#Kento #Rowen #RoninWarriors

What? What?

A survey from West Health-Gallup found that nearly one in 10 adults say they’ve postponed retirement because of healthcare costs, with many respondents also reporting delaying job changes, home buying, or having a child. What do you think?

The post Poll: Nearly 1 In 10 Adults Have Postponed Retirement Due To Healthcare Costs appeared first on The Onion.

Don't give me that! You have no idea who you're dealing with here! #CowboyWho

QUEEN’S PARK – Pitching itself as “one of the most transparent governments in the history of Ontario,” the Ford government has announced that it will radically curtail transparency. The Ford Government unveiled plans today to “modernize” Ontario’s freedom-of-information laws, specifically by exempting the records of the premier, cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants and their offices from […]

The post Doug Ford launches transparent effort to end transparency appeared first on The Beaverton.

Today's links

• Three more AI psychoses: Everybody calm down.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: "Jules, Penny and the Rooster"; Superinjunction; Harper Lee's kids v cheap paperbacks; 3D printed cat battle-armor; Black sf.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Three more AI psychoses (permalink)

"AI psychosis" is one of those terms that is incredibly useful and also almost certainly going to be deprecated in smart circles in short order because it is: a) useful; b) easily colloquialized to describe related phenomena; and c) adjacent to medical issues, and there's a group of people who feel very strongly any metaphor that implicates human health is intrinsically stigmatizing and must be replaced with an awkward, lengthy phrase that no one can remember and only insiders understand.

So while we still can, let us revel in this useful term to talk about some very real pathologies in our world.

Formally, "AI psychosis" describes people who have delusions that are possibly induced, and definitely reinforced and magnified, by a chatbot. AI psychosis is clearly alarming for people whose loved ones fall prey to it, and it has been the subject of much press and popular attention, especially in the extreme cases where it has resulted in injury or death.

It's possible for AI psychosis to be both a new and alarming phenomenon and also to be on a continuum with existing phenomena. Paranoid delusions aren't new, of course. Take "Morgellons Disease," a psychosomatic belief that you have wires growing in your body, which causes sufferers to pick at their skin to the point of creating suppurating wounds. Morgellons emerged in the 2000s, but the name refers to a 17th-century case-report of a patient who suffered from a similar delusion:

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

Morgellons is both a 400 year old phenomenon and an internet pathology. How can that be? Because the internet makes it easier for people with sparsely distributed traits to locate one another, which is why the internet era is characterized by the coherence of people with formerly fringe characteristics into organized blocs, for better (gender minorities, #MeToo) and worse (Nazis).

Morgellons is rare, but if you suffer from it, it's easy for you to locate virtually every other person in the world with the same delusion and for all of you to reinforce and egg on your delusional beliefs.

Morgellons isn't the only delusion that the internet reinforces, of course. "Gang stalking delusion" is a belief in a shadowy gang of sadistic tormentors who sneak hidden messages into song lyrics and public signage and innuendo in overheard snatches of other people's conversations. It is an incredibly damaging delusion that ruins people's lives.

Gang stalking delusion isn't new, either – as with Morgellons, there are historical accounts of it going back centuries. But the internet supercharged gang stalking delusion by making it easy for GSD sufferers to find one another and reinforce one another's beliefs, helping each other spin elaborate explanations for why the relatives, therapists, and friends who try to help them are actually in on the conspiracy. The result is that GSD sufferers end up ever more isolated from people who are trying mightily to save them, and more connected to people who drive them to self-harm.

Enter chatbots. Ready access to eager-to-please LLMs at every hour of the day or night means that you don't even have to find a forum full of people with the same delusion as you, nor do you have to wait for a reply to your anguished message. The LLM is always there, ready to fire back a "yes-and" improv-style response that drives you deeper and deeper into delusion:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/

It's possible that there are delusions that are even more rare than GSD or Morgellons that AI is surfacing. Imagine if you were prone to fleeting delusional beliefs (and whomst amongst us hasn't experienced the bedrock certainty that we put something down right here, only to find it somewhere else and not have any idea how that happened?). Under normal circumstances, these cognitive misfires might be fleeting moments of discomfort, quickly forgotten. But if you are already habituated to asking a chatbot to explain things you don't understand, it might well yes-and you into an internally consistent, entirely wrong belief – that is, a delusion.

