namely, a limited liability corporation.

These nonhuman "persons" have been a feature of our legal system since the late 19th century, when the Supreme Court found that the 14th Amendment's "Equal Protection" clause could be applied to a railroad. In the 150-some years since, corporate personhood has monotonically expanded, most notoriously through cases like Hobby Lobby, which gave a corporation the right to discriminate against women on the grounds that it shared its founders' religious opposition to abortion; and, of course, in Citizens United, which found that corporate personhood meant that corporations had a constitutional right to divert their profits to bribe politicians.

Theoretically, "corporate personhood" extends to all kinds of organizations, including trade unions – but in practice, corporate personhood primarily allows the ruling class to manufacture new "people" to serve as a botnet on their behalf. A union has free speech rights just like an employer, but the employer's property rights mean that it can exclude union organizers from its premises, and employer rights mean that corporations can force workers to sit through "captive audience" meetings where expensive consultants lie to them about how awful a union would be (the corporation's speech rights also mean that it's free to lie).

In my view, corporate personhood has been an unmitigated disaster. Creating "human rights" for these nonhuman entities led to the catastrophic degradation of the natural world, via the equally catastrophic degradation of our political processes.

In a strange way, corporate personhood has realized the danger that reactionary opponents of votes for women warned of. In the days of the suffrage movement, anti-feminists claimed that giving women the vote would simply lead to husbands getting two votes, since wives would simply vote the way their husbands told them to.

This libel never died out. Take the recent hard-fought UK by-election in Gorton and Denton (basically Manchester): this was the first test of the Green Party's electoral chances under its new leader, the brilliant and principled leftist Zack Polanski. The Green candidate was Hannah Spencer, a working-class plumber and plasterer who rejected the demonization of the region's Muslim voters, unlike her rivals from Labour (which has transformed itself into a right-wing party), Reform (a fascist party), and the Conservatives (an irrelevant and dying right party). During the race (and especially after Spencer romped to a massive victory) Spencer's rivals accused her of courting "family voters," by which they meant Muslim wives, who would vote the way their Islamist husbands ordered them to. Despite the facial absurdity of this claim – that the Islamist vote would go for the pro-trans party led by a gay Jew – it was widely repeated:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyxeqpzz2no

"Family voting" isn't a thing, but corporate personhood has conferred political rights on the ruling class, who get to manufacture corporate "people" at scale, each of which is guaranteed the same right to contribute to politicians and intervene in our politics as any human.

Contrast this with the Rights for Nature movement. Where corporate personhood leads to a society with less empathy for living things (up to and including humans), Rights for Nature creates a legal and social basis for more empathy. In her stunning novel A Half-Built Garden, Ruthanna Emrys paints a picture of a world in which the personhood of watersheds and animals become as much of a part of our worldview as corporate personhood is today:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

Scenes from A Half-Built Garden kept playing out in my mind last month while I attended the Bioneers conference in Berkeley, where they carried on their decades-long tradition of centering indigenous activists whose environmental campaigns were intimately bound up with the idea of personhood for the natural world and its inhabitants:

https://bioneers.org/

On the last morning, my daughter and I sat through a string of inspiring and uplifting presentations from indigenous-led groups that had used Rights of Nature to rally support for legal challenges that had forced those other nonhuman "persons" – limited liability corporations – to retreat from plans to raze, poison, or murder whole regions.

The final keynote speaker that morning was the writer Michael Pollan, who spoke about a looming polycrisis of AI, and I found myself groaning and squirming. Not him, too! Were we about to be held captive to yet another speaker convinced that AI was going to become conscious and turn us all into paperclips?

That seemed to be where he was leading, as he discussed the way that chatbots were designed to evince the empathic response we normally reserve for people – the same empathy that all the other speakers were seeking to inspire for nature. But then, he took an unexpected and welcome turn: Pollan compared extending personhood to chatbots to the disastrous decision to extend personhood to corporations, and urged us all to turn away from it.

This crystallized something that had niggled at me for years. For years, people I respect have used the Rights for Nature movement as an argument for extending empathy to software constructs. The more we practice empathy – and the more rights we afford to more entities – the better we get at it. Personhood for things that are not like us, the argument goes, makes our own personhood more secure, by honing a reflex toward empathy and respect for all things. This is the argument for saying thank you to Siri (and now to other chatbots):

https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/download/14294/12136

Siri – like so many of our obedient, subservient, sycophantic chatbots – impersonates a woman. If we get habituated to barking orders at a "woman" (or at our "assistants") then this will bleed out into our interactions with real women and real assistants. Extending moral consideration to Siri, though "she" is just a software construct, will condition our reflexes to treat everything with respect.

For years, I'd uncritically accepted that argument, but after hearing Pollan speak, I changed my mind. Rather than treating Siri with respect because it impersonates a woman, we should demand that Siri stop impersonating a woman. I don't thank my Unix shell when I pipe a command to grep and get the output that I'm looking for, and I don't thank my pocket-knife when it slices through the tape on a parcel. I can appreciate that these are well-made tools and value their thoughtful design, but that doesn't mean I have to respect them in the way that I would respect a person.

That way lies madness – the madness that leads us to ascribe personalities to corporations and declare some of them to be "immoral" and others to be "moral," which is always and forever a dead end:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

In other words: there's an argument from the Rights of Nature movement that says that the more empathy we practice, the better off we are in all our interactions. But Pollan complicated that argument, by raising the example of corporate personhood. It turns out that extending personhood to constructed nonhuman entities like corporations reduces the amount of empathy we practice. Far from empowering labor unions, the creation of "human" rights for groups and organizations has given capital more rights over workers. A labor rights regime can defend workers – without empowering bosses and without creating new "persons."

The question is: is a chatbot more like a corporation (whose personhood corrodes our empathy) or more like a watershed (whose personhood strengthens our empathy)? But to ask that question is to answer it – a chatbot is definitely more like a corporation than it is like a watershed. What's more: in a very real, non-metaphorical way, giving rights to chatbots means taking away rights from nature, thanks to LLMs' energy-intesivity.

Empathy then, for the nonhuman world – but not for human constructs.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Khan vs. Cutter: A Tale of Two Careers https://prospect.org/2026/04/14/khan-vs-cutter-tale-of-two-careers/

• The MetaBrainz Foundation is seeking a new Executive Director (ED) https://blog.metabrainz.org/2026/04/14/seeking-a-new-executive-director/

• Missouri Town Council Approves Data Center. A Week Later, Voters Fire Half of Council https://gizmodo.com/missouri-town-council-approves-data-center-a-week-later-voters-fire-half-of-council-2000746005

• Wikilinker https://whitelabel.org/wikilinker/about/

• Fold Catastrophes/Peter Watts https://tachyonpublications.com/product/fold-catastrophes/?mc_cid=c20986aa78

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Canadian labels pull out of RIAA-fronted Canadian Recording Industry Ass. https://web.archive.org/web/20060414170111/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1204/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#20yrsago EFF publishes “7 Years Under the DMCA” paper https://web.archive.org/web/20060415110951/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004555.php

#20yrsago Life of a writer as a Zork adventure https://web.archive.org/web/20060414115745/http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/04/disadventure.html

#20yrsago NOLA mayoral candidate uses photo of Disneyland New Orleans Square https://web.archive.org/web/20060414214356/https://www.wonkette.com/politics/new-orleans/not-quite-the-happiest-place-on-earth-166989.php

#20yrsago AOL won’t deliver emails that criticize AOL https://web.archive.org/web/20060408133439/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_04.php#004556

#15yrsago UK court rules that kettling was illegal https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/apr/14/kettling-g20-protesters-police-illegal

#15yrsago If Chris Ware was Charlie Brown https://eatmorebikes.blogspot.com/2011/04/lil-chris-ware.html

#10yrsago Piracy dooms motion picture industry to yet another record-breaking box-office year https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-fails-to-prevent-box-office-record-160413/

#10yrsago Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca law offices raided by Panama authorities https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panama-tax-raid-idUSKCN0XA020/

#10yrsago Panama Papers reveal offshore companies were bagmen for the world’s spies https://web.archive.org/web/20160426083004/https://www.yahoo.com/news/panama-papers-reveal-spies-used-mossak-fonseca-231833609.html

#10yrsago How corporate America’s lobbying budget surpassed the combined Senate and Congress budget https://web.archive.org/web/20150422010643/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-corporate-lobbyists-conquered-american-democracy/390822/

#10yrsago URL shorteners are a short path to your computer’s hard drive https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02734

#10yrsago UL has a new, opaque certification process for cybersecurity https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/underwriters-labs-refuses-to-share-new-iot-cybersecurity-standard/

#10yrsago Jeremy Corbyn overpays his taxes https://web.archive.org/web/20160413192208/https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/labour-party/news/73724/jeremy-corbyn-overstated-income-his-tax-return

#10yrsago Cassetteboy’s latest video is an amazing, danceable anti-Snoopers Charter mashup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2fSXp6N-vs

#10yrsago Texas: prisoners whose families maintain their social media presence face 45 days in solitary https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/texas-prison-system-unveils-new-inmate-censorship-policy

#5yrsago Data-brokerages vs the world https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

#5yrsago What "IP" means https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#ip

#5yrsago Bill Gates will kill us all https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

#5yrsago Jackpot https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#affluenza

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16
  https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

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, 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

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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

A few days ago, by pure chance, I came across the website of an Italian startup that proudly defines itself “your digital experience company. AI driven, human powered.” Got it? Those guys are proud to be what Doctorow calls “reverse centaurs” instead of the exact opposite - “Human driven, AI powered” - that any serious organization should aspire to be in a saner world.

That, of course, is just the example closer to me of a much wider, much deeper problem: the adoration of fake innovation, intertwined with beliefs that being good at coding and nothing else automatically turns people into demigods exempt from maturity and responsibility that everybody else must follow. Or, as Chesterton more or less said 90 years ago, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

Is believing in any thing, no matter how dumb, a direct consequence of not believing in God anymore, as Chesterton said? Whatever your answer is to that question, I’m confident you’ll agree that people who believe in the dumbest things are everywhere these days, from main streets to the highest offices, oval or not.

This inability to recognize dumb ideas, products and practices, and their long-term effects is everywhere, of course. Here, I just want to call out four cases I frequently write about, and thank somebody who started described their long-term effects before I was born.

From now on, I’ll name these four things CSARs for two reasons: it’s the acronym of their initials, in the order in which they came to be, and sounds like “czar”, whose derogatory meaning is the same of my CSARs: “tyranny, unchecked power, and distant, autocratic control”.

In order of appearance - not as new concepts but as mass phenomena that shape and control the whole society, - the four CSARs are: Corporations (as a shortcut for, and personification of Capitalism), Social Media, AI and (Humanoid) Robots.

I dump them all together because they are all the same: Social media are the forerunners of what we call AI, which is just peak software; Humanoid Robots for the masses are just AI hype, repackaged out of desperation; and Corporations, as I have been saying for seven years now, were the first AIs.

Another proof that the four CSARs are four faces of the same thing is that there is at least one set of long-term effects they all cause, and it’s one that was first described, quite well, decades ago.

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Earth always was Asimov’s Galaxy

More than seventy years ago, Isaac Asimov started writing a great sci-fi saga about the evolution of the human race and its colonization of its whole galaxy, the Milky Way.

One main theme of that saga is the clash between the two almost opposite kinds of human societies that attempt to colonize the galaxy, Spacers and Settlers. The two groups look at each other with reciprocal contempt and suspicion for several reasons, the bigger one being just their attitudes towards humanoid robots. Spacers totally depend on humanoid robots, and aim to make them completely undistinguishable from real humans. Settlers deeply hate humanoid robots and outright ban them, because they demean humans.

Reading those books really makes you realize that all the struggles, responsibilities and opportunies of galactic Spacers and Settlers that Asimov started describing seventy years ago are right here on this planet (1). Heck, he did it so well to almost make you suspect that that was his whole point all along, didn’t he?

Whatever’s Asimov’s intentions were, it’s hard to ignore that the long-term effects of CSARs on societies that acritically adopt them are the same of Humanoid Robots on Spacers, that Asimov explicitly described in the novels Naked Sun (NS, 1956), Robots of Dawn (RD, 1983) and Robots and Empire (RE, 1985). Read these quotes (2) replacing “robots” with CSAR, and you’ll see what I’m talking about:

• NS: once you starting depending on robots, that dependance can only increase

• NS: never dare to say that robots are dangerous, saying so is a human disease (especially of inferior humans like the Settlers)

• RD: [Spacers] insist to deny the robotic nature of their serfs and give them human status, to avoid acknowledging how much they depend on objects operated by artificial intelligence (and therefore less than human)

• RE: (just like the internet, social media and AI) robots weaken the dependencies all human beings have with each other. Robots fill all the interstices between them

• RE: Robots are an insulator that undermines the natural attraction of each human towards the others, and when that happens the whole system (of cohesive human society) falls apart, breaking into many separate entities

Indeed, todays we are all much more Spacers than Settlers, thanks to CSARs whose common feature, necessity and purpose is exactly to minimize any need and desire of direct human contacts. “AI driven, lonely-humans powered” is how the Spacers would have described their societies, if only they had been lucid and honest enough to see what they were doing.

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We must be Settlers, not Spacers

Continuing to repeat with CSARs the errors Spacers did with their robots can only have the same final effects: in the worst case, extinction. In the most likely, but still pretty dark case, transformation into something hardly human. Ending those errors doesn’t mean going back in time though. Asimov’s Settlers aren’t clueless luddites. If they survive and thrive all over the Galaxy is exactly because they don’t refuse technology outright, only certain technologies, and certain uses of those technologies, that are inherently toxic.

That’s the same thing we should do. We must realize that the CSARs we have today are inherently toxic in the ways Asimov described decades ago, and that this is happening because (Chesterton, again?), instead of reining the CSARs in we are treating them (especially the root one, that is corporations) as if they were supernatural entities that deserve supernatural status.

Getting rid of all the CSARs would be impossible, even if it were right, which it isn’t. What we really, urgently need to do is to strip them of their superpowers and reputation, as soon as possible. Joanna Bryson’s argument in 2009 that robots should be slaves seems taken straight from Robots of Dawn, but it’s equally valid for all the CSARs, especially the first one:

Robots should not be described as persons, nor given legal nor moral responsibility for their actions. Robots are fully owned by us. We determine their goals and behaviour, either directly or indirectly through specifying their intelligence or how their intelligence is acquired. In humanising them, we not only further dehumanise real people, but also encourage poor human decision-making in the allocation of resources and responsibility... Robots should rather be viewed as tools we use to extend our own abilities and to accelerate progress on our own goals.

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All I can add to that is what I first said six years ago: any call to treat AIs and robots like human beings just strenghtens the pretense of corporations to be treated as real human beings.

Summing up: the long-term effects of social media, AI and Humanoid Robots on society are those Asimov started describing seventy years ago. But it’s corporations as they are today - ubiquitous, eternal, millions of times stronger than any single human being, allowed to morph into each other but required to have the same long-term vision of a toddler who refuses bedtime - that are the root problem. It’s them, coupled with inferiority complexes towards whoever got some Computer Science degree, without the maturity and culture to use it right. Enforcing on corporations the same laws Asimov conceived for robots may not be enough to get all the other CSARs right, but it’s a first step in the right direction. In the meantime, thanks for supporting my human-digital work in any way you can, be it subscription, direct donations or simply sharing these posts in and outside Substack.

1. In my humble opinion, you should read those books regardless of robots, for the struggles between Spaces and Settlers look every year more like those the aging rich countries and the young but poor ones of our own earthly Galaxy.

2. those are not literal quotes, but my translations, as faithful as possible, of the corresponding sentences in the Italian versions of those books. All the parentheses are my additions.

Today's links

• In praise of (some) compartmentalization: Go with the flow (mostly).
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Multitasking teens; Copyrighted dirt; NZ internet disconnection x CHCH quake; Hubble cake; Churchill's booze Rx; Fraud-resistant election tech.
• Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
• 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.

In praise of (some) compartmentalization (permalink)

If there's one FAQ I get Q'ed most F'ly, it's this: "How do you get so much done?" The short answer is, "I write when I'm anxious (which is how I came to write nine books during lockdown)." The long answer is more complicated.

The first complication to understand is that I have lifelong, degenerating chronic pain that makes me hurt from the base of my skull to the soles of my feet – my whole posterior chain. On a good day, it hurts. On a bad day, it hurts so bad that it's all I can think about.

Unless…I work. If I can find my way into a creative project, the rest of the world just kind of fades back, including my physical body. Sometimes I can get there through entertainment, too – a really good book or movie, say, but more often I find myself squirming and needing to get up and stretch or use a theragun after a couple hours in a movie theater seat, even the kind that reclines. A good conversation can do it, too, and is better than a movie or a book. The challenge and engagement of an intense conversation – preferably one with a chewy, productive and interesting disagreement – can take me out of things.

