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Received — 3 August 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Dualism (03 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
3 August 2026 at 10:25


Today's links

  • Dualism: Why not both?
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: UK's Great Firewall falls; Mint the coins; Virtual pets v DRM; Getty copyfrauds 47,000 photos; Net Mexico-US illegal migration is zero; Build a wall (around Trump Tower); Remote-hacking big rigs; Collectible AOL CDs; Indefinite Gitmo; Circuit City rips DVDs; Real Names policies are abusive failures; Escher in a water drop; Maximally code-like bugs.
  • Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A man's bearded face, constructed out of a medieval hillside, with walls, buildings, trees, hayricks and boulders forming the features. It has been hand-tinted. It looks across at an inverted, blurred, rippling version of itself. The background is a detail from a 19th C French anatomical chart depicting many different ear shapes.

Dualism (permalink)

The greatest magic trick of them all is lying. The reason you can't figure out that coin vanish even after the conjurer performs it three times in a row is that they didn't do the same trick three times in a row! They did three different tricks: "Didn't catch it? Here, let me do it again!" is a lie:

https://magiciansmag.com/3-cool-coin-disappearing-trick/

There's times when it makes sense to treat two outcomes as the same, even if they were produced by very different means. As a reader, my enjoyment of your novel is the same whether it was dictated, typed on an Underwood Noiseless, keyed into a word processor, or scratched out with a fountain pen:

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your

There's plenty of routes that arrive at the same place, and if the destination is all that matters to you, it's fine to ignore the journey. But often, those end-points have subtle differences that are only revealed when things go wrong. If all you care about is how things work, chances are good that you're in for an unpleasant surprise when things fail.

I recently found myself arguing with an interviewer about whether AI is, or could be, conscious. We weren't arguing about whether it might someday be possible to make an artificial consciousness – as a materialist, I'll happily stipulate to this. I think that everything we call "consciousness" is the result of a physical process occurring within our bodies (and possibly around them?), so I think it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that someday we might create another physical process that produces the same effect.

But that's not what the interviewer wanted to argue about. His point was that teaching more words to the word-guessing program would produce consciousness, an argument I always liken to "breeding horses to run faster and faster until one of them foals a locomotive." In support of this (outlandish) proposition, the interviewer performed a kind of cognitive coin-trick: "I can often predict what my wife is going to say, and so can a chatbot that's been trained on her words. Therefore, we're both doing the same conscious work – and therefore the chatbot will eventually be as conscious as I am."

"Predicting what you will say through an understanding based on a theory of your mind" and "predicting what you are going to say based on a statistical analysis of your utterances" might produce the same outputs, but they are not the same trick. You can tell by what happens when the trick fails.

My wife and I have been together for 23 years now, and there's plenty of times that we can finish each other's sentences – and so can the autocomplete on our phones. The autocomplete manages the trick by exploiting the fact that we often repeat ourselves. But we manage the trick by understanding each other (and by exploiting the fact of repetition).

When my wife says something surprising – because she is angry or delighted, sad or happy – I can make a reliable guess about what caused my prediction to misfire. Our "sentence completion" trick doesn't emerge from a rough, automatically generated mental table of the statistical likelihood that word A will follow word B. We also understand why those combinations appear in each other's speech and writing.

"Understanding" and "statistical extrapolation" can often lead to the same place, but when they don't, "understanding" provides a way forward, while "extrapolation" founders. Both work fine, but only one fails gracefully. The two tricks only appear the same, but they are fundamentally different.

AI's investor story – and the science fiction tales of AI's eventual capabilities that underpin that investor story – makes heavy use of this conjurer's trick, in which two different outcomes are equated to one another because they resemble each other.

This "ignore the journey, focus on the destination" idea is baked very deeply into the way we think about AI. Take the "Turing Test," a complicated and nuanced thought-experiment proposed in 1950. Over the ensuing 75 years, Turing's thought-experiment has been stripped down into a blunt metric: "Can a chatbot trick a human into thinking it is also human?"

