LePartisan.info À propos Podcasts Fil web
Flux grenoblois
Fr3 Alpes Fr.Bleu Isère Infos épinglées Agendas Ressources Assos Webcams
Écologie BLOGS Revues Médias
🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist
Souscrire à ce FLUX

PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

27.03.2025 à 16:05

Pluralistic: Reality-Based Communities (27 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3746 mots)


Today's links


Robin Hood, as seen from the back. He stands before a plinth atop which sits a guillotine with a hapless aristocrat strapped to it, an executioner holding the rope. To one side is an archery target with an arrow in the bullseye position. The background is a waving American flag, heavily halftoned.

Reality-Based Communities (permalink)

Remember the Global War on Terror? I know, it's been a minute. But there was a time when we were all meant to take terrorism – real terrorism, the knocking-down-buildings kind, not the being-mean-to-Teslas kind – seriously.

Back in the early oughts, I remember picking up a copy of the Financial Times in an airport lounge and flipping through it, and coming across an "advice to corporate management" column in which the question was, "Should I take out terrorism insurance for my business?" The columnist's answer: "The actual risk to your business of a terrorism-related disruption rounds to zero. However: a) your shareholders don't understand this, an b) your insurance company does. That means that you can buy a very large amount of terrorism insurance for a very small amount of money, making this a cheap price to pay to mollify your easily frightened investors."

I never forgot that little piece of writing. It was a powerful reminder that successful large-scale enterprises must attend to the world as it is, not as ideology dictates that it should be. This was – and is – a deeply heterodox position among the ideological defenders of capitalism, who continue to uphold Milton Friedman's maxim that:

Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

These ideologues – who often cross over from boardrooms into governments – are with the GW Bush official who dismissed a journalist as a member of the "reality-based community":

When we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

But ultimately, someone has to make investments and plans that take accord of the world as it is, the adversaries they face, the real and material emergencies unfolding around them. When the Pentagon announces that henceforth the climate emergency will take a prime place in its threat assessments and budgets, that's not "the military going woke" – it's the military joining the reality-based community:

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/10/26/the-pentagon-has-to-include-climate-risk-in-all-of-its-plans-and-budgets/

This explains the radical shear between the Wall Street Journal's editorial page – in which you'll learn that governments can't solve any problems and markets solve all problems (including the problem of governments) – and the news reporting within, in which the critical role of the state in regulating and fueling markets is acknowledged.

The tension between the right's ideologues in boardrooms and governments and the operational people in charge of keeping the machines running has only escalated since the War on Terror days. There's an important sense in which leftists – as materialists – are playing the same game as these operational managers of capitalism. Take Thomas Piketty, the socialist economist whose blockbuster 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century argued that rising inequality threatened capitalism itself:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

By analyzing three centuries' worth of capital flows, Piketty showed that when inequality reached a certain tipping point, the result was societal upheaval that continued until so much capital had been destroyed that inequality was reduced (because everyone had been pauperized). Piketty appealed to capitalism's technocrats to institute redistributive programs. His point was that building hospitals and schools was ultimately cheaper than paying for the guard-labor you'd need to keep people from building guillotines outside the gates of your walled estate.

The rise and rise of surveillance tech, and its successors, such as lethal drones and offshore gulags, can be seen as a tacit acknowledgment of Piketty's thesis. By lowering the cost of guard labor, it might possible to stabilize a society with higher levels of inequality, by identifying and neutralizing the people who are radicalized by the system's unfairness before you get an outbreak of guillotines:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#less-lethals

But reality is stubborn. Capitalism's defenders can insist that society will continue to function while wages stagnate and greedflation stokes the cost of living crisis, but ultimately, the military can't afford to have a fighting force that's in hock to payday lender usurers who are tormenting their families with arm-breaker collection calls:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/payday-loan-apps-cost-new-yorkers-500-million-plus-new-study-estimates.html

As Stein's Law – a bedrock of finance – has it, "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." The ideologues of capitalism can insist that Luigi Mangione is a monster and an aberration, an armed freeloader who wants something for nothing. But privately, their own security forces are telling them otherwise.