There's a degree to which ignoring my body is the right thing to do. I've come to understand a lot of my pain as being a phantom, a pathological failure of my nervous system to terminate a pain signal after it fires. Instead of fading away, my pain messages bounce back and forth, getting amplified rather than attenuated, until all my nerves are screaming at me. Where pain has no physiological correlate – in other words, where the ache is just an ache, without a strain or a tear or a bruise – it makes sense to ignore it. It's actually healthy to ignore it, because paying attention to pain is one of the things that can amplify it (though not always).

But this only gets me so far, because some of my pain does have a physiological correlate. My biomechanics suck, thanks to congenital hip defects that screwed up the way I walked and sat and lay and moved for most of my life, until eventually my wonky hips wore out and I swapped 'em for a titanium set. By that point, it was too late, because I'd made a mess of my posterior chain, all the way from my skull to my feet, and years of diligent physio, swimming, yoga, occupational therapy and physiotherapy have barely made a dent. So when I sit or stand or lie down, I'm always straining something, and I really do need to get up and move around and stretch and whatnot, or sure as hell I will pay the price later. So if I get too distracted, then I start ignoring the pain I need to be paying attention to, and that's at least as bad as paying attention to the pain I should be ignoring.

Which brings me to anxiety. These are anxious times. I don't know anyone who feels good right now. Particularly this week, as the Strait of Epstein emergency gets progressively worse, and there's this January 2020 sense of the crisis on the horizon, hitting one country after another. Last week, Australia got its last shipment of fossil fuels. This week, restaurants in India are all shuttered because of gas rationing. People who understand these things better than I do tell me that even if Trump strokes out tonight and Hegseth overdoes the autoerotic asphyxiation, it'll be months, possibly years, before things get back to "normal" ("normal!").

Any time I think about this stuff for even a few minutes, I start to feel that covid-a-comin', early-2020 feeling, only it's worse this time around, because I literally couldn't imagine what covid would mean when it got here, and now I know.

When I start to feel those feelings, I can just sit down and start thinking with my fingers, working on a book or a blog-post. Or working on an illustration to go with one of these posts, which is the most delicious distraction, leaving me with just enough capacity to mull over the structure of the argument that will accompany it.

I can't do anything about the impending energy catastrophe, apart from being part of a network of mutual aid and political organizing, so it makes sense not to fixate on it. But there are things that upset me – problems my friends and loved ones are having – where there's such a thing as too much compartmentalization. It's one thing to lose myself in work until the heat of emotion cools so I can think rationally about an issue that's got me seeing red, and another to use work as a way to neglect a loved one who needs attention in the hope that the moment will pass before I have to do any difficult emotional labor.

Compartmentalization, in other words, but not too much compartmentalization. During the lockdown years, I transformed myself into a machine for turning Talking Heads bootlegs into science fiction novels and technology criticism, and that was better than spending that time boozing or scrolling or fighting – but in retrospect, there's probably more I could have done during those hard months to support the people around me. In my defense – in all our defenses – that was an unprecedented situation and we all did the best we could.

Creative work takes me away from my pain – both physical and emotional – because creative work takes me into a "flow" state. This useful word comes to us from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term in the 1960s while he was investigating a seeming paradox: how was it that we modern people had mastered so many of the useful arts and sciences, and yet we seemed no happier than the ancients? How could we make so much progress in so many fields, and so little progress in being happy?

In his fieldwork, Csikszentmihalyi found that people reported the most happiness while they were doing difficult things well – when your "body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." He called this state "flow."

As Derek Thompson says, the word "flow" implies an effortlessness, but really, it's the effort – just enough, not too much – that defines flow-states. We aren't happiest in a frictionless world, but rather, in a world of "achievable challenges":

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/how-zombie-flow-took-over-culture

Thompson relates this to "the law of familiar surprises," an idea he developed in his book Hit Makers, which investigated why some media, ideas and people found fame, while others languished. A "familiar surprise" is something that's "familiar but not too familiar."

He thinks that the Hollywood mania for sequels and reboots is the result of media execs chasing "familiar surprises." I think there's something to this, but we shouldn't discount the effect that monopolization has on the media: as companies get larger and larger, they end up committing to larger and larger projects, and you just don't take the kinds of risks with a $500m movie that you can take with a $5m one. If you're spending $500m, you want to hedge that investment with as many safe bets as you can find – big name stars, successful IP, and familiar narrative structures. If the movie still tanks, at least no one will get fired for taking a big, bold risk.

Today, we're living in a world of extremely familiar, and progressively less surprising culture. AI slop is the epitome of familiarity, since by definition, AI tries to make a future that is similar to the past, because all it can do is extrapolate from previous data. That's a fundamentally conservative, uncreative way to think about the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/14/everybody-poops/#homeostatic-mechanism

The tracks the Spotify algorithm picks out of the catalog are going to be as similar to the ones you've played in the past as it can make them – and the royalty-free slop tracks that Spotify generates with AI or commissions from no-name artists will be even more insipidly unsurprising:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Thompson cites Shishi Wu's dissertation on "Passive Flow," a term she coined to describe how teens fall into social media scroll-trances:

https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2104&context=doctoral_dissertations

Wu says it's a mistake to attribute the regretted hours of scrolling to addiction or a failure of self-control. Rather, the user is falling into "passive flow," a condition arising from three factors:

I. Engagement without a clear goal;

II. A loss of self-awareness – of your body and your mental state;

III. Losing track of time.

I instantly recognize II. and III. – they're the hallmarks of the flow states that abstract me away from my own pain when I'm working. The big difference here is I. – I go to work with the clearest of goals, while "passive flow" is undirected (Thompson also cites psychologist Paul Bloom, who calls the scroll-trance "shitty flow." In shitty flow, you lose track of the world and its sensations – but in a way that you later regret.)

Thompson has his own name for this phenomenon of algorithmically induced, regret-inducing flow: he calls it "zombie flow." It's flow that "recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose."

Zombie flow is "progress without pleasure" – it's frictionless, and so it gives us nothing except that sense of the world going away, and when it stops, the world is still there. The trick is to find a way of compartmentalizing that rewards attention with some kind of productive residue that you can look back on with pride and pleasure.

I wouldn't call myself a happy person. I don't think I know any happy people right now. But I'm an extremely hopeful person, because I can see so many ways that we can make things better (an admittedly very low bar), and I have mastered the trick of harnessing my unhappiness to the pursuit of things that might make the world better, and I'm gradually learning when to stop escaping the pain and confront it.

(Image: marsupium photography, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Uncovering Webloc https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-penlinks-ad-based-geolocation-surveillance-tech/

• The Science of Forced Perspective at Disney Parks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqefjmRVLTM

• The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780374621568

• EFF HOPE: Join Us This August! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-hope-join-us-august

• Here Are the Finalists for the 2025 Locus Awards https://reactormag.com/finalists-2025-locus-awards/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Pee-Wee Herman on his career https://web.archive.org/web/20010414033156/https://ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,105857~1~0~paulreubensreturnsto,00.html

#25yrsago Anxious hand-wringing about multitasking teens https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/12/technology/teenage-overload-or-digital-dexterity.html

#20yrsago Clever t-shirt typography spells “hate” – “love” in mirror-writing https://web.archive.org/web/20060413102804/https://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/4/12/1881414.html

#20yrsago New Mexico Lightning Field claims to have copyrighted dirt https://diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/walter-de-maria-the-lightning-field#overview

#20yrsago Futuristic house made of spinach protein and soy-foam https://web.archive.org/web/20060413111650/http://bfi.org/node/828

#15yrsago New Zealand to sneak in Internet disconnection copyright law with Christchurch quake emergency legislation https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4882838/Law-to-fight-internet-piracy-rushed-through

#10yrsago Bake: An amazing space-themed Hubble cake https://www.sprinklebakes.com/2016/04/black-velvet-nebula-cake.html

#10yrsago Shanghai law uses credit scores to enforce filial piety https://www.caixinglobal.com/2016-04-11/shanghai-says-people-who-fail-to-visit-parents-will-have-credit-scores-lowered-101011746.html

#10yrsago Walmart heiress donated $378,400 to Hillary Clinton campaign and PACs https://web.archive.org/web/20160414155119/https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/alice-walton-donated-353400-clintons-victory-fund

#10yrsago Mass arrests at DC protest over money in politics https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/mass-arrests-of-protesters-in-demonstration-at-capitol-against-big-money/2016/04/11/96c13df0-0037-11e6-9d36-33d198ea26c5_story.html

#10yrsago Churchill got a doctor’s note requiring him to drink at least 8 doubles a day “for convalescence” https://web.archive.org/web/20130321054712/https://arttattler.com/archivewinstonchurchill.html

#5yrsago Big Tech's secret weapon is switching costs, not network effects https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/12/tear-down-that-wall/#zucks-iron-curtain

#5yrsago Fraud-resistant election-tech https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/12/tear-down-that-wall/#bmds

#1yrago Blue Cross of Louisiana doesn't give a shit about breast cancer https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/12/pre-authorization/#is-not-a-guarantee-of-payment

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16
  https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

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, 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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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

Today's links

• Austerity creates fascism: We can't afford to not afford nice things.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: The Server of Amontillado; Flapper's Dictionary; Mastercard v rec.humor.funny; Philippines electoral data breach; A front page from the Trump presidency; Spike Lee x Bernie Sanders; France v password hashing; Algorithms as Central European folk-dances; Save Comcast; Lex Luthor v export controls; Zuckerberg in the dock.
• Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
• 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.

Austerity creates fascism (permalink)

I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes our "capital allocators" spend $1.4T on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That's some next-level underpants-gnomery:

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

The thing that worries me about billionaires' AI psychosis isn't concern for their financial solvency. No, what I worry about is what happens when the seven companies that comprise a third of the S&P 500 stop trading the same $100b IOU around while pretending it's in all of their bank accounts at once and implode, vaporizing a third of the US stock market.

My concern about a massive collapse in the capital markets isn't that workers will suffer directly. Despite all the Wonderful Life rhetoric about your money being in Joe's house and the Kennedy house and Mrs Macklin's house, the reality is that the median US worker has $955 saved for retirement. You could nuke the whole financial system and not take a dime out of most workers' pockets:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

No, the thing that has me terrified about AI is that when it craters and takes the economy with it, that we will respond the same way we have during every financial crisis of the 21st century: with austerity, and austerity breeds fascism.

There's a direct line from every K-shaped recovery to every strong-man who's currently sending masked gunmen into the streets. The Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban rose to power after people who'd been suckered into denominating their mortgages in Swiss francs lost their houses when the currency markets moved suddenly, because the swindlers who'd sold them those mortgages took the position that wanting to live somewhere automatically made you an expert in forex risk, so caveat fuckin' emptor, baby.

Back in America, Obama decided to bail out the banks and not the people. His treasury secretary Tim Geithner told him the banks were headed for a catastrophic crash and could only be saved if he "foamed the runways" with everyday Americans' mortgages. Millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure as banks, flush with public cash, threw them out of their homes and then flipped them to investment banks who became the country's worst slumlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Americans were understandably not entirely happy with this outcome. So when Hillary Clinton replied to Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" with "America is already great," her message was, "Vote for me if you think everything is great; vote for Trump if you think everything is fucked":

https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/clinton-america-is-already-great-220078

"Austerity begets fascism" is one of those things that makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it turns out that there's a good empirical basis for believing it. In "Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right" four economists from the LSE and Bocconi provide an excellent look at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists:

https://catherinedevries.eu/NHS.pdf

Here's how they break it down. Political scientists have assembled a large, reproducible body of evidence to show that "public service provision is crucial to people’s perceptions of their quality of life and living standards." Good public services are the basis for "the social contract between rulers and the ruled" – pay your taxes and obey the laws, and in return, you will be well served.

When public services go wrong, people don't always know who to blame, but they definitely notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray. They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they "withdraw their support" for the system.

Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can't get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about "undeserving migrants" who've taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to "deserving natives."

(This is grimly hilarious, given that the wizened, decrepit rich world is critically dependent on migrants as a source of healthy, working-age workers who pay massive amounts into the system while barely making use of it, many of whom plan on retiring to their home countries when they do reach the age where they're likely to extract a net loss to the benefits system.)

Enter the NHS, a beloved institution that is hailed as the pride of the nation by both the political left and the right. The majority of Britons use the NHS, with only 12-14% of the population "going private," so when the NHS declines, everybody notices (what's more, even people with private care use the NHS for many of their needs).

Britons love the NHS and they want the government to spend more on it. There's "a broad public consensus that the government is not going far enough when it comes to funding." That's because generations of cuts to the NHS have left it substantially hollowed out, with major parts of the service handed over to for-profit entities who overcharge and underserve.

The most tangible and immediate evidence of this slow-motion collapse comes when your local general practitioner ("family doctor" or "primary care physician" in Americanese) shuts down. The UK has lost 1,700 GP practices since 2013.

Reasoning that a GP closure would make people angry at the system, the economists behind the paper wanted to see what happened to people's political beliefs when their GP's office shut. They relied on the GP Patient Survey, a longitudinal study run by NHS England and Ipsos Mori. The survey polls a statistically significant random sample of patients from every GP practice in the NHS and then weights the results "to reflect the demographic characteristics of the local population according to UK Census estimates." It's good data.

The researchers cross-referenced this with various high-quality instruments that measured the political views of Britons, like the U Essex Understanding Society Panel, drawing on 13 years' worth of surveys from 2009-2022, gaining access to a protected version of the dataset with fine-grained geographic information about survey respondents, which allowed them to link responses to the "catchment areas" for specific GPs' office. They combined this data with the British Election Study panel, which has surveyed voters 29 times since 2014.

Most of the paper describes the careful work the researchers did to analyze, cross-reference and validate this data, but what interested me was the conclusion: that people who see a severe degradation in the quality of the services they rely on switch their political affiliation to one of Britain's fascist parties – UKIP, the Brexit Party, or Reform – parties that have called for ethnic cleansing in Britain.

This is what has me scared. We can see the looming economic crises in our near future. If it's not the AI crash that triggers the next wave of austerity, it'll be the oil crisis created by Trump's bungling in the Strait of Epstein. And of course, we could always get a twofer, because the Gulf States that were pouring hundreds of billions into AI data-centers now need every cent to rebuild the LNG shipping terminals and oil refineries that Iran blew up after Trump, Hegseth, and Netanyahu started murdering all the schoolgirls they could target. Once they nope out of the AI bubble, that could trigger the collapse.

This is a study about the NHS, but it's not just about the NHS. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that people react this way when they experience cuts to their road maintenance, their schools, their community centers, and any other service they rely on. Fascism – what Hannah Arendt called 'organized loneliness' – can only take root when people stop believing that their society will reward their lawfulness with an orderly and humane existence.