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

"I mistook a chatbot for a human" and "I took a human for a human" arrive at near-identical places, but they are subtly and importantly different. The erroneous assumption that my phone's autocomplete is actually a person who understands me well enough to finish my sentences works fine, but the instant I turn to it for understanding, it will fail very badly. Autocomplete's predictions are always grounded in who you used to be, which means autocomplete knows very little about who you are now, and absolutely nothing about who you will become:

https://reallifemag.com/instant-recall/

The low-rez Turing Test that captured popular discourse is profoundly misleading. It's the unsound foundation of a worldview that renders you incapable of distinguishing your understanding of your spouse from their phone's autocomplete function. It's the self-serving rationale that leads you to declare yourself a proud stochastic parrot:

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

The AI bubble is (seemingly) full of contradictions, but – like those baffling coin-tricks – these contradictions often resolve themselves very neatly once you realize that the "contradiction" is actually just two things that appear to be one.

For example, some of the billionaires who put up the first several hundred million for AI are solipsists who just don't believe other people are entirely real and therefore find it easy to believe that AI can do their jobs. Other billionaires are cynics who think that bosses can be sold defective worker-replacing chatbots because they're credulous suckers for that pitch, the same way they believe that desperate young men are suckers for Joe Rogan's useless and/or dangerous supplements and peptides:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/24/supplemental-income/#andrew-tate-gwyneth-paltrow

Billionaire AI true believers and billionaire AI cynics make for a powerful coalition. The roadblocks that might discourage the first group are easily hurdled by the second, and vice-versa. You don't have to believe AI works to believe it can be sold, and you don't have to be motivated by the sales opportunity to believe that AI is about to become god.

Almost every debate I get into about AI turns out to be an unjustified, unacknowledged conflation of two things that seem similar, but have profoundly different underlying characteristics. Take this argument: "Every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world – watersheds, endangered animals, ecosystems – the world gets better. Let's extend rights to AI – whether or not we think it's a 'person' and so reap those benefits."

This, too, is a coin trick. Extending rights to nature reliably makes the world better, but extending rights to constructs makes the world far worse (Exhibit A is corporate personhood) (obviously).

A few moments' thought reveals the difference. If we extend rights to a watershed, that might result in an AI data-center being killed. If we extend rights to AI, that might lead to sacrificing the watershed to cool the data-center:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people

Then there's AI and labor. The world is full of skilled workers who have found ways to use AI on the job that they insist have improved their work. It's also full of skilled workers who warn us that on-the-job AI is producing tech debt at unimaginable scale, seriously depreciating the quality of the tools we use today, and setting us up for painful reckonings in the future.

This (seeming) contradiction melts away once you realize that these workers only appear to be doing the same thing. The first group of workers, excited about their AI-assisted output, are "centaurs": people assisted by machines; workers who choose the time and manner of their AI adoption. The second group are "reverse centaurs": people recruited to serve as peripherals for machines, which direct their actions and workflow:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Note that this isn't the same thing as saying "A skilled worker who adopts a tool willingly is always right and will produce a better output as a result." Nor is it saying, "The tool is so flawed that workers who claim it works for them must be deluded."

That's another coin trick! The reality – again – is that this is two things: some workers whose AI-assisted work is measurably worse are wrong about AI making their work better (centaurs, but wrong), and; some workers are being forced to use AI and know damned well that it's making their work worse (reverse centaurs).

Finally, there's an economic coin-trick: "AI will destroy jobs." Sure, yes, AI is destroying jobs. But there's a vast difference between "You got fired because an AI can do your job" and "You got fired because your boss was convinced that the AI can do your job, even though it cannot."

This is one of the most consequential coin-tricks, because it's a real convincer for the investors who are funding the AI bubble. The difference is huge: "AI can do your job" means you're well and truly screwed. If an AI can really replace a contract lawyer, then everyone who needs a contract written or evaluated should be on the side of mass technological unemployment for contract lawyers. The point of contract lawyers is to produce contracts, not to pay contract lawyers' law-school debts and mortgages.