Writing for The American Prospect, Daniel Boguslaw reports on a leaked intelligence dossier from the Connecticut regional intelligence center – a "fusion center" created as part of the War on Terror – wherein we learn that the American people sees Mangione as a modern Robin Hood:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-27-intelligence-dossier-compares-luigi-mangione-robin-hood/

Many view Thompson as a symbolic representation of both as reports of insurance companies denying life sustaining medication coverage circulate online. It is not an unfair comparison to equate the current reaction toward Mangione to the reactions to Robin Hood, citizens may see Mangione’s alleged actions as an attack against a system designed to work against them.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hM3IZbnzk_cMk7evX2Urnwh5zxhRHpD5/view

The Connecticut fusion center isn't the only part of capitalism's operational wing that's taking notice of this. Today, Ken Klippenstein reports on an FBI threat assessment about the "heightened threat to CEOs":

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/fbi-becomes-rent-a-cops-for-ceos

The report comes from the FBI's counter-terrorism wing, which (Klippenstein notes) is in the business of rooting out "pre-crime" – identifying people who haven't committed a crime and neutralizing them. As Klippenstein writes, Trump AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have both vowed to treat anti-Tesla protests as acts of terror. That's the view from the top, but back on the front lines of the Connecticut fusion center, things are more reality-based:

[The public] may view the ensuing manhunt and subsequent arrest of Mangione as NYPD, and largely policing as a whole, as a tool that is willing to expend massive resources to protect the wealthy, while the average citizen is left to their own means for personal security.

Any good investor knows that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The only question is: will that halt is a controlled braking action, or a collision with reality's brick wall?

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Battlefield Earth screenwriter apologises https://nypost.com/2010/03/28/i-penned-the-suckiest-movie-ever-sorry/

#15yrsago UK government’s smoke-filled room legislative process https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/mar/28/pre-election-parliamentary-wash-up

#15yrsago UK government wants to secretly read your postal mail https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/henryporter/2010/mar/27/intercepting-mail-stasi-tax-inspectors

#10yrsago What it’s like to teach evolution at the University of Kentucky https://orionmagazine.org/article/defending-darwin/

#10yrsago Prisoner escapes by faking an email ordering his release https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-32095189

#10yrsago 8-bit photo gun made from a Game Boy and a thermal printer https://vtol.cc/filter/works/gbg-8

#5yrsago Employers scramble to buy remote-worker spyware https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#one-way-solidarity

#5yrsago United gets $25B stimulus and announces layoffs https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#friendly-skies

#5yrsago Trump officials killed Walmart opioid prosecutions https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#walmart-heroin

#5yrsago Boardgame Remix Kit https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#hide-n-seek

#5yrsago The Pandemic Playbook https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#pebkac

#5yrsago Charter techs get $25 gift cards instead of hazard pay https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#charter-sucks

#1yrago The credit card fee victory is a defeat https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/28/concentrated-benefits/#diffuse-harms

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)

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

26.03.2025 à 18:59

Pluralistic: The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing (26 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3280 mots)


Today's links


A modified version of the IWW 'The Hand That Will Rule the World - One Big Union' cartoon. The original depicts a collection of workers raising their fists, such that all their fists have merged into one gigantic fist. The image has been modified to add AOC sticking out from behind the fist on the left, speaking into a mic and raising her hand. From behind the right side of the fist emerges Bernie Sanders in mittens and mask, an iconic image of Sanders at the 2021 Biden inauguration.

The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing (permalink)

It's hard to imagine today, but Barack Obama ran as a populist outsider, buoyed into office by a grassroots organizing campaign that used an incredibly innovative online organizing tool called MyBarackObama.com, which directly connected rank-and-file supporters so they could self-organize, creating an unstoppable force.

But as far as Obama was concerned, MyBarackObama.com was a campaigning tool, not a governing tool. The last thing Obama wanted was a clamorous electorate jostling his elbow while he made the grand bargains that defined his presidency: secret drone killings, immunity for telcos that profited from in illegal NSA spying, impunity for CIA torturers, bailing out bankers, complicity in the foreclosure epidemic, and, of course, unlimited free money for health insurance companies through the ACA.

Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile, the GOP of his day was dominated by its own "grassroots" groups, the Tea Party movement that was funded and organized by the Kochs but who quickly slipped the leash and became an ungovernable force that conquered the party. It turns out that the kind of people who get really involved in party activism are, well, passionate (a less charitable term might be cranks – and I say this as a certified, grade-A crank). They really believe in the principles that bring them into party activism, and the only people they hate more than the other party are their own sellout leaders (oh, hi, Senator Fetterman!).

