Cory Doctorow

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)
doctorow (npub1hs3…585k).

Archived at pluralistic.net

I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my newsletter, or any of my various long-form feeds. Links at https://pluralistic.net.

Books: https://craphound.com
Blog: https://pluralistic.net
Podcast: https://craphound.com/podcast/
Latest book: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

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pluralistic_at_mamot.fr@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2026-06-16 13:53:33 UTC

Gotta say, the fact that Kaiser Socal has ended its policy of validating your parking when you go in for cancer therapy is some genuine, grade-a, nickel-and-dime bullshit.

2026-06-12 20:49:11 UTC

Long before "agentic AI," we had the idea that software was your agent on the internet. That's why the technical term for a browser is a "user agent." Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It's your agent:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing
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2026-06-11 16:10:22 UTC

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I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is *different* now - and many of them cite my work on enshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn't a *market* problem, it's a *political* problem, and shopping isn't politics:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/#stop-fucking-that-chicken
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2026-06-11 16:08:23 UTC

Douglas Adams wrote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."
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2026-06-09 16:30:58 UTC

Our junk fee is not a tip
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2026-06-02 09:20:01 UTC

Yesterday, I attended a Brian Eno talk about the nature of creativity and art based on *What Art Does*, the short book he published with Bette Adriaanse last year:
https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571395514-what-art-does-an-unfinished-theory/
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/02/must-we-pretend/#everything-you-dont-have-to-do
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2026-06-01 09:31:29 UTC

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Despite this faded prominence, the Bund is all but unknown today. I was only vaguely aware of it, even though I attended seven years' worth of Yiddish classes at the Workmen's Circle, a Bund-originated socialist fraternal organization, and was bar-mitzvahed at a Workmen's Circle hall. It wasn't until I read about the Bund in Naomi Klein's essential 2023 book *Doppelganger* that I first caught a glimmer of its significance:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine
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2026-06-01 09:31:19 UTC

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were hundreds of thousands of Bund members, both in the Pale of Settlement (the rural regions of the Russian empire that the Tsar confined most Jews to) and in diasporic centers like New York City. The Bund played an important role in the Russian Revolution and in the resistance to the rise of European fascism, and fought valiantly in the antifascist underground guerrilla bands in Nazi-occupied territories.
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2026-06-01 09:30:33 UTC

Molly Crabapple's *Here Where We Live Is Our Country* is one of the most important, timely and *salient* works of history I've ever read. It's a history of the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist, internationalist organization that once dominated Jewish political identity:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646320/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-by-molly-crabapple/
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/01/doikayt/#socialism-or-barbarism
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2026-05-31 12:35:16 UTC

The Madonna has had quite enough of your shit.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55292284611/in/dateposted/
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2026-05-26 12:10:37 UTC

ITTIFICATION
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2026-05-26 10:04:44 UTC

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The AI bubble isn't like the internet bubble: No one had to force-feed the web to workers.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116640243696727370
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2026-05-26 10:04:26 UTC

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My next book is *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI*, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the *right* way to reach an audience, it's also the *best* way to reach them:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai
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2026-05-26 10:03:57 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: The AI bubble isn't like the internet bubble; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-26 09:47:54 UTC

One of the surprise breakouts of the early web was Lotus Notes, a primitive precursor to all-in-one office suites like Office365. It was so important that its creator, Ray Ozzie, was promoted to Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, succeeding Bill Gates himself:
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wharton-podcast/the-man-who-would-change-microsoft-ray-ozzies-vision-for-connected-software/
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves
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2026-05-25 08:14:53 UTC

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My next book is *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI*, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the *right* way to reach an audience, it's also the *best* way to reach them:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai
eof/
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2026-05-25 08:14:42 UTC

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I'm also on Bluesky. Read today's thread there at:
https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net/post/3mmnzgxop6k2x
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2026-05-25 07:52:16 UTC

It shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that a company that uses dishonest tactics to spy on you for profit will also use dishonest tactics to sell the resulting surveillance data.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/23/lying-spies/#spying-liars
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2026-05-21 15:13:16 UTC

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Again, this isn't to say that you shouldn't choose to have nice things. Buy stuff you like, shop at places you like. And when circumstances allow all of us to start making consumption choices in unison - as when Comrades Trump and Putin stage an orgy of demand-destruction for fossil fuels, catapulting the world into the Gretacene - then by all means, take the win. That is one of the rare instances in which we can do political change with consumption!
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/#hormuzed-into-the-gretacene
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2026-05-21 15:09:07 UTC