BUT! If some BigLaw's credulous partners can be suckered into firing their juniors and replacing them with chatbots who bill you $1,200/hour to produce unenforceable, error-riddled contracts, then everyone who needs a contract is on the same side as the contract lawyers – united in opposition to their bosses:

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/06/its-finally-happened-both-sides-ai.html

Every time we fail to draw this distinction, we help an AI boss raise another billion dollars. Every time we insist on this distinction, we hasten the day that the AI bubble pops, thus sparing a few more everyday savers and innocent bystanders from being wiped out in the crash we can all see on the horizon:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-how-new-dealers.

As "Cathy" so aptly put it: "The thing that is a good tool for the skilled people is being sold as a thing to reduce the number of skilled people hired":

https://bsky.app/profile/cathyby.bsky.social/post/3ms3pzq57nc2c

The former is a normal technology. The latter is the root of a catastrophic folly that is destroying our environment, destroying workers' lives, destroying the quality of the goods and services we rely on, and which will shortly destroy our economy.

It's a distinction with a difference.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Collectible AOL CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20011119212602/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45585,00.html

#20yrsago Gonzales: Gitmo prisoners can be held indefinitely https://www.dawn.com/news/204441/guantanamo-detainees-may-remain-indefinitely-us-attorney-general-s-warning

#20yrsago Circuit City offers DVD ripping service https://web.archive.org/web/20060811215644/https://consumerist.com/consumer/circuit-city/circuit-city-flouts-the-dmca-for-a-tenner-192049.php

#15yrsago UK government kills Copyright Great Firewall, establishes user rights https://torrentfreak.com/uk-government-abandons-file-sharing-website-blocking-plans-110803/

#15yrsago Mugshot sites and mugshot removal sites: unholy blackmail symbiosis https://web.archive.org/web/20110817051528/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/mugshots/

#15yrsago Law prof: it would be legal to mint 2x $1 trillion platinum coins & use them to pay the US debt https://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/07/28/balkin.obama.options/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

#15yrsago Virtual pets starve after bungled resolution to Second Life’s “unauthorized food” war https://web.archive.org/web/20110807214820/http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/08/sl-meeroos-griefed.html

#15yrsago Google Plus’s “Real Name” policy is abusive; Facebook is not a “Real Name” success story https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html

#15yrsago Photo: Escher painting refracted in a drop of falling water https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j5whr/water_drop_falling_in_front_of_an_mc_escher/

#15yrsago Getting digital copyright right: pay artists, but don’t break the Internet https://www.straight.com/article-415146/vancouver/interview-siggraph-2011-keynote-speaker-cory-doctorow-copyright-reform

#10yrsago After repeated budget cuts, Missouri’s underfunded Public Defender drafts the Governor to work for him https://web.archive.org/web/20160804061408/http://www.publicdefender.mo.gov/Newsfeed/Delegation_of_Representation.PDF

#10yrsago Spoofing GPS is surprisingly easy; detecting it is surprisingly hard https://spectrum.ieee.org/gps-spoofing

#10yrsago Decision to retain personally identifying information puts Australian census under threat https://web.archive.org/web/20160804124914/https://censusfail.com/

#10yrsago Residents of Silicon Valley homeless camp clear 48,000 Lbs of garbage from creek, ask for housing https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/08/03/san-jose-homeless-remove-24-tons-of-trash-from-coyote-creek/

#10yrsago Copyright Office to FCC: Hollywood should be able to killswitch your TV https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/copyright-office-jumps-set-top-box-debate-says-hollywood-should-control-your-tv

#10yrsago Walking Tables: a strandbeest for your dining room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBOdZ6nhDJg

#10yrsago Lawsuit: Getty Images copyfrauded 47,000 photos from indie press agency Zuma https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/getty-images-sued-again-over-alleged-misuse-of-over-47000-photos/

#10yrsago Mexico-US illegal migration has been at zero for 8 years, and other eye-opening facts https://wnyc.org/story/bnch-migration-doug-massey/

#10yrsago Activists are crowdfunding to build a wall around Trump Tower https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/wallintrump/wall-in-trump#/

#10yrsago Chinese government decrees that it is always legal to video-record the police https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/03/yes-you-read-that-correctly-china-says-ok-members-public-to-record-police/