For a leader whose theory of governance involves a lot of back-room favor-trading and Extremely Grown Up compromising, an activated, organized base represents a powerful obstacle. Obama's seeming genius was his ability to awaken a grassroots campaigning force that he could then hit pause on once he attained office, then re-activate on demand (Obama "revived" MyBarackObama.com for his second presidential campaign):

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1532634/barack-obama-s-big-data-won-the-us-election-2.html

But ultimately, I think we have to conclude that Obama's strategy was a losing one. By putting his own organization into an induced coma between elections, Obama lost an important source of discipline and feedback that would have told him when his compromises overstepped the tolerance of the electorate – and the fact that Obama didn't have an organized base meant that his Democratic Party rivals and his Republican opponents could force him into bad compromises, as with the ACA.

Contrast Obama with another "populist outsider" in the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders. Sanders has never been afraid of his own base or their passion. Members of his staff disproportionately come from community and union organizing backgrounds. Think of the difference between Sanders' "Not me, US" and "Our revolution" slogans and Obama's dotcom URL, "MyBarackObama.com." Sanders' presidential campaigns were always organizing campaigns, and he's kept those going in non-election years.

Since Trump/Musk's shock therapy assault on American democracy, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been making headlines with a series of gigantic rallies across the country. The two Democratic Socialists have turned out vast crowds in Republican strongholds: 11,000 in Greely, CO; 15,000 in Tempe, AZ – and even bigger crowds in traditional Democratic turf: 34,000 in Denver.

Writing for The American Prospect, Micah Sifry describes the larger strategy behind these rallies. According to Faiz Shakur, the Sanders staffer who's organizing the events, the point of these events is to build a massive, grassroots organization that gets shit done:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-03-26-bernies-fighting-oligarchy-tour-organizing/

The campaign is hiring full-time organizers in "Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and several Western states," and they're already actively fighting in state-level battles, like a Colorado bill to make it easier to form a union:

https://www.cpr.org/2025/02/03/colorado-labor-peace-action-union-history/

These people-powered movements are mobilizing directly against Musk's dark money operation, like the Wisconsin Supreme Court election where Musk is paying people $100 each to vote against Susan Crawford, a progressive candidate:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-21-wisconsin-court-election-drawing-elon-musks-money/

The campaign is using online RSVPs to build out mailing lists. One interesting fact from Sifry's article: 65% of the signups are from people who are new to Sanders' mailing lists. 107,000 people have RSVPed so far. You can sign up here:

https://berniesanders.com/oligarchy/

Rationalization is easy to slip into and impossible to avoid. Politicians who make themselves beholden to organized supporters who really care about the issues are armoring themselves against the enormous pressure on elected representatives to make compromises. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have made compromises in their careers that I disagree with. I don't support them because I think they're perfect or immune to self-serving justifications. I support them because they are deliberately putting themselves in a position where it's much harder for them to make excuses and get away with it.

(Image: Matt A.J., CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago San Francisco Sheriff’s Deputy ring accused of pit-fighting inmates https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/S-F-jail-inmates-forced-to-fight-Adachi-says-6161221.php

#10yrsago Welfare encourages entrepreneurship https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare-makes-america-more-entrepreneurial/388598/

#10yrsago Here’s the TSA’s stupid, secret list of behavioral terrorism tells https://theintercept.com/2015/03/27/revealed-tsas-closely-held-behavior-checklist-spot-terrorists/

#5yrsago Reasonable covid food-safety advice https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#germophobes

#5yrsago Boris Johnson has coronavirus https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#bojo

#5yrsago States prep for postal voting https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#save-usps

#5yrsago Plutes cash in on stimulus https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#stimulus-scam

#5yrsago The US is now the epicenter of the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#suicide-cults

#1yrago End of the line for corporate sovereignty https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/27/korporate-kangaroo-kourts/#corporate-sovereignty

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)

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

25.03.2025 à 23:23

Pluralistic: Why I don't like AI art (25 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3936 mots)


Today's links


Norman Rockwell’s ‘self portrait.’ All the Rockwell faces have been replaced with HAL 9000 from Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ His signature has been modified with a series of rotations and extra symbols. He has ten fingers on his one visible hand.

