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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist

PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

16.08.2025 à 16:42

Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (2915 mots)


Today's links


LLMs are slot-machines (permalink)

When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.

Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of users: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine – in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work) and "reverse-centaurs" (people conscripted into being an assistant to a machine – here, people whose bosses have fired their colleagues and ordered the survivors to oversee an LLM that badly approximates the work of those departed workers):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

But yesterday, I read "The Futzing Fraction," an essay by Glyph, that advances a compatible, but very different hypothesis that I find extremely compelling:

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html

Glyph proposes that many LLM-assisted programmers who speak highly of the reliability and value of AI tools are falling prey to two cognitive biases:

  1. The "availability heuristic" (striking things are easier to remember, which is why we remember the very rare instances of kids being kidnapped and killed, but rarely think about the relatively common phenomenon of kids dying in boring car-crashes); and

  2. The "salience heuristic" (big things are easier to remember, which is why we double-check that the oven is turned off and the smoke alarms are working after our neighbor's house burns down).

In the case of LLM coding assistants, this manifests as an unconscious overestimation of how often the LLM saves you time. That's because a coding program that produces a bug that you have to "futz with" for a while before it starts working is normal, and thus unmemorable, while a coding tool that turns a plain-language prompt into a working computer program is amazing, so it stands out in your memory.

Glyph likens this to a slot-machine: when you lose a dollar to a slot-machine, that is totally unremarkable, "the expected outcome." But when a slot pays out a jackpot, you remember that for the rest of your life. Walk through a casino floor on which a player hits a slot jackpot, and the ringing bells, flashing lights, and cheering crowd will stick with you, giving you an enduring perception that slot-machines are paying out all the time, even though no casino could stay in business if this were the case.

Glyph develops this analogy to describe why LLMs are worse than slot machines. He says that (non-pathological) gamblers set a budget for the amount of money they're prepared to lose to the slots, while a coder who's feeling warmly disposed to an LLM coding assistant may not put any explicit limits on how much time they'll spend futzing with LLM-generated code (I'll add here that part of the seductive joy of coding is that it can put its practitioners into a kind of autohyptnotic fugue state where they don't notice the passing of time, a state that is also a feature of pathological gambling).

Glyph poses a hypothetical: if you have a coding project that you ask a chatbot to write, and the resulting code initially doesn't work, but does work after ten minutes of futzing, that feels amazing and you will remember it forever as the time you saved 3:50 by using a chatbot. But it's possible that you repeated the "well, I'll just futz with this for ten minutes" step to get to that final success so many times that the whole affair took six hours, two hours longer than it would have taken had you just written the program from scratch. It's like winning a $1000 jackpot after "just putting a dollar in," except that that was the one-thousand-and-first dollar that you fed to the machine.

Glyph says that in other business activities, the "let's just try this for 10 minutes more" strategy usually pays off, but that LLMs produce an "an emotionally variable, intermittent reward schedule" that subverts your ability to wisely deploy that tactic.

But that's not the only way in which an LLM coding assistant is like a slot machine. Reg Braithwaite proposed that AI companies' business model is also like a casino's, because they charge every time you re-prompt the AI. He writes:

When you are paying by the "pull of the handle," the vendor's incentive is not to solve your problem with a single pull, but to give the appearance of progress towards solving your problem.

https://social.bau-ha.us/@raganwald/115033262770049100

Jpeck likens the use of an LLM coding assistant to "a dense intern" who has to be walked through each step and then have their work double-checked:

https://universeodon.com/@boscoandpeck/115033787721848290

But there's an important difference between an intern and an LLM. For a senior coder, helping an intern is an investment in nurturing a new generation of talented colleagues. For a reverse-centaur, refining an LLM is either an investment in fixing bugs in a product designed to put you on the breadline (if you believe AI companies' claims that their products will continue to improve until they don't need close supervision), or it's a wasted investment in a "dense intern" who is incapable of improving.

(Image: Frank Schwichtenberg, CC BY 4.0Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

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)

#20yrago PC disguised as a set of encyclopedia volumes https://www.mini-itx.com/projects/encyclomedia/

#20yrago Nobel economist on harm lurking in copyright monopolies https://web.archive.org/web/20060217023906/http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_16-8-2005_pg5_12

#15yrsago Heinlein biography: LEARNING CURVE – the secret history of science fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/16/heinlein-memoir-learning-curve-the-secret-history-of-science-fiction/

#5yrsago Amazon bans podcasts that criticize Amazon #https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#nondisparagement

#5yrsago Combat Wheelchairs https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#combat-wheelchairs

#5yrsago How to Argue With a Racist https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

#5yrsago Self-driving cars are bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#car-wreck

#1yrago MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1022 words yesterday, 32968 words total).

  • 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

PDF

15.08.2025 à 21:55

Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4316 mots)


Today's links


A painting of Ulysses tied to the mast, beset by flying sirens. The sirens' wings have been replaced with the Bluesky butterfly wing logo. On the deck of Ulysses' trireme is a giant poop emoji.

Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (permalink)

I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky. As much as I trust and respect the Bluesky executives and board members I am acquainted with, I believe the service itself is insufficiently enshittification-resistant to trust:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

I've met Bluesky's CEO Jay Graber on a few occasions and heard her speak several times and I'm hugely impressed with her documented commitment to make "enshittification-resistant" social media:

https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/

Some of Bluesky's most innovative and well-developed features are extremely enshittification-resistant, like "composable moderation," which gives users an extraordinary degree of control over their feeds, which means that the service's owners can't readily dial down the amount of desirable information in those feeds in order to create space for ads or posts that someone has paid to boost (or, as is the case with Twitter, the personal maunderings of the service's boss and whichever esoteric fascist crony talked to him last):

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

What's more, this composable moderation, along with an open API for clients, allows Bluesky (the company) to adhere to its legal obligations to block content, while allowing Bluesky users to sidestep those blocks. For example, Bluesky has a labeling service that flags content that has to be blocked under Turkey's system of authoritarian censorship, and, by default, the Bluesky client blocks anything with that flag for Turkish users. But users can turn off that block, and/or use an alternative Bluesky client that doesn't pay attention to the blocked-in-Turkey flag.

Same goes for the new British system of mass censorship under the Online Safety Act: Bluesky the company will do an age-verification process with users of its official client (like all age verification, this system is janky and it sucks), but UK users who choose a different client (one that isn't worried about being sanctioned by the UK government) can access all of Bluesky without any age verification.

But the key anti-enshittification measure – federation – has lagged on Bluesky. For most of Bluesky's history, it's been impossible to participate in the Bluesky service without being a Bluesky user, because the most critical parts of the Bluesky network were incredibly expensive to operate (tens of millions of dollars per year), and lacked any tooling to make it easy to create independent, federated servers.

Without the ability to participate on the Bluesky network without having to create an account with Bluesky (the company), users would have to subject themselves to Bluesky's terms of service, and could have their access to the Bluesky network unilaterally terminated by Bluesky (the company).

Now, I happen to think pretty highly of the management of Bluesky (the company) at the moment. But Bluesky has outside investors – the distressingly stupid- and sinister-sounding Blockchain Capital – and if these people get it into their heads to enshittify Bluesky, then can force good actors off the board of directors, fire the management, and replace them with standard-issue corporate sociopaths.

What's more, the fact that users are hostage to Bluesky – that they have no way to part ways with the company without parting ways with the people they value on the service – means that new management can torment Bluesky users with impunity, so long as these torments are kept to a level such that Bluesky users hate the company less than they love one another.

By contrast, with federation – the ability to part ways with the Bluesky company without losing access to the service – investors might understand that if they turn the screws on users, those users will find it trivial to leave the company's servers, because doing so won't cost them access to the service. And if the investors don't understand this, well, users can leave – without enduring any switching costs.

The good news here is that Bluesky has made enormous progress in true federation. The cost of operating a full Bluesky stack has fallen from tens of millions of dollars per year to tens of dollars per month:

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l

This is an extremely welcome development and it goes a long way toward enshittification-proofing the Bluesky service, and some way to enshittification-proofing Bluesky, the company.

But Bluesky, the company, still needs serious work.

As things stand, Bluesky has very bad terms of service that every user who creates an account has to subject themselves to. In particular, Bluesky's ToS contain a "binding arbitration" waiver that forces users to surrender the right to sue Bluesky no matter how the company harms them. This is so pro-enshittificatory, it's like a landing strip for the sole use of Enshittification Airlines, which can land a 747 full of enshittfying nonsense on Bluesky's users every 10 minutes, around the clock, without worrying about any legal repercussions.

Binding arbitration used to be illegal. Sure, two entities of similar size and power could elect to streamline their disputes by seeing an arbitrator instead of going to court, but you couldn't take away people's right to sue just by cramming 40,000 words of legalese down their throat as they passed over your threshold. It took the absolute fuckery of an Antonin Scalia to unleash the plague of binding arbitration waivers on the world, with the result that these days, everyone from dentists to solar installers to ride-hailing companies force you to permanently waive your right to sue, even if they are so negligent or malicious that you are permanently maimed or killed:

https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&context=blr

These days, binding arbitration is everywhere, allowing corporations to proceed with total legal impunity. When a woman died of allergens in her Disney World meal (after being told it was allergen-free), Disney told her widower that he couldn't sue because he'd clicked through a binding arbitration waiver when he signed up for a free trial of the Disney Plus streaming service:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/disney-stops-claiming-disney-terms-require-arbitration-in-allergy-death-case/

Binding arbitration has been creeping into every corner of the internet, to the extent that lawyers will tell you that you must put it in your ToS "just to be safe." Those lawyers are either ignorant, or assholes (or, you know, ignorant assholes), but they're everywhere. Earlier this summer, Mastodon almost launched a new ToS (which would have been the default for every Masto instance) with binding arbitration, because their lawyers told them they needed it:

https://en.chuso.net/mastodon-tos-july-2025.html

Bluesky has just announced a new ToS, through which they claim they are improving on the binding arbitration waiver:

https://bsky.social/about/support/tos#governing-law

But what they've come up with is utterly baffling and nonsensical. I have re-read it at least a dozen times, and – despite having followed and written about binding arbitration for more than a decade – I have no idea what it means.

The new waiver says that you don't have to arbitrate for "claims that fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence by Bluesky caused death or personal injury." That sounds good! It also sounds like everything that someone might sue Bluesky for, leaving me to wonder what Bluesky will make you arbitrate for.

What's more, if the point of a binding arbitration waiver is to reduce nuisance suits and threats, this completely nullifies that tactic, because all a nuisance litigant has to do is claim that they are suing because of "fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence," and Bluesky is back in court.

All I can assume is that the point of this clause is to intimidate people with grievances against Bluesky out of seeking legal redress because they can't figure out if their claim is covered by this baffling, nonsensical clause.

There are other, gigantic red flags in the arbitration waiver, like a prohibition on class actions. Here's why that's especially bad in an arbitration waiver.

By default, arbitration is a) confidential and b) nonprecedential. That means that if a corporation injures a ton of people through negligence, fraud or malice, each victim of the company has to individually go before an arbitrator and prove their case, but they're not allowed to know how other victims argued their case, and the arbitrator is not required to judge two identical cases in the same way (earlier cases are not a precedent).