Think of how often you noticed "42" after reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or how many times "6-7" crops up once you've experienced a baseline of exposure to adolescents. Now imagine that an obsequious tale-spinner was sitting at your elbow, helpfully noting these coincidences and fitting them into a folie-a-deux mystery play that projected a grand, paranoid narrative onto the world. Every bit of confirming evidence is lovingly cataloged, all disconfirming evidence is discounted or ignored. It's fully automated luxury QAnon – a self-baking conspiracy that harnesses an AI in service to driving you deeper and deeper into madness:

That's the original "AI psychosis" that the term was coined to describe. As Sam Cole notes in her excellent "How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis,'" mental health practitioners are not entirely comfortable with the "psychosis" label:

https://www.404media.co/ai-psychosis-help-gemini-chatgpt-claude-chatbot-delusions/

"Psychosis" here is best understood as an analogy, not a diagnosis, and, as already noted, there is a large cohort of very persistent people who make it their business to eradicate analogies that make reference to medical or health-related phenomena. But these analogies are very hard to kill, because they do useful work in connecting unfamiliar, novel phenomena with things we already understand.

It's true that these analogies can be stigmatizing, but they needn't be. As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who would also describe ICE as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life. I am capable of understanding "autoimmune disorder" as referring to both a literal, medical phenomenon; and a figurative, political one. I have never found myself confusing one for the other.

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

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

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

But once those companies' growth slows down, investors revalue those shares at a much lower PE multiplier, which makes individual executives at the company (who are primarily paid in stock) personally much poorer, prompting their departure, while simultaneously kneecapping the company's ability to grow through acquisition and hiring, because a company with a falling share price has to buy things with cash, not stock. Companies can make more of their own stock on demand, simply by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet – but they can only get cash by convincing a customer, creditor or investor to part with some of their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

Tech companies have absurdly large market shares – think of Google's 90% search dominance – and so they've spent 15+ years coming up with increasingly absurd gambits to convince investors that they will continue to grow by capturing other markets. At first, these companies claimed that they were on the verge of eating one another's lunches (Google would destroy Facebook with G+; Facebook would do the same to Youtube with the "pivot to video").

This has a real advantage in that one need not speculate about the potential value of Facebook's market – you only have to look at Facebook's quarterly reports. But the downside is that Facebook has its own ideas about whether Google is going to absorb its market, and they are prone to forcefully make the case that this won't happen.

After a few tumultuous years, tech giants switched to promoting growth via speculative new markets – metaverse, web3, crypto, blockchain, etc. Speculative new markets are speculative, and the weakness of that is that no one can say how big those markets might be. But that's also the strength of those markets, because if no one can say how big those markets might be, then who's to say that they won't be very big indeed?

There's a different advantage to confining your concerns to imaginary things: imaginary things don't exist, so they don't contest your public statements about them, nor do they make demands on you. Think of how the right concerns itself with imaginary children (unborn babies, children in Wayfair furniture; children in nonexistent pizza parlor basements, children undergoing gender confirmation surgery). These are very convenient children to advocate for, since, unlike real children (hungry children, children killed in the Gaza genocide, children whose parents have been kidnapped by ICE, children whom Matt Goetz and Donald Trump trafficked for sex, children in cages at the US border, trans kids driven to self-harm and suicide after being denied care), nonexistent children don't want anything from you and they never make public pronouncements about whether you have their best interests at heart.