Why I don't like AI art (permalink)

A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.

The thing that LLMs have changed in my friend's law school is letters of reference. Historically, students would only ask a prof for a letter of reference if they knew the prof really rated them. Writing a good reference is a ton of work, and that's rather the point: the mere fact that a law prof was willing to write one for you represents a signal about how highly they value you. It's a form of proof of work.

But then came the chatbots and with them, the knowledge that a reference letter could be generated by feeding three bullet points to a chatbot and having it generate five paragraphs of florid nonsense based on those three short sentences. Suddenly, profs were expected to write letters for many, many students – not just the top performers.

Of course, this was also happening at other universities, meaning that when my friend's school opened up for postdocs, they were inundated with letters of reference from profs elsewhere. Naturally, they handled this flood by feeding each letter back into an LLM and asking it to boil it down to three bullet points. No one thinks that these are identical to the three bullet points that were used to generate the letters, but it's close enough, right?

Obviously, this is terrible. At this point, letters of reference might as well consist solely of three bullet-points on letterhead. After all, the entire communicative intent in a chatbot-generated letter is just those three bullets. Everything else is padding, and all it does is dilute the communicative intent of the work. No matter how grammatically correct or even stylistically interesting the AI generated sentences are, they have less communicative freight than the three original bullet points. After all, the AI doesn't know anything about the grad student, so anything it adds to those three bullet points are, by definition, irrelevant to the question of whether they're well suited for a postdoc.

Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I've concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist's mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else's mind.

Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren't even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don't make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing it definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.

Now, I'm not much of a visual artist. I can't draw, though I really enjoy creating collages, which you can see here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

I can tell you that every time I move a layer, change the color balance, or use the lasso tool to nip a few pixels out of a 19th century editorial cartoon that I'm matting into a modern backdrop, I'm making a communicative decision. The goal isn't "perfection" or "photorealism." I'm not trying to spin around really quick in order to get a look at the stuff behind me in Plato's cave. I am making communicative choices.

What's more: working with that lasso tool on a 10,000 pixel-wide Library of Congress scan of a painting from the cover of Puck magazine or a 15,000 pixel wide scan of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights means that I'm touching the smallest individual contours of each brushstroke. This is quite a meditative experience – but it's also quite a communicative one. Tracing the smallest irregularities in a brushstroke definitely materializes a theory of mind for me, in which I can feel the artist reaching out across time to convey something to me via the tiny microdecisions I'm going over with my cursor.

Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line's worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that's the only part that carries any communicative freight. The AI has taken one sentence's worth of actual communication intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling and diluted it amongst a thousand brushtrokes or 10,000 words. I think this is what we mean when we say AI art is soul-less and sterile. Like the five paragraphs of nonsense generated from three bullet points from a law prof, the AI is padding out the part that makes this art – the microdecisions intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling – with a bunch of stuff that has no communicative intent and therefore can't be art.

If my thesis is right, then the more you work with the AI, the more art-like its output becomes. If the AI generates 50 variations from your prompt and you choose one, that's one more microdecision infused into the work. If you re-prompt and re-re-prompt the AI to generate refinements, then each of those prompts is a new payload of microdecisions that the AI can spread out across all the words of pixels, increasing the amount of communicative intent in each one.

Finally: not all art is verbose. Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" – a urinal signed "R. Mutt" – has very few communicative choices. Duchamp chose the urinal, chose the paint, painted the signature, came up with a title (probably some other choices went into it, too). It's a significant work of art. I know because when I look at it I feel a big, numinous irreducible feeling that Duchamp infused in the work so that I could experience a facsimile of Duchamp's artistic impulse.

There are individual sentences, brushstrokes, single dance-steps that initiate the upload of the creator's numinous, irreducible feeling directly into my brain. It's possible that a single very good prompt could produce text or an image that had artistic meaning. But it's not likely, in just the same way that scribbling three words on a sheet of paper or painting a single brushstroke will produce a meaningful work of art. Most art is somewhat verbose (but not all of it).