One way around this is mass arbitration, like the Uber drivers engaged in when Uber stole tens of millions of dollars worth of tips from them, a tactic successfully deployed by other corporate victims:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard

Class actions are the only way that corporations can be held to account for actions that victimize vast numbers of people in relatively small ways. If you've been injured to the tune of less than, say, $500, you probably won't hire a lawyer to get it back. Bluesky has 36 million users, meaning – thanks to the ban on class actions – it could steal about $18 billion from them all without having to worry about a gigantic, business-destroying lawsuit.

This is not how you enshittification-proof your service.

To be fair, the carve-out in the arbitration clause might help keep the company from committing this kind of fraud, but only if anyone could figure out what the hell it means. And also to be fair, the new arbitration clause provides for three arbitrators, one chosen by Bluesky, one by you, and a third, mutually agreed upon one.

This does inject more fairness into an unacceptably unfair process, and also does not make it acceptably unfair. Especially since Bluesky retains the right to consolidate arbitration claims into a mass arbitration, but does not let potential victims form a class if such a move would be disadvantageous to Bluesky.

If Bluesky wants to protect itself from legal liability, let it do what every company did until just a couple years ago: a) don't break the law on purpose, and; b) buy insurance

These new ToS are an absolute dog's breakfast. I wouldn't click through them.

And luckily, I don't have to! Because, to Bluesky's eternal credit, they have shipped the technical components needed to create a Bluesky server that is a full, first-class participant in the Bluesky service, without its users having to sign up to these Terms of Service (unfortunately, if you're already a Bluesky user, it's too late, because its ToS says you're still bound to mandatory arbitration even if you delete your account).

Legacy social media is in trouble. Facebook and Twitter are thrashing around, using AI finance-theater in a bid to convince investors not to panic-sell their stock because they no longer have any growth left.

A new, federated, independent, web is being born before our eyes, running on Activitypub (Mastodon) and Atproto (Bluesky). This web does not have to fall prey to the enshittifying norms of the zuckermuskian web. If the people building this new web are wise, they will take irrevocable action that will limit their ability (and the ability of their successors) to fall prey to the siren song of enshittification in the future. This is called a "Ulysses pact" – when you tie yourself to the mast so that you don't yield to future temptation.

Putting binding arbitration in your ToS is the opposite of a Ulysses pact: it's ensuring that you – and whoever you are replaced with when your investors decide it's time for a service-level heel turn – always retain the ability to enshittify, should the mood take you.

We can demand something better – and, if you run your own Bluesky server, you can.

My sysadmin, Ken, just took delivery of some new server hardware at his colo, and he's gonna be setting me up my own Mastodon and Bluesky servers in the coming weeks. I'm really looking forward to using the Bluesky service, especially since I can do so without clicking through the Bluesky terms of service or making myself vulnerable to the enshittificatory gambits that future management might assay, because those terms have given them the leeway to do so.

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 Babies on the no-fly list https://web.archive.org/web/20050910182032/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/08/15/national/w115806D06.DTL&type=printable

#10yrsago AT&T was the NSA’s enthusiastic top surveillance partner https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html

#10yrsao Stephen Harper will use 12-18 year old junior rangers to fight the Russians https://web.archive.org/web/20150818192810/https://northumberlandview.ca/index.php?module=news&type=user&func=display&sid=36144

#10yrsago Miami police union smears woman who posted video of cop beating handcuffed suspect in police cruiserhttps://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/police-union-smears-woman-who-posted-video-of-police-beating-on-facebook-7823262

#10yrago Pre-crime: DHS admits that it puts people on the no-fly list based on “predictive assessment” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/10/us-no-fly-list-predictive-assessments

#5yrsago AI, 1A and Citizens United https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/15/wish-youd-share/#clearview-1a

#1yrago Apple vs the "free market" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1053 words yesterday, 32026 words total).

  • 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:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

14.08.2025 à 18:34

Pluralistic: "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit (14 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4807 mots)


Today's links


Three kids in a trenchcoat, atop one another's shoulders. They stand before a hellishly complex midcentury computing control room.

"Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit (permalink)

I don't think that it's impossible for politicians, even nontechnical politicians, to make good tech policy. After all, the fact that no one in Congress is a microbiologist doesn't stop federal standards from delivering potable water (and it doesn't excuse the ghastly failures, such as Flint, MI):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/

For politicians to make good policy, they don't need to be technical experts: they need to have solid, independent, well-resourced expert agencies. Those would be the very agencies that Trump and Musk have DOGEd into oblivion, which is pretty ominous, since the work of expert agencies is how you avoid dying of food poisoning, water poisoning, air poisoning, collapsing buildings, faulty antilock brakes, train explosions and plane-crashes.

But when it comes to tech policy, politicians get it all so goddamned wrong. Partly that's because the cartel of tech companies lies to them like crazy, even under oath, leading to a kind of nihilistic refusal to believe any expert input. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that's it's inconceivable for you to have a social life without him eavesdropping on it, and any rule demanding this is a farce, like a demand to make water that's not wet:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism

Big Tech's highly resourced bullshit machine convinces some politicians that technical expertise is not to be trusted, and gives other, more cynical politicians cover for ignoring experts by saying, "Oh you people are always telling us that this or that is impossible."

For example, since the Clinton era, politicians all over the world demanded a kind of impossible encryption: encryption that works perfectly when it's doing something legitimate, like keeping hackers from pushing malware to your pacemaker or stealing your life's savings or listening in on you through your phone's microphone, but also they require that this encryption offer no protection to criminals, drug dealers, terrorists, child abusers, and other miscreants.

This really is like water that's not wet. We can make encryption that works. It's hard to get right, but when we do, it offers a wondrous level of protection from interception and eavesdropping, scrambling our data so thoroughly that you would have to consume multiple universes worth of time and space to build all the computers necessary to guess the descrambling key. We can also make encryption that doesn't work. People do this by accident all the time. Sometimes, the NSA does it on purpose (and doesn't mention that fact to the people who rely on it for their safety and integrity):

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

But what we absolutely, positively, totally cannot make is encryption that both works and does not work, depending on whose secrets it is protecting. That's impossible.

But when technologists tell policymakers this, they tell us that they have every confidence in our ingenuity, and also, they can't be certain we're not telling a Zuck-style fable about how the stuff we merely disprefer is actually impossible. They tell us to NERD HARDER!

NERD HARDER! is the answer every time a politician gets a technological idée-fixe about how to solve a social problem by creating a technology that can't exist. It's the answer that EU politicians who backed the catastrophic proposal to require copyright filters for all user-generated content came up with, when faced with objections that these filters would block billions of legitimate acts of speech:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/03/after-months-of-insisting-that-article13-doesnt-require-filters-top-eu-commissioner-says-article-13-requires-filters/

When politicians seize on a technological impossibility as a technological necessity, they flail about and desperately latch onto scholarly work that they can brandish as evidence that their idea could be accomplished.

For example, back in 2019, Trump's Bureau of Land Management tried to impose a ton of absolutely bizarre, environmentally devastating requirements on Burning Man's land-use permit. One of these requirements was to effectively ban LED lights at night (!), on the basis that these were so bright at altitude that they could disrupt nocturnal birds.

In support of this measure, the BLM cited a PhD dissertation from a physicist who developed a method for estimating light pollution. That physicist turns out to be a burner, who filed comments in the docket describing how the BLM had misapplied his work, making crude mathematical errors that led them to grossly overstate the amount of light pollution at altitude (I've just spent an hour trying to find this comment and I came up craps – if you can find it, please let me know, as it was delicious).

That kind of Annie Hall/Marshall McLuhan/"You know nothing of my work" moment is always fantastic, and especially so when politicians are demanding that technologists NERD HARDER! to realize their cherished impossibilities.

That's just happened, and in relation to one of the scariest, most destructive NERD HARDER! tech policies ever to be assayed (a stiff competition). I'm talking about the UK Online Safety Act, which imposes a duty on websites to verify the age of people they communicate with before serving them anything that could be construed as child-inappropriate (a category that includes, e.g., much of Wikipedia):

https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/08/11/wikimedia-foundation-challenges-uk-online-safety-act-regulations/

The Starmer government has, incredibly, developed a passion for internet regulations that are even stupider than Tony Blair's and David Cameron's. Requiring people to identify themselves (generally, via their credit cards) in order to look at porn will create a giant database of every kink and fetish of every person in the UK, which will inevitably leak and provide criminals and foreign spies with a kompromat system they can sort by net worth of the people contained within.

This hasn't deterred Starmer, who insists that if we just NERD HARDER!, we can use things like "zero-knowledge proofs" to create "privacy-preserving" age verification system, whereby a service can assure itself that it is communicating with an adult without ever being able to determine who it is communicating with.

In support of this idea, Starmer and co like to cite some genuinely exciting and cool cryptographic work on privacy-preserving credential schemes. Now, one of the principal authors of the key papers on these credential schemes, Steve Bellovin, has published a paper that is pithily summed up via its title, "Privacy-Preserving Age Verification—and Its Limitations":

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf

The tldr of this paper is that Starmer's idea will not work and cannot work. The research he relies on to defend the technological feasibility of his cherished plan does not support his conclusion.

Bellovin starts off by looking at the different approaches various players have mooted for verifying their users' age. For example, Google says it can deploy a "behavioral" system that relies on Google surveillance dossiers to make guesses about your age. Google refuses to explain how this would work, but Bellovin sums up several of the well-understood behavioral age estimation techniques and explains why they won't work. It's one thing to screw up age estimation when deciding which ad to show you; it's another thing altogether to do this when deciding whether you can access the internet.

Others say they can estimate your age by using AI to analyze a picture of your face. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, not least of which is that biometric age estimation is notoriously unreliable when it comes to distinguishing, say, 16 or 17 year olds from 18 year olds. Nevertheless, there are sitting US Congressmen who not only think this would work – they labor under the misapprehension that this is already going on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/

So that just leaves the privacy-preserving credential schemes, especially the Camenisch-Lysyanskaya protocol. This involves an Identity Provider (IDP) that establishes a user's identity and characteristics using careful document checks and other procedures. The IDP then hands the user a "primary credential" that can attest to everything the IDP knows about the user, and any number of "subcredentials" that only attest to specific facts about that user (such as their age).

These are used in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) – a way for two parties to validate that one of them asserts a fact without learning what that fact is in the process (this is super cool stuff). Users can send their subcredentials to a third party, who can use a ZKP to validate them without learning anything else about the user – so you could prove your age (or even just prove that you are over 18 without disclosing your age at all) without disclosing your identity.

There's some good news for implementing CL on the web: rather than developing a transcendentally expensive and complex new system for these credential exchanges and checks, CL can piggyback on the existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that powers your browser's ability to have secure sessions when you visit a website with https:// in front of the address (instead of just http://).

However, doing so poses several difficulties, which Bellovin enumerates under a usefully frank section header: "INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLES."

The most insurmountable of these obstacles is getting set up with an IDP in the first place – that is, proving who you are to some agency, but only one such agency (so you can't create two primary credentials and share one of them with someone underage). Bellovin cites Supreme Court cases about voter ID laws and the burdens they impose on people who are poor, old, young, disabled, rural, etc.