The crisis is coming, but whether we do austerity when it gets here is our choice. Everywhere we turn, political leaders are rejecting generations of failed austerity in favor of "sewer socialism" – the idea that you get people to trust their government by earning that trust. Zohran Mamdani is fixing 100,000 potholes in the first 100 days, despite the multi-billion dollar deficit that outgoing Mayor Eric Adams created by "running the city like a business":

https://prospect.org/2026/04/10/zohran-mamdani-getting-new-york-city-believe-in-government/

In Canada and the UK, party leaders like Avi Lewis (NDP) and Zack Polanski (Greens) are vowing to fight the coming crises by spending, not cutting. Compare that with UK fascist leader Nigel Farage, who says that if he's elected, he'll create a "paramilitary style" British ICE, building concentration camps for 24,000 migrants, with the hope of deporting 288,000 people per year:

https://www.thenerve.news/p/reform-deportation-operation-restoring-justice-data-surveillance-palantir-uk-labour

"Socialism or barbarism" isn't just a cliche – it's actually a choice on the ballot.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, calling US tech dependence a strategic risk https://www.xda-developers.com/frances-government-ditching-windows-for-linux/

• The Indie News Queen Who’s Not Done Pissing Off the Powerful https://www.wired.com/story/the-indie-news-queen-whos-not-done-pissing-off-the-powerful/

• Another Court Rules Copyright Can’t Stop People From Reading and Speaking the Law https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/another-court-rules-copyright-cant-stop-people-reading-and-speaking-law

• EFF is Leaving X https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x

• Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy https://www.the-independent.com/tech/renewable-energy-solar-nepal-bhutan-iceland-b2533699.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago The Server of Amontillado https://web.archive.org/web/20070112024841/http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012

#25yrsago Mastercard threatens the moderator of rec.humor.funny https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Apr/mcrhf.html

#15yrsago Sweden exports sweatshops: Ikea’s first American factory https://web.archive.org/web/20190404035900/https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2011-apr-10-la-fi-ikea-union-20110410-story.html

#15yrsago Canada’s New Democratic Party promises national broadband and net neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20110412064952/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5734/125/

#15yrsago Flapper’s dictionary: 1922 https://bookflaps.blogspot.com/2011/04/flappers-dictionary.html

#15yrsago Toronto’s Silver Snail to leave Queen Street West https://web.archive.org/web/20110409181737/http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/970520–the-silver-snail-comics-icon-sold-to-move

#15yrsago WI county clerk whose homemade voting software found 14K votes for Tea Party judge is an old hand at illegal campaigning https://web.archive.org/web/20110412121323/http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/elections/article_7e777016-62b2-11e0-9b74-001cc4c002e0.html

#15yrsago Canadian Tories’ campaign pledge: We will spy on the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20110412125250/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5733/125/

#15yrsago France to require unhashed password storage https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-12983734

#15yrsago Central European folk-dancers illustrated sorting algorithms https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/2255-sorting-algorithms-as-dances.html

#10yrsago Save Comcast! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-comcast

#10yrsago Goldman Sachs will pay $5B for fraudulent sales of toxic debt, no one will go to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20160412155435/https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/goldman-sachs-to-pay-5b-to-settle-charges-of-selling-troubled-mortgages-ahead-of-the-financial-crisis/

#10yrsago How could Lex Luthor beat the import controls on kryptonite? https://lawandthemultiverse.com/2016/04/11/batman-v-superman-and-import-licenses/

#10yrsago Congresscritters spend 4 hours/day on the phone, begging for money https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk

#10yrsago Philippines electoral data breach much worse than initially reported, possibly worst ever https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/every-voter-in-philippines-exposed/

#10yrsago A cashless society as a tool for censorship and social control https://web.archive.org/web/20260311032317/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/cashless-society/477411/

#10yrsago Boston Globe previews a front page from the Trump presidency https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2797782/Ideas-Trump-front-page.pdf

#10yrsago Spike Lee interviews Bernie Sanders: Vermont, Trump, Clinton, guns and Brooklyn https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/bernie-sanders-interviewed-by-spike-lee-thr-new-york-issue-880788/

#5yrsago Youtube blocks advertisers from targeting "Black Lives Matter" https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/10/brand-safety-rupture/#brand-safety

#5yrsago Google's short-lived data-advantage https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

#1yrago Zuckerberg in the dock https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

#1yrago The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about) https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16
  https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

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, 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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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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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

This week on my podcast, I read Not Normal, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the surreal and terrible world we’ve been eased into thanks to anti-circumvention laws.

If you were paying attention in 1998, you could see what was coming. Computers were getting much cheaper, and much smaller. From cars to toast­ers, from speakers to TVs, we were shoveling them into our devices. and an it doesn’t take a lot of expense or engineering to add an “access control” to any of those computers.

That meant that DMCA 1201 was about to metastasize. Once you put a computer into a thermostat or a bassinet or a stovetop or a hearing aid, you can add an access control and make it a felony to use it in ways the manufac­turer disprefers. You can make it illegal to use cheap batteries, or a different app store. You can add little chips to parts – everything from a fuel pump to a touchscreen – and make it illegal to manufacture a working generic part, because the generic part has to bypass the “access control” in the device that checks to see whether it’s the manufacturer’s own part.

MP3

Oh Internet of My Youth.

For so long, I have looked back on you with melancholy sadness, bittersweet longing, a cloud of nostalgia of the best and worst kind. The sort of feeling you have toward a home country you cannot return to, a street you grew up on now lined with strip malls, or a lover once held tight and now lost.

You were the one that got away.

But the thing about nostalgia is that it is a clinging cloud, and clouds obscure the landscape. The more I think about the Way We Were, the more clearly I remember us. It’s not that all that love is wrong or untrue, or wasted on you, beautiful, weird, disgusting, awkward, miraculous thing that you were. Those worlds of good, those little villages, that fellowship, those nights by the blue screen-fire, the lives you made possible, the friendships you facilitated, that was all so real, and maybe more importantly, very much authentic, not a droning monotone of bots talking to bots about bots.

I believed in you. I believed in us. In the potential to make a world different than the one we thought was non-negotiable. And I guess it sure is different. It’s also nothing like you said it would be before you locked us all down and felt totally secure that we could never, ever leave. Before the mask came off.

But you promised.

You promised that the problem with the Old World was that the popular kids were in charge. The jocks and preppies, the born-rich, the beautiful and strong, the ones who found it easy and natural to fit in, the regular cast of the yearbook photo-spreads, the social butterflies, the goody two-shoes churchgoers, the bullies, those so accustomed to being in charge they never had to even look at the rest of us on their way to the top.

But you promised.

You promised that if we just flipped the script, if we could just start over with a new new world where the geeks and nerds and weirdos and techies were in charge for fucking once, if the ones on the bottom could find a way to the top, if wealth could find its way to the nerds in basements instead of prom kings and queens in parades, if the outcasts and matheletes and student body secretaries and artists and science kids who actually knew how things worked got to make things work, if the obsessive and the dedicated with their strange and wonderful passions were to remake the world and its rules, things would be better. They’d make different choices. They’d know what it was like to be powerless in a way the powerful never had before, and so they’d naturally remember the little guy. They’d make mistakes, sure, but different mistakes. And since science has no trouble adjusting to new data, they’d easily learn and adjust to any missteps, too.

Read more

The past few weeks my social media feeds have been more apocalyptic than usual. Not due to escalating war with Iran, the shellshocked economy, or oil prices, but because of a wave of posts and news articles proclaiming imminent doom for trans people in the United States. Attacks on trans rights are obviously not new and have steadily risen the past ten years, but this recent collection of worrying claims are especially apocalyptic, or outright genocidal.

Just this month I’ve seen viral posts, citing online articles, saying that ICE is going to round up and “disappear trans people,” that the FDA is making a national “registry of trans women,” and that an adult trans healthcare ban is rapidly on the way. These panic inducing claims and the articles they’re sourced from are referring to real things or movements happening in anti-trans activism, regulations, and legislation, but are framed in a way to maximize catastrophe rather than understanding what’s actually happening at the moment and what we can do about it.

The danger of uncritically engaging with trans panic clickbait is that it reduces the worthwhile process of “staying informed” to being in a state of constant doom and feeling hopeless against an unstoppable enemy. Alternatively, it risks causing people to completely check out and not believe anything they see online even if there is a real pressing threat. Both of these outcomes cloud our ability to accurately assess and respond to very real threats.

Migrating While Trans

The bulk of this article will focus on a story claiming that ICE is now permitted to detain anyone for “looking trans.” This story and the online discussion around it is a microcosmatic example of how we understand both the Trump administration’s attacks on trans people, and how and why ICE operates as an agency.

On March 12th, a Substack article was posted with the headline “Trump Administration Opens the Door for ICE to Target Anyone Suspected of Being Trans.” The subheadline continues by reading, “Under a new rule, the State Department will be able to revoke trans people’s visas over ‘misrepresentation.’ It’ll give ICE grounds to suspect all trans people of being in the US illegally.”

The information contained in this headline is the furthest many people will engage with the content of this article. Combining that headline with preconceived notions about how ICE functions under the second Trump administration makes this a very frightening claim.

So what evidence does the Substack article include to support this claim? Earlier this month the State Department updated its policy for the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, also known as the green card lottery.

New State Department rules require that applicants upload a scan of their foreign passport’s biographic and signature page to help cut down on fraudulent DV Program entries. The policy update also changed the “gender” entry to “sex” on the form. In the policy rule update the State Department wrote, “The marker reflected in the “sex” field on any visa application, including the entry form, should match the applicant’s biological sex at birth, even if that differs from the sex listed on the applicant’s foreign passport or other identifying documentation.”

The Substack article claims this could force a “mismatch between trans people’s applications and their passports—something it can then use to declare their applications fraudulent and disqualify them entirely.” The first half of that sentence is true, a mismatch may occur between the gender listed on foreign documents, and the sex listed on a US visa application. But it’s not the case that this mismatch will inevitably result in an application being deemed fraudulent and then denied.

According to Malita Picasso, staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project, the kind of fraud this rule change is trying to combat by requiring a passport scan is not unique to trans people. Picasso said in an email that the new rule “seems to more directly target fraudulent activities involving third parties basically entering the lottery on behalf of individuals without their knowledge and consent, and then extorting them for large amounts of money if they are selected.”

The stipulation requiring an applicant to list their “biological sex at birth” on forms has actually already been State Department policy for both immigrant and nonimmigrant visa applications for over a year. Effectively since Trump’s executive order mandating the US government officially recognize two biological sexes which are determined at birth, and that “government-issued identity documents, including visas, and all forms that require an individual’s sex shall accurately reflect an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”

Claiming that a mismatch between the gender listed on a foreign document and the sex marked on application forms will itself “disqualify” someone from receiving a visa has little to no basis in government policy. Picasso told me that the new policy itself recognizes this could cause discrepancies, and that she doesn’t see a “new or heightened risk of being accused of fraud/willful misrepresentation if a transgender person follows the instructions by listing their sex assigned at birth on the application, even if they also file a birth certificate that has been updated to reflect their gender identity.”

The State Department has been aware for a while that their “biological sex” policy will create these kinds of mismatches. A February, 2025 State Department memo reads, “There may be instances when a consular officer becomes aware that the sex listed on the foreign passport may not be the applicant’s sex as defined in the [Executive

Order]. In such cases, the adjudicator should confirm the applicant’s sex as defined in the E.O., indicate that sex on the visa, and add a case note documenting any discrepancy between the passport and the visa to prevent issues at the [Port of Entry].”

Later in April of 2025, USCIS officially updated their policy on requiring “biological sex” on immigration applications. The policy also states that “USCIS does not deny immigration benefits solely based on a failure to properly indicate the benefit requestor’s sex.” ACLU staff attorney Malita Picasso told me that USCIS officials do have “a lot of discretion,” and that the policy warns that failure to list biological sex “will cause delays in processing the application while USCIS tries to verify your sex assigned at birth,” according to Picasso.

The State Department has said there are grounds to deny visa applications for trans people if they make a “willful, affirmative, material act of misrepresentation” by misrepresenting their “biological sex at birth” in application forms or to a consular officer to gain entry to the United States under false pretenses. This language was written to restrict trans athletes from entering the country to play sports. The sort of misrepresentation the State Department is talking about is if a trans woman “misrepresents” her birth sex to procure a visa or admission into the country for the purpose of competing in a women’s sports competition.

This same sports memo, dated February 24th 2025, also states, “If there is a discrepancy either in the applicant’s documents or in electronic consular records, or if other evidence casts reasonable doubt on the applicant’s sex, you should refuse the case under 221(g) and request additional evidence to demonstrate sex at birth.” Section 221g of the INA is a temporary visa refusal pending further documents or information provided by the applicant. For an athlete visa the bar is very high and the burden is on the applicant to prove they have the special and rare qualities required to be eligible for a visa.

But the Substack article doesn’t just claim being trans could disqualify you from receiving a visa, the article escalates its claims to say that trans people who already have a valid visa could have it revoked and be deported for misrepresenting their sex in the past. The author of the Substack cites US law that if an alien is found to have obtained a visa “by fraud or willfully misrepresenting a material fact” they are ineligible to be in the United States, and refers to a section of the foreign affairs manual which includes providing a “fake birth certificate in support of an Immigrant Visa application” as “misrepresenting a material fact.” The article goes on to assert that the Trump administration would refuse to recognize trans people’s amended birth certificates and essentially consider them “fake,” thus making their visa eligible to be revoked.

The author links to another of her own articles on federal policy regarding the issuing of US passports with sex markers reflecting “biological sex at birth.” Under the new passport policy, State Department employees may check birth certificates for signs of being amended, and request more documents that list sex at the time of birth such as medical, hospital, or early school records. Picasso said that this does not mean officially amended birth certificates are “fake” for the purposes of establishing fraud or willful misrepresentation, which the Trump administration has never argued.

“I think it’s dangerous to even suggest that a legally obtained and valid birth certificate could be viewed as “fake” without a much clearer statement from the federal government to that effect,” Picasso advised. Trump’s recent travel bans have specifically mentioned the availability of fake birth certificates in certain countries.

This whole claim about trans people’s visas being revoked because of accusations of misrepresentation is contradicted by the State Department which said last year, “Currently valid U.S. visas issued prior to the effective date of this guidance bearing a sex that differs from the visa holder’s sex as defined in the E.O. will remain valid through its expiration date; the visa holder does not need to apply for a new visa with an amended sex marker until the current visa expires.”

The first half of this article covers what I argue are misinterpretations of State Department visa policy. The second half speculates on how this misinterpretation could be enforced by ICE. In a Supreme Court ruling last year, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that ICE could detain people based on a combination of factors such as working a certain kind of job, ethnicity, and speaking Spanish or talking with an accent. Kavanaugh said that ICE can detain someone for questioning “if they have a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned . . . is an alien illegally in the United States.”

With a substantial leap in logic, the Substack author argues that Kavanaugh’s concurrence “effectively permitted” ICE to use the fact that someone ‘looks’ trans as the “specific articulable fact allowing its officers to question, harass, detain, and even deport both citizens and non-citizens—as long as it has a reason to claim that being trans makes a person more likely to be in the US illegally.” Adding that because of State Department policy asking applicants to list “biological sex” on forms, ICE now has the “enforcement rationale to assert that trans people are more likely than cis people to have “misrepresented” themselves during the visa process and, therefore, are more likely to have entered the country “unlawfully.””

This assertion rests on the idea that looking transgender makes someone more likely to be in the US illegally, which is simply not supported by any immigration policy, memo, or guideline. It also assumes the justification for a Kavanaugh stop is the same as the legal process of removal, which it is not. This idea was invented by the author of this article, it’s not based on any enforcement directive from ICE, and misrepresents what the State Department means by “intentionally misrepresenting” biological sex in the visa application process.

Discrepancies in gender markers across government documents is not itself grounds for detention or deportation, in fact it’s federal policy to create such discrepancies. Furthermore, dealing with potential discrepancies between gender markers on foreign documents and the Trump admin’s insistence on only using “biological sex at birth” on federal documents is handled by State Department consular officers and USCIS employees, not ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers who work under an entirely different agency.

But the main thing that makes me believe that ICE will not suddenly start targeting people for being trans is that this State Department policy requiring sex at birth on visa applications isn’t actually new! It’s existed since February of 2025 for both immigrant and nonimmigrant visas, the only recent change is that the green card lottery rules have been updated to use the same language.

“Nothing about this new rule makes it more or less likely that ICE will be free to scrutinize trans people’s documents and detain those whose documents show any inconsistencies,” affirmed Picasso.

Put plainly, State Department restrictions on stating assigned sex at birth on green card/visa applications does not give ICE any new justification to roam around disappearing random people who “look trans.” But it could make border crossings more risky for noncitizens and visa applications harder to navigate and subject to delays. This policy from the State Department is bad, but turning that into “ICE is going to now round up trans people and v-code them” doesn’t understand how this will actually affect immigrant trans people.

[ “V-coding” refers to the systematic enabling of sexual abuse toward incarcerated trans women to please male prisoners. ]

Near the end of the article the author suggests that trans Kansans could be at extra risk of getting detained by ICE because of a new law invalidating driver’s licences and birth certificates with amended gender markers, possibly leaving some US citizens temporarily unable to prove citizenship with a valid birth certificate. In that case a passport would be ideal, otherwise a hospital birth certificate or early school records can theoretically be used to help prove citizenship. It’s worth reiterating that a citizen temporarily losing documentation, does not put them at the same level of marginalized risk as an undocumented immigrant. The new Kansas law does direct the office of vital statistics to “reissue birth certificates when necessary to correct the sex identification.” Similarly, DMVs were instructed to reissue a “corrected” license once the invalided one was turned in.

Doomer Discourse

The unsubstantiated claims made in this article went viral across social media platforms like TikTok, Bluesky, and Twitter bolstering speculation. Social media posts even further extrapolating the potential harm facing trans people by ICE agents beyond the claims made in the article by saying ICE will now “deport” or “disappear” trans citizens.

Anyone who tried to push back on the legitimacy of these were labeled “dangerous” or “feds” for trying to “downplay” the threat posed by ICE. Back and forth discourse largely took three forms. One: Saying that because ICE is already doing X bad things, they could then also start doing this new bad thing. Two: Asserting that this is already happening. Three: Arguments based on distrust of the government or ICE’s lack of legality.