So there you have it: the reason I don't like AI art. It's not that AI artists lack for the big, numinous irreducible feelings. I firmly believe we all have those. The problem is that an AI prompt has very little communicative intent and nearly all (but not every) good piece of art has more communicative intent than fits into an AI prompt.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Secret copyright treaty will sideline the UN and replace it with private club of rich countries https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/03/acta-superstructure/

#15yrsago Discarded photocopier hard drives stuffed full of corporate secrets https://web.archive.org/web/20100322192937/http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/781567–high-tech-copy-machines-a-gold-mine-for-data-thieves

#10yrsago If Indiana legalizes homophobic discrimination, Gen Con’s leaving Indianapolis https://files.gencon.com/Gen_Con_Statement_Regarding_SB101.pdf

#10yrsago Sandwars: the mafias whose illegal sand mines make whole islands vanish https://www.wired.com/2015/03/illegal-sand-mining/<?a>

#10yrsago Woman medicated in a psychiatric ward until she said Obama didn’t follow her on Twitter https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-held-in-psychiatric-ward-after-correctly-saying-obama-follows-her-on-twitter-10132662.html

#10yrsago As crypto wars begin, FBI silently removes sensible advice to encrypt your devices https://www.techdirt.com/2015/03/26/fbi-quietly-removes-recommendation-to-encrypt-your-phone-as-fbi-director-warns-how-encryption-will-lead-to-tears/

#10yrsago Australia outlaws warrant canaries https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/australian-government-minister-dodge-new-data-retention-law-like-this/

#10yrsago TPP leak: states give companies the right to repeal nations’ laws https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/its-time-act-now-congress-poised-introduce-bill-fast-track-tpp-next-week

#5yrsago Social distancing and other diseases https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#flu-too

#5yrsago Record wind-power growth https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#blows-blows

#5yrsago Sanders on GOP stimulus cruelty https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#unlimited-cruelty

#5yrsago Canada nationalizes covid patents https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#c13

#5yrsago LoC plugs Little Brother https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#lb-loc

#5yrsago The ideology of economics https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#piketty

#1yrago Meatspace twiddling https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

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)

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

24.03.2025 à 17:12

Pluralistic: Trump loves Big Tech (24 Mar 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4336 mots)


Today's links


A science fiction illustration of a giant robot in a massive laboratory; on a lab-bench in the foreground are two bell jars. One contains a 'John Bull' character representing the UK. He looks alarmed. In the other jar is a WWI German officer with a musket; his jacket has been colorized to EU flag blue, and the EU circle of stars appears on his belly and the front of his peaked cap. The robot is attacking the John Bull jar with red laser beams coming from its eyes; the beams are melting the jar. The robot has Trump's hair and a Tesla logo on its chest.

Trump loves Big Tech (permalink)

The sight of the CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Tiktok arranged in a decorative semicircle behind Trump on the dais on inauguration day was the final repudiation of the Obama-era notion that tech was somehow committed to democracy (or the Democrats).

These billionaires transferred millions from their personal accounts to Trump's "inauguration fund," a kind of presidential tip jar that Trump rattled under the noses of any convenient industry leaders hoping for preferential treatment from his regime. It paid off handsomely.

Just days before the inauguration, Trump flew to Davos where he told the world's leaders – especially in the EU – that he would not tolerate attempts to regulate US Big Tech companies, such as the EU's groundbreaking Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act:

https://gizmodo.com/trump-returns-big-techs-ass-kissing-at-davos-2000554158

There's been a lot of talk about how disillusioned liberals – especially those in Silicon Valley – are with Big Tech's heel turn, but what about the Trumpist factions that hate Big Tech? Plenty of people in the Trump base profess a hatred of Big Tech, and then there are the "Khanservatives" – JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz, Marsha Blackburn, Ted Cruz, etc – who aligned themselves with Biden's FTC Chair Lina Khan and professed a principled objection to Big Tech monopolies and even co-sponsored bills with the likes of Elizabeth Warren that were designed to strike at the root of tech monopolists power.

Trumpism – like every successful political movement – is a coalition. It's made up of factions who virulently disagree on key issues, and Trump himself is the arbiter of which faction emerges triumphant and which one will have to eat shit and like it:

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

It's pretty clear at this point that the anti-Big Tech wing of the Trump Party has lost. Trump's saber-rattling is funneling billions into Big Tech's pockets and consolidating their power. Nowhere is this more visible than in the UK, where PM Keir Starmer fired the country's top anti-monopoly enforcer and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

But the British giveaways to US tech monopolists don't end there. Now, Starmer's announced plans to give a £800m/year tax giveaway to US Big Tech:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j0dgym8w1o

If the Trumpist techbusters were truly sincere in their professed belief that Big Tech had too much power and must be broken up, then this should all be provoking howls of outrage from the Khanservatives – but they're all conspicuously silent.