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If you're roasting in a drought, drowning in a flood, or being incinerated by a wildfire, your only move is to go shopping and hope that by buying a Tesla, you will emit a "demand signal" that "tips the market equilibrium" to "not killing you and everyone you love."
Shopping isn't politics. Politics are politics, and shopping is shopping.
This isn't to say shopping can't improve your life! I am a materialist, and having nice things is *nice*.
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2026-05-21 15:08:56 UTC

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It's a nihilistic view that insists that the only nice things we can have are the things that "the market" chooses for us. If "the market" doesn't decide to swap out fossil fuels for cleantech, then that's that - any attempt to draw down our carbon emissions through regulation will only "distort the market."
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2026-05-21 15:08:35 UTC

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By voting with your wallet, you are supposedly injecting information about your preferences and dispreferences into a vast, distributed computer we call "the market," which uses "demand signals" to decide how we live our lives.
This belief is incompatible with the idea of politics - that is, the idea that our lives can be shaped by representative democracy, deliberation, and/or solidarity.
3/

2026-05-21 15:08:17 UTC

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The idea of voting with your wallet is fundamentally antiprogressive, and not only because wallet-voting favors the wealthy. The ideological basis for voting with your wallet is the belief that politics are slow and unresponsive, while markets dynamically optimize for human wellbeing.
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2026-05-21 15:07:36 UTC

I've written about the futility of "voting with your wallet." Billionaires love it when you try to vote that way. Billionaires are 0.00004% of the population, but their wallets are 100,000x larger than average. So when we wallet-vote, their vote counts 100,000X more than yours:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/#stop-fucking-that-chicken
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2026-05-20 08:44:11 UTC

Da boids
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2026-05-19 08:25:34 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: There's no such thing as "age verification"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/19/shes-dead-of-course/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-15 05:48:24 UTC

Hey #Ubuntu friends: I keep fatfingering the numlock key and switching off my numeric keypad. I used Tweaks to set "Numeric keypad always enters digits" to true, but hitting numlock still switches off the numeric keypad. I also tried using xmodmap to set numlock to blank, but it rejected every identifier I tried for the key ("77," "0xff7f," "Num_Lock") with "bad keycode value".
Ideas?
Thanks!

2026-05-14 11:44:53 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Kickstarting "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/14/who-it-does-it-for/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-14 11:08:50 UTC

My next book, *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI*, will be out in about a month - and (once again) Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform refuses to carry it, and so (once again) I'm pre-selling the audio, ebook and print edition in a Kickstarter campaign that proves that DRM-free isn't just the *right* way to reach an audience, it's also the *best* way to reach them:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai
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2026-05-13 16:11:36 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-12 07:59:34 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: A fascist paradigm; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-05 14:08:28 UTC

Dawkins extending more humanity to a language model than he does toward Muslims or trans people is hardly a surprise based on his personal and political views. https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2026/05/richard-dawkins-and-the-claude-delusion/

2026-04-16 11:11:04 UTC

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.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge
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2026-04-13 05:37:11 UTC

I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes "capital allocators" spend *$1.4T* on the money-losingest technology in human history, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs
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2026-03-26 07:58:51 UTC

Love to see that Virgin UK/O2 have blacklisted "http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html" (the URL Ffox uses to invoke a captive portal, such as the ones you have to clear in order to use public hotspots with Virgin as a provider). Also nice to see that they've copyrighted the error page.
https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/116/294/411/355/725/026/original/63721e0ebc904e04.png

2026-03-26 04:35:11 UTC

Hey, EU-savvy friends. Vueling lost my baggage on a recent trip. I'm trying to file a claim with them, but the only path to do so is via their chatbot, which only produces this error:
> Sorry, this page doesn't exist. You can access all our Virtual Assistants on our Customer Services Centre
How do I open a complaint with the EC about this?