Much of the discussion emerged from the genuine belief that ICE has been granted new power or has been “authorized“ to detain someone for “looking trans,” that Trump has “opened the door” for ICE to start profiling trans people. That, like the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, profiling has essentially been greenlit for trans people, or that checking the consistency of gender markers has been added to ICE’s “jurisdiction.” To be 100% clear, there has not been any new ICE memo or policy related to trans people, gender markers, or documentation being in their jurisdiction. State Department policy about not misrepresenting birth sex on visa applications has existed for over a year. The real danger posed by this policy is that more trans immigrants could have visas delayed or in extreme cases denied, and may need help navigating an increasingly confusing application process.

Still, social media users have tried to assert that ICE’s specific targeting of trans people was “already happening.” In the past year ICE has detained trans people; it’s hard to get exact numbers on this because ICE stopped collecting detention data for trans people last year to comply with Trump’s anti-trans executive orders. Though we do know of attempts to deport trans people from news reporting. Last August, ICE detained a trans woman who overstayed a visa by 6 years, and in November a trans woman who lost her lawful permanent resident status in 2023 after pleading guilty to a felony was “inadvertently” deported to Mexico, despite a court order specifically barring her being sent to Mexico. There’s no evidence that these women were targeted for removal on the basis of being trans, but what happened to them is still horrific. As of now there has been no reporting on people being targeted for detention based on “looking trans,” because the government has not actually argued that being trans itself qualifies as reasonable suspicion of illegal presence.

When I posted about this online in an attempt to dissuade panic-inducing misinformation, people argued that even if this has yet to happen, ICE still could expand their operations to include profiling and targeting trans people for detention since they’re already profiling and rounding up “random brown people.” After all, I write for a podcast called “It Could Happen Here,” and ICE has detained both citizens and legal immigrants and sent them to camps.

Just because I work on a news show called It Could Happen Here doesn’t mean I should spread unsubstantiated doom spiraling disconnected from the material reality of real policies advancing a fascist project. The Trump administration has been very clear and open about targeting groups of people flooding through our southern border. That’s who ICE is designed to target. ICE has policies directing them to do so and expanded authority from the Supreme Court.

It is true that ICE has temporarily detained US citizens when looking for people they suspect are undocumented immigrants. This has been for two reasons: US citizens accused of interfering with ICE activity while protesting, or because ICE suspects US citizens may be undocumented, based on factors like skin tone, occupation, or speaking a foreign language, usually Spanish. This second group of people then must demonstrate proof of citizenship, or if they are immigrants, their legal status. The period they’re detained is supposed to be relatively short, usually a few hours, though in extreme cases that’s stretched into multiple days.

During my brief engagement in this online discourse, someone sent me a Wikipedia article claiming it proved that ICE has deported 170 US citizens during Trump’s second term. This article actually said 170 citizens have been detained. Since Trump’s took office again there have been a few reported instances of US born citizens being deported, these were citizen children deported with immigrant parents to avoid child separation.

The last argument people fall back on is simply that ICE is a completely lawless agency and can do whatever it wants, including going after trans people. After all, ICE has murdered US citizens on camera in broad daylight. But it’s important to remember that happened for a reason, those were not random acts. ICE and CBP murdered people protesting ICE raids targeting immigrant neighbors. Federal agents killed people because the protesting was an inconvenience, and there was use of force policy and training directing ICE to do so. For decades CBP agents have killed people at the border and gotten away with it.

The Trump admin may not care about the law, but this analysis is not based on any assumptions about legality. It’s based on the administration’s own stated goals, which they have been very open about, and the policies and practices currently in effect, none of which relate to ICE targeting people for “looking trans.” The Kavanaugh stops have never been used to target trans people for being trans as reasonable suspicion of being illegally in the country, and there’s been no change in guidelines saying that being trans can be the basis for stops. Asserting otherwise is simply false. Insisting that because of State Department application guidelines, ICE will now randomly arrest trans people is conflating two very different things. This is not about the potential legality of ICE targeting trans people, it’s that there is no such directive instructing ICE to do that.

Asserting that the Trump admin is completely 100% unbounded by law ignores the fact that federal and immigration courts are still an active terrain of battle. While the administration has ignored the courts and judges orders, people have also been successfully released from ICE custody by filing habeas corpus petitions.

It’s not that I believe in the personal integrity of ICE agents, far from it, but this concept of ICE as this vague fascist death squad that will go after any group the Trump administration hates turns ICE into this abstract idea, rather than a single material agency with concrete motivations and limits, that leaves a wake of destruction in the course of achieving their purpose. ICE does raids where there are high concentrations of immigrant workers. Their targeting isn’t actually random, ICE is going after undocumented immigrant workers, sometimes using skin and language as a rough proxy for document checks.

To assert the inevitability of ICE going after trans people, people invoke comparisons to the Nazis. As rhetorically useful as it is to equate ICE to a modern version of the Gestapo, this is not Germany in the 1930s. ICE is a contemporary version but the current world is different. History is not destined to repeat the exact same way, it evolves. The chronically online doomer may retort, “But once ICE is done with immigrants, then they will go after trans people! What’s the purpose of increasing ICE’s staff and funding, or building a network of detention centers across the country, if not to use them against the undesirables?”

There’s about 15 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and about 3 million trans people. That’s five times as many undocumented immigrants than trans people! Last year ICE reached a record high number of deportations, over 600,000. This record number still leaves millions and millions of undocumented immigrants. ICE will never be “done” with immigrants. This logic again reduces ICE to this vague abstract evil and fails to consider the purpose of ICE and why it currently operates as it does.

So what motivates ICE? Do individual ICE agents share the same motivations as the agency itself, or the people directing it? Individual agents certainly could be motivated by racism, political ideology, a paycheck, or a combination thereof. But the motivating factors cannot solely be based on ethnicity itself, or else you wouldn’t see as many hispanic ICE and CBP agents.

People tend to think of hate as a vague causal force itself, rather than being the result of complex societal factors shaped by material forces, like the economy, job insecurity, and housing shortages. These material forces are often expressed as racial or ethnic prejudice, but the underlying motivation of ICE as an agency, and by extension DHS, still rests on material forces, not racial hatred as an abstract ideal.

Rank and file employees could have entirely different modifications compared to some of those at the top or the agency as a whole. People in charge of the agency may even be confused as to the material motivations that underline the existence of immigration enforcement agencies; this lack of alignment is a weakness in the agency and DHS more broadly, as demonstrated by the fallout of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis which left ICE and DHS in a compromised state.

Then why does ICE exist, what material role does it fulfil? It seeks to stabilize the social order by targeting surplus populations. And what’s the most efficient way to do that? By going after the most marginalized populations with the least amount of legal and economic protections, which are undocumented immigrants. This operation may be sold to the public, and indeed its enforcers, by marketing it in the language of race and crime, categories which are often equated, but underneath that it’s still an attempt to solve problems caused by material economic forces. In reality this material motivation establishes a certain direction of impact as well as material limits, like budget, personnel, and balancing between public approval and opposition.

So with that in mind, does it make sense to claim that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going to conduct the targeted mass detention of trans people as a class? Signs point to no. It’s not that I disagree with the idea that trans people are under threat from the government, but they’re under a different threat than undocumented immigrants or people detained by ICE based on profiling.

Obviously trans immigrants have an overlapping threat vector. As such, migrant support should remain focused on ICE-Watch, rapid response networks, and providing immigrants legal resources, including to trans immigrants who may need assistance navigating the visa process, and working to get people out of ICE detention. The latter is especially important considering Trump’s executive order forcing trans women in federal custody to be detained with men, and the Trump administration’s plan to end federal prison rape protections for trans people.

Most people engaged in this discourse genuinely don’t understand how the State Department policy on visa applications will actually affect trans immigrants and what we can then do to support trans immigrants. This whole discourse takes the focus away from the people most at risk of ICE which are undocumented immigrant workers. Lilith in Seattle with a 150k dollar tech job is not at high risk being detained by ICE. Believing otherwise prohibits people who are actually safe and secure from using their wealth and status to support others who do not have the same safety provided by status or wealth, whether they’re transgender, an immigrant, or both.

Misleading articles and the larger panic driven information economy encourages people with financial or legal security to be scared into paralysis because they believe that any amount of opposition to the government will result in being disappeared to a concentration camp. This justifies a retreat from the world by framing it as safety, allowing one to focus on maximizing their own power and wealth to achieve security. Retreating solely into the role of the victim

achieves a sort of emotional catharsis, but this also alienates you from the world and ends up doing propaganda for the enemy.

In this discourse there’s a tendency to make the enemy out to be an unstoppable monster, which further justifies inaction because it doesn’t allow you to understand the limits of the enemy, whether logistical or ideological, and resigns us to cower before an omnipotent all powerful evil. ICE operations are an expensive, unpopular, destabilizing thing, we must keep an eye on the fragility of power as that informs us how to fight it. When removed from action in the real world people have no way to confront truth.

It is a frightening time to be a trans person, on top of what feels like never ending attacks on healthcare and our ability to exist in public life, you now see news stories about a US state invalidating people’s ID at the same time as viral social media posts claim ICE has been given the authority to detain trans people and deport immigrants for having the wrong gender marker.

Various attacks on trans rights separated through time could be viewed as a coherent centralized strategy towards a singular horrific end, but in fact are disparate, often petty attempts at cruelty intending to demoralize trans people and make trans life prohibitively difficult. The way red states and the Trump admin are trying to “eliminate transgenderism,” as Michael Knowles would say, is by making it incredibly difficult to socially and medically transition, such as not recognizing gender on government documents, being excluded from public bathrooms, and the continuing efforts to restrict healthcare.

Constant Catastrophe

Trans internet is trapped in a state of catastrophic fear. This is maintained by a near constant wave of articles that flood the zone with panic-inducing headlines, which then fuel social media posts that further escalate and abstract the claims made in headlines to a Nazi Germany-esque level of potential danger facing trans people.

One such impending danger circulating online this month is a claim that the FDA is making a registry of trans women and moving to criminalize DIY estrogen. This claim originated from an article in a trans news outlet, published March 12, reporting that anti-trans lobbying groups sent a petition to the FDA to create a registry of trans women who take estrogen and to restrict the use of feminizing HRT, which if implemented could “fast track a pathway to criminalizing estrogen use.”

Importantly, this citizen’s petition is not US law or proposed government legislation, nor is it FDA policy or regulation, it was written by an anti trans activist coalition and sent to the FDA over three months ago in December of 2025. The petition requests “immediate action” by establishing a new docket for the public to officially comment on the “safety and effectiveness” of estrogen in gender transitions, and to schedule a public hearing on the subject. That is mainly what this petition is for, though it does make further “recommendations” following the conclusion of a public hearing. These recommendations include adding a warning label to estrogen, conducting a safety review, having clinicians report adverse events to the FDA, and requiring drug manufacturers “establish a patient registry as part of a Risk Evaluation and Mitigations Study to capture real-world safety data.”

This article, or more accurately, distorted versions of its claims went viral around trans twitter, with tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of thousands of “views,” but received strong pushback on Bluesky for being “sensationalist and inflammatory.” The outlet that published the story later updated the article to clarify that the FDA receives hundreds of petitions a year, and even if implemented it can take years to go into effect. From 2001 to 2013 only 6.6% of FDA citizen petitions were approved and resulted in new regulation. A study from 2016 found that on average “these petitions required 2.85 years for a final agency decision, and many decisions remain pending 10–13 years after their initial submission.”

The FDA petition story was not the only article this month theorizing about a trans registry or adult HRT restrictions. In mid March, multiple LGBTQ news outlets reported that Republican lawmakers in Tennessee advanced a bill that would “create a public list” of trans residents in the state. The bill in question mandates insurance companies also cover detransition, and would require that care providers submit statistics on gender-affirming care to the Tennessee Department of Health, which must “not contain individually identifiable information defined in HIPAA.” The Tennessee Department of Health would then use that information to make a publicly available statistics report.

But online accounts are spreading this story as if Tennessee is making a “sex offender style” public registry with the names and locations of all trans people in the state. A bill like this could potentially be used for harm, and it may face court challenges for possibly violating parts of HIPAA by collecting data on county of residence and procedure dates, but the reporting on the bill and viral reaction online make it out to be something completely different. There’s no reason to believe this bill would create a publicly accessible registry or list identifying trans people in the state.

The bill has not yet passed the state senate, and it may not in its current form. Currently it’s unclear what exact form the collected data will take within a statistics report and what level of anonymizing data aggregation will be employed. This is something to keep an eye on if the bill does pass and the state Department of Health drafts guidelines for the mandatory statistics reporting, but the way it’s being reported is misleading. Interestingly, the originating source for the “public list” framing is the same substack outlet that created the false story about ICE now being able to detain people for “looking trans.”

Earlier this month, multiple LGBTQ news outlets reported that the 4th circuit court approved state bans on gender affirming healthcare for adults. On March 10th, a Republican appointed three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that states can prohibit gender affirming surgery from being covered by Medicaid. The ruling affirmed a ban on Medicaid coverage for “sex-change surgeries” in West Virginia, with the panel arguing it doesn’t discriminate against trans people because it applies to specific procedures, not specific individuals.

Certainly bad news for trans people in West Virginia on medicaid, but reporting that this decision could soon result in trans people losing healthcare in other states or nationally is misleading and removes key context. This is not a total ban on these procedures, it’s a ban on state Medicaid coverage of these procedures. The ruling is not a ban on other forms of gender affirming healthcare like HRT, nor does it threaten the hospital’s ability to receive Medicare and Medicaid funds for providing gender affirming healthcare like the Trump admin has threatened, so far unsuccessfully.

Some independent reporters theorized about how this ruling could be laying the legal groundwork to eliminate adult transgender healthcare, but trans journalist David Forbes noted that this ruling will likely be appealed to the wider 4th circuit, which has recently ruled in the opposite direction of this three panel ruling. What panicked assertions of an impending total ban on trans healthcare tends to overlook is that going from a state ban on medicaid coverage for surgery straight to an all ages ban on gender affirming healthcare skips a lot of steps, and those steps are crucially important.

The larger problem here is that panic clickbait induced doomer mindset treats every single horrific potentiality as an inevitable eventuality. This “flooded zone” undermines our ability to accurately assess risk and effectively dedicate resources to oppose pressing threats, like the new Idaho bill punishing public bathroom use with prison time.

The Substack Incentive

So what purpose does this sort of doom posting serve? And why are people so primed to believe it? These panic driven claims rest on the very real fact that trans people are facing present danger. Oftentimes people boosting these panic stories are genuinely trying to help inform their own community of potential harm. In the case of that ICE story, it was based on the assumption that there was a legitimate recent rule change enabling ICE to target people under suspicion of being trans.

It makes sense that people want to raise the alarm about ICE gaining new powers, but ACLU staff attorney Matilda Picasso cautioned, “We are supporting our community by trying to warn people. BUT these warnings need to be clear and accurate. Otherwise we end up inadvertently contributing to the chaos and fear.”

Other times, these panic stories are spread with the hope of scaring allies into caring about the ongoing attacks on trans people. Perhaps successfully in some cases, I don’t know, but as a side effect this strategy deals significant damage to the people it’s trying to protect. Forecasting inevitable doom 24/7 can drive people into hopeless despair and push them away from strategies to fight against the current attacks on trans rights. Panic driven agit-prop could also contribute to a girl who cried wolf scenario where allies start to discount concerns about certain attacks on trans rights due to previous unsubstantiated viral claims.

Though many people spreading these claims may have genuinely good intentions, the people creating these claims may develop certain material incentives. Traditional mainstream journalism has failed to question the massive government overreach into the lives of trans people, and in some cases helped manufacture consent for the stripping away of trans rights. This state of affairs made trans people lose faith in the big outlets, leading to small upstart outlets filling the information gaps in trans news coverage without any institutional backing.

Independent news sites and Substack style blogs have to build an audience and generate traction to stay operating. Turns out thousands of people constantly freaking out creates high social media engagement! This creates a loop where trans panic fearmongering boosts social media engagement, which further encourages more irresponsible clickbait framing.

Those who are successful may slowly develop a new class position which then needs to be maintained. Financial incentives may even pressure journalists who have done good work to fall back on panic driven engagement bait to attract new traffic. This isn’t exclusive to trans outlets either. Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Ken Klippenstein reported on his substack that the FBI was about to “designate transgender people as violent extremists.”

New verifiable information was absent from this report, the core evidence was an unnamed “senior official” who told Klippenstein he “feels” like trans people could be labeled “Nihilist Violent Extremists.” Klippenstein has previously misunderstood the NVE label, the term actually predates the Trump admin and refers to groups like 764, other child sextortion rings, and communities like the school shooter fandom “TCC.”

Hours before Klippenstein’s report was published, the Heritage Foundation and the Oversight Project publicly released a petition calling for a new classification of extremism called “Trans Ideology Inspired Violent Extremism,” to categorize attacks they believe are motivated by “transgender ideology.” The petition memo denied that all trans people and their allies would be designated domestic terrorists under this label, only those who “encourage, promote, condone, take, or incite unlawful violent action or threats based on this ideology.” The Heritage petition also runs contrary to Klippenstein’s report by advocating against the use of the NVE label to describe transgender motivated violence.