Fundamentally, it can be insurmountably hard for a lot of people to get, say, a driver's license, or any other singular piece of ID that they can provide to an IDP in order to get set up on the system.

The usual answer for this is for IDPs to allow multiple kinds of ID. This does ease the burden on users, but at the expense of creating fatal weaknesses in the system: if you can set up an identity with multiple kinds of ID, you can visit different IDPs and set up an ID with each (just as many Americans today have drivers licenses from more than one state).

The next obstacle is "user challenges," like the problem of households with shared computers, or computers in libraries, hotels, community centers and other public places. The only effective way to do this is to create (expensive) online credential stores, which are likely to be out of reach of the poor and disadvantaged people who disproportionately rely on public or shared computers.

Next are the "economic issues": this stuff is expensive to set up and maintain, and someone's gotta pay for it. We could ask websites that offer kid-inappropriate content to pay for it, but that sets up an irreconcilable conflict of interest. These websites are going to want to minimize their costs, and everything they can do to reduce costs will make the system unacceptably worse. For example, they could choose only to set up accounts with IDPs that are local to the company that operates the server, meaning that anyone who lives somewhere else and wants to access that website is going to have to somehow get certified copies of e.g. their birth certificate and driver's license to IDPs on the other side of the planet. The alternative to having websites foot the bill for this is asking users to pay for it – meaning that, once again, we exclude poor people from the internet.

Finally, there's "governance": who runs this thing? In practice, the security and privacy guarantees of the CL protocol require two different kinds of wholly independent institutions: identity providers (who verify your documents), and certificate authorities (who issue cryptographic certificates based on those documents). If these two functions take place under one roof, the privacy guarantees of the system immediately evaporate.

An IDP's most important role is verifying documents and associating them with a specific person. But not all IDPs will be created equal, and people who wish to cheat the system will gravitate to the worst IDPs. However, lots of people who have no nefarious intent will also use these IDPs, merely because they are close by, or popular, or were selected at random. A decision to strike off an IDP and rescind its verifications will force lots of people – potentially millions of people – to start over with the whole business of identifying themselves, during which time they will be unable to access much of the web. There's no practical way for the average person to judge whether an IDP they choose is likely to be found wanting in the future.

So we can regulate IDPs, but who will do the regulation? Age verification laws affect people outside of a government's national territory – anyone seeking to access content on a webserver falls under age verification's remit. Remember, IDPs handle all kinds of sensitive data: do you want Russia, say, to have a say in deciding who can be an IDP and what disclosure rules you will have to follow?

To regulate IDPs (and certificate authorities), these entities will have to keep logs, which further compromises the privacy guarantees of the CL protocol.

Looming all of this is a problem with the CL protocol as being built on regulated entities, which is that CL is envisioned as a way to do all kinds of business, from opening a bank account to proving your vaccination status or your right to work or receive welfare. Authoritarian governments who order primary credential revocations of their political opponents could thoroughly and terrifyingly "unperson" them at the stroke of a pen.

The paper's conclusions provide a highly readable summary of these issues, which constitute a stinging rebuke to anyone contemplating age-verification schemes. These go well beyond the UK, and are in the works in Canada, Australia, the EU, Texas and Louisiana.

Age verification is an impossibility, and an impossibly terrible idea with impossibly vast consequences for privacy and the open web, as my EFF colleague Jason Kelley explained on the Malwarebytes podcast:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/podcast/2025/08/the-worst-thing-for-online-rights-an-age-restricted-grey-web-lock-and-code-s06e16

Politicians – even nontechnical ones – can make good tech policy, provided they take expert feedback seriously (and distinguish it from self-interested industry lobbying).

When it comes to tech policy, wanting it badly is not enough. The fact that it would be really cool if we could get technology to do something has no bearing on whether we can actually get technology to do that thing. NERD HARDER! isn't a policy, it's a wish.

Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one will be full first:

https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/oqiic7/studying_the_origins_of_the_phrase_wish_in_one/

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 Lloyds of London to offer insurance for corporate open source users https://www.theregister.com/2005/08/12/opensource_indemnification/

#20yrsago Vampire novel as a work of first-rate science fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2005/08/14/vampire-novel-as-a-work-of-first-rate-science-fiction/

#10yrsago Chinese theme-park queue-jumping techniques http://www.capndesign.com/archives/2015/08/the_art_of_queue_jumping.php

#10yrsago Even when you turn on Win 10’s “privacy” flags, it still spies on you https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/

#10yrsago Trickle-down kids’ TV: Sesame Street will air on HBO 9 months before PBS https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/14/trickle-down-kids-tv-sesame-street-will-air-on-hbo-9-months-before-pbs/

#10yrsago Transgenic mouse company pays academics who cite them in papers https://www.badscience.net/2015/08/so-this-company-cyagen-is-paying-authors-for-citations-in-academic-papers/

#10yrsago Australian court hands copyright trolls their own asses https://torrentfreak.com/dallas-buyers-club-ruling-devastates-copyright-trolling-down-under-150814/

#10yrsago Student suspended for tweeting two words will get to sue his school, police chief https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/14/school-police-chief-must-face-lawsuit-brought-student-suspended-10-days-tweeting-actually-yes/

#5yrsago Maidan in Belarus https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/14/shock-doctrine/#walkaway

#5yrsago NYC Street View, WPA edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/14/shock-doctrine/#wpa-nyc

#5yrsago NYC homeless lose bathroom access https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/14/shock-doctrine/#everybody-poops

#5yrsago The CARES Shock Doctrine https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/14/shock-doctrine/#shock-doctrine

#1yrago The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

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13.08.2025 à 19:14

Pluralistic: Maga's boss class think they are immune to American carnage (13 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4594 mots)


Today's links


A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face.

Maga's boss class think they are immune to American carnage (permalink)

It's not just that Texas DA Gocha Ramirez charged a woman with murder for having an abortion (something he wasn't allowed to do, even under Texas law); it's that Ramirez paid for his mistress's own abortion, after he impregnated her while having an affair with her and her sister:

https://archive.is/20250812192203/https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/abortion-murder-charge-district-attorney-20812966.php

This is perfect Magaism, as captured by Wilhoit's Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Maga is a coalition of turkeys voting for Christmas, and ax-sharpening farmers planning to make a meal out of them. The Maga base wants a bunch of stuff that the Maga elites would never tolerate, but that's OK, because the Maga elites are pretty sure they will never have to suffer under the laws they pass for others. Peter Thiel is happy to support a political movement whose dominant factions would like to put him – and every other gay man – in a concentration camp, because he's pretty sure that only applies to the poor gays, not the billionaire gays.

Financiers who back Trump know that they can afford to transport their daughters, wives, mistresses and the housekeepers, babysitters and teenagers they impregnate across state lines (or national borders) to get an abortion should the need arise. Their participation in Maga was a bet that after victory was attained, the base could be made to settle for performative cruelty against people other than them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

The finance sector is the critical faction in Maga, because the financialized ideal is to accumulate wealth and power without exposure to any real-world risks. As Doug Rushkoff writes in Survival of the Richest, the finance move is to "go meta" – don't drive a taxi, buy a medallion and rent it to a taxi driver. Don't buy a medallion, start a rideshare company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Crypto is as meta as it gets, so no wonder crypto bros are all-in on Trump, and no wonder Trump is all-in on crypto. As Hamilton Nolan writes:

Crypto coins… are pure speculative baubles, endowed with value only to the extent that you can convince another person to pay you more for them than you paid. They are a claim on nothing. They are the grandest embodiment of Greater Fool Theory ever invented by mankind.

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/scams-and-bribery-are-becoming-the

Trump's tariffs are blowing up the economy and wiping out the agricultural sector. All those rural, Christmas-voting turkeys are getting it in the neck:

https://kdwalmsley.substack.com/p/tariffs-wiping-out-american-farmers

Trump's answer to this is to fire the government statisticians and replace them with work-for-hire fiction hacks who'll publish whatever numbers he tells them to:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-08-13-cooking-inflation-jobs-numbers-trump-bls/

You'd think that this would worry the finance sector, but fake numbers are actually good for finance, provided you're on the right side of them. Plenty of people got dynastically rich off of the fake numbers that propped up the pre-2008 housing bubble and the pre-2001 dotcom bubble. Those same people – and their ideological heirs – are now all-in on AI. It's impossible to overstate how structurally important AI is to the US economy. AI bubble companies now account for the value of 35% of the US stock market:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

The instant that bubble pops, the US economy gets a 35% amputation. It's no surprise that, under Trump, the FTC and DoJ have brought the Biden administration's antitrust enforcement against Big Tech to a screeching halt:

https://www.citizen.org/article/deleting-enforcement-trump-big-tech-billion-report/

Nothing would be worse for the AI bubble than antitrust and securities-law enforcement. Companies that cook their balance sheets and suck up hundreds of billions in investment capital cannot function in a world with an orderly market system overseen by publicly accountable referees charged with keeping everyday people from having their life's savings stolen.

And indeed, Trump's enforcers are running away from their duties, as fast as they can. The latest wheeze is to change the rules so that you can "invest" your retirement savings in cryptocurrency and private equity funds (two tired old swindles whose ropers are scraping the barrel looking for new marks):

https://prospect.org/power/2025-06-13-retirement-crisis-401k-private-equity-scrambled/

Not that AI is much better. AI is hemorrhaging money and bringing in pennies:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/

And things are looking grimmer for AI by the day. It's not just that Openai's latest, "fifth-generation" model was such a spectacular flop that they've been forced to bring back the old version. Far more important is the utter uselessness of AI as a way of realizing cost-savings for the companies that try it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/business/ai-business-payoff-lags.html?unlocked_article_code=1.d08.Re3i.TDnOyE2FgyNJ&smid=url-share

After all, AI is implicitly a bet on firing workers. The hundreds of billions in investment, the trillions in valuation – these can't be realized by merely making workers' jobs easier or more satisfying. AI isn't a bet on making radiologists better at diagnosing solid-mass lung tumors: it's a bet on firing nearly all the radiologists and using the remainder to be "humans in the loop" for AI, in order to absorb the blame when you die of cancer. There are plenty of radiologists who might welcome AI as a tool they use alongside their traditional workflow – but their bosses aren't about to hand over vast fortunes just to make those workers happier.

This is why AI users often sound like they're using totally different technologies. Workers who get to decide whether and how to incorporate AI into their jobs are doubtless finding lots of utility and delight from the new tool. These workers are "centaurs" – people assisted by machines.

The workers who describe their on-the-job AI as a hellish monstrosity are being ordered to use AI, in workplaces where mass firings have terrified the survivors, who are told they must use the AI to make up for their jobless former colleagues. They are reverse-centaurs: machines assisted by human workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

There is no way that AI can be worth 35% of the economy if all it does is produce some happy centaurs. The only way that 35% bet pays off is if half the workers get fired and replaced by AI, which is a thing that AI pitchmen are promising, to the letter (a letter that is credulously repeated by the dutiful stenographers of the press):

https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/dario-amodei-ai-entry-level-jobs

The problem is that when businesses fire a bunch of workers and replace them with AI, they don't get the promised savings. Instead, they end up with a system that's so broken that all the wage savings are incinerated by the cost of making good on the AI's failures.