2026-03-25 07:31:39 UTC

The most important part of any law, rule or policy isn't what it permits or prohibits - it's whether you can *enforce* the law at all.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/25/fact-intensive#market-definition
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2026-03-23 06:07:45 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Understaffing as a form of enshittification; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/23/nobodys-home/
#Pluralistic
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2026-03-17 15:28:50 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/
#Pluralistic
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2026-03-14 15:16:52 UTC

An amazing thing happened this week: a whopping bipartisan Senate majority (89:10!) passed Elizabeth Warren's housing bill, which severely limits private equity companies' ability to buy single-family homes to turn into rental properties:
https://prospect.org/2026/03/13/elizabeth-warrens-amazingly-progressive-housing-bill/
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/14/ill-have-what-xis-having/#binge-and-purge
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2026-03-13 03:03:27 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Three more AI psychoses; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/
#Pluralistic
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2026-03-13 02:34:09 UTC

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That's actually kind of awesome. It's the kind of thing Aaron Swartz used to do - like when he ingested every law review article ever published and used it to trace the way that oil companies' donations to law schools resulted in profs writing articles about why Big Oil can't be held liable for trashing the planet:
https://web.archive.org/web/20111129181943/https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/print/article/punitive-damages-remunerated-research-and-legal-profession
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2026-03-13 02:33:58 UTC

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Depending on why you're doing it, it can be *archiving*, or *making a search engine*:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/
Too many AI critics have started from the undeniable fact that these guys are odious creeps who boast about wanting to ruin the lives of workers and then worked backwards to find the sin. The sin isn't performing mathematical analysis on all the books ever written.
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2026-03-13 02:33:47 UTC

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We don't have to burnish their reputations by elevating them to the status of archdemons who taint everything they touch with unwashable sin. Sam Altman isn't Lex Luthor. He's just a conman:
https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/breaking-sam-altmans-greed-and-dishonesty?r=8tdk6&utm_medium=ios
The fact that these bros are just normal assholes means that we don't have to treat everything they do as a sin. Scraping the entirety of human knowledge to make something new out of it isn't "stealing."
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2026-03-13 02:33:33 UTC

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Nor are AI bros exceptional. The stock swindlers who've blown $700b (and counting) on AI aren't cyber-Svengalis with the power to cloud investors' minds. They're just running the same con that tech has been running ever since its returns started to taper off and survival became a matter of ginning up enthusiasm for speculative new ventures.
That doesn't mean those people aren't awful shits. *Fuck those people*. It just means that they're *normal* awful shits.
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2026-03-13 02:33:18 UTC

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AI is just normal. The bubble is what drives the environmental costs. If the only LLMs were a couple big data-centers at Sandia National Labs, no one would be particularly exercised about the water and energy demands they represented. Big scientific endeavors - from NASA launches to the large Hadron Collider - often come with immense material and energy needs. The bubble causes massive, wasteful, duplicative efforts that chase diminishing returns through farcical scale.
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2026-03-13 02:33:11 UTC

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It's only the belief that AI is *exceptional* - exceptionally wicked, but exceptional nevertheless - that leads critics to decide that they are a better judge of whether a skilled worker should or should not use certain automation tools, and to make that judgment not based on the quality of the work in question, but on the moral character of the tool itself.
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2026-03-13 02:33:00 UTC

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A skilled, centaur-configured programmer learns from experience which automation tools they should trust, and under which circumstances, and guides themselves accordingly.
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2026-03-13 02:32:41 UTC

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It is *nuts* to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes
They're just adding another automation tool to a highly automated practice, and using it when it makes sense. Perhaps they won't always choose wisely, but that's normal too. There's plenty of ways that pre-AI automation tools for software development led programmers astray.
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2026-03-13 02:32:26 UTC

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They're just treating AI like a normal technology, like a plugin. Programmers' tools have acquired useful automation plugins at regular intervals for decades - syntax checkers, advanced debuggers, automated wireframe utilities. For many programmers - including several of my acquaintance, whom I know to be both thoughtful and skilled - AI is another plugin, one they find useful enough to be modestly enthusiastic about.
55/

2026-03-13 02:32:16 UTC

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There are many, many skilled and reliable practitioners of technical and creative trades who've found extremely reasonable, normal ways in which AI has automated some part of their job. They aren't hyperventilating about how AI has changed everything forever and the world is about to end. They're not mistaking AI for god, or a therapist.
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2026-03-13 02:32:06 UTC

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This is an extremely *normal* tech situation: for a new technology to be promoted and productized by shitty people who have grandiose goals that would be apocalyptic should they ever come to pass - and for some people to find uses of that technology that are nevertheless beneficial to them and their communities.
The belief that AI is an exceptionally bad *technology* (as opposed to an exceptionally bad *economic bubble*) drives AI critics into their own absurd *culs-de-sac*.
53/