A Heritage petition to establish a new category of extremist action is different from an unnamed official who “feels” like trans people as a whole could be labeled under “NVE,” and it’s important to understand that distinction. That was last September, it’s now half a year later and neither of these things has come to fruition. The closest was in late September following Trump’s Antifa Terrorism executive order, with the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 which listed “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as “common recurrent motivations and indicia…of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism,”” among many other threads animating violent conduct. Regardless of that, people online interpreted both Klippenstein’s reporting and the Heritage petition as meaning that the FBI classified the entire class of trans people as domestic terrorists.

Social media both amplifies and distorts already misleading claims, turning news into a massive game of telephone, and the siloing of certain users and platforms makes countering misinformation difficult. The social media economy carries certain incentives, for the producers of panic bait that could be attention, status, and money. Monetized news aggregation accounts like “NewsWire,” “PopBase,” and the Polymarket powered “RawsAlerts” have figured out that trans panic posting is a cheat code for high engagement. But the consumers of panic also stand to gain something, catharsis, justification for their actions (or lack thereof), as well as attention from fellow consumers. Panic produces helplessness, but helplessness can actually be cathartic for the individual. It’s not helpful for people currently in the most danger.

These clickbait panic pieces explode around trans Twitter which is still quite active, consisting of sex workers, gamers, tttt style posters, and zoomers who think Bluesky is cringe and liberal. Some of these panic stories, like the FDA registry, don’t do very well on Bluesky because that’s where a lot of trans journalists who do actual journalism are. But those journalists are not as active on Twitter and Tiktok, making it harder to counter misinformation on those platforms.

Countering trans panic clickbait misinformation suffers from algorithmic suppression because it doesn’t get people as riled up. A wave of emotionally charged doom posting is boosted much farther than a calm and calculated rebuttal. The biggest TikTok about ICE detaining people under suspension of being trans has 1.2 million views, the biggest TikTok “fact checking” this claim has 290k views.

So much of social media politics is emotional manipulation based on anger, fear, or catharsis. Posting about perceived danger is essentially viewed as a form of activism, and if someone casts doubt on what’s seen as an existential threat, that person becomes emotionally equated with the enemy threat.

So then what is there to do? In terms of the trans panic information economy, don’t be afraid to openly question the legitimacy of certain reporting due to fear of backlash from “the community.” If it’s good reporting, it should be able to stand up to scrutiny. When you see a new story that triggers an emotional response, stop a moment before clicking share and find out where this claim is coming from. A reliable journalistic outlet? An independent publication? What other reporting has this publication done, has it been accurate? Who is the reporter? Are you familiar with their reporting? What else have they reported on? Is it speculative? Are there logical jumps without supporting evidence? Have other outlets reported this differently?

I’m not trying to minimize the danger coming from attacks on trans people, quite the contrary. The right is continuing to take away trans rights, and these threats should be treated seriously. When trying to counter these real attacks, one must be cautious about looking so far ahead into the speculative future that it takes the focus away from the clear and present harms. Healthy skepticism regarding certain claims isn’t about trusting the government, it’s about trying to accurately understand the world in order to change it.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by merchants, scraped, digested, weaponized…

Today, if this is relevant to you, is the final day to file a claim in the massive* Anthropic Copyright Settlement, and I just finished filing mine.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Yes, I put it off til the last minute, and other than my usual dizzying procrastination abilities, I definitely did that because I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to face it. I knew, because my agents emailed me instructions, that at least two of my books were on that list, and probably more. But it was so unutterably depressing to have to actually deal with that, and all it means. To have to accept this money despite the filth of it, because the world is too expensive not to and I have a child, and also know that almost all systems of ethics or morality toyed with throughout history would say that taking blood money sucks shit and taints the soul. I don’t know, maybe I hoped it was only two. I am, after all, small beer in all this, just a midlist genre writer hacking it up hackily. Maybe only a couple of my babies were used to straight-up fuck humanity’s hopes, dreams, potential, stability, and basic social capacity in thousands upon thousands of ways.

Fifteen.

Fifteen of my books were used in the gargantuan effort to train AI to replace us all to no good end whatsoever.

And that is not too much compared to writers more famous than I. My work was a small drop in the ocean than fueled these models. I’m not trying to make this about me, because it isn’t, so much as purge the absolute helpless rage I felt entering the names of such a swath of my life’s work into form fields to get a few trash dollars back when the damage is already grotesquely done.

Because I am a small drop in the ocean, but fifteen novels is not a small drop in the ocean of me.

I know a lot of you here don’t actually know me as a fiction writer at all. But that’s what I do. That’s been my life’s work since I was barely an adult. Social media comes and goes, but stories have been my passion, my touchstone, my everything. I’ve never been a vast commercial juggernaut with my fingers on the tastes of the masses. I have fought to keep writing the weird shit I want to keep writing even when it didn’t sell. I have fought to stay true to myself and what I believe is important while making enough money to live. It has never been easy. But each and every time, I have tried so hard to put art into the wild that is strange and beautiful and connective, that connects people one to the other with a daisy-chain of printed pages. I write books that are deeply and profoundly me, usually pretty uncomfortably emotionally available and vulnerable and wordy and out there and experimental—and painfully in love with this world.

And they just…took it. They took the best work of my mind and used it to build the very thing that is actively ruining just about everything all the time. They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator.

They took my heart and used it to replace me and everyone else.

I think what shocked me most is the scope of the theft. They didn’t take everything I’ve written. But they took something from just about every year I’ve been writing. All the way back to The Orphan’s Tales. The fucking Orphan’s Tales. A duology I wrote when I was 22. When none of this was even a glimmer in the eye of Sauron. When I was just a dreamer dreaming up fairy tales to tell by the fire, with no notion that they’d ever be published. And Palimpsest and Deathless and all the Fairyland books and Space Opera and a lot more. My whole life, scraped to teach a bot to replace every possible way to live in this world with more of itself. The grey goo of the soul.

These are little books. Even the ones that were bestsellers, they were books about the small and the helpless learning to be strong, about love and longing and strangeness, about hope and wyverns and rock stars and girls who turn in to geese. They’re full of queer people and marginalized people and hurt people and people who cannot find a way to belong to a world that doesn’t want them to be at all. They’re not some hot commodity that would be of obvious interest to the grindhouse corporate maw, they’re just little pretty things. Made with yearning, made out of the stuff of my marrow. They’re not easy and they’re not normal, they’re nothing like the hollow monotone insincerity, the false and hungry cheer of LLMs. But somehow they are part of that. Which means I am a part of that.

For fuck’s sake. My books are my babies. I poured everything I had into them. I made them in good faith that the act of telling stories was in and of itself beautiful and worthy. That they could touch someone, maybe change a tiny bit of how they see the world, communicate what I could not by any other means. They’re a thousand late nights trying to find the right words, a million despairs at elusive endings, a million ecstasies of finally getting it right, sheer tonnages of loneliness and self-doubt and pride and want and togetherness and joy, hundreds upon hundreds of moments of real genuine living that crystallized into the seeds of a story, the long searing thread of whatever it is in us that needs to create something or we’ll just die of not doing it, masticated, compacted, and vomited up to convince every corner of society that a phone is better than a person.

And there is no use-case for AI that doesn’t come down to just that, sooner or later.

I am angry. I feel disgusting. I feel complicit in all this. In the LLMs that are rejecting job applications and denying health claims and starving out whole sectors of workers and cockblocking anything approaching education and pretending to be a therapist or a partner or a friend and making certain that once all the jobs are gone, at least we won’t be able to make art anyone else ever experiences, either. It feels like they went back in time and mugged that 22-year-old doofus kid. Stole her fairies and her heroes and her lovers and chopped them up to make monsters.

I just wanted to tell stories. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child. I don’t know what the actual digitized fuck Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and all these other ichor-dripping creatures of the oncoming feudal night want, or what their fucking problem is. Couldn’t just let us have an internet and try to live life. Had to Absorbaloff everything into their revolting oligarch-gullets. It’s certainly not to help anyone or make anything easier or improve anything. I don’t think it’s even to make money particularly, since they have it all already and constantly make dumbfuck decisions that hurt their profits. But they stole from so many storytellers to do it, to tell a story of a world that is nothing, contains nothing, produces nothing, and knows nothing.

I just wanted to tell stories. And I thought, for awhile, that for all the struggles and stress and weirdness of my job, at least, as far as jobs go, I made my living without hurting anyone. As long as you don’t start JK Rowling about with your influence, writing stories is a pretty ethical line of work. But there is no job like that, I guess. My weird little gnarly over-emotional purpley-florid babies are a small part of something that’s hurting more people, more severely, more deeply, than most other technologies could ever aspire to.

And again, I know in the grand garbage scheme of curbstomping us into serfs, my part in it is very small. But it’s mine, so I’m fucking mad. And hurt. It may sound stupid, but as I entered every title of mine into those fields I felt so personally betrayed by these ghouls. For fuck’s sake, my own books were part of what trained something that is going to skull-drill my own child’s education and job prospects. There’s really no way to Good-Place-math that to come out right, to make that not sting.

And I’m mad for all of us who were stolen from, forced to give the best of us to these corporations without our consent or knowledge, and only in retrospect, when caught, offered a few pennies from the lord’s purse to take or leave, but if left we get nothing and the harm still compounds.

Obviously, I’m not going to stop telling stories. But it’s hard not to thing this will happen again, to anything I write, because in the end $1.5 billion is only a lot to us. It’s nothing to the forces behind Anthropic, and that they can portion out so much and steam right on ahead should tell you just how *not massive at all this blood pocket change really is.

And it’s absolutely gutting. To live with it. To look at a list of the very specific actual grains of Fantasia I have, in my longest nights, held up against the existential darkness to say I was here, I had a heart, I used it as well as I knew how, I made what magic I could, I left something behind and know they were stolen, along with so many others, to be nothing but grit in a road paved through the wasteland fascists, liars, and tech vampires long to consign us to, just to allow their golden carriages easy passage and a comfortable seat from which to view the damage they so dearly love.

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Preface

A few weeks ago I had a great conversation with Dr Tomislav Karačić of the London School of Economics, who had just lead a webinar titled “Developing Catholic AI: How to Balance Values in Design”. Most of the time we talked about “the world’s leading Catholic AI” I have just discussed in my previous post, and of Catholic Open Source. This is a “collaborative initiative empowering Catholic technologists to develop digital tools in service of the Church’s evangelizing mission” coordinated by the Texas-based Catholic Digital Commons Foundation (CDCF), whose mission is to coordinate community efforts for the common good and contributes to a shared digital patrimony for the Catholic Church.

The first part of this post summarizes what I dare say everybody, not just Catholics, should really know about the goals of Catholic OS and CDCF. The second part, that is primarily but not exclusively aimed at Catholic OS, CDCF and any other similar community, explains why I am in a special position to care about these issues and, hopefully, also to contribute.

Here are what I consider the most important points of the Catholic OS Manifesto (”M”) and CDCF Bylaws (”B”), rearranged and labeled by me for easier reference:

M-1: The Church’s social teaching offers a compelling vision for lifting up human dignity: a digital commons to serve the common good, strengthen families, democratize economic opportunity, inspire new evangelism, and empower human solidity.

M-2: Technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities.

M-3: We build against the reduction of the person to a data point or a mere instrument of production.

M-4: We cannot allow algorithms to limit or condition respect for human dignity, or to exclude... the hope that people are able to change.

M-5: [We also] commit to a human-centered pace of change... [and] advocate for a digital environment that respects the natural rhythms of human life and the “analog” requirements of a healthy soul... [because] “Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear. -- Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)”

M-6: The Catholic Digital Commons is a “builder commons.”... Across countless repositories, there are tools built in the quiet of parish life - identity systems, liturgical calendars, and workflow engines- awaiting the nurture of a supportive community... Our mission is to aggregate, vet, and communalize these gifts. We transform scattered code into a durable architectural spine that outlasts any single volunteer, providing the Church with a discoverable and adoptable commons of open infrastructure.

M-7: [We want to preserve] each institution’s independent ability to use, contribute to, and govern its own data and tools.

M-8: We must learn to speak the language of technology to carry the Gospel into the digital age.

M-9: To guide our development, we adopt the full “algor-ethical” vision of the Rome Call for AI Ethics.

The Bylaws of CDCF state that the foundation is organized exclusively for charitable, educational, and religious purposes which include:

• B-1: to coordinate, develop, steward, and disseminate open-source software, data repositories, technical standards, and digital platforms in service of the Catholic Church’s evangelizing mission

• B-2: organization, structuring, preservation, and ethical use of ecclesiastical data [of all kinds]

• B-3: Academic research coordination, data standards, academic advisory roles, joint initiatives, and educational programming.

• B-4: fostering interdisciplinary exchange between theology, pastoral practice, and technology.

• B-5: promote the ethical development and governance of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in accordance with Catholic social teaching.

Why I PERSONALLY care about all this stuff

I care because I’m the guy who more than twenty years ago spelled out Free Software’s surprising sympathy with Catholic doctrine, then co-wrote the Elèutheros Manifesto for a Catholic Approach To Information Technology, followed up thirteen years ago with all the reasons why Catholic Social Doctrine and the Openness Revolution are Natural Travel Companions, and has been struggling to get reactions since then.

Backed by that work, I sincerely wish CatholicOS and CDCF every success because I think they are great. I mean, look again at the first five points of the Manifesto I selected above, just scraping “inspire new evangelism” if you’re not Catholic or religious in general: how could anybody of any political creed but sincerely wishing to make the world a better place disagree with them?

More specifically, I seriously think that anybody doing software should carefully read that manifesto and imbue any software they write with its principles, regardless of their religion or lack thereof. This said, I have three concerns about what I read - or sometimes did not read - in that Manifesto and Bylaws.

My first concern directly follows from the fact that building great Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is not enough to make people use it. Not at all. “If you build it they will come” seldom works as in the Field of Dreams movie. Social inertia is always huge, especially about something like software that for 90% of the world population is still undistinguishable from black magic. In my experience, the hardest part of “making Catholics use FOSS” never was its quality. It was to make clergymen at any level get that they should care in the first place, instead of going “oh, this is about computers? Talk to my system administrator then”, or ignoring me altogether.

Even more important, the license of any software is much, much less important than what one creates with it, and how. In all my research and popularization work I routinely make this point with these three slogans:

• “YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you”“

• “You can build the perfect police state using only Free as in Freedom Software”

• A Gnu/Linux user publishing documents in MS Office formats with LibreOffice makes more harm than a Windows user publishing documents in ODF formats with MS Office, because file formats are more important than software

So my first concern is seeing that education of ordinary users and calls for them to adopt free as in freedom formats and software aren’t the first goals of Catholic OS and CDCF. That is, I fear that they develop great products that won’t be adopted by enough people to make a difference.

The second concern is restriction of both stakeholders and of the “playing field”.

Shouldn’t the Catholic Overton Window for AI be wider?

I criticized the Rome Call for AI Ethics that guides Catholic OS and CDCF (point M-9 above) as soon as it appeared, but not because I think the Vatican should not make such calls. I did it because that Call seemed to me too restricted to Big Tech representatives and top catholic scholars with the best possible theological preparation and intentions, but not deep enough knowledge of the technologies involved.

That was in 2020. This month, I discovered that the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome hosted last November a “Builders AI Forum” that, at least from the outside, appears to have the same limits. The motto of that forum was “Uniting to Build & Scale AI” and its goal to “foster a new interdisciplinary community of practice dedicated to supporting the development of AI products that serve the Church’s mission”. That’s why its sponsors included:

• “a dynamic investment firm backing visionary founders committed to building with purpose”

• the “For Schools” branch of a company develping “AI-driven Teacher Tools that guide educators toward efficiency and impact”, letting every student “embark on a personalized learning journey with an on-demand AI tutor”

With those premises, I should have not been surprised (and yet I was) to see among the participants... none other than the canadian branch of Palantir! Yes, Palantir, the company led by the very Peter “Better Jesus” Thiel who was here in Rome just a few days ago to lecture a few elects about the antichrist.

The bigger restriction I worry about here, however, isn’t about who is invited to these talks - only the powerful, not the meek who should inherit the Earth. It is the restriction of the agenda: “Build & Scale AI” and “supporting the development of AI products that serve the Church’s mission” seem to me too close to acritical acceptance of both AI into and for everything just because it’s AI, and of the “builders” primacy I already criticized around Magisterium AI.

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Some proposals now

First, let me repeat it: I sincerely wish Catholics OS and CDCF every success, because what they want to do is necessary for the Common Good, regardless of religion. I am only concerned about two things, the first being that promoting development of the right software in the right way cannot be enough.