#10yrsago Big rigs can be hijacked and driven with software-based attacks https://www.wired.com/2016/08/researchers-hack-big-rig-truck-hijack-accelerator-brakes/

#5yrsago Elite debt hits record heights https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/03/fitzgerald-was-an-optimist/#debt

#5yrsago Utilities governed like empires https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#thank-you-come-again

#5yrsago Congress has allocated enough money to end the eviction crisis https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#helicopter-not-found

#5yrsago Vaccine refusal and health insurance https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#risk-management

#1yrago AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), 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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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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Received — 1 August 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Why businesses lie about AI (01 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
1 August 2026 at 14:29


Today's links


A sepia-toned 1950s era boardroom in which men in suits sit around a circular table. The chair of the meeting has been replaced with a man in a straitjacket, making a funny face. The heads of the remaining board-members have been replaced with robots from 1930s pulp magazines. The image has been hand-tinted.

Why businesses lie about AI (permalink)

Neoclassical economics assumes rationality. The corollary of, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing everything," well then, AI must be changing everything.

But the evidence for this "changing everything" thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real, pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need to create "sovereign AI," no one can really articulate the case for "sovereign AI." If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.

(Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist. If "digital sovereignty" means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize

The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources.

Maybe.

(They're pretty sure.)

One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that is, tech consultants). Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking":

https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking

Suresh has a good track record of writing trenchant, frank criticism of AI. You may know him from his 2024 essay, "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again":

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

Or possibly from his "Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI," a stinging rebuttal to Thomas Ptacek's widely read "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts":

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-article-on-ai/

While those are important pieces of critical AI realpolitik, none of them have the heft or urgency of "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking," whose thesis can be summed up with this passage from halfway through this 6,000-word article:

[W]e’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.

In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.

In support of this thesis, Suresh cites "hundreds" of conversations with execs and employees who spoke to him on the condition that he would "file the serial numbers" off their stories. These, combined with his own experience consulting for large, multi-billion-dollar companies make it clear that "AI mania" is an absolutely justifiable label for the state of AI in corporate circles.

Here are a few highlights from this morning's read – moments where I had to look away from my screen and read out a passage to my wife so that we could share a "holy shit" moment.

A person worked for a division that "pivoted" to re-engineer its software to create interfaces that support AI agents. When it became apparent that only ten users had touched this expensive new technology, they "pivoted" again to support "agentic workflows." Why did they double down on AI agents after discovering such yawning market indifference for "agentic"? "Because every company has to do something agentic now."

Suresh describes this as a literal religious mania. In the 500+ employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted – or even spared from being fired – were people who professed "religious declarations of faith" about "the transformative power of AI." Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs.

This has created a situation in which everyone – "boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants" – has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Suresh says he's seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place.

Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project: "Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half." Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're "terminally bad at running software projects effectively." Adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem – it just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail.

Chatbots don't help. The internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training data – the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere.

Suresh recounts his sole positive customer service chatbot experience: a Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural sounding, responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is certain that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car.

Suresh and his team at Hermit Tech now have a policy of not even asking about ongoing AI projects. They've learned that by the time an AI project has begun, no one will discuss it honestly until it reaches a crisis point.

Suresh says he frequently encounters people who reflexively utter the AI catechism: "AI is changing everything." But when he presses these people for details, they admit that their organization "does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT."

This shear ("AI is changing everything"/"Well, OK, we're not using AI for anything") is so extreme that Suresh once met an exec who confessed to crafting an AI-centered AI strategy for a $2b/year business, even though that exec "had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life."

Some people have privately admitted to Suresh that they've embraced AI in order to earn a career-boosting corporate reputation for "thought leadership." But many other people (especially nontechnical people) sincerely believe that AI is about to "change everything." As Suresh says, if you're in business with a liar, you might be able to reason with them in private – but you can't reason with a true believer.

The true believers are in charge. Suresh points out that it would be very weird for the CEO of an engineering firm or a hospital to mandate "specific procedures or building techniques without explicit agreement from the professionals on staff." But when it comes to AI, business leaders will confidently demand that the skilled professionals who perform the business's core functions use AI, even if those professionals don't think it will help.