But for Maga's finance wing, this is all OK. They're going meta. Don't hire workers, hire AI. Don't hire AI, make AI. Don't make AI, invest in AI. So long as the number keeps going up, finance wins, even if that's only because every structurally important firm in America is being thimblerigged into filling their walls with AI-powered, immortal asbestos that is destined to transform their firms into Superfund sites.

They're betting that when the bubble finally bursts, that they will have become too big to fail, and will thus be in for the bailouts that rescued the finance sector in 2008. They think that so long as they curry favor with Trump, he'll make sure they're all OK, because they are the people the law protects, but does not bind.

This is a pretty good bet. Trump's a gangster capitalist, and fascists love a "dual state" – a system where the law is followed to the letter, except when it suits someone with the protection of the ruling clique to wipe their ass with it:

https://archive.ph/8T8of

And bailouts for finance crooks are a bipartisan consensus. Remember, it was Obama, not Bush, who took his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's advice to allow the bailed-out banks to steal their borrowers homes and trigger the foreclosure crisis, because this would "foam the runways" for the crashing banks:

https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/

The Obama wing of the party insists that they're the responsible adults in the room, the ones that will govern wisely and hold their gigadonors to account when they wreck the economy. They tell us Zohran Mamdani is – despite all evidence to the contrary – too unpopular to win an election:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

They ratfucked Katie Porter, one of finance's most savage and talented opponents, teaming up with the crypto-bros who are Maga's bagmen. Joke's on them, because it looks like Porter is gonna be California's next governor:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-08-13-establishment-struggles-control-california-governors-race/

(I donated $100 I can't afford to her campaign; maybe you will donate, too?)

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/kpg_web

Maga's finance wing are convinced that the game is rigged in their favor – heads they win and the law protects them, tails we lose and the law binds us. But if there's one thing we know about gangster capitalism, it's that the capo isn't shy about seizing the fortunes of his various underbosses when the mood suits him. One day he's demanding that you quit your job as CEO, the next day he imposes a 15% tax on your products:

https://www.firstpost.com/world/trump-meets-intel-chief-calls-him-a-success-days-after-demanding-his-resignation-13923838.html

You can bet your ass that if it looks like Trump is gonna lose his grip on power, they'll come sleazing over the Democrats, demanding the defenstration of Mamdani, Porter, and anyone who wants a habitable and just world, rather than a system designed to convert the planet's resources to something that can be sequestered in a luxury bunker or on a private island.

Because for all that they moan about "wokeness," they wouldn't want their kids to have to tolerate a shitty boss; they wouldn't want their kids to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. They wanna live out their cuckold fantasies in peace:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/02/stephen-miller-wife-musk/

They don't have any problem with living in a world where there's lip service to social values and Pricewaterhousecooper has a cringe Pride parade float. They'll happily save a couple bucks on the nanny's abortion by going down to the corner Planned Parenthood rather than flying her to Toronto on the private jet. All that performative cruelty was just a shuck to get some of the dumber surviving turkeys to pull the lever for Christmas. So long as they can live in a world where the law protects them, but does not bind them, they're happy as pigs in shit.

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)

#15yrsago Kenk: graphic novel humanizes Toronto’s most notorious bike-thief without apologising for him https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/13/kenk-graphic-novel-humanizes-torontos-most-notorious-bike-thief-without-apologising-for-him/

#10yrsago Lenovo preloaded laptops with reformat-resistant perpetual crapware https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenovo-used-windows-anti-theft-feature-to-install-persistent-crapware/

#10yrsago Hilariously terrifying talk about security https://vimeo.com/135347162

#10yrsago Income inequality turns “neglected tropic diseases” into American diseases of “the poor living among the wealthy” https://web.archive.org/web/20150820045551/http://mosaicscience.com/story/america-tropical-disease

#10yrsago Rightscorp teams up with lawyers to mass-sue people who ignore blackmail letters https://torrentfreak.com/rightscorp-deal-turns-dmca-notices-into-piracy-lawsuits-150812/

#10yrsago Inside the Machine: a visual history of electronics, technology and art https://meganprelinger.com/book/inside-the-machine-art-and-invention-in-the-electronic-age/

#10yrsago Twitter snoop-requests from UK cops/gov’t more than double in 2015 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33882688

#10yrsago The failed writer who became NSA’s in-house “philosopher” https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/surveillance-philosopher-nsa/

#10yrsago Internet filters considered harmful https://web.archive.org/web/20150809023346/http://knowledgequest.aasl.org/latest-internet-filtering-ala/

#10yrsago FBI opened a file on George Carlin for telling “bad taste” Hoover jokeshttps://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/aug/13/george-carlins-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Caveman Science Fiction https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

#5yrsago Florida sheriff bans masks https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#death-cult

#5yrsago "Less lethal" is a euphemism, too https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#less-lethals

#5yrsago My origin story https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

#5yrsago Trump's Solicitor General says bribery is legal https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#backhanders-r-us

#5yrsago Payday lenders are CFPB's pandemic aid https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#cfpb-quislings

#5yrsago Sorting machines snatched from post offices https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#machine-breakers

#5yrsago Marvel's $0.10 mini-comics https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#tiny-heroes

#5yrsago Failed State https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#chris-brown

#5yrsago Mexico's terrible copyright is in trouble https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#viva-mexico

#1yrago The paradox of choice screens https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/#make-up-your-mind-already

#1yrago Madeline Ashby's 'Glass Houses' https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/13/influencers/#affective-computing

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Alice Taylor, Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1086 words yesterday, 29915 words total).

  • 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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11.08.2025 à 18:29

Pluralistic: Goodhart's Law (of AI) (11 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5099 mots)


Today's links


A black and white photo of an old one-room schoolhouse, seen from the back of the classroom. A teacher sits behind a desk and a US flag at the front of the class. Beside her, a small girl stands, reading aloud from a book. The image has been altered. In the foreground is a Robin Hood figure, seen from behind, holding a bow, a quiver of arrows on his back. Behind the little girl is the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' An arrow vibrates dead-center in the eye.

Goodhart's Law (of AI) (permalink)

One way to think about AI's unwelcome intrusion into our lives can be summed up with Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Goodhart's Law is a harsh mistress. It's incredibly exciting to discover a new way of measuring aspects of a complex system in a way that lets you understand (and thus control) it. In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page realized that all the links created by everyone who'd ever made a webpage represented a kind of latent map of the value and authority of every website. We could infer that pages that had more links pointing to them were considered more noteworthy than pages that had fewer inbound links. Moreover, we could treat those heavily linked-to pages as authoritative and infer that when they linked to another page, it, too, was likely to be important.

This insight, called "PageRank," was behind Google's stunning entry into the search market, which was easily one of the most exciting technological developments of the decade, as the entire web just snapped into place as a useful system for retrieving information that had been created by a vast, uncoordinated army of web-writers, hosted in a distributed system without any central controls.

Then came the revenge of Goodhart's Law. Before Google became the dominant mechanism for locating webpages, the only reason for anyone to link to a given page or site was because there was something there they thought you should see. Google aggregated all those "I think you should see this" signals and turned them into a map of the web's relevance and authority.

But making a link to a webpage is easy. Once there was another reason to make a link between two web-pages – to garner traffic, which could be converted into money and/or influence – then bad actors made a lot of spurious links between websites. They created linkfarms, they spammed blog comments, they hacked websites for the sole purpose of adding a bunch of human-invisible, Google-scraper-readable links to pages.

The metric ("how many links are there to this page?") became a target ("make links to this page") and ceased to be a useful metric.

Goodhart's Law is still a plague on Google search quality. "Reputation abuse" is a webcrime committed by venerable sites like Forbes, Fortune and Better Homes and Gardens, who abuse the authority imparted by tons of inbound links accumulated over decades by creating spammy, fake product-review sites stuffed with affiliate links, that Google ranks more highly than real, rigorous review sites because of all that accumulated googlejuice:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Goodhart's Law is 50 years old, but policymakers are woefully ignorant of it and continue to operate as though it doesn't apply to them. This is especially pronounced when policymakers are determined to Do Something about a public service that has been starved of funding and kicked around as a political football to the point where it has degraded and started to outrage the public. When this happens, policymakers are apt to blame public servants – rather than themselves – for this degradation, and then set out to Bring Accountability to those public employees.

The NHS did this with ambulance response times, which are very bad, and that fact is, in turn, very bad. The reason ambulance response times suck isn't hard to winkle out: there's not enough money being spent on ambulances, drivers, and medics. But that's not a politically popular conclusion, especially in the UK, which has been under brutal and worsening austerity since the Blair years (don't worry, eventually they'll do enough austerity and things will really turn around, because, as the old saying goes, "Good policymaking consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome)."

Instead of blaming inadequate funding for poor ambulance response times, politicians blamed "inefficiency," driven by a poor motivation. So they established a metric: ambulances must arrive within a certain number of minutes (and they set a consequence: massive cuts to any ambulance service that didn't meet the metric).

Now, "an ambulance where it's needed within a set amount of time" may sound like a straightforward metric, and it was – retrospectively. As in, we could tell that the ambulance service was in trouble because ambulances were taking half an hour or more to arrive. But prospectively, after that metric became a target, it immediately ceased to be a good metric. That's because ambulance services, faced with the impossible task of improving response times without spending money, started to dispatch ambulance motorbikes that couldn't carry 95% of the stuff needed to respond to a medical emergency, and had no way to get patients back to hospitals. These motorbikes were able to meet the response-time targets…without improving the survival rates of people who summoned ambulances:

https://timharford.com/2014/07/underperforming-on-performance/

AI turns out to be a great way to explore all the perverse dimensions of Goodhart's Law. For years, machine learning specialists have struggled with the problem of "reward hacking," in which an AI figures out how to meet some target in a way that blows up the metric it was derived from:

https://research.google/blog/bringing-precision-to-the-ai-safety-discussion/

My favorite example of this is the AI-powered Roomba that was programmed to find an efficient path that minimized collisions with furniture, as measured by a forward-facing sensor that sent a signal whenever the Roomba bumped into anything. The Roomba started driving backwards, smashing into all kinds of furniture, but measuring zero collisions, because there was no collision-sensor on its back:

https://x.com/smingleigh/status/1060325665671692288

Charlie Stross has observed that corporations are a kind of "slow AI," that engage in endless reward-hacking to accomplish their goals, increasing their profits by finding nominally legal ways to poison the air, cheat their customers and maim their workers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/12/29/charlie-strosss-ccc-talk-the-future-of-psychotic-ais-can-be-read-in-todays-sociopathic-corporations/

Public services under conditions of austerity are another kind of slow AI. When policymakers demand that a metric be satisfied without delivering any of the budget or resources needed to satisfy it, the public employees downstream of that impossible demand will start reward-hacking and the metric will become a target, and then cease to be a useful metric.

Which brings me, at last, to AI in educational contexts.

In 2008, George W Bush stepped up the long-running war on education with the No Child Left Behind Act. The right hates public education, for many reasons. Obviously, there's the fact that uneducated people are easier to mislead, which is helpful if you want to get a bunch of turkeys to vote for Christmas ("I love the uneducated" -DJ Trump). Then there's the fact that, since 1954's Brown v Board of Ed, Black and brown kids were legally guaranteed the right to be educated alongside white kids, which makes a large swathe of the right absolutely nuts. Then there was the 1962 Supreme Court decisions that banned prayer in school, leading to bans on teaching Christian doctrine, including nonsense like Young Earth Creationism. Finally, there's the fact that teachers a) belong to unions; and, b) believe in their jobs and fight for the kids they teach.