The other is the possibility that certain positions unwillingly end up favoring, instead of containing, forces that are only driven by profit or that confuse technology with religion. Remember point M-8 above? The one saying that Catholics must “learn to speak the language of technology to carry the Gospel into the digital age”? I am worried that as it is, that pointt can be exploited by those forces, instead of boldly being what surely is already in the heart of every Catholic OS and CDCF member, that is

“learn to speak the language of technology to make adoption and deployment of technology speak the language of the Gospel”.

Enough with concerns! Let me make some concrete proposals now. What about Catholics, Catholics grassroots communities, Catholic NGOs and Catholics institutions explicitly working to, in no particular order:

• since “only the person who is still can hear [and accept reality]”, actively promote development and adoption, leading by example, of completely different social media, based on personal, permanent clouds, that encourage thinking by rejecting instantness, and are interoperable in the right way instead of pointless “data portability”

• for the same reason, campaign as if there is no tomorrow to make everybody “get news online” in the only way that minimize stress, tracking and echo chambers, that is straight from the sources, the Open Source way

• demand open formats everywhere, even before Free/Open Source Software, (for the record, that’s another thing I first proposed and taught twenty years ago, here (”Just Say No to OpenXML”) and here, and Germany did JUST last week! YAY!)

• ask every government and local administration of the world the five questions I wish Pope Francis had asked to J. D. Vance

• education!, that is: teach and popularize the general principles and technology-related concepts behind all these proposals in Catholic seminaries, schools, universities and dioceses worldwide

I and other Catholics first tried to propose a Catholic approach to Information Technology with the Eleutheros Project twenty years ago. I have never stopped to fight these fights in the widest ways I could, as everybody can see from my main publications, Foss Force column, main blog and its current Substack proxy.

I will continue to do it, but I would really like to work more, much more on everything I’ve mentioned in this post. If anybody is interested, just email mfioretti@nexaima.net.

(please DO read this to know what I write here, why and how, and how to support it. Thanks!)

Magisterium AI is a chatbot (free for 10 queries) that’s presented as “the world’s leading Catholic AI”. Its developers obviously present it as something unconditionally good, because it’s about True Faith. Its opponents call for its destruction, because it’s about True Faith.

What is truth here, about Magisterium AI or any other religious chatbot for that matter? That’s a question everybody should consider and, unlike Pilate, here you can stay for an answer.

“Instant, trustworthy answers” (remember ,”instant”)

Magisterium AI offers “instant, trustworthy answers rooted in Catholic tradition to explore faith with clarity and depth, get accurate answers to specific questions about faith and morals and clarify complex doctrines (like the Trinity or Sacraments) faithfully”.

Longbeard, the company that develops this chatbot, says it trained it exclusively on the world’s largest database of Church documents: almost 25,000 magisterial documents and (in Scholarly Mode) over 4,333 Catholic theological and philosophical works from St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Fathers of the Church, etc.

This, says Longbeard, makes Magisterium AI avoid hallucinations and provide answers “grounded only in authentic Catholic teaching and tradition with specific citations to every assertion it makes, minimizing the risk of doctrinal error and giving confidence that the information aligns with the mind of the Church”.

Should Magisterium AI be deleted?

In January 2026 Marc Barnes, editor of New Polity, published his reasons why Longbeard should delete Magisterium AI. Some of those reasons are purely philosophical or theological. Barnes argues that conversations about faith should only happen between humans, but no AI chatbots can really converse about anything and that, regardless of the quality of the sources of Magisterium AI, it cannot use them properly anyway because “faith should never be probabilistically specified. A dice-roll is still a dice-roll even when it always lands on precisely the “6” you want... The Holy Faith is never simply “the right words in the right order,” but a Credo, an “I believe in”“ that no machine could ever say.

One part of the answer by Harvey Sanders, CEO of Longbeard, isn’t enough for me to agree with Barnes, but really rubs me the wrong way: “I leave the deep metaphysical distinctions to the scholars who are far more learned than I. I am a builder.”

Sorry, but... isn’t that the same, stale “Move Fast and Break Things” Big Tech religion that had already made a mess of society and political discourse before AI? “Trust we who can code because we can code and code we will, will ye, nill ye”? Thanks, but no thanks, on principle.

Sanders, certainly in good faith, also insists that Magisterium AI is “just a tool”. Sorry again, but no, no technology is just a “neutral” tool, especially if it’s digital. One year ago, I explained that current digital social media are toxic because they just repeat the same architectural and urban design errors that make physical cities mentally toxic.

This year, Barnes said something very similar: the very design of any machine, including chatbots, presumes and contributes to mold a certain kind of human being and society, regardless of how much its “builders” realize or want it. Since the philosophy behind chatbots is not really compatible with the Catholic one, Barnes says, they could never be neutral “tools” completely adaptable to Catholic ends. I tend to agree, but even this wouldn’t be enough for me to call for an outright deletion of Magisterium AI.

The other two main arguments in Sanders’ defence of Magisterium AI are one implicit (”every digital technology is great”) the other very explicit, that is FOMO (”Fear Of Missing Out”) and TINA (”There Is No Alternative”), which is well represented by these three almost literal quotes from his reply:

1. We are already crossing the river that separates the world before AI and the world with AI. The question is: who will write the code that governs the other side?

2. If we “delete” our presence in this sphere, we don’t stop the sphere from existing; we simply ensure it remains godless.

3. We must have the courage to baptize the tool, not bury it.

Now, regardless of what people who will lose big money when (NOT “if”!!!) the AI bubble pops desperately claim, what we call AI today is NOT AI and above all is not unavoidable. Not at all. To see why, you can read what a veteran tech journalist defined “one of the best articles on AI you’ll read this year”.

There are plenty of good things we should do as soon as possible with a saner version of AI, starting with agriculture. But accepting AI everywhere for everything just because it’s here is the same mistake already made with IoT, NFTs, the metaverse and soon, if we keep being dumb,humanoid robots.

But even if AI everywhere was truly unavoidable, so what? If some version of some technology or practice is objectively unavoidable but also bad or dangerous... shouldn’t Catholics and everybody else still strive to limit as much as possible its usage in every form? If “unavoidable” were a sufficient reason to make one’s own version of something, the Catholic solutions to prostitution and smoking could be Catholic brothels and cigarette factories.

Those are paradoxical examples of why “just make a Catholic version of something and it will be fine” isn’t a great strategy, but Barnes makes the same point much more seriously.

“Let’s make a Catholic version”, he notes, is the same thing lay people have been always encouraged to do with any other media before chatbots: newspaper, radio, television, computers, the Web... but in the end the only places where Catholicism grew instead of just slowing down its retreat are those “with the least and tardiest access to each new technological instrument of mass communication” but bigger size and strength of families, or stronger missionary presence. Here is another way Barnes puts it: “Places that have good things don’t need technologies which produce online versions of good things.” That is, social innovation is always much more powerful than technology alone. Even when the task is to make places “not remain godless”.

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My extra reason to dislike the defense of Magisterium AI

Sanders passionately rejects any conclusion that “we must delete this technology to preserve our humanity [because doing so] confuses the medium with the mission [and] the mechanics of language with the intimacy of conversation..., [Q]uerying in natural language is [not] the same as conversing”, and Magisterium AI just offers “intellectual clarity, not sacramental grace”.

What Sanders does there, again surely in good faith, is the same mistake that Free / Open Source traditional advocates have made for decades, and I already denounced 20 years ago in the Seven things we’re tired of hearing from software hackers, and the Free Software Manifesto for the rest of us:

the belief, absolutely detached from reality, that since software “builders” were born with the capability to write and use software in a certain way, everybody else will eventually do the same and love it, will he, nill he.

I don’t doubt that Sanders never confuses clarity with grace, or querying with conversing. I am just equally sure, because that’s what I’ve seen happening every day with Gnu/Linux, Web 2.0, social media, AI bots and every other software since the mid-1990s, that 90% of real people are not like him, and WILL indeed confuse themselves. Especially after having been dumbed down by 20 years of social media designed with the very purpose of isolating and dumbing everybody down.

This is not judgment or criticism of anybody. This is just an acknowledgment that there are millions of different types of human brains, all equally worthy, but those wired to react to software exactly as Sanders pictures are a tiny, tiny minority.

Sanders’ other statement that Longbeard is not replacing authority, just amplifying access to it thanks to the “instant, trustworthy answers” of Magisterium AI is just as weak and worrying: “Trust us, human brains and souls will only benefit from always-on media and super-fast information with instantaneously amplified feedback and amplified, worldwide exposure!”... is exactly what Zuckerberg, Altman and Co have been pushing on the world for two decades now, and we all know how it worked.

So. should Magisterium AI be deleted? No, it should just...

In spite of everything I wrote, I don’t think there is a need to delete Magisterium AI as Barnes wants. I think Sanders himself unwillingly showed what to do in his answer, when he wrote that:

1. When a student queries Magisterium AI, they are not seeking “communion” with the software any more than a scholar seeks “communion” with the card catalog or the index of the Summa Theologiae. They are seeking access to the patrimony of the Church

2. Magisterium AI acts less like an author and more like a paralegal. It locates the precedent, summarizes the specific text, and places the document in front of you.

Exactly! Thanks Mr. Sanders! Paralegals are legal professionals who do legal research or drafting legal documents only for, and under the direct supervision of a lawyer!, not for her clients. Nobody (OK, nobody in his mind...) who needs legal help would hire a paralegal instead of a lawyer, even if paralegals were allowed to work as lawyers. Paralegals cannot have clients.

On top of that, anybody who’s really, deeply competent in some topic will tell you something like “I regularly see AI chatbots making mistakes about that topic; therefore, I exclusively use them for that topic, not for any other purpose where I couldn’t spot and avoid errors by myself”.

Add that fact to the limits of paralegals, and the solution is simple: instead of deleting Magisterium AI,

1. immediately change its name to something more sincere like “Magisterium Assistant”. In 2026, “AI” is already attached to way too many product names to look anything but FOMO marketing, and once the bubble pops it will become a liability anyway

2. only, only license the “Magisterium Assistant” to priests, or people like theology professors with at least five years of experience and the knowledge to properly evaluate Barnes philosophical objections

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In other words, it’s practically certain that the general public will misuse and abuse Magisterium AI just like it has done with ChatGPT and any other “know-it-all” chatbot since 2022. Therefore, there is no reason why Magisterium AI (or any similar service for any other religion, of course) should not be treated as I already recommended two years ago for every AI chatbot like ChatGPT: just block universal access to it.

While I’m at this, everything Sanders says is for me further proof that the future of AI - that is of AI applications that make sense and don’t bankrupt a whole planet or suck up all the energy it needs, is not AGI, but SMALL, single-purpose AIs. Which hey, is just what China is doing, unlike the US.

Final note: the next piece will also be about Catholics vs (open) software in the 21st century and why everybody should care, so stay tuned!

Creation of Humanoid Robots, experts say, is “driven by the simple fact that our world is built for the human body”. Rather than reshaping the environment to suit machines, Humanoid Robots offer a way to adapt automation to the world as it is, especially when labor-intensive, dangerous, or repetitive jobs are concerned. The two most significant rationales for robots actually shaped as humans (i.e. two legs, two arms, one torso and one head) that I’ve read so far would be:

1. Compatibility with any already existing infrastructure designed for humans (stairs, doors, shelves, elevators...)

2. “Labor Augmentation”, that is taking over the most strenuous or alienating tasks, and consequently empowering humans to “focus on more complex responsibilities (addressing the infamous “alienation of labor” Marx had an issue with)” (source)

Concretely, the sectors of the economy most frequently quoted in which Humanoid Robots would work would be:

• Manufacturing and Assembly

• Logistics (moving goods, pushing carts, and inventory management)

• Equipment Maintenance, especially in hazardous areas

• Construction (carrying and positioning materials)

• Healthcare and Medical Applications

Is that so?

Except in healthcare, that deserves a separate post, the idea that it’s better to adapt machines to the human world rather than doing the opposite does make sense. Probably not always, but often.

But labor “augmentation” MY ASS. That’s not the plan. The plan is to replace “HR as in Human Resources” with “HR as in Humanoid Robots” in every company’s org chart. This is why I’m always capitalizing “Humanoid Robot” here: to make the next, intended meaning of “HR” stand out: Humanoid Robots enable executives to dream (reality is another matter) they can let go even the workers who aren’t already replaceable by ordinary desktop computers or data centers alone.

Never forget that fact, but don’t let it make you too angry either. More robots in manufacturing and other economic sectors may be good, if we only learned to finally put the need for money and the need for “work” (note the quotes) in the right order! Let’s look at the real problems and real stupidity behind Humanoid Robots instead, because they are not in the workplace.

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A Humanoid Robot For Everybody

Elon Musk, self-appointed master thief of our night sky, said in January 2026 that he expects Tesla to begin selling to the public Humanoid Robots, which would be eventually “capable of performing innumerable human tasks”, by the end of 2027.

Musk’s vision is that “you can basically ask [those robots] to do anything you’d like” and that there will be “more robots than people” because he thinks that “everyone on earth is going to have one and want one”.

Other fine experts explain that “while most envision Humanoid Robots cleaning, cooking, or gardening, the possibilities go much further... unlocking a new level of support and creativity in everyday life.”

That’s because, since robotic hands are still too clumsy for most jobs, “today’s humanoids are not capable or cannot consistently manage full household routines yet... So, instead of focusing only on chores, let’s imagine what else Humanoid Robots could do for us at home.”

That piece then goes on to list Five Really Cool Things that Humanoid Robots could “do for us at home”:

1. Dog Walker and Carer

2. Robot Cameraman and Content Creator. Imagine having your own humanoid photographer to film your next business pitch, document your trip to Napa, or help you shoot content for socials.

3. Dance Partner and Coach

4. Multilingual Cultural Guide: Finding a good local guide is hard—so why not bring your own? A humanoid that speaks the local language, understands cultural nuances, recommends nearby five-star tapas bars, and carries your shopping, like a modern C-3PO+...

5. Personal Stylist who could catalogue your wardrobe, understand timeless style rules and current trends, and choose outfits that flatter your body, suit the occasion - and match your mood. Bonus: they can help zip up the back of that little black dress. Now that’s an investment!

I kid you not. The five bullets above are literal quotes from a company doing “advanced robotics solutions”, not a satire website. More on them below.

The truth about Humanoid Robots for everybody

Let’s assume that personal Humanoid Robots can be mass made without fighting even more wars to procure the necessary raw materials.

Let’s assume personal Humanoid Robots would soon be so cheap that everybody could actually afford one.

Let’s assume that the homes, sidewalks, cars, subways, planes and tourist attractions of the whole world could indeed contain twice the bodies that already fill them, because this is exactly what Elon “more robots than people” Musk said.

Let’s also assume that the guys pushing personal Humanoid Robots for profit wouldn’t be allowed to repeat the same abuses they did with phone chargers, phone cables and countless other products, that is: programmed obsolescence, lock-in, incompatible spare parts, overpriced or just impossible repairs, kill switches, and selling personal data.

Even in that physically impossible world, what would be the real reasons for any sane adult not brainwashed by internet pressure to have their own Humanoid Robot? The Five Cool Things Listed Above? Let’s look at them again:

• Dog carer? what’s the point of a pet if something else gets all its time and affection?

• Traveling with a personal cameraman whose air ticket would come from your pocket, to be filmed hidden by the robots of all the other tourists? In places already overflowing with humanoid human tourists? To get the same translation, bar recommendations and carrying services that your trolley and smartphone already do, for a fraction of the cost and physical size?

• In other words, becoming a pretend Kardashian (servant included) who, besides paying for all your robot’s energy, tickets etc... should still pay a human to do all the household chores beneath a Humanoid Robot’s station, because if you did them yourself what would the robots of your friends say?

Those are use cases? Stuff that could never happen in our real world or that doesn’t require at all to put the necessary software inside a body-shaped computer, because any smartphone can already do it without requiring its own plane ticket?

If I may get personal for a moment, I find it very, VERY depressing that people so shameless or clueless to write such manure get any money. Fund me instead.

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I am well aware that my “nobody would need a personal Humanoid Robot” sounds a bit too much another “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” , but let me ask you: with the possible exception of healthcare and caring for disabled or senior people, which as I said deserves a separate post, what could be the only real, concrete reason to have personal or family Humanoid Robots? What could it be when, besides all the other issues, the dwellings that most people can afford to live in become smaller every year?

Let’s be honest: maybe that reason is to do stuff that would work well only if done by human bodies or to humans bodies: that is sex, of course or (as I already warned five years ago) bossing around something that looks and feels like human, but will never complain.