Riley Quinn, showrunner of the amazing Trashfuture podcast, once proposed that the conservative animus towards Big Tech was driven entirely by grievances over content moderation algorithms that downranked conspiracy theories, racial slurs, and fundraising messages from grifting far-right politicians. Quinn joked that these conservative techbusters could be satisfied if every Big Tech board meeting was henceforth solemnized with a "Stolen Likes Acknowledgement," in which the execs publicly repudiated the fortunes their forerunners amassed through the suffering of shadowbanned culture warriors. Think of it as a Twitter Files mirror world doppelganger of the "stolen land" acknowledgments often heard before progressive meetings and presentations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

For its part, the EU is holding its ground in the face of Trumpism. Indeed, Trump's obnoxious belligerence has trashed the popularity of many of the EU's far right parties, especially in Scandinavia, where the burgeoning neofascist movement has lost nearly all momentum in the face of Trump's threats to annex Greenland away from Denmark:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g0718g3jwo

(The same thing has happened in Canada, where the Trumpist Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has seen his massive polling leads collapse on the eve of a snap election):

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/livestory/canada-election-party-leaders-make-their-pitches-as-snap-campaign-kicks-off-9.6695126

But if the EU really wants to assert its sovereignty against American Big Tech, it should roll back Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, which copies the 1998 American Digital Millennium Copyright Act by banning reverse-engineering and modification of tech products and services:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

By rolling back this legislation – which the US trade rep lobbied hard for, threatening tariffs on EU exports if it wasn't passed – the EU would open space for European companies to compete with American tech giants, striking at their most profitable lines of business. This would let EU companies make app stores for mobile devices and games consoles (so EU software authors wouldn't have to send 30% of all revenues to a US tech monopolist). It would also let EU companies jailbreak US cars, like Teslas, unlocking all their software upgrades and also seling made-in-the-EU apps to European drivers. This move would let EU mechanics fix any car without paying an American car company for an expensive diagnostic tool, and it would let EU small businesses refill printer ink cartridges, crashing the 10,000,000% margins enjoyed by US giants like HP.

Trump is in the tank for American Big Tech. He may have courted the anti-Big Tech wing of his movement by trash-talking US tech giants, but all it took was a few million in bribes and he changed his tune. US Big Tech is now an ascendant faction in the Trump Party coalition, which makes them fair game for the trade war.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Record sales up, P2P sales up — RIAA’s story doesn’t add up https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/business/music-sales-rise-in-united-states.html

#20yrsago If the Constitution was a EULA https://web.archive.org/web/20050327014732/https://slate.msn.com/id/2115254/

#20yrsago Starbucks’ cup-aphorisms enrage “conservatives” https://web.archive.org/web/20050327061148/http://sptimes.com/2005/03/25/Business/Coffee_with_steam.shtml

#20yrsago US sabotaging efforts to create humanitarian copyright and patent policies https://web.archive.org/web/20050912085714/https://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/03/25/united_states_v_wipos_development_agenda.php

#20yrsago Send Frist photos of your ailments for diagnosis https://web.archive.org/web/20050326014931/https://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/470

#20yrsago Fox is advertising on Grokster, also suing to put Grokster out of business https://web.archive.org/web/20050702081915/http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=28535&Nid=12722&p=244505

#20yrsago Orphan works: what’s wrong and how to fix it https://web.archive.org/web/20120905011655/https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/orphanworks.html

#15yrsago Profit-sharing arrangements among Somali pirates https://web.archive.org/web/20100323020702/https://undispatch.com/somali-pirates-buisiness-model

#15yrsago Child-abuse survivors oppose EU censorwall https://mogis-verein.de/archive/eu/

#15yrsago Telcoms expert on Verizon’s fiber maintenance procedures https://web.archive.org/web/20100331120017/https://isen.com/blog/2010/03/verizon-doesnt-know-what-verizon-knows/

#15yrsago Reciting Pi while balancing books and spinning a Rubik’s Cube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUGjUCHSKLM

#15yrsago How the American phone companies used to feel about privacy https://web.archive.org/web/20100329150129/http://www.crypto.com/blog/wiretap_risks/

#15yrsago UK record lobby: democracy is a waste of time https://memex.craphound.com/2010/03/24/uk-record-lobby-democracy-is-a-waste-of-time/

#15yrsago Writers’ Union of Canada smears attempt to expand fair dealing: “Legalised theft” https://web.archive.org/web/20100327073841/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4903/125/

#15yrsago Ottawa joins the war on photography https://web.archive.org/web/20100327213857/http://www.sto.ca/secure/index_en.html

#15yrsago Airport worker caught photographing screen as female worker passed through naked scanner https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/mar/24/airport-worker-warned-body-scanner

#15yrsago Stop DRM on UK TV! Sign onto ORG’s comments https://web.archive.org/web/20100316073211/https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/stop-bbc-drm

#10yrsago ACLU sues TSA to make it explain junk science “behavioral detection” program https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/nyclu-and-aclu-sue-tsa-records-discredited-behavior-detection-program

#10yrsago Randomized dystopia generator that goes beyond the Bill of Rights https://www.brainwane.net/dystopia/

#10yrsago Bankrupt Radio Shack will sell the customer data they promised to keep private https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/despite-privacy-policy-radioshack-customer-data-up-for-sale-in-auction/

#10yrsago I hate your censorship, but I’ll defend to the death your right to censor https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/25/i-hate-your-censorship-but-ill-defend-to-the-death-your-right-to-censor/

#5yrsago Posties are key to America's emergency response https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#going-postal

#5yrsago Toilet paper separator https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#single-ply

#5yrsago Doctors hoard choloroquine https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#choloroquine

#5yrsago Trump's Bible study teacher thinks coronavirus is God's wrath https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#church-and-state

#5yrsago No more O'Reilly events https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#foo-camp

#5yrsago Kaiser threatens to fire Oakland nurses who wear their own masks https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#insubordiation

#5yrsago Internet Archive lifts lending restrictions on ebooks https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#universal-access

#5yrsago MIT's ingenious manual/automatic open source ventilator https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#oshw-ventilator

#5yrsago Bailouts and moral hazard https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#moral-hazard

#5yrsago Quarantine reveals the falsity of the automation crisis https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#what-automation

#5yrsago Financial stability vs economic stability https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

#5yrsago The Party of Death https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#death-panels

#5yrsago Murdering 20% of elderly Americans is bad strategy for the GOP https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#turkey-shoot

#5yrsago Stock Jump https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#off-the-cliff

#5yrsago Data is the new toxic waste https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#digital-toxic-waste

#1yrago Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

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)

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

10 / 10
 Persos A à L
Mona CHOLLET
Anna COLIN-LEBEDEV
Julien DEVAUREIX
Cory DOCTOROW
EDUC.POP.FR
Marc ENDEWELD
Michel GOYA
Hubert GUILLAUD
Gérard FILOCHE
Alain GRANDJEAN
Hacking-Social
Samuel HAYAT
Dana HILLIOT
François HOUSTE
Tagrawla INEQQIQI
Infiltrés (les)
Clément JEANNEAU
Paul JORION
Michel LEPESANT
Frédéric LORDON
Blogs persos du Diplo
LePartisan.info
 
 Persos M à Z
Henri MALER
Christophe MASUTTI
Romain MIELCAREK
Richard MONVOISIN
Corinne MOREL-DARLEUX
Timothée PARRIQUE
Thomas PIKETTY
PLOUM
VisionsCarto
Yannis YOULOUNTAS
Michaël ZEMMOUR
 
  Numérique
Christophe DESCHAMPS
Louis DERRAC
Olivier ERTZSCHEID
Olivier EZRATY
Framablog
Francis PISANI
Pixel de Tracking
Irénée RÉGNAULD
Nicolas VIVANT
 
  Collectifs
Arguments
Bondy Blog
Dérivation
Dissidences
Mr Mondialisation
Palim Psao
Paris-Luttes.info
ROJAVA Info
 
  Créatifs / Art / Fiction
Nicole ESTEROLLE
Julien HERVIEUX
Alessandro PIGNOCCHI
XKCD
🌓