No Child Left Behind was a vicious salvo in the war on teachers, positing the problem with education as a failure of teachers, driven by a combination of poor training and indifference to their students. Under No Child Left Behind, students were subjected to multiple rounds of standardized tests, and teachers with low-performing students had their budgets taken away (after first being offered modest assistance in improving those scores).

Some of NCLB's standardized tests represented reasonable metrics: we really do want kids to be able to read and do math and reason and string together coherent thoughts at various points in their schooling. But when these metrics became targets, boy did they stop being useful as metrics.

It's impossible to overstate how fucking perverse NCLB was. I once met an elementary school teacher from an incredibly poor school district in Kansas. Many of her students were resettled refugees who didn't speak English; they spoke a language that no one in the school system could speak, and which had no system of writing. They arrived in her classroom unable to speak English and unable to read or write in any language, and no one could speak their language.

Obviously, these students performed badly on standardized tests delivered in English (it didn't help that they had to take the tests just months after arriving in the classroom, because the clock started ticking on their first test when they entered the system, which could take half a year to place them in a class). Within a couple years, these schools had had most of their budgets taken away.

When the standardized tests rolled around, this teacher would lead her students into the only room in the school with computers – the test taking room. For many of these students, this was the first time they had ever used a computer. She would tell them to do their best and leave the room for an hour, while a well-paid proctor (along with test-taking computers, the only thing NCLB guaranteed funding for) observed them as they tried to figure out how a mouse worked. They would all score zero on the test, and the school would be punished.

NCLB was such a failure that it was eventually rescinded (in 2015), but by that time, a new system of standardization had rushed in to fill the gap, the Common Core. Common Core is a set of rigid standardized curriciula – with standardized assessment rubrics – that was, once again, driven by contempt for teachers. The argument for Common Core was that students were failing – not because of falling budgets or No Child Left Behind – but because the unions were "protecting bad teachers," who would then go on to fail students. By taking away discretion from teachers, we could impose "accountability" on them.

The absolutely predictable outcome followed Goodhart's Law to a tee: teachers prioritized inculcating students with the skills to pass the standardized tests, and when those test-taking skills crowded out actual learning, learning fell by the wayside.

This continues up to the most advanced part of public education, the Advanced Placement courses that students aspiring to college are strongly pressured to take. If Common Core is rigid, AP is brittle to the point of shattering. Anyone who's ever parented a kid through the US secondary school system knows how much time their kids spent learning to hit their marks on standardized assessments, to the exclusion of actual learning, and how soul-suckingly awful this is.

Take that staple of the AP assessment rubric: the five-paragraph essay (5PE), bane of students, teachers and parents everywhere:

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/kill-5-paragraph-essay

Speaking as a sometime writing teacher and an internationally bestselling essayist, 5PEs are objectively very bad essays. Their only virtue is that they can be assessed in a totally standard way, so the grade any given 5PE is awarded by any grader is likely to be the same grade it receives when presented to any other grader. Grading an essay is an irreducibly subjective matter, and the only way to create an objective standard for essays is to make the essays unrecognizable as essays.

And yet, the 5PE is the heart of assessment for many AP classes, from History to English to Social Studies and beyond. A kid who scores high on any humanities APs will have put endless hours into perfecting this perfectly abominable literary form, mastering a skill that they will never, ever be called upon to use (the top piece of college entrance advice is "don't write your personal essay as a 5PE" and college professors spend the first half of their 101 classes teaching students not to turn in 5PEs).

The same goes for many other aspects of AP and Common Core assessment. If you do AP Lit, you'll be required to annotate the literature you read by making a set number of marginal observations on every page of the novels, poems and essays you read. Again, as a literary reviewer, novelist, and nonfiction writer who's written more than 30 books, I have to say, this is a batshit way to learn to analyze and criticize literature. Its sole virtue is that it reduces the qualitative matter of literary analysis to a quantitative target that students can hit and teachers can count.

And that's where AI comes in. AI – the ultimate bullshit machine – can produce a better 5PE than any student can, because the point of the 5PE isn't to be intellectually curious or rigorous, it's to produce a standardized output that can be analyzed using a standardized rubric.

I've been writing YA novels and doing school visits for long enough to cement my understanding that kids are actually pretty darned clever. They don't graduate from high school thinking that their mastery of the 5PE is in any way good or useful, or that they're learning about literature by making five marginal observations per page when they read a book.

Given all this, why wouldn't you ask an AI to do your homework? That homework is already the revenge of Goodhart's Law, a target that has ruined its metric. Your homework performance says nothing useful about your mastery of the subject, so why not let the AI write it. Hell, if you're a smart, motivated kid, then letting the AI write your bullshit 5PEs might give you time to write something good.

Teachers aren't to blame here. They have to teach to the test, or they will fail their students (literally, because they will have to assign a failing grade to them, and figuratively, because a student who gets a failing grade will face all kinds of punishments). Teachers' unions – who consistently fight against standardization and in favor of their members discretion to practice their educational skills based on kids' individual needs – are the best hope we have:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/29/jane-mcalevey/#trump-is-a-scab

The right hates teachers and keeps on setting them up to fail. That hatred has no bottom. Take the Republican Texas State Rep Ryan Guillen, whose House Bill 462 will increase the state's school safety budget from $10/student to $100/student, with those additional funds earmarked to buy one armed drone per 200 students (these drones are supplied by a single company that has ties to Guillen):

https://dronelife.com/2024/12/08/texas-lawmaker-proposes-drones-for-school-security-a-less-lethal-solution/

Imagine how much Texas schools could do with an extra $90/student/year – how much more usefully that money could be spent if it were turned over to teachers. But instead, Rep Guillen wants to put "AI in schools" in the form of drones equipped with pepper-spray, flash bangs, and "lances" that can be smashed into people at 100mph.

The problem with AI in schools isn't that students are using AI to do their homework. It's that schools have been turned into reward-hacking AIs by a system that hates the idea of an educated populace almost as much as it hates the idea of unionized teachers who are empowered to teach our kids.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Lee Haywood, CC BY-SA 2.0; modified)

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)

#15yrsago Bill Ayers’s To Teach: The Journey, in Comics, a humanist look at education https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/10/bill-ayerss-to-teach-the-journey-in-comics-a-humanist-look-at-education/

#10yrsago Kansas officials stonewall mathematician investigating voting machine “sabotage” https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article27951310.html

#10yrsago Chinese mega-manufacturers set up factories in India https://web.archive.org/web/20150811043714/https://www.itworld.com/article/2968375/android/foxconn-to-invest-5b-to-set-up-first-of-up-to-12-factories-in-india.html

#10yrsago Oracle’s CSO demands an end to customers checking Oracle products for defects https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/oracle-security-chief-to-customers-stop-checking-our-code-for-vulnerabilities/

#10yrsago Girl Sex 101: “for EVERYone who wants to bone down with chicks, regardless of your gender/orientation.” https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/girlsex-101/

#10yrsago John Oliver on the brutal state of sex-ed in America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0jQz6jqQS0

#10yrsago Insurance monitoring dashboard devices used by Uber let hackers “cut your brakes” over wireless https://www.wired.com/2015/08/hackers-cut-corvettes-brakes-via-common-car-gadget/

#10yrsago US lobbying for TPP to lock up clinical trial data https://theconversation.com/how-the-battle-over-biologics-helped-stall-the-trans-pacific-partnership-45648

#10yrsago Larry Lessig considers running for the Democratic presidential nomination https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaqrQz71bMk

#10yrsago Felicia Day’s “You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)” https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/11/felicia-days-youre-never-weird-on-the-internet-almost/

#10yrsago Overshare: Justin Hall’s biopic about the first social media/blogging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxD4mqFtySQ

#5yrsago When you hear "intangibles"… https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#capitalists-hate-competition

#5yrsago How they're killing the post office https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#sos-usps

#5yrsago Terra Nullius https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#terra-nullius

#5yrsago Uber lost $4b in H1/2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/10/folksy-monopolists/#bezzled

#5yrsago Warren Buffet, monopolist https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/10/folksy-monopolists/#folksy-monopolists

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1076 words yesterday, 27803 words total).

  • 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

PDF

09.08.2025 à 15:40

Pluralistic: Millionaire on billionaire violence (10 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3351 mots)


Today's links


A Roman ruin. In the foreground are two figures: a guerrilla fighter with a rifle and crossed bandoliers and a boxer in trunks and sash, fists raised. Both figures' heads have been replaced with tophatted caricatures of millionaires from Gilded Age editorial cartoons.

Millionaire on billionaire violence (permalink)

For the past year, I've been increasingly fascinated by a political mystery: how has antitrust enforcement become a global phenomenon after spending 40-years in a billionaire-induced coma?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

Political scientists will tell you that policies that billionaires hate will not ever be enacted by politicians, no matter how popular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

And yet, all around the world – the US (under Trump I, Biden and Trump II), Canada, the UK, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, even China – governments have done more on antitrust over the past couple years than over the past four decades. Where is this coming from?

My working theory basically boiled down to "enough is enough" – AKA Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." As in: people are just so pissed off with corporate power that politicians are finally acting to curb it.

But I was never very satisfied with this. There's lots of stuff that the public is furious about, which politicians aren't acting on, from climate change to taxing billionaires. Why antitrust and not all that stuff?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

I've been mulling this over, and I got to thinking about a low-key disagreement I used to have with comrades in the digital human rights world, just before all the antitrust stuff really kicked off:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/04/why-is-there-so-much-antitrust-energy-for-big-tech-but-not-for-big-telco/

Back then, people on the same side as the barricades as me were deeply suspicious of antitrust. They thought that the bubbling policy revival for antitrust was a way for phone and cable companies to enlist the government to go after their adversaries in the tech world, against whom they were (badly) losing the Net Neutrality fight:

https://www.techdirt.com/2019/06/04/if-big-tech-is-huge-antitrust-problem-why-are-we-ignoring-telecom/

Back then, my thesis was, Sure, maybe Big Telco is pushing for antitrust to target Big Tech, but once antitrust arises from its long slumber, it will turn on telcos – and every other concentrated industry.

Tldr: I'm pretty sure that's what's happening.

You see, one part of the antitrust battle boils down to a fight between rentiers and capitalists. The largest tech (and other) companies are primarily rentiers – entities that make money by owning things, rather than doing things. They make rents, at the expense of other companies' profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Companies like Epic (makers of Fortnite) want to sell your kids skins and mods for their in-game avatars without giving Apple and Google 30% of every dollar that brings in, and they've got a lot of money to make that desire real:

https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/07/31/24-6256.pdf

This is millionaire-on-billionaire violence. It's gigantic corporations going to war against galactic-scale corporations. These pro-antitrust companies are the inheritors of the telcos' mantle, powerful belligerents in an Extremely Large Tech war on Big Tech. There are a lot of these large companies and they're sick of being subjected to a 30% economy-wide App Tax on all the payments they receive in-app:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Let me be clear: I'm not saying that the only reason we're getting muscular, global anti-monopoly action is that slightly smaller corporations (who universally aspire to acquiring monopolies of their own) are fighting for their own self-interest.