As an aside: I remember the dotcom era, when the business press was full of articles about the conflict between CEOs and a new workforce that demanded the right to use the web on the job. Today, the business press is full of articles about the conflict between the workforce and CEOs who demand that they use AI.

Suresh describes workers who feel they have to "AI wash" their work: "They just do the work, the same way they have for decades, and say Claude did it." To add verisimilitude to this sham, they write circular processes in which one chatbot prompts another, and then the process repeats itself in reverse, for the sole purpose of consuming AI tokens to score a high rank on corporate "token leaderboards."

How to account for this wildly, expensively irrational corporate leadership? Suresh places the blame in the hypnotizing, mesmerizing power of the AI demo. For example: Hermit Tech is often engaged to set up a database product called Snowflake for its customers. Snowflake has a useless, expensive AI bolt-on called Cortex, that Snowflake itself describes as being 92% accurate under ideal circumstances (that is, at least 8% of the time, it will mislead you, perhaps very badly).

Suresh describes sales meetings with execs who were lukewarm on the idea of retooling with Snowflake, but who were very interested in Cortex. Against their better judgment, Suresh and his team provided them with a Cortex demo, carefully explaining that this AI tool could not satisfy their requirements. Without fail, this resulted in the previously lukewarm customers insisting that they be allowed to purchase Cortex immediately. Sales prospects who'd been unmoved by a pitch for new technology that would result in millions in savings were hypnotized by demos of a product that was described as unsuitable and unreliable.

To their credit, Hermit Tech refused to sell these customers Cortex, and stopped doing Cortex demos altogether. Suresh describes the experience of "the total 180°, that shift from ice-cold to red-hot buying frenzy" as "deeply unsettling." What's more, the Cortex demos that Suresh and co performed were, by his account, pretty uninspiring. The thing that these demos had going for them is that they showed AI actually doing something marginally useful, to execs who'd already spent millions on AI without having anything to show for their money. The spectacle of AI that does something galvanizes corporate leaders who feel like they're the only bosses who can't find a revolutionary use for AI in their businesses.

This is the situation up and down the corporate org-chart. Suresh has a reader whose title is "Head of AI" at a billion-dollar firm who tells him "their job is totally fraudulent but it was the only promotion pathway remaining at the organisation." This exec is hardly alone. They're part of a cohort of executives at companies that have publicly announced "100x" productivity gains, but who confessed to Suresh that nothing of the sort has happened.

Why did these companies make these claims? Because their customers were making the claims. How could you hope to sell to a company that had 100x'ed its productivity with AI unless you, too had 100x'ed your productivity? If, as a vendor, you walked into a boardroom and said that this wasn't a plausible claim, you'd be calling your sales prospect a liar, with real consequences: "getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn’t really matter to your organisation’s mission is a great way to get fired."

With the state of the industry dominated by froth, lies and mutual destruction pacts, it's no wonder that companies are deploying "totally gameable metrics such as 'money spent on AI'" as a means of evaluating employees and divisions.

Between true believers and people who must find ways to plausibly tout their AI usage, there is now a gigantic market for "AI solutions." At best these are just traditional tech consulting contracts, like migrating a database from Oracle to Snowflake, with some kind of ornamental AI usage around the edges so that the person who commissions the work can claim to be "procuring AI-enabled services" for the business.

This isn't a harmless frippery: contracts are delayed and work is put off until the work can be made "sufficiently AI" to attain the minimum degree of buzzword compliance. Worse: every fake AI project that produces real results (because it's not really AI) adds credibility to the AI true believers, who view these projects as proof that AI can do anything, and therefore demand to know why everything isn't being done by AI.

Suresh ends his essay with a long section on how to "navigate AI mania" – advice for how to smile and nod politely when you're confronted with AI bullshit, while steering clear of the worst consequences and avoiding needless fights. This looks like very sound advice for anyone in a corporate environment, but thankfully, that isn't me.

Rather than summarize that advice, I want to reflect a little on two questions that Suresh's essay raises but doesn't answer. The first is why? Why are people in power such easy converts to this religious mania?