Using robots for such purposes would be surely better than forcing other humans to endure the same abuses, especially because it would only be a temporary measure: after one generation living like that there would be no humans left to worry, or to worry about. If there are meaningful reasons to have personal Humanoid Robots, they apply to a world so different than our present one that nobody has been able to imagine them yet. Besides…

Humanoid Robots are nothing new. Nothing at all

Do you remember the Internet of Things? Humanoid robots are IoT all over again: great for industrial and professional uses but, just like Consumer IoT, almost always unnecessary, ridiculously expensive and deeply stupid at home

Do you remember really autonomous cars? The ones that, according to the same good old Musk are, like Humanoid Robots now, “coming next year” since 2013?? HumanoidRobots are autonomous cars all over again: the same industry that has failed for years to put really autonomous cars everywhere because roads are messy now wants you to buy machines that, as nVidia itself points out, have the same AI-related needs (”situational awareness, interaction efficiency... context-aware responses”), just at a much larger, much more varied, much more unpredictable scale.

Do you remember AI? Of course, how could you possibly forget it? HumanoidRobots are AI all over again: good, sometimes badly needed for “professional” applications, ridiculously expensive and toxic as a a consumer technology.

Besides them being the next attack to whatever remains of your pension funds after AI crashes, there’s another reason to be concerned about Humanoid Robots. I observed three years ago that AI could exterminate humans only if humans were so monumentally stupid to let AI manage all by itself life-threatening infrastructures. Like, you know, weapons. But hey, this is exactly what the American Pentagon wants from Antropic, and what Altman just accepted to do, and I find it really funny: weapons that their owner can’t really control are the least cowboy, least Second Amendment, least American things I can imagine.

Point is, after AI-controlled weapons, Humanoid Robots may be just what I warned about, that is one way in which “AI” could actually kill us. Nate Soares said it well: “as long as [AI] systems remain in the form in which we are currently most accustomed to them, which is a chat interface, there might be ways of stopping them from accessing the physical world. But [what about robots that] are meant to be able to manipulate the world, that are meant to be in your home and do your cooking for you and do your laundry for you and so on. It is once the intelligence of a GPT-style system meets the physical ability to manipulate the world that it will acquire with robotics that [AI could actually kill].”

If they are so stupid, why are “Humanoid Robots for everybody” pushed so hard?

This is easy. “Humanoid Robots for everybody” come from two needs that industries and organizations alone could never satisfy: one is the pathological urge to never have other real humans around that has driven so much software development in the last twenty years.

The other is the DESPERATE need to create another huge bubble, because the AI one is popping soon (never too soon, I say) and personal Humanoid Robots are the only way in which Musk or anybody else could sell enough robots to make the amount of money they keep thinking they are divinely entitled to have.

That’s the business strategy of 2026: “real artificial intelligence is impossible, if it were possible it would consume more energy and money than actually exist anyway, and we have nothing else left to sell. So let’s put the fake AI we got into puppets instead, and claim that everybody needs one”.

I bet you anything that this is one of the reasons why the nVidia CEO “predicts” that humanoids will be “one of the largest industries ever”. Again, fund me instead.

To conclude, as far as real adults alive today are concerned, Humanoid Robots are - like the AI that will remain after its coming crash - technology that can do a lot of good if it’s restricted to professional applications, not forced down everybody’s throat just to improve somebody else’s bottom line. So, stick to reality:

1. Don’t get fooled by “visions” of what life may be like five or ten generations from now thanks to robots and AI

2. Laugh at any political candidate who promises “at least one full-sized humanoid robot” (yes, they exist!)

3. Don’t let your pension fund touch anything related to Humanoid Robots

4. Oh, and of course fund both me and the many others who are trying hard to keep some sanity in the world, instead of the usual Pied Pipers

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Is there any real point in yelling into the Universal Void-Equipped Vomitorium that the internet has become about a thing many, many unconnected people say every day?

Not really, I guess.

Am I going to do it anyway?

I mean, have we met? Of course I am.

Now, when we all found out that Trump had gone ahead and bombed Iran, killed its leader, seemingly without any plan whatsoever other than YOLO, did I shake my head like I was a hundred fucking years old, which is what it feels like these days, and think about all the other times my country bombed the shit out of another one and either kidnapped or killed their leaders?

Clearly.

And when that video of the violent cartel enforcer caravan going by the street name “ICE” cheerfully murdering Alex Pretti started going around LITERALLY FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO IN MEDIA TIME, did I think: well, now people will care, because that looks like a very nicely-groomed white man with a concealed carry weapon they shot in the back and not literally any other kind of human person, because all the other kinds have been getting killed for some time now and/or the whole time?

Sure did, friends.

When everyone, even conservatives, started actually finally (temporarily) pushing back against the sweaty, meth-blistered, right-wing romantasy the White House instantly pitched to their eager agents in the press room, like the President, with all the authority that office still drags with it, presenting to the public as fact, a full narrative of who is to blame, who is innocent, and what the victim was thinking and doing, let alone a totally fabricated one, is anything like a legal, normal thing to do, did I think: Wow, so even Renee Good wasn’t enough for the Great American Id, because white doesn’t fix woman and queer in that shrunken, desiccated hive-mind, but now we can actually see and understand very clear high definition video? No nasty nicknames like AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) for Alex’s entire demographic this time? What a shock, view and behold how shocked I am.

And then, when the phalanx of Renfields, Wormtongues, and groveling Trashcan Men that have ruined everything for everyone received permission from their masters to, very gently, poke at the edges of the utter reality-shearing fugue state that allowed anyone anywhere to ever believe Donald “Father of All Bombs In My First Month Because Big Beautiful Boom-Boom So Fun” Trump was the candidate of peace, a sentence I can’t even write without cringing it’s so pants-eatingly stupid, did I tap my feet to a nasty song I’ve been forced to listen to all my life?

Yeah, of course. We here in Garbagetown are not, as they say, brand new.

Did I then go online, see people being genuinely horrified and trying to figure out what to do about it, and start splatting into their replies yelling about how they shouldn’t be surprised because America has always been like this for everyone who isn’t [insert demographic here] and if they weren’t so privileged they’d know that?

Despite the existence of yesterday’s not-at-all-funny essay about Baby’s First Foreign Intervention that I definitely did write (carefully not including that very sentiment) no I fucking didn’t because it’s one of the most unhelpful, unproductive, pointless, performative, actively harmful to any kind of movement toward getting out of this eternal shit-shower sentiment I can even think of and I’m beyond tired of hearing it.

Even if it’s kind of true.

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I remember it so clearly.

One of those childhood memories that gets etched in glass, permanent lasered onto the inside of your skull, sometimes for good reason, sometimes just a moment that stands out among other moments, a redheaded memory in the long fog.

It was early winter and I was in fifth grade. I caught the school bus before 7 am, as everyone in our neighborhood did. Everything was wet and sunny and pale, slick and blindingly bright. Outside the bus smelled like pine trees, mucky leaves, and ozone. Inside smelled like cheap lip gloss, hairspray, permanent markers, and sour socks. I unshouldered my backpack and slid into the second cracked vinyl seat next to my only friend, a blonde girl with big glasses named Leigh. The door made that signature hydraulic-piston-creaking-hinge noise combination as the driver shoved the lever closed and the engine started complaining about the hills again.

I was quiet for a minute. Stared out through the hoarfrost of hearts and initials and misspelled swear words scratched into the bus window behind Leigh’s frizzy head. I was quiet because I didn’t know what to say. I felt like everyone must know. That’s why the boys in the back row were so rowdy, the older girls in the middle were whispering, that’s why the driver seemed so tired and sad. They must all be feeling what I was feeling. Angry and afraid and sad and confused. They must all not know what to say, either.

But I had to say something to someone or one of my organs was gonna just pop. One of little ones you could stand to lose, hopefully. Maybe not pop. Maybe ooze. Like one of those old crappy snake-bomb firecrackers that sludged out coil after coil of horrible black rope but never made any noise.

“Leigh,” I whispered. “We just invaded Panama.”

She turned to look at me with those huge pink-translucent rimmed glasses taking over her whole face. I even remember the sunlight glinting on the little gold cross she wore. Leigh’s parents were super religious and ran a Bible camp out of their backyard every summer. I was dying to go, not because I was so hot for God, really, but mainly because I wanted to spend the summer at Leigh’s house.

“What’s a panama?” Leigh said.

And that’s it, that’s the moment that crystallized so perfectly that I remember it in total detail thirty-five years later. What I remember isn’t that the US invaded Panama in December of 1989, though I do remember that.

What I remember is that none of the other kids knew or cared what the hell I was talking about.

I thought the world was coming apart that morning when I saw it on the news. I’d been raised a good patriotic little Leslie Knope red, white, and blue bunny, gone with my parents to vote every year. Believed all the things about what America stood for and what kind of person I should try to be because of it. I loved saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I named my puppy after Abigail Adams.

Be gentle. I was ten. We all think a lot of strange things when we’re ten. I still believed in Santa Claus, too. The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and fairies in the English countryside and yes, justice and progress and the promise of America.

And when you are ten, you may not know a lot of fine details about world events, history, political philosophy, or varying systems of governance, both social and economic, but you feel like you have a handle on a couple of big-picture concepts, enough to get you through a bus ride, anyway.

Like, for example, the simplistic, childlike, but kind of fucking true notion that good nations full of good people with good intentions do not preemptively invade other countries.

Even if they give the operation a neat little nickname. (For Panama, it was “Operation Just Cause,” and let’s take a moment to give that one a big wow.) Even if the leader of that other country is a horrible person who does all kinds of illegal stuff and kills his own people kind of a lot and nobody likes him, not even, or maybe especially, his own people. Even if everybody plays a bunch of word games about how it’s not really preemptive or an actual invasion, just a sparkling strategic operation.

Invading other countries is wrong. Kidnapping or killing the leaders of other nations is wrong. How could my country do that? Was my home bad? Was I bad, too? Weren’t there rules about war? We had a whole color-coded system just to go to the bathroom at my school. Wasn’t there a system for this? Aren’t you not supposed to be able to just do war because you felt like it? Were all the grown-ups who taught me to be proud of my nation and work for its future lying or did they not know?

What’s a Panama?

I was a child. The nature of childhood is partial understanding. Or none. Every year everything you know is washed away by the fall rain and filled in again, with a little more detail every time. I was a little girl who knew too much and not enough. A little girl who geneuinely thought everyone on that bus must be just as upset about all of this as she was, and now realized they didn’t have the first idea, or even know that there was a country called Panama. They were just yelling and throwing pencils on the bus for the same reasons kids yell and throw pencils on the bus every day.

I was just little girl on her way to school.

Like a lot of little girls in Iran. Only that day in 1989, I got to come home from school. That day in 2026, those other little girls didn’t.

And I’m sure they believed a lot of pretty, simplified, half-formed things that weren’t true, too. I’m sure they believed there were rules, like I did.

All these years later, another century, another winter, another war. And I still don’t know what to say. Now I know that in fact my country does do this, pretty frequently. It had done many times before I was ten and did many more times afterward.

They did, once, feel they needed to lie about it, to dress it up so it looks like something anyone would want. And I also know that it is a profoundly dark sign that they no longer bother with the effort.

I know that the men who make these decisions are so far removed from the world of school buses and mucky December leaves and black snake firecrackers that they might as well not be human, and they don’t think of us or anyone else at all. I know that some grown-ups are lying, and some don’t know. Some do know, but are all for it. Some know, but they can’t figure out how to explain to a kid that everything is a mess but it’s still worth believing in what a country can be even when you can see its ugliness with your own eyes every day, because that belief is the only way out of the dark.

And some know, but are just as stuck as the rest of us inside this machine that won’t stop just because the people inside it are screaming for it to stop. It’s all drowned out by the screaming of the people crushed beneath its treads. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because the people who run the machine love both sounds and crave them.

And though I frequently forget, I do know that no matter how upset I am, no matter how axiomatic it seems to me that everyone around me must know what’s going on and be just as horrified by it, just as desperate to fix it, for the most part, everyone’s just stuck on the same shitty bus, barely chugging up over the hill, cracked seats and vandalized windows and a muffler from the depths of hell, not thinking about anything but their own worries and needs, all headed toward the same destination, not because they want to go there, but because that’s where the machine is heading and the doors are locked, for our safety, of course.

I’m one of the grown-ups now. And I didn’t tell my second grader about Iran. Just like Leigh’s parents didn’t tell her about Panama, if they knew. I’ve participated in the generational lies of this place. Because I still don’t know what to say. It’s wrong. Everyone knows it’s wrong, even the people doing it. But they’re going to keep doing it, not because there is a goal to be achieved, but because they want to, and they like it, and, at a very distant third, they might think it will give them more power and allow them to keep what they have. But that part isn’t really that important. It isn’t the reason, any more than God was the reason I wanted to go to Bible camp that summer. The people driving the bus just want to feel the way they feel when they push a button in a comfortable room and other people they don’t know or like die. They want to feel that way forever.

How do you explain that? To children? To grown-ups? What’s a Panama?

Maybe I don’t even know anymore.

I hope for a better outcome than I expect. I hope there are answers on the other side of this. I hope to find a little optimism at the bottom of this very deep box.

But I’ve spent thirty-five years staring out that long-vanished bus window repeating a non-sensical question in my mind. Staring out at the same moment happening over and over again even though it’s not supposed to happen at all, at America catching fire, hissing and sputtering as endless coil after endless coil of hideous black smoking dead rope spools out onto the cement in silence while claiming to be something of value, something to enjoy, claiming to be a firework.

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(please DO read here to know what I write here, why and how, and how to support it. Thanks!)

In case you missed it, there is a growing trend that, since last December, is making angry and concerned parents happy: Australia mandated by law a minimum age (16) for having social media accounts and, answering a call to governments that keeps growing, Finland and other countries are seriously considering doing the same. Is this good news, bad news or, as I suspect... news that’s not relevant anymore? Let’s find out.

Weak objections to age limits

As surprising as it may seem, not everybody is convinced that social media does way more harm than good to kids, but I fail to find their arguments valid. Claims that this or the next one or two generations of real children may do wonderful things with a smartphone invariably come from people so smart they can’t understand they and their own kids are needles in haystacks.

A more concrete objection is that banning social media may isolate and ultimately harm both kids with disabilities and adolescents who are at high risk for suicide. While I do agree that social media can be quite beneficial in those special cases, I find all certain concerns quite ill-thought-out, for a simple reason: socialization benefits come, by definition, only if all the non-special kids are in the same environment.

But if something that - however you call it - is very often harmful to the majority of children does benefit what’s surely a minority of them... why on Earth should we keep the majority in harm’s way, instead of finding other solutions for the special cases???

You may have also heard that it’s wrong and counterproductive to call and treat social media as real addictions, instead of less harmful “bad habits”. That’s an argument that strictly speaking may have some merit, but I personally find almost irrelevant at this point.

While I’m at this, I’m also unable to trust reports that kids with smartphones are less likely to find life meaningless and get angry, because that’s the same thing opium addicts surely reported of their dens. Duh. If something makes you forget, or prevent you from ever learning how happier you’d be playing with peers in the sun... of course it also diminishes your anger and depression. Until it doesn’t.

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The real problems with age limits for social media

Since the beginning of social media, if not of the web itself, proposals of setting age limits online by mandatory identification or automatic profiling have shared the same problems.

First, age limits alone just kick the can down the road, because they don’t touch toxic features like infinite scrolling, that afflict everybody over 16, starting from older adults. To solve the problem instead of just delaying it, we’d also need to outlaw all those features.

Much more important is that, as I myself explained two months ago, age-limits laws facilitate censorship and harm collective freedom.

This said, here is the real bad news: in 2026, these other issues are still valid, but they are also quickly becoming irrelevant.

It almost doesn’t matter anymore if “social media” are good or bad

Forget social media, for a moment. Let’s look at something that, in spite of all the hype that keeps its investors alive, is much more invisible and ubiquitous. That is AI or, more exactly, the effects of universal, uninterrupted, unavoidable exposure to AI chatbots and other services. The first and easier to see result is... hardly any real productivity: OpenAI itself reports that 73% of its user prompts concern non work-related topics, very often by young people. Many of those requests are to write (that is, to conceive on behalf of the user) some sort of finished product (homework, dating profiles etc..).

Unsurprisingly, this is an habit that can lower cognitive activity and is only going to get bigger, because every online interaction that can happen through written words or spoken words is, or will soon be, vulnerable to AI. Problem is, this affects much more than practical activities.

What’s really bad is that AI bots and apps capture human interiority, invisibly influencing personal thoughts and actions.

Without AI, social media would “only” influence and shape human-to-human relationships. AI bots replace that with a direct, exclusive connection, on equal footing between individual humans and machines. Such forced or even voluntary immersions in AI personal services don’t merely shortcut brains together like social media do: they engage every single individual relationally and emotionally, by grabbing and offering emotions instead of just data.