What I'm saying is that the coalition of everyday people who've had their lives ruined by monopolists and corporations that are stuck paying the app tax (and the 51% tax that Google/Meta take out of every ad-tech dollar, the 45-51% Amazon takes out of every e-commerce dollar, and the sums that Tiktok, Twitter and Meta extort from business customers to "boost" in order to reach their own followers) is, in combination, sufficient to awaken the antitrust giant.

Members of the public are critical to this fight – we're the ones who tip the scales from one side to the other. That's why rentiers go to such great lengths to convince policymakers that they have the public on their side, whether that's Amazon trotting out "small businesses" that depend on (and get viciously fucked by) Amazon's ecommerce platform:

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4760357-amazon-basics-antitrust/

Or leaders of groups like the NAACP who've been bribed to front for the phone companies and cable operators in the fight against Net Neutrality:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/12/19/naacp-fought-net-neutrality-until-last-week-now-suddenly-supports-idea/

All other things being equal, policymakers will simply side with the deepest-pocketed, most unified corporate lobby in any fight (which is how the media companies won the Napster Wars). But when the public and one side of the corporate world is on one side of an issue, policymakers understand that siding with them will get them votes and money, which is much better than just getting money (which is how we won the SOPA/PIPA fight):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/everyone-made-themselves-hero-remembering-aaron-swartz

We can really see this in the EU, where the new Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are going after Big Tech with both barrels, with the enthusiastic support of the EU's tech industry. That's because the EU's tech industry barely registers when placed alongside of US Big Tech, which has sucked up nearly 100% of the market oxygen by cheating (on privacy, taxes, wages, etc). Despite the farcical efforts of US tech shills like Nick Clegg (former UK Deputy Prime Minister turned Meta shill, who insisted that Facebook was "defending European cyberspace from Chinese communism"), everyone knew that US tech companies were extracting billions of euros (and the personal information of 500m Europeans) from the bloc and siphoning it off to America, after first cleansing it of any tax obligations by laundering it through Ireland and the Netherlands.

If Europe still had thriving tech "national champions" – Olivetti, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, etc – these companies might plausibly mount an opposition to muscular tech regulation in the EU. But these companies were crippled by predatory capital and then mostly absorbed into US Big Tech (or ground into dust).

Back when I was having a friendly blog-argument with my comrades about whether tech antitrust was a Big Telco plot, I averred that it didn't really matter, because Big Tech really was terrible, and because once we'd roused antitrust enforcement from its 40-year slumber, we could wrest control of it from the telecoms monopolists who'd helped us dig it up and reanimate it.

In other words: the war against the corruption brought about by corporate concentration is hard to kindle, but it's even harder to extinguish. The corporations that are fanning the flames are focused – as corporations inevitably are, to the detriment of our planet and politics – on the short term gains they stand to reap from their actions. But we can – we must – take the long view. Smashing corporate power is the key to destroying fascism and ensuring our species' survival, so our focus needs to be on building the blaze, and if some of those adding fuel to the fire happen to aspire to building monopolies of their own, then our job is to give 'em a nasty surprise when that day comes.

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)

#15yrsago The Last Musketeer: whimsical, dreamlike, delightful comic https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/08/the-last-musketeer-whimsical-dreamlike-delightful-comic/

#15yrsago Resistance: YA comic about the kids who served in the French resistance https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/09/resistance-ya-comic-about-the-kids-who-served-in-the-french-resistance/

#5yrsago Test-proctoring software worsens systemic bias https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/09/just-dont-have-a-face/#algorithmic-bias

#5yrsago Commercial real-estate's looming collapse https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/09/just-dont-have-a-face/#systemic-risk

#1yrago "Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/09/terawulf/#hunterbrook

#1yrago Private equity rips off its investors, too https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/08/sucker-at-the-table/#clucks-definance

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1031 words yesterday, 25719 words total).

  • 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/

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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.

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07.08.2025 à 17:31

Pluralistic: Good ideas are popular (07 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3289 mots)


Today's links


A black and white photo of a massive crowd (a 1910s Mayday parade); matted into the background of the photo are the three wise monkeys, posed before a cloud-shrouded capitol building.

Good ideas are popular (permalink)

In democracies, we're told, politicians exist to reflect and enact the popular will; but the truth is, politicians' primary occupation is thwarting the will of the people, in preference to the will of a small group of wealthy, powerful people.

That's an empirical finding, based on a study of 1,779 policy outcomes, which concluded that:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

The policy preferences of the public would give the leadership of any mainstream party the fantods. Here's a remarkable thread where the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel summarizes recent polling on public preferences:

https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1953126243118813556

  • "Capitalism does more harm than good" (56% globally; 69% in France; 74% in India)

https://www.edelman.com/news-awards/2020-edelman-trust-barometer

  • In 28 of 34 countries, the majority are anti-capitalist:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecaf.12591

  • A majority of Canadians, Australians and Britons aged 18-34 believe "socialism will improve the economy and well-being of citizens":

https://jacobin.com/2023/03/socialism-right-wing-think-tank-polling-support-anti-capitalism

  • 62% of Americans aged 18-30 "hold favorable views of socialism" (61% of Democrats have a positive view of socialism vs 50% who are positive on capitalism):

https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher-taxes-next-year

  • Majority of youth climate group members blame "a system that puts profit over people and planet" and 89% say that system is capitalism:

https://www.climatevanguard.org/publications-all/mapping-the-global-youth-climate-movement

  • Majority support a national job guarantee (72% UK, 78% US; 79% France):

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas

  • Majority of Americans support workplace democracy (unions, worker shareholders and board seats):

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/what-do-americans-want-from-private-government-experimental-evidence-demonstrates-that-americans-want-workplace-democracy/D9C1DBB6F95D9EEA35A34ABF016511F4

  • Majority of Britons support public ownership of services (education, healthcare, rail, water, postal service, parks); 64% of Americans support universal public health care; 64% support public options for internet, child care, and housing;

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas

  • 74% of Britons support national, permanent rent-controls; 71% of Bay Staters and 55% of Californians agree:

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas

  • 72% of Americans support a living wage; 87% of Britons agree:

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas

  • 84% of Europeans support a millionaires' tax; 69% of Americans agree:

https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/

  • Majority of people in 40 countries want 4:1 maximum pay ratios for CEOs and their lowest-paid workers:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691614549773

  • 71% of Europeans want transformational reform of the UN and IMF, with proportional votes based on member-states' populations (58% of Americans agree):

https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/

  • Majorities of Europeans and Americans support "compensating low-income countries for climate damages, funding renewable energy in low-income countries, and supporting low-income countries to adapt to climate change":

https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/

  • 80-90% of people in medium/high-income countries want to finance this with a global tax on millionaires:

https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/

Hickel's thread reminded of the 2023 Pew report that found that:

  • 65% of Americans feel exhausted when thinking about politics;

  • 63% have little/no confidence in the US political system;

  • 4% think the US system works well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/18/the-people-no/#tell-ya-what-i-want-what-i-really-really-want

Unsurprisingly:

  • 87% of Americans want Congressional term limits;

  • 79% favor age limits for Congress and the Supreme Court;

  • 62% support automatic voter-registration for every American;

  • 65% want to abolish the Electoral College (47% of Republicans agree!);

  • 70% believe voters have too little influence over their representatives;

  • 83% of Republicans say big donors call the shots (80% of Dems agree);

  • 72% of Americans want to limit campaign contributions (75% D/71% R);

  • 58% of Americans believe it is possible to get money out of politics.

So on the one hand, this is all pretty dismal. It also makes the trend towards electing anti-democratic politicians who want to abolish elections a lot easier to understand: if you (correctly) believe you live in a world where politicians don't care about you, then why not vote for a strongman who'll punish your enemies and maybe leave you with a few more crumbs?

But on the other hand, this is very exciting, because it shows us what a truly democratic world would look like (and just how different that world would be from the billionaire astroturf-dominated social media world)! If the popular will can achieve primacy, we would live in a veritable paradise!

It also explains how candidates like Zohran Mamdani were able to clobber the political establishment simply by a) telling people that he would do popular things; and b) convincing them that he meant it.

Suppressing popular preferences in (nominal) democracies isn't easy. It requires absolute unity of the ruling classes. Whenever the faintest crack appears in capital's unity, good policies gush out of it. That's what's happened with antitrust this decade, where the divisions between billionaire rentiers like Apple/Google and the millionaire capitalists who want to escape their 30% app tax has allowed a rush of effective antitrust enforcement to sweep the world, to the detriment of both:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

By not hanging together, the rich let us hang them separately. And since there is no honor among thieves – since the rich want nothing more than to eat one anothers' lunches – there is disunity aplenty for us to exploit. We just have to remember that we are the (very large) majority and act like it.

(Image: Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

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 Charlie Stross, Hugo winner https://web.archive.org/web/20050810024249/http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2005/08/07/#hugo-thing

#10yrsago Veiny, slick silicone ovipositors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkfFZnK5W9s

#10yrsago A treadmill for Slinky toys, for your infinite Slinky-torturing pleasure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dinVcBEDhQ

#10yrsago The Princess and the Pony, from Kate “Hark a Vagrant” Beaton https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the-princess-and-the-pony-from-kate-hark-a-vagrant-beaton/

#5yrsago Free the law https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#recap

#5yrsago Google bans anticompetitive vocabularies https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#newspeak

#5yrsago Peter Thiel was right https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#christmas-voting-turkeys

#1yrago The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1048 words yesterday, 23678 words total).

  • 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:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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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

PDF

06.08.2025 à 16:20

Pluralistic: Which jobs can be replaced with AI? (06 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3150 mots)


Today's links


A hand-grenade whose pull-ring has a circular tag with the number 1 in the center of it dangling from it. Next to it, in dripping letters, is the phrase 'Customer service department - take a number,' over the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Behind the scene is a confusion of gears and mechanisms.

Which jobs can be replaced with AI? (permalink)

I don't think AI can do your job (but I do think an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job). However, there is a class of workers whose jobs can be performed perfectly by AI: workers with bullshit jobs:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/20/david-graebers-bullshit-jobs-why-does-the-economy-sustain-jobs-that-no-one-values/

David Graeber (RIP) identified several kinds of bullshit jobs and not all of those can be perfectly performed by an AI (for example, the flunkies that minor corporate princelings surround themselves with to demonstrate their status need to be human). But there are whole categories of job that perform functions that corporations don't want performed, like customer service rep, jobs they've spent decades degrading to the point where the people who do them have been stripped of all power and authority and serve no function except allowing a company to claim that they have a customer service department.

Replacing these workers with an AI not only saves money by removing their wage-bill from the corporate overhead, but it can actually turn the former cost center into a profit center. That's what Air Canada discovered when they replaced their customer service workers with chatbots. These chatbots gave bad advice to fliers that cost them money, and in every instance except one (where the aggrieved flier was so tenacious that he chased 8 weeks' worth of internal appeals at Air Canada before escalating the matter to a regulator), Air Canada got to keep the money:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/

All of this raises an obvious question: how can Air Canada (and other companies) get away with having customer service reps who are so useless that they can be swapped for defective chatbots?