I have my own theory. The most important discomfort that powerful people experience is having ego-shattering conflicts with subordinates who know how to do things they do not know how to do. The fact that you're "in charge" is hard to reconcile with the fact that the people you're nominally in charge of tell you that all your ideas are impossible, illegal, immoral, or lethal:

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

Take that Cortex demo. Sure, Cortex is an expensive, unreliable way to address a Snowflake database. But (unlike Snowflake) Cortex is controlled via conversational, plain-language commands. With Cortex, a boss doesn't need to ask an underling to retrieve information from the company Snowflake system, an interaction that might come with unsolicited feedback about the technical or commercial incoherence of the boss's request. Cortex is the underling, except that unlike a human underling, Cortex never back-sasses you about your foolish questions. The fact that it grossly misleads you 8% of the time is a small price to pay for a life untroubled by uppity pismires who insist that your ideas be connected to base reality as they understand it.

The other question Suresh implicitly raises is, "How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't "100x" your code this way, at least, not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost.

That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms, to improve their work in the ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a "token-maximization" scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't "sufficiently AI." When they set out to do a project, no one makes them prove that it couldn't be "done by AI."

As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't "what it does," but "who it does it for" and "who it does it to."

All the pathologies Suresh observes and documents so well in this piece are hypertrophied versions of the buzzword-compliance dysfunctions from previous bubbles, but at a scale never before seen. Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions – they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Vernor Vinge in the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/02/technology/a-scientist-s-art-computer-fiction.html

#25yrsago Why publishers should thank Syklarov https://web.archive.org/web/20011023092940/http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2800985,00.html

#25yrsago David Byrne track to be bundled with WinXP https://web.archive.org/web/20010804040357/http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_365899.html?menu=news.technology

#20yrsago Five things about blogs that no one ever needs to say again https://web.archive.org/web/20060813090449/http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2006/08/five_things_all.html

#15yrsago Castles made from human hair https://inhabitat.com/artist-uses-human-hair-to-construct-a-castle-of-3000-bricks/

#15yrsago Wisconsin Democratic voters targeted with Koch-funded absentee ballot notices advising them to vote 2 days after the recall election https://www.politico.com/blogs/david-catanese/2011/08/afp-wisconsin-ballots-have-late-return-date-037977?showall

#15yrsago Gingrich’s million Twitter followers: “80% dummy accounts, 10% paid followers” https://web.archive.org/web/20110812100159/https://gawker.com/5826645/most-of-newt-gingrichs-twitter-followers-are-fake

#15yrsago Missouri State business-school professor leads successful campaign to ban Slaughterhouse-Five from local schools https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/29/slaughterhouse-five-banned-us-school

#10yrsago Australian media accessibility group raises red flag about DRM in web standards https://hotelsantalya.net/accessiq/news/news/2016-p/08-p/concerns-raised-for-assistive-technology-development-as-w3c-debates-encrypted/

#10yrsago Reminder: the GOP has been attacking veterans and their families for years https://web.archive.org/web/20160803203106/https://crookedtimber.org/2016/08/02/trumps-indecent-proposal/

#10yrsago Isis joins Donald Trump in denouncing Khizr Khan https://web.archive.org/web/20160802161454/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/02/donald-trump-and-islamic-state-agree-no-room-for-people-like-khizr-khan/

#10yrsago Furries don’t have sex in fursuits https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/fursuits-grey-white/

#5yrsago Machine learning sucks at covid https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/02/autoquack/#gigo

#1yrago AI's pogo-stick grift https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/02/inventing-the-pedestrian/#three-apis-in-a-trenchcoat

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), 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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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

Received — 11 July 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Workplace "flexibility" isn't (11 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
11 July 2026 at 10:54


Today's links


A giant arachnoid woman arched backwards on the banks of a tropical river alongside which stand armed men. Behind loom palms, mountains and a smoking volcano. Rain sleets down over the scene.

Workplace "flexibility" isn't (permalink)

Here's an irony: the "gig economy" is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app.