2026-03-13 02:31:45 UTC

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Others' choices that seem unwise to you might have perfectly good explanations that aren't visible from your perspective. Ultimately, the world is a better place where workers get to decide which parts of their jobs they want to automate and which parts they want to lean into.
52/

2026-03-13 02:31:23 UTC

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Nor is this to say that when workers get to decide when and how to use technology, we will always make wise decisions. Perhaps the hobbyist who opts for an automated soldering machine will lose out on the opportunity to refine their hand-eye coordination in ways that will have many other benefits to their practice.
Or perhaps attempting to improve their hand-eye coordination to that point will wreck so many projects that they grow discouraged and give up altogether.
51/

2026-03-13 02:31:15 UTC

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Reverse centaurs are trapped in capital's automation plan - to make everything faster and cheaper. But that's the result of *bosses*. It's not the result of *technology*.
This is not to say that technology is apolitical. Only a fool would imagine that there are no politics embedded in technology. But you'd be a far greater fool if you asserted that the politics of a technology were *simple*, *clear*, and *immutable*.
50/

2026-03-13 02:31:07 UTC

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The boss want to achieve *corporate* goals, to "sweat the assets," making maximum use of the soldering machines. The pace at which the line runs is set to be the maximum that the workers can match. The workers on the line are "reverse centaurs" - humans who are pressed into service as peripherals for machines, at a pace that is constantly at the very limit of their endurance.
49/

2026-03-13 02:30:57 UTC

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Think of a hobbyist who pines for an automated soldering machine. That hobbyist longs to make board-level repairs and modifications that require precision that humans struggle to match. The hobbyist is a centaur, using a machine to help achieve human goals.
Now think of a factory owner who invests in an assembly line of the same machines: that boss wants to fire a bunch of workers and make the survivors of the purge take up the slack.
48/

2026-03-13 02:30:48 UTC

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Automation comes in two flavors: there's automation that produces things *more quickly* (and hence more cheaply), and there's automation that makes *better* things. Generally, capital prefers to use automation to increase the pace at which things are made, while workers prefer to use automation to improve the quality of the things they make.
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2026-03-13 02:30:22 UTC

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Their utility is a function of what they *do*, not who made them or how they were sold. The *utility* of AI products is based on whether people find ways to use them that make them happy - not whether the people who made those technologies are good people, or whether the funding for the technology was fraudulent, or whether other people use the technology to harm others.
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2026-03-13 02:30:15 UTC

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It's not exceptional for these companies to lie about their products, bankrupt naive investors through stock swindles, and pitch themselves to investors as a way for capital to win the class war.
*None of this means that AI companies are good*, it just means that they are not *exceptional*. And because they aren't exceptional, the same dynamics that govern other technologies apply to AI companies' products.
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2026-03-13 02:29:58 UTC

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IBM built tabulators for Auschwitz. HP were the Pentagon's contractors for any project was so dirty no one else would touch it. We only got Unix because Bell Labs committed so many antitrust violations that they weren't allowed to productize it themselves.
It's not exceptional for AI companies to have terrible, piece-of-shit founders. It's not exceptional for these companies to participate in war crimes. It's not exceptional for these founders to want to pauperize workers.
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2026-03-13 02:29:27 UTC

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Ada Lovelace wasn't interested in making slavery more efficient, but neither was she driven by pure scientific inquiry. She invented programming to help her bet on the horses (it didn't work):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
The silicon transistor was co-invented by William Shockley, one of history's great pieces of shit, a eugenicist who was committed to exterminating all non-white people that he never managed to ship a commercial product:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/
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2026-03-13 02:29:16 UTC

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Not every technology is invented by a shitty person, but shitty people and institutions are well represented (and possibly disproportionately represented) in the history of technology. Charles Babbage invented the idea of general purpose computers as a way of improving labor control on slave plantations:
https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/
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2026-03-13 02:29:08 UTC

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That's all because of the *bubble*, and the bubble relies on the idea that AI is *exceptional*, not normal. Repeating and amplifying claims about AI's exceptionalism *helps* the AI companies, because they rely on exceptionalism to keep the capital flowing and the bubble inflating.
AI is a normal technology. It's normal for a technology to be invented by unlikable and immoral people and institutions.
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2026-03-13 02:28:55 UTC