The answer lies in enshittification. While most people who encounter the idea of enshittification glom onto the symptoms it describes, of a three-stage process by which platforms shuttle value from users to business customers to themselves, the crux of enshittification is why this decay takes place. The answer is power: firms that enshittify must first overpower the forces that keep their enshittificatory impulses in check, like competition and regulation (these are two sides of the same coin: getting rid of competition paves the way for regulatory capture).

Over decades, Air Canada has merged with the majority of its competitors and has become so structurally important to Canada – a big, geographically dispersed country with many fly-in settlements – that regulators can't really threaten it with meaningful penalties, not without threatening Canada itself. They're too big to fail, thus too big too jail, thus too big to care.

That's how Air Canada was able to turn its customer service department into such a joke that it just didn't matter anymore, and so it didn't matter if it replaced those purely ornamental customer service reps with chatbots.

The rise and rise of overseas call-center outsourcing paved the way for AI replacement in the same way that Walmart paved the way for Amazon. Once Walmart destroyed your town center and vaporized all the businesses that served your community, why wouldn't you shop on Amazon? Likewise: once companies replaced their customer service department with immiserated overseas call-center workers who were required to recite rote responses from a three-ring binder and were given no agency or capacity to solve your problem, why not replace them with AIs?

Monopolistic firms are full of people who they don't value because they do jobs the company doesn't value (e.g. moderators on large social media services).

This week, I'm at Skyboat Media studios, recording the audiobook for the Enshittification book, and so I got to talking with Gabrielle De Cuir and Stefan Rudnicki, the owners. They talked about the threat they're facing from AI audiobook "narrators," who replace directors, actors and editors with a single piece of software.

There's a whole class of audiobooks where AI can be a perfect substitute – thanks to Audible, and its enshittification. Audible has waged war on unionized voice actors, replacing them with desperate newbies who will tolerate terrible working conditions, including a practice called "punch and roll" that makes actors responsible for doing their own editing when they misspeak, rather than re-recording a passage for an editor to fix later ("pickups"). There are plenty of Audible books that are recorded without a director or an editor or a proofer, meaning that inexperienced actor's mistakes and mispronunciations survive into the final product. These books, produced by the monopolist audiobook platform, with a 90%+ market share for popular fiction, are already degraded to the point of being not fit for purpose. Replacing the actors with AI barely makes a difference.

AI text-to-speech is a giant improvement on existing TTS tools, and there are plenty of people who stand to benefit from this, for example people with visual impairments. But there's no business model in selling readaloud bots to blind people – certainly not a model that recoups the hundreds of billions that has been sprayed around for AI training and operation.

The AI business model relies on obliterating the wage bill of workers and replacing it with a cheaper software license. Unfortunately (for the fortunes of AI investors) the majority of workers whose wages can be readily swapped for a software license are the lowest-paid, most precarious ones, people whose jobs have already been degraded and enshittified to the point where no one will notice the difference if they are replaced with a chatbot.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; KBetik; CC BY-SA 3.0; modified)

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)

#10yrsago Why privacy activists and economists should be on the same side https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2640607

#10yrsago Universal Music’s anti-piracy ads reached new heights of crazypants gore https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/06/universal-musics-anti-piracy-ads-even-crazier-than-you-can-imagine/

#10yrsago UK govt wants your opinion on sending file-sharers to jail for 10 years https://web.archive.org/web/20150905144030/https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/copyright-enforcement-consultation

#10yrsago Robert Charles Wilson’s The Affinities: when science changes everything https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/06/robert-charles-wilsons-the-affinities-when-science-changes-everything/

#5yrsago California DMV's $50m/year data selloff https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#you-are-the-product

#5yrsago Novartis's $678m bribery scandal https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#novartis

#5yrsago US plummets below Russia and Mexico in global misery index https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#usa-usa-usa

#5yrsago Satanic Abortions cut through unconstitutional abortion laws https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#thyself-is-thy-master

#5yrsago Restore the Office of Technology Assessment https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#ota

#1yrago Circular battery self-sufficiency https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1007 words yesterday, 22630 words total).

  • 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:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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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

PDF

05.08.2025 à 15:00

Pluralistic: Bragging about replacing coders with AI is a sales-pitch (05 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3065 mots)


Today's links


A group of miserable men walking in a circle (Van Gogh's 'Prisoners'); they are cupped in two giant hands, between which protrudes a raygun that is bathing them in a sinister yellow-red light. In one corner sits a supremely self-satisfied business man, reclining in a comfortable chair, surrounded by fluffy clouds. The background is a hellscape of red smoke and brimstone.

Bragging about replacing coders with AI is a sales-pitch (permalink)

We spend a lot of time talking about AI's technical capabilities: what it can do now, what it might do tomorrow, what it will never do. But AI is only secondarily a technological phenomenon; it is primarily a financial phenomenon, hundreds of billions of dollars in investment capital in search of a return.

The return on that capital only comes from one place: workers' wages. AI – as a financial phenomenon – represents that AI will a) replace, and/or; b) frighten workers to the point where more of the revenues generated by firms that buy AI tools will be returned to executives and shareholders, at the expense of their workforce.

This is why AI bosses are so eager to cite statistics – conjured out of thin air, without any backing – about how AI is about to replace the majority of workers:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/07/will-your-job-survive-ai/

And it's why tech companies that are peddling AI tools boast so brazenly about how many programmers' work can be replaced by AI:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-jassy-8b1615_one-of-the-most-tedious-but-critical-tasks-activity-7232374162185461760-AdSz/

After all, tech workers were – until recently – the princes of labor. Despite infinitesimal union density in the tech sector, tech workers were in such high demand that they could tell their bosses to go fuck themselves – and keep their jobs. Those bosses knew that a worker who quit during the morning scrum could have a better job with a rival firm before evening cocktails.

While tech bosses cultivated a chumminess with these workers, treating them as peers (temporarily embarrassed founders, not employees) and sitting down for "town halls," they clearly hated this and wanted nothing more than to put these arrogant pismires in their place. The instant tech labor's supply caught up with demand, these bosses mass-fired their precious tech workers, canceled town halls ("Not a good use of my time" -M. Zuckerberg), and told workers that the "sweet spot" was a 60-hour work-week:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others

Facebook announced a 5% across-the-board layoff and doubled its executives' bonuses – on the same day. They fired thousands of workers and then hired a single AI researcher for $200m:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/07/10/meta-lured-ai-exec-away-from-apple-with-blockbuster-200m-pay-package

Whatever else all this is, it's a performance. It's a way of demonstrating the efficacy of the product they're hoping your boss will buy and replace you with: Remember when techies were prized beyond all measure, pampered and flattered? AI is SO GOOD at replacing workers that we are dragging these arrogant little shits out by their hoodies and firing them over Interstate 280 with a special, AI-powered trebuchet. Imagine how many of the ungrateful useless eaters who clog up your payroll *you will be able to vaporize when you buy our product!*

Which is why you should always dig closely into announcements about AI-driven tech layoffs. It's true that tech job listings are down 36% since ChatGPT's debut – but that's pretty much true of all job listings:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-layoffs-tech-industry-jobs-ece82b0babb84bf11497dca2dae952b5

And the major decline in tech hiring isn't the result of hiring far fewer programmers – the tech companies have mostly cut back on hiring marketers, administrative assistants, and HR staff.

The whole fucking economy is in freefall. It's so bad that Trump just fired the country's head labor statistician and pledged to replace her with a flunky who wouldn't produce numbers "that made him look bad":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twNjon4tp84

The tech industry has changed. During the lockdowns, tech companies trumpeted their hiring sprees as a performance of growth, staged for pandemic-panicked investors. Now, tech companies trumpet their layoffs as a performance of AI's technical excellence, aimed at potential AI customers and credulous investors stampeded by FOMO.

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)

#15yrsago Stuff: Oliver-Sacks-like account of pathological hoarders https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/05/stuff-oliver-sacks-like-account-of-pathological-hoarders/

#10yrsago David Byrne explains the streaming music ripoff https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/open-the-music-industrys-black-box.html

#10yrsago The only furniture you need is a single smooth stone that reminds you of your mother https://web.archive.org/web/20150809132854/http://the-toast.net/2015/02/24/get-rid-clutter-live-abundantly/

#10yrsago WATCH: Elizabeth Warren rescues Planned Parenthood, excoriates misogynist GOP creeps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeilHs9kZ2g

#10yrsago India’s porn ban collapses in less than 48 hours https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-33783539

#10yrsago Parenting and the Internet: the smarter, missing third way https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/05/what-is-missing-from-the-kids-internet

#10yrsago Idaho court strikes down anti-whistleblower “ag-gag” law https://www.acluidaho.org/en/news/idaho-ag-gag-law-ruled-unconstitutional-federal-court

#10yrsago Actual questions from my Green Card questionnaire https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/05/actual-questions-from-my-green-card-questionnaire/

#10yrsago Germany’s top prosecutor fired for bringing “treason” charge against Netzpolitik https://web.archive.org/web/20150807201032/https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/world/article/German-prosecutor-accuses-gov-t-of-meddling-in-6423563.php

#5yrsago Qanon is magical thinking https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#magical-thinking

#5yrsago Trump wants to force you to invest in failing fossil fuel companies https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#crybabies

#5yrsago Cori Bush triumphs in Missouri https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#cori-bush

#5yrsago Qanon is an ARG https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#adrian-hon

#5yrsago GE's billion dollar tax-fraud https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#ge-fraud

#5yrsago Contextual ads can save media https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads

#1yrago Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1053 words yesterday, 21600 words total).

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

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04.08.2025 à 15:55

Pluralistic: AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot (04 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4716 mots)


Today's links


A giant junkbot made of, variously, a ladder, a bathtub, a set of rickety stairs, a slippery rug, a pair of scissors. It brandishes a double-barreled shotgun. Its head is the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' It is bearing down on a male suited figure who is in the process of slipping and falling on his ass. His head has been replaced by a hoodie, which casts his face into shadow. He has lost control of a laptop that is about to fall to the ground. It displays a Windows Blue Screen of Death. The shadow cast by the robot is filled with the green 'code waterfall' letters seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot (permalink)

It's easy to understand why some programmers love their AI assistants and others loathe them: the former group get to decide how and when they use AI tools, while the latter has AI forced upon them by bosses who hope to fire their colleagues and increase their workload.

Formally, the first group are "centaurs" (people assisted by machines) and the latter are "reverse-centaurs" (people conscripted into assisting machines):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

Most workers have parts of their jobs they would happily automate away. I know of a programmer who uses AI to take a first pass at CSS code for formatted output. This is a notoriously tedious chore, and it's not hard to determine whether the AI got it right – just eyeball the output in a variety of browsers. If this was a chore you hated doing and someone gave you an effective tool to automate it, that would be cause for celebration. What's more, if you learned that this was only reliable for a subset of cases, you could confine your use of the AI to those cases.

Likewise, many workers dream of doing something through automation that is so expensive or labor-intensive that they can't possibly do it. I'm thinking here of the film editor who extolled the virtues to me of deepfaking the eyelines of every extra in a crowd scene, which lets them change the focus of the whole scene without reassembling a couple hundred extras, rebuilding the set, etc. This is a brand new capability that increases the creative flexibility of that worker, and no wonder they love it. It's good to be a centaur!