All this can only shape one’s thinking less visibly, but much more effectively than social media. Double that for children and adolescents, for whom by far the likeliest outcome of AI interfering with their inner development is to:

• “second-guess their developing sense of how to treat other people. But A.I. has been trained to give us answers we like, rather than the ones we may need to hear”

• “reduce willingness to repair interpersonal conflict, while increasing the conviction of being in the right, creating new compulsions and cementing performative social obligations”

Summing up, leave concerns that AI will destroy all jobs to people who still get AI and the meaning of work and money backwards. Worry about personal growth and social interactions, instead, because unrestricted dumping of AIs inside people brains and feelings as it’s allowed today does everything bad that social media do, just much more, much better. Of course, that’s no accident.

Current AI does all this by design

The reduction of the effort and emotional load of managing human interaction summarized in the previous paragraph is there by design, driven (as most digital tech from Silicon Valley in the last decade at least) by two urges. One is money, obviously, not just for greed but out of desperation. This AI is just the software side of peak capitalism, and “Hail Mary” AI investments the only thing keeping the US out of recession. The sooner it crashes, the better.

The other, deeper force driving AI like this is the urge, by challenged kids who only knew how to code, to limit any physical interaction with other humans, making them optional. They want to “democratize” - that is: to force on everybody - the soul-destroying convenience that before digitization was only accessible to rich people: the capability, thanks to fences, butlers, guards and secretaries, to notice and meet only the humans they wanted, when and how they wanted.

Those two urges are the reason why every company now is an AI-powered company seeking to replace communication and interaction with family, friends and pets with solitary people using AI products. But they offer no way for kids to grow up decently, or for adults to stay sane.

Back to age limits for social media now

A full solution to the urges above requires disruption and reinvention of the only thing that really needs it these days. So let’s stick to digital bans for children for today.

Even the main advocates of the 16 age limit for social media have no idea of why their call succeeded so quickly, after decades of both governments and parents looking the other way. I think the answer is quite simple, and has two components.

One is that governments finally got that such laws are excellent proxies for generalized internet censorship and datafication.

The other, more serious reasons is that the childish sociopaths that run Big Tech don’t really need social media anymore. AI is the new social media, that is their new, and much better tool to control people and avoid bankruptcy. In their present scheme of things, social media on smartphones was just an appetizer and marketing strategy that opened the way to plug AI into everybody’s skull, and is less needed every day. Age limits for social media are yesterday’s battle.

What to really ban under 16 and why

In general, I already wrote two years ago that universal, unrestricted access to AI chatbots should stop yesterday, even for adults.

Speaking of kids, growth happens by doing stuff for real, and often by making mistakes. We must preserve space for kids to screw up socially and learn how to solve concrete problems by themselves. We also have a way to do just that that’s been field-tested worldwide for 120 years now, a way that is still unexplicably ignored by the gurus of child protection online. I already introduced that way before, so as I said, let’s stick to digital bans here.

Advocates of age limits for social media explain 16 is the right age because puberty is a crucial period of brain re-wiring and identity formation, and the ability to self-regulate increases throughout adolescence, only reaching a plateau in the mid 20s. Consequently, parents should be most careful about how their children spend their time and who (or what) is influencing their developing brains and identities, that is until the end of puberty, fixed at 16 for practical purposes. I fully agree with that. What I find wrong is what to be careful about.

The point that most parents and gurus alike continue to ignore because it’s uncool, bad for GDP and too simple is that what really “influences developing brains and identities”, and would do it even if social media and AI bots didn’t exist is the damn smartphone dropped into kid laps years before they are ready.

Smartphones are not the Internet. It’s perfectly possible to get all that’s good online with desktop or laptop computers or smart TVs, and the sooner children learn how to do it with those tool the better, I say. But smartphones, or any other mobile, pocket-sized or wearable device with Internet access and a camera, are wildly different, for two reasons that’s easy to miss because they are too big and simple.

One is that, even if porn, social media and predators didn’t exist, smartphones before 16 years old would still facilitate sleep deprivation and myopia epidemics. Above all, they would still be synonyms of unrestricted, uncontrollable access to questionable websites, uninterruptable peer pressures and other pressures and surveillance by... overzealous parents. Plus, of course, unrestrictable, continuous exposure to all sorts of “personality-shaping” AI services. Please notice that even when (not “if”) the AI bubble will crash, all the other issues will remain.

The other reason is that banning personal smartphone before 16 it’s hugely easier (not to mention orders of magnitudes cheaper) than enforcing age limits, and without side effects.

I’ve read learned people opposing smartphone bans because “Why would anyone want to deprive children of such a remarkable tool as a smartphone?” The one-sentence version of the really easy answer is: because (NO offense meant, this is a systemic, generational issue beyond any parent’s control!!), unlike the experts who ask such question, 95% of the real children and parents existing today are able to do it properly.

Five bullet take-home summary: what to ban, how, and who should do it

• Ask governments to outlaw the intrinsically toxic features of social media, for everybody’s benefit

• Never ask governments to ban or restrict internet access. It cannot work, only backfire, and when kids are concerned, certain actions are the parents’ job anyway

• If you have kids, don’t give them a personal smartphone before 16, period. Give them any kind of home-tied computer as soon as possible and, if you really really must, a dumbphone. They’ll grow up just fine, practically for free, without missing anything important, and without anybody controlling them as today

• If you have no kids, loudly support the parenting style in the previous bullet. Again, keep governments out of this, not just for-profit companies. Social pressure is the way

• All the bullets above were already valid ten years ago. In 2026, AI is just giving parents and everybody else a billion more urgent reasons to do them now

UPDATE, 8.03pm GMT+1, 23/2/2026

I only noticed this instant that Afterbabel too had warned about “AI chatbot for kids” six months ago: But the most effective strategy remains the same: before (not instead!) struggling to reform AI chatbots as they suggest, make it impossible for them to reach kids through smartphones!

(This is the first sample of what I will write here from now on, beside digital issues. Please do read why, how and how to support me here)

I grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a New York trip with stops in stores like “Dal Triestino” to buy every symbol of American coolness one could afford was the ideal holiday for many Italian teenagers, me included:

Back then, for me and most other Italians, Americans were the good guys. Yes, they did look clumsy and weird sometimes: here in Italy, we call “americanata” things or behaviors “eccentric, naively grandiose, exaggerated, tacky and kitch”. But “americanate” or not, Americans were likeable. They were the people with the most inviting places to visit, the coolest movies and music and the most effective army. Most of us also considered Americans the guys who, even if they were doing it primarily for their own advantage, mostly did the right things on the international scene.

I also worked almost two years in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s, when the Valley was still building software and hardware that did make sense, and I really enjoyed it.

In other words, throughout my whole life, I’ve almost always lived with lots of reasons to appreciate “the American way” and wish Italy was, for some things at least, a lot more like America. I still do.

Now, however, I am sad and pissed off because on one hand, there are plenty of wonderful places and people in the US I almost surely won’t see anymore in my life, and on the other hand I’m still forced to care about America. I am sad and pissed off because...

Crossing an ocean to be kicked back? Of course not.

First and foremost, I am not willingly going to land, not even for an intermediate stop, in airports where the stupidest thing outside my control may send me back home right away on my own pocket if I’m lucky, or block me there for weeks before doing that.

Travel-wise, China, Russia or even Iran seem safer to me these days. By this, I mean they look as places where, if a visitor knows and follows some clearly defined set of rules known in advance, everything will be all right. Not so in current America, where misfits who never learned or understood that Europe and Mexico aren’t neighboring places have more chances than everywhere else to work as Custom officers. Or, out of airports, deliberately badly trained ICE guys could shot or harass me just because I don’t look scandinavian, or speak with a local accent. You loathe me for no real reason? No problem whatsoever, as long as you stop me before I buy the plane ticket.

More in general, I’m sad because today’s US are a place that lost itself so much into infantilization, assorted extremisms, self-adsorbing identity issues and other kinds of virtue signalling of both colors to lose both any interest in their own people and, which is much more relevant, any perception of their weight in the world, and any responsibility for it.

The US of these times are a country doing a terrific job of making itself despised and ridiculized at the same time. Greenland? As arrogant and clownish as he was, had Berlusconi been in the Oval Office instead of Trump, with his same powers, he’d already have Greenland by now, just thanks to better manners and higher maturity. Ditto for, to name just the most recent events, kidnapping foreign Presidents abroad or, at home, (potential!) migrants not cute and blond as the foreign trophy wife of their Presidents. Tom Clancy novels like “Executive Orders” are fun to read, not to live in.

Feelings and perceptions like these may be exaggerated, or based on incomplete information. I am aware of that. Fact is, these are all feelings that, until very few years ago, got no news stories to spring from, and above all no US administration so happy to see them arise.

The same US which I’ve liked a lot for decades is doing all it can to make me wish for a world where I can finally - finally! - afford to ignore, if not their actual existence, at least everything they trouble themselves with at home. That’s what looms largest in my mind these days, more than debating, or proving, which system is better.

Looking the other way now

This America is doing all it can to make me accept, if not really like, a Heartland 2.0 world: a self-sufficient Eurasia, in which food and other physical goods don’t travel on sea lanes that US warships may block, but on electric trains powered by nuclear plants done right, and nothing is paid in dollars, or through US-controlled systems (for the latest EU steps in that direction, read here).

Can you imagine an Eurasia in which each part is free and content to live in its own way within its own borders because...

• China, India and their neighbors make cars, processors and other stuff

• Russia (without Putin) provides raw materials and energy to do it

• the Middle East is poorer but pacified at last, because its remaining fossil fuels and anything else there don’t matter enough anymore to stir trouble, and...

• the EU (possibly self-reduced to its current western part, with a cultural and military Intermarium buffer block) is...

• in the best case, the next “nation of free people, a country that would be a light unto the nations, and a shining city upon a hill”, just done right, maybe partnering with Canada in a NONATO (North Of (former) North Atlantic Treaty Organization)

• in the worst case, a new edition of “Graecia Capta Ferum Victorem Cepit”: that is, a vassal backwater, politically, but one with such a huge cultural soft power and legacy to shape its rulers for centuries, as Greeks did to the Romans

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I am well aware that the list above may be a mix of naivete and cluelessness from my part. By all means, do (politely!) tear it apart, if it deserves it, no problem. My goal here is to convey a feeling, not to promote any specific geopolitical doctrine.

It’s the feeling that matters, regardless of which place is “best”, if there even is one “best”: the US of the 2020s is strongly pushing me to consider as the lesser evil, if not as an intrinsically positive outcome, a world that doesn’t need to keep America happy and American dollars at the centers of every issue because - finally!- what happens inside American borders doesn’t matter anymore for the rest of the world.

As things stand today, I’m sure the number of Europeans who would accept such a world - if not actively ask for it - is already large and can only grow. And again, this is happening because America went off the rails first, not us. This is what the First in “America First” looks like from here.

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Had the US become a modern, limits-aware version of what its movies and leaders said it was in the 1980s (yes, I know that’s a contradiction in terms), I wouldn’t have any real issue to keep thinking as I did back then, and accept them as THE Big Guy.

But that’s over now, and things won’t change anytime soon. As far as I am concerned, I know a lot of Americans who are wonderful people, and want to stay in touch - and possibly work - with them all. But politically and culturally, it will take at least one generation, probably two, before trust and admiration for all that’s STILL great in the US return as they were just a few years ago.

By then though, it will be too late to rewind whatever version of “Heartland 2.0” will have actually happened.

And by then, of course, Africa will rise anyway. But that’s a topic for another post.

Bonus “it’s not just me!” quotes

You may say I’m a (naive) dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Here are a few quotes from some posts published in the last year, to prove that point:

• “America Is Crashing Like Sri Lanka Did, Hopefully Worse”:

  • “Historically, America does not care if countries collapse and in fact enjoys it. Chaos is a ladder, and as a reserve currency, they’re at the top.”

  • “I don’t think America can vote their way out of this, and I hope they don’t. In fact, I hope America crashes so completely that it just disappears as an entity, an identity, and as an enemy that holds deaths and debt over everyone.”

• The Brutish Are Coming, The Brutish Are Coming!

  • “There’s nothing overly imaginative about Trump’s and Musk’s unbridled attack strategy. They’re using the nation’s bigness and control of the jobs and money to intimidate - primarily friends.”

• It Was Us All Along

  • “The developed world made a deal with America 80 years ago. So long as we operated under the cover story of our stated values, other developed nations were willing to live under the American corporate and military umbrella. We’ve broken the deal. You can say it was Trump, but that doesn’t matter. We broke it.”

• What Happens Now That the World Can’t Trust America Anymore?

  • “there’s the world asking: can we still trust America? Remember, it hasn’t quite arrived at an answer yet. It’s sort of stunned. It can’t quite comprehend this weird... explosion-implosion”

  • “The point is that [right now, the world still] wants to [trust America]... But at some point, and it’s coming soon, America will finally lose all credibility.”

  • “[and then], nobody will bother even attempting to “deal” with [America]”

  • “go ahead and ask a European or Canadian if they’ll trust America again just because it elects someone nicer. They’ll tell you: so what? Now the problem is that you just might do it all over again, at any point, and how do we know you won’t?”

Also on topic:

• ‘It’s like our friend started a fist fight with us’: These Europeans are skipping US travel

• Is Trump the unwitting historical agent of Cosmolocal Accelerationism?

I still believe that YOUR rights and quality of life depend every year more on how software in all its forms, including robots, cryptcurrencies and AI, is used AROUND you.

From now on, however, I will also write here about all the other, many faces of the current crisis. That is, in more or less random order: climate change, families and parenting, overconsumption of natural resources, inequality, mental health, pollution, education, and other major obstacles to a fairer society.

This multi-faced look at things will be very likely bad for finding and retaining “followers”, because many people seem to prefer very specialized, single-topic “sources” these days.

But on one hand, I find it necessary, because a recurring topic here will be that those crises are all related, and cannot be solved independently. For example, I do think that climate change is real and man-made. But I also see it is only a symptom of something bigger and deeper inside us, which must be fixed first.

On the other hand, I just don’t care anymore about extending my audience with all the usual tricks.

I’ve stopped caring about any form of Search Engine “Optimization” because, in an age when search engines use one’s SEO efforts to find which sources to leech first with “AI”, but keep them hidden from people, it just doesn’t make sense anymore.

I’ve stopped caring about social media optimization too. I do try to remain and advertise my work on social media, because I accept that if I want people to hear my message I need to go where they already hang out... but I refuse to play by their rules:

• unless it’s some really throw-away thingy, I will always POSSE, that is “Publish (on your) Own Site (1), Syndicate Elsewhere”

• when I’ll post on social media, I may sometimes add a picture to each post even when it wouldn’t be necessary, and (usually) surrender to the totally idiotic practice of putting “link in the first comment”, but nothing more

• and I will try to post as little as possible, not whenever the algorithm says I should do it

Ditto for Substack, of course. I’ll try to post here once a week, but sometimes it will be more, sometimes (as lately) much less. Without AI generated images.

What you can do / your part in all this:

I have stuff to say that several competent people agree it’s worth knowing. But I don’t want everybody to agree with me. I want everybody to know the issues I write about, instead of ignoring their existence and interconnections, so they have no excuse to not make their own informed decisions about them.

This, plus my dislike for the subscription economy (see “unusual request” here for details) is why none of my writing is paywalled, and will remain such (1). But of course, the more concrete support I get, the more I can write. So, thanks for helping with any combination of:

• comment my posts and recommend this blog (NOT “substack” (1)!) here on Substack

• share my posts outside Substack, as you can

• send one time donations for any amount you want, via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay (for other means, just email mfioretti@nexaima.net)

• connect me with any organization or community who may need a researcher, speaker, teacher or popularizer

• giving advice about the next paragraph

• and then yes, why not, even becoming Substack paying subscribers

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Other media?

Much more often than not, on the Web a thousand words is worth more than an image or video. Text is hugely easier to reuse, share and preserve, and more respectful of users’ time too: skimming text to get its gist is way faster than doing the same with its audio or video versions.

Besides, while I have spoken around the world many times, I am good at writing. I was definitely not born a video or podcast person. Should I ever set up a podcast or YouTube channel, it could never be much more than me repeating my written posts vocally. If you think that doing so would still be enough to significantly increase my reach and are willing to share detailed advice, by all means please do it, and thanks in advance!

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(1) Very IMPORTANT Reminder: this is not a newsletter, or “a Substack”!

This is just a newsletter-based temporary interface to my blog that’s been online since 2007 and will surely outlive Substack.

I was forced to adopt a newsletter interface by bad Web habits, but over time (remember POSSE?) I will copy all the posts here on the blog, and replace their content here with links to the new locations.