The reason this is ironic is that the "gig economy" is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won't share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture.

Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public's understanding of the gig companies' business is fragmentary and thin.

But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber's business operations.

In a new American Prospect longread called "The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility," Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering "flexibility" that lets workers "choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around":

https://prospect.org/2026/07/09/dangerous-myth-of-flexibility-uber-lyft-gig-economy/

This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company's efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California's Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state's landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris's brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign's corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor.

On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.

Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok.

In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum).

This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.

This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It's the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly.

For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.

But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.

Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too – when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.

This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.

Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same ride, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2025/Uber-Expands-AI-Data-Platform-to-Power-Next-Gen-Enterprise-and-AI-Lab-Needs/default.aspx

(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)

Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).

As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement – rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.

Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.

Weil has been in many forums – including that Massachusetts courtroom – where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs – but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections."

Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy":

https://onlabor.org/a-win-for-platform-workers-ilo-convention-no-193/

The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide":

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3435961/america-must-lead-gig-economy/

But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.

The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted.

What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:

https://vimeo.com/1203473793

This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.

This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying:

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

The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop – once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5729723

The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution

Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility – they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Alanya to Alanya: feminist science fiction adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/12/alanya-to-alanya-feminist-science-fiction-adventure/

#20yrsago Soviet jokes https://web.archive.org/web/20060708144926/http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7412

#10yrsago Empirical proof that Terms of Service are “the biggest lie on the Internet” https://web.archive.org/web/20160712233511/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/nobody-reads-tos-agreements-even-ones-that-demand-first-born-as-payment/

#10yrsago Fox’s employee contracts may mean Gretchen Carlson will never get her day in court https://web.archive.org/web/20160712123858/https://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/11/3797060/dirty-trick-fox-news-using-undercut-gretchen-carlsons-sexual-harassment-suit/

#10yrsago To see the future, visit the most remote areas of the GBAO https://medium.com/studio-d/6-1-glimpses-of-the-future-e3fdb510dcc1#.iwyo4x141

#10yrsago Benjamin Frisch’s “Fun Family”: good old American narcissism https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/12/benjamin-frischs-fun-family-good-old-american-narcissism/

#5yrsago The Sacklers will get to keep billions https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), 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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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.

How to get Pluralistic:

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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

Received — 6 June 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Criticizing the everything machine (06 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
6 June 2026 at 20:00


Today's links


A medieval one-man band standing on a crate; his head has been replaced with the head of a killer robot. Observing him are a cluster of critics, who are variously gesticulating wildly, peering disapprovingly, looking on in amusement, etc. The background is a phantasmagoric cloudscape.

Criticizing the everything machine (permalink)

"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):

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

I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.

Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"

I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?

"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."

In 13 minutes.

You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:

https://bsky.app/profile/petermiles.eurosky.social/post/3mnffjqczjs2t

Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"

In 800 words:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."

Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.

What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/uber-ceo-says-other-execs-are-lying-about-ai-they-say-it-ll-be-fine-publicly-but-privately-admit-millions-of-jobs-are-gone/ar-AA1Z9QMv

Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.

AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/

So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?

This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.

Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.

Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.

My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then offering me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Shortly after writing the book, I turned it into a lecture:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb

But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago UK Parliament report damns DRM, calls for limits https://web.archive.org/web/20060615115510/http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2006/06/05/launch-of-the-apig-report-on-drm/

#20yrsago Colbert’s Knox College commencement speech https://web.archive.org/web/20111228135413/http://departments.knox.edu/newsarchive/news_events/2006/x12547.html

#15yrsago Counterfeiting can be good for luxury goods sales https://web.archive.org/web/20110602061646/http://www.slate.com/id/2294927/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Joule Thief and get all the power you’ve paid for https://www.instructables.com/Make-a-Joule-Thief/

#15yrsago School suspends student for refusing to remove personal animation from YouTube, threatens other students for petitioning on his behalf https://web.archive.org/web/20110603041200/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/student-cites-freedom-of-speech-after-suspension-for-online-videos/article2043954/

#5yrsago Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/05/lean-back/#lean-forward

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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