Then there's the poor reverse-centaurs. These are workers whose bosses have saddled them with a literally impossible workload and handed them an AI tool. Maybe they've been ordered to use the tool, or maybe they've been ordered to complete the job (or else) by a boss who was suggestively waggling their eyebrows at the AI tool while giving the order. Think of the freelance writer whom Hearst tasked with singlehandedly producing an entire, 64-page "best-of" summer supplement, including multiple best-of lists, who was globally humiliated when his "best books of the summer" list was chock full of imaginary books that the AI "hallucinated":

https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/

No one seriously believes that this guy could have written and fact-checked all that material by himself. Nominally, he was tasked with serving as the "human in the loop" who validated the AI's output. In reality, he was the AI's fall-guy, what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink," who absorbed the blame for the inevitable errors that arise when an employer demands that a single human sign off on the products of an error-prone automated system that operates at machine speeds.

It's never fun to be a reverse centaur, but it's especially taxing to be a reverse centaur for an AI. AIs, after all, are statistical guessing programs that infer the most plausible next word based on the words that came before. Sometimes this goes badly and obviously awry, like when the AI tells you to put glue or gravel on your pizza. But more often, AI's errors are precisely, expensively calculated to blend in perfectly with the scenery.

AIs are conservative. They can only output a version of the future that is predicted by the past, proceeding on a smooth, unbroken line from the way things were to the way they are presumed to be. But reality isn't smooth, it's lumpy and discontinuous.

Take the names of common code libraries: these follow naming conventions that make it easy to predict what a library for a given function will be, and to guess what a given library does based on its name. But humans are messy and reality is lumpy, so these conventions are imperfectly followed. All the text-parsing libraries for a programming language may look like this: docx.text.parsing; txt.text.parsing, md.text.parsing, except for one, which defies convention by being named text.odt.parsing. Maybe someone had a brainfart and misnamed the library. Maybe the library was developed independently of everyone else's libraries and later merged. Maybe Mercury is in retrograde. Whatever the reason, the world contains many of these imperfections.

Ask an LLM to write you some software and it will "hallucinate" (that is, extrapolate) libraries that don't exist, because it will assume that all text-parsing libraries follow the convention. It will assume that the library for parsing odt files is called "odt.text.parsing," and it will put a link to that nonexistent library in your code.

This creates a vulnerability for AI-assisted code, called "slopsquatting," whereby an attacker predicts the names of libraries AIs are apt to hallucinate and creates libraries with those names, libraries that do what you would expect they'd do, but also inject malicious code into every program that incorporates them:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

This is the hardest type of error to spot, because the AI is guessing the statistically most plausible name for the imaginary library. It's like the AI is constructing one of those spot-the-difference image puzzles on super-hard mode, swapping the fork and knife in a diner's hands from left to right and vice-versa. You couldn't generate a harder-to-spot bug if you tried.

It's not like people are very good at supervising machines to begin with. "Automation blindness" is what happens when you're asked to repeatedly examine the output of a generally correct machine for a long time, and somehow remain vigilant for its errors. Humans aren't really capable of remaining vigilant for things that don't ever happen – whatever attention and neuronal capacity you initially devote to this never-come eventuality is hijacked by the things that happen all the time. This is why the TSA is so fucking amazing at spotting water-bottles on X-rays, but consistently fails to spot the bombs and guns that red team testers smuggle into checkpoints. The median TSA screener spots a hundred water bottles a day, and is (statistically) never called upon to spot something genuinely dangerous to a flight. They have put in their 10,000 hours, and then some, on spotting water bottles, and approximately zero hours on spotting stuff that we really, really don't want to see on planes.

So automation blindness is already going to be a problem for any "human in the loop," from a radiologist asked to sign off on an AI's interpretation of your chest X-ray to a low-paid overseas worker remote-monitoring your Waymo…to a programmer doing endless, high-speed code-review for a chatbot.

But that coder has it worse than all the other in-looped humans. That coder doesn't just have to fight automation blindness – they have to fight automation blindness and spot the subtlest of errors in this statistically indistinguishable-from-correct code. AI's are basically doing bug steganography, smuggling code defects in by carefully blending them in with correct code.

At code shops around the world, the reverse centaurs are suffering. A survey of Stack Overflow users found that AI coding tools are creating history's most difficult-to-discharge technology debt in the form of "almost right" code full of these fiendishly subtle bugs:

https://venturebeat.com/ai/stack-overflow-data-reveals-the-hidden-productivity-tax-of-almost-right-ai-code/

As Venturebeat reports, while usage of AI coding assistants is up (from 76% last year to 84% this year), trust in these tools is plummeting – 33%, with no bottom in sight. 45% of coders say that debugging AI code takes longer than writing the code without AI at all. Only 29% of coders believe that AI tools can solve complex code problems.

Venturebeat concludes that there are code shops that "solve the 'almost right' problem" and see real dividends from AI tools. What they don't say is that the coders for whom "almost right" isn't a problem are centaurs, not reverse centaurs. They are in charge of their own production and tooling, and no one is using AI tools as a pretext for a relentless hurry-up amidst swingeing cuts to headcount.

The AI bubble is driven by the promise of firing workers and replacing them with automation. Investors and AI companies are tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) betting that bosses who can fire a worker and replace them with a chatbot will pay the chatbot's maker an appreciable slice of that former worker's salary for an AI that takes them off the payroll.

The people who find AI fun or useful or surprising are centaurs. They're making automation choices based on their own assessment of their needs and the AIs' capabilities.

They are not the customers for AI. AI exists to replace workers, not empower them. Even if AI can make you more productive, there is no business model in increasing your pay and decreasing your hours.

AI is about disciplining labor to decrease its share of an AI-using company's profits. AI exists to lower a company's wage-bill, at your expense, with the savings split between your boss and an AI company. When Getty or the NYT or another media company sues an AI company for copyright infringement, that doesn't mean they are opposed to using AI to replace creative workers – they just want a larger slice of the creative workers' salaries in the form of a copyright license from the AI company that sells them the worker-displacing tool.

They'll even tell you so. When the movie studios sued Midjourney, the RIAA (whose most powerful members are subsidiaries of the same companies that own the studios) sent out this press statement, attributed to RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier:

There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry. Unfortunately, some bad actors – like Midjourney – see only a zero-sum, winner-take-all game.

Get that? The problem isn't that Midjourney wants to replace all the animation artists – it's that they didn't pay the movie studios license fees for the training data. They didn't create "partnerships."

Incidentally: Mitch Glazier's last job was as a Congressional staffer who slipped an amendment into a must-pass bill that killed musicians' ability to claim the rights to their work back after 35 years through "termination of transfer." This was so outrageous that Congress held a special session to reverse it and Glazier lost his job.

Whereupon the RIAA hired him to run the show.

AI companies are not pitching a future of AI-enabled centaurs. They're colluding with bosses to build a world of AI-shackled reverse centaurs. Some people are using AI tools (often standalone tools derived from open models, running on their own computers) to do some fun and exciting centaur stuff. But for the AI companies, these centaurs are a bug, not a feature – and they're the kind of bug that's far easier to spot and crush than the bugs that AI code-bots churn out in volumes no human can catalog, let alone understand.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

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 Napster loses $20MM on $21MM revenue in Q1 05 https://web.archive.org/web/20051112133158/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=12264

#10yrsago NSA conducted commercial espionage against Japanese government and businesses https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/wikileaks-says-us-spied-on-another-ally—-this-time-japan/2015/07/31/893e1207-9b4e-4c88-80ad-c8eb79f8df2e_story.html

#10yrsago Windows 10 defaults to keylogging, harvesting browser history, purchases, and covert listening https://www.bgr.com/general/windows-10-upgrade-spying-how-to-opt-out/

#10yrsago UK ECHELON journalist: “Snowden proved spies need accountability” https://theintercept.com/2015/08/03/life-unmasking-british-eavesdroppers/

#10yrsago David Cameron will publish the financial details and viewing habits of all UK porn-watchers https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jul/30/cameron-promises-action-to-restrict-under18s-accessing-pornography

#10yrsago Proof-of-concept firmware worm targets Apple computers https://www.wired.com/2015/08/researchers-create-first-firmware-worm-attacks-macs/

#10yrsago What happened when we got subpoenaed over our Tor exit node https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/04/what-happened-when-we-got-subpoenaed-over-our-tor-exit-node/

#10yrsago EFF and coalition announce new Do Not Track standard for the Web https://www.eff.org/press/releases/coalition-announces-new-do-not-track-standard-web-browsing

#10yrsago Trophy hunting is “hunting” the way that Big Thunder Mountain is a “train ride” https://www.flickr.com/photos/bar-art/20287603731/

#10yrsago 3D maps of London Underground stations https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/3d-maps-of-every-underground-station-hijklm-14683/

#10yrsago Open “Chromecast killer” committed suicide-by-DRM https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/04/matchstick-more-open-chromecast-destroyed-drm-announces-plans-to-return-all-funds/

#10yrsago Privatized, for-profit immigration detention centers force detainees to work for $1-3/day https://www.latimes.com/nation/immigration/la-na-detention-immigration-workers-20150803-story.html

#10yrsago What happened when we got subpoenaed over our Tor exit node https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/04/what-happened-when-we-got-subpoenaed-over-our-tor-exit-node/

#10yrsago EFF and coalition announce new Do Not Track standard for the Web https://www.eff.org/press/releases/coalition-announces-new-do-not-track-standard-web-browsing

#10yrsago Trophy hunting is “hunting” the way that Big Thunder Mountain is a “train ride” https://www.flickr.com/photos/bar-art/20287603731/

#10yrsago 3D maps of London Underground stations https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/3d-maps-of-every-underground-station-hijklm-14683/

#10yrsago Open “Chromecast killer” committed suicide-by-DRM https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/04/matchstick-more-open-chromecast-destroyed-drm-announces-plans-to-return-all-funds/

#10yrsago Privatized, for-profit immigration detention centers force detainees to work for $1-3/day https://www.latimes.com/nation/immigration/la-na-detention-immigration-workers-20150803-story.html

#5yrsago Papercraft Addams Family house https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#neat-sweet-petite

#5yrsago Google acquires major stake in ADT https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#vertical-integration

#5yrsago Jack Dorsey's interop plan https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#jack-giant-killer

#5yrsago Collective Action In Tech For Black Lives Matter https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#anti-racist-tech

#5yrsago Papercraft Addams Family house https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#neat-sweet-petite

#5yrsago Google acquires major stake in ADT https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#vertical-integration

#5yrsago Jack Dorsey's interop plan https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#jack-giant-killer

#5yrsago Collective Action In Tech For Black Lives Matter https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#anti-racist-tech

#5yrsago NSO Group cyberweapons targeted Togo's opposition https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/03/turnkey-authoritarianism/#nso-togo

#5yrsago The sordid tale of We Charity https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/03/turnkey-authoritarianism/#we-charity

#5yrsago A universal remote for killing people https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/03/turnkey-authoritarianism/#minimed

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1079 words yesterday, 20530 words total).

  • 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

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