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AI is a *normal* technology. The people who made it, and the circumstances under which it was made, are normal. Its uses and abuses are normal. That doesn't make it *good*, but it does make it *unexceptional*:
https://www.normaltech.ai/p/a-guide-to-understanding-ai-as-normal
The *exceptional* part of AI isn't the technology, it's the *bubble*. There's nothing about AI *per se* that makes it exceptionally prone to devouring our natural resources, or endangering our jobs, or abetting war crimes.
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2026-03-13 02:28:17 UTC

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This is a species of "criti-hype," which is when critics repeat the hyped-up claims of the companies they're targeting, but as criticism (think of all the people who believed and uncritically amplified the ad-tech industry's self-serving claims of being able to control our minds by "hacking our dopamine loops"):
https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/
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2026-03-13 02:28:02 UTC

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Like the delusional person who can be led deeper and deeper into a fantasy world by a chatbot, a boss's delusion that they are worth thousands of times more than their workers makes them easy prey for a chatbot *salesman* that pushes them deeper and deeper into that delusion, until they bet the whole company on it.
Now we come to the third and final novel AI psychosis, the *critics'* psychosis, that AI is an abnormally terrible *technology*.
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2026-03-13 02:27:52 UTC

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This is a powerfully erotic proposition for bosses, the realization of the libidinal fantasy in which sky-high CEO salaries can be justified by the fact that everything that happens in the company is truly, directly attributable to the boss.
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2026-03-13 02:27:28 UTC

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AI dangles the possibility of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drive-train, so that the company's products go directly from the boss's imagination to the public without the boss having to ask people who know how to *do things* to execute their cockamamie schemes:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism
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2026-03-13 02:27:11 UTC

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Bosses are haunted by the ego-shattering knowledge that they aren't in the driver's seat: if the boss doesn't show up for work, everything continues to operate just fine. If the *workers* all stay home, the business grinds to a halt. In their secret hearts, bosses know that they're not in the driver's seat - they're in the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel.
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2026-03-13 02:26:53 UTC

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This means that the fact that a chatbot can't do your job isn't nearly as important as the fact that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that *can't* do your job. Bosses keep replacing humans with defective chatbots, with *catastrophic* consequences, like Amazon's cloud service crashing:
https://www.techradar.com/pro/recent-aws-outages-blamed-on-ai-tools-at-least-two-incidents-took-down-amazon-services
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2026-03-13 02:26:46 UTC

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Investors' AI psychosis is cross-fertilized by our second form of AI psychosis, which is the *bosses'* AI psychosis: bosses' bottomless passion for firing workers and replacing them with automation.
Bosses are easy marks for anything that lets them fire workers. After all, the ideal firm is one that charges infinity for its outputs (hence the market's passion for monopolies) and pays nothing for its inputs (e.g. "academic publishing").
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2026-03-13 02:26:35 UTC

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This is a great narrative trick, because it turns losing money into a virtue. If you've convinced a mark that the upside of the project is a multiple of the capital committed to it, then the more money you're losing, the better the investment seems.
So this is the first AI psychosis: the idea that we should bet the world's economy on these highly combustible GPUs and data centers with terrible unit economics and no path to break-even, much less profitability.
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2026-03-13 02:26:26 UTC

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To make AI look like a good investment, AI bosses and their pitchmen have to come up with a story that somehow addresses this phenomenon. Part of that story relies on the Byzantine premium: "Sure, you don't understand AI, but why would all these smart people commit hundreds of billions of dollars to AI if they weren't confident that they would make a lot of money from it?" In other words, "A pile of shit *this big* must have a pony underneath it *somewhere*!"
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2026-03-13 02:26:18 UTC

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Every time a user logged onto the web, it made the industry more profitable. Every generation of web tech was more profitable than the last.
Contrast this with AI: every user - paid or unpaid - an AI company signs up costs them money. Every time a user logs into a chatbot or enters a prompt, the company loses more money. The more a user uses an AI product, the more money that product loses. And each generation of AI tech loses more money than the generation that preceded it.
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2026-03-13 02:25:51 UTC

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You can't reach the $700b break-even point at $60b/year in two years, three years, *or* five years.
Now, some exceptionally valuable technologies *have* attained profitability after an extraordinarily long period in which they lost money, like the web itself. But these turnaround stories all share a common trait: they had good "unit economics. Every new web user reduced the amount of money the web industry was losing.
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2026-03-13 02:25:42 UTC

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AI's core assets - data centers and GPUs - last 2-3 years, though AI bosses insist on depreciating them over five years, which is unequivocal accounting fraud, a way to obscure the losses the companies are incurring. But it doesn't actually matter whether the assets need to be replaced every two years, every three years, or every five years, because all the AI companies *combined* are claiming no more than $60b/year in revenue (that number is grossly inflated).
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2026-03-13 02:25:28 UTC

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There's a name for this: it's called the "Byzantine premium" - that's the premium that an investment opportunity attracts by being so complicated and weird that investors don't understand it, making them easy to trick:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/
AI is a terrible economic phenomenon. It has lost more money than any other project in human history - $600-700b and counting, with *trillions* more demanded by the likes of OpenAI's Sam Altman.
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2026-03-13 02:25:19 UTC

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But as the AI project has required larger and larger sums to keep the wheels spinning, the usual suspects have started to run out of money, and now AI hustlers are increasingly looking to tap *public* markets for capital. They want you to invest your pension savings in their growth narrative machine, and they're relying on the fact that you don't understand the technology to trick you into handing over your money.
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2026-03-13 02:25:00 UTC

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....(hungry children, children killed in the Gaza genocide, children whose parents have been kidnapped by ICE, children whom Matt Goetz and Donald Trump trafficked for sex, children in cages at the US border, trans kids driven to self-harm and suicide after being denied care)..., nonexistent children don't want anything from you and they never make public pronouncements about whether you have their best interests at heart.
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2026-03-13 02:24:53 UTC

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Think of how the right concerns itself with imaginary children (unborn babies, children in Wayfair furniture; children in nonexistent pizza parlor basements, children undergoing gender confirmation surgery). These are very convenient children to advocate for, since, unlike real children...
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2026-03-13 02:24:20 UTC

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But that's also the *strength* of those markets, because if no one can say how big those markets might be, then who's to say that they won't be *very* big indeed?
There's a different advantage to confining your concerns to imaginary things: imaginary things don't exist, so they don't contest your public statements about them, nor do they make demands on you.
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2026-03-13 02:23:59 UTC

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But the downside is that Facebook has its own ideas about whether Google is going to absorb its market, and they are prone to forcefully make the case that this won't happen.
After a few tumultuous years, tech giants switched to promoting growth via speculative new markets - metaverse, web3, crypto, blockchain, etc. Speculative new markets are *speculative*, and the weakness of that is that no one can say how big those markets might be.
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2026-03-13 02:23:47 UTC

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At first, these companies claimed that they were on the verge of eating one another's lunches (Google would destroy Facebook with G+; Facebook would do the same to Youtube with the "pivot to video").
This has a real advantage in that one need not speculate about the potential value of Facebook's market - you only have to look at Facebook's quarterly reports.
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2026-03-13 02:23:34 UTC

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Companies can make more of their own stock on demand, simply by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet - but they can only get cash by convincing a customer, creditor or investor to part with some of their own:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american
Tech companies have absurdly large market shares - think of Google's 90% search dominance - and so they've spent 15+ years coming up with increasingly absurd gambits to convince investors that they will continue to grow by capturing *other* markets.
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2026-03-13 02:23:24 UTC

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But once those companies' growth slows down, investors revalue those shares at a much lower PE multiplier, which makes individual executives at the company (who are primarily paid in stock) *personally* much poorer, prompting their departure, while simultaneously kneecapping the company's ability to grow through acquisition and hiring, because a company with a falling share price has to buy things with cash, not stock.
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2026-03-13 02:23:10 UTC

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Growing companies *need* to keep growing, but not because they have "the ideology of a tumor." Growing companies' imperative to keep growing isn't ideological at all - it's material. Growth companies' stock trade at a high multiple of their "price to earnings ratio" (PE ratio), which means that they can use their stock like money when buying other companies and hiring key employees.
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2026-03-13 02:22:53 UTC

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Let's start with the investors' delusion. AI started as an investment project from the usual suspects: venture capitalists, private wealth funds, and tech monopolists with large cash reserves and ready access to loans during the cheap credit bubble. These entities are accustomed to making large, long-shot bets, and they were extremely motivated to find new markets to grow into and take over.
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2026-03-13 02:22:46 UTC

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"AI psychosis" is one of those very useful analogies, and you can tell, because "AI psychosis" has found even *more* metaphorical uses, describing *other* bad beliefs about AI. Today, I want to talk about three of these AI psychoses, and how they relate to one another: the investor AI delusion, the boss AI delusion, and the critic AI delusion.
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2026-03-13 02:22:36 UTC

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As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who describe ICE as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life. I am capable of understanding "autoimmune disorder" as referring to both a literal, medical phenomenon; *and* a figurative, political one. I have never found myself confusing one for the other.
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2026-03-13 02:22:24 UTC

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"Psychosis" here is best understood as an *analogy*, not a diagnosis, and, as already noted, there is a large cohort of very persistent people who make it their business to eradicate analogies that make reference to medical or health-related phenomena. But these analogies are very hard to kill, because they do useful work in connecting unfamiliar, novel phenomena with things we already understand.
It's true that these analogies *can* be stigmatizing, but they *needn't* be.
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2026-03-13 02:22:13 UTC

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That's the original "AI psychosis" that the term was coined to describe. As Sam Cole notes in her excellent "How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis,'" mental health practitioners are not entirely comfortable with the "psychosis" label:
https://www.404media.co/ai-psychosis-help-gemini-chatgpt-claude-chatbot-delusions/
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2026-03-13 02:21:57 UTC

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Now imagine that an obsequious tale-spinner was sitting at your elbow, helpfully noting these coincidences and fitting them into a folie-a-deux mystery play that projected a grand, paranoid narrative onto the world. Every bit of confirming evidence is lovingly cataloged, all disconfirming evidence is discounted or ignored. It's fully automated luxury QAnon - a self-baking conspiracy that harnesses an AI in service to driving you deeper and deeper into madness:
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2026-03-13 02:21:49 UTC

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But if you are already habituated to asking a chatbot to explain things you don't understand, it might well yes-and you into an internally consistent, entirely wrong belief - that is, a delusion.
Think of how often you noticed "42" after reading *Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, or how many times "6-7" crops up once you've experienced a baseline of exposure to adolescents.
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2026-03-13 02:21:40 UTC

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It's possible that there are delusions that are even more rare than GSD or Morgellons that AI is surfacing. Imagine if you were prone to fleeting delusional beliefs (and whomst amongst us hasn't experienced the bedrock certainty that we put something down *right here*, only to find it somewhere else and not have any idea how that happened?). Under normal circumstances, these cognitive misfires might be fleeting moments of discomfort, quickly forgotten.
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2026-03-13 02:21:31 UTC

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Enter chatbots. Ready access to eager-to-please LLMs at every hour of the day or night means that you don't even have to find a forum full of people with the same delusion as you, nor do you have to wait for a reply to your anguished message. The LLM is always there, ready to fire back a "yes-and" improv-style response that drives you deeper and deeper into delusion:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/
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2026-03-13 02:21:22 UTC

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But the internet supercharged gang stalking delusion by making it easy for GSD sufferers to find one another and reinforce one another's beliefs, helping each other spin elaborate explanations for why the relatives, therapists, and friends who try to help them are actually in on the conspiracy. The result is that GSD sufferers end up ever more isolated from people who are trying mightily to save them, and more connected to people who drive them to self-harm.
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2026-03-13 02:21:12 UTC

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Morgellons isn't the only delusion that the internet reinforces, of course. "Gang stalking delusion" is a belief in a shadowy gang of sadistic tormentors who sneak hidden messages into song lyrics and public signage and innuendo in overheard snatches of other people's conversations. It is an incredibly damaging delusion that ruins people's lives.
Gang stalking delusion isn't new, either - as with Morgellons, there are historical accounts of it going back centuries.
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2026-03-13 02:21:02 UTC

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That's is why the internet era is characterized by the coherence of people with formerly fringe characteristics into organized blocs, for better (gender minorities, #MeToo) and worse (Nazis).
Morgellons is rare, but if you suffer from it, it's easy for you to locate virtually *every* other person in the world with the same delusion and for all of you to reinforce and egg on your delusional beliefs.
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2026-03-13 02:20:49 UTC

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Morgellons emerged in the 2000s, but the name refers to a 17th-century case-report of a patient who suffered from a similar delusion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_to_a_Friend
Morgellons is *both* a 400 year old phenomenon and an internet pathology. How can that be? Because the internet makes it easier for people with sparsely distributed traits to locate one another.
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