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

There's a name for this: it's called the "Byzantine premium" – that's the premium that an investment opportunity attracts by being so complicated and weird that investors don't understand it, making them easy to trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/

AI is a terrible economic phenomenon. It has lost more money than any other project in human history – $600-700b and counting, with trillions more demanded by the likes of OpenAI's Sam Altman. AI's core assets – data centers and GPUs – last 2-3 years, though AI bosses insist on depreciating them over five years, which is unequivocal accounting fraud, a way to obscure the losses the companies are incurring. But it doesn't actually matter whether the assets need to be replaced every two years, every three years, or every five years, because all the AI companies combined are claiming no more than $60b/year in revenue (that number is grossly inflated). You can't reach the $700b break-even point at $60b/year in two years, three years, or five years.

Now, some exceptionally valuable technologies have attained profitability after an extraordinarily long period in which they lost money, like the web itself. But these turnaround stories all share a common trait: they had good "unit economics." Every new web user reduced the amount of money the web industry was losing. Every time a user logged onto the web, they made the industry more profitable. Every generation of web technology was more profitable than the last.

Contrast this with AI: every user – paid or unpaid – that an AI company signs up costs them money. Every time that user logs into a chatbot or enters a prompt, the company loses more money. The more a user uses an AI product, the more money that product loses. And each generation of AI tech loses more money than the generation that preceded it.

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

This is a great narrative trick, because it turns losing money into a virtue. If you've convinced a mark that the upside of the project is a multiple of the capital committed to it, then the more money you're losing, the better the investment seems.

So this is the first AI psychosis: the idea that we should bet the world's economy on these highly combustible GPUs and data centers with terrible unit economics and no path to break-even, much less profitability.

Investors' AI psychosis is cross-fertilized by our second form of AI psychosis, which is the bosses' AI psychosis: bosses' bottomless passion for firing workers and replacing them with automation.

Bosses are easy marks for anything that lets them fire workers. After all, the ideal firm is one that charges infinity for its outputs (hence the market's passion for monopolies) and pays nothing for its inputs (e.g. "academic publishing").

This means that the fact that a chatbot can't do your job isn't nearly as important as the fact that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job. Bosses keep replacing humans with defective chatbots, with catastrophic consequences, like Amazon's cloud service crashing:

https://www.techradar.com/pro/recent-aws-outages-blamed-on-ai-tools-at-least-two-incidents-took-down-amazon-services

Bosses are haunted by the ego-shattering knowledge that they aren't in the driver's seat: if the boss doesn't show up for work, everything continues to operate just fine. If the workers all stay home, the business grinds to a halt. In their secret hearts, bosses know that they're not in the driver's seat – they're in the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI dangles the possibility of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drive-train, so that the company's products go directly from the boss's imagination to the public without the boss having to ask people who know how to do things to execute their cockamamie schemes:

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

This is a powerfully erotic proposition for bosses, the realization of the libidinal fantasy in which sky-high CEO salaries can be justified by the fact that everything that happens in the company is truly, directly attributable to the boss. Like the delusional person who can be led deeper and deeper into a fantasy world by a chatbot, a boss's delusion that they are worth thousands of times more than their workers makes them easy prey for a chatbot salesman that pushes them deeper and deeper into that delusion, until they bet the whole company on it.

Now we come to the third and final novel AI psychosis, the critics' psychosis, that AI is an abnormally terrible technology. This is a species of "criti-hype," which is when critics repeat the hyped-up claims of the companies they're targeting, but as criticism (think of all the people who believed and uncritically amplified the ad-tech industry's self-serving claims of being able to control our minds by "hacking our dopamine loops"):

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

AI is a normal technology. The people who made it, and the circumstances under which it was made, are normal. Its uses and abuses are normal. That doesn't make it good, but it does make it unexceptional:

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/a-guide-to-understanding-ai-as-normal

The exceptional part of AI isn't the technology, it's the bubble. There's nothing about AI per se that makes it exceptionally prone to devouring our natural resources, or endangering our jobs, or abetting war crimes. That's all because of the bubble, and the bubble relies on the idea that AI is exceptional, not normal. Repeating and amplifying claims about AI's exceptionalism helps the AI companies, because they rely on exceptionalism to keep the capital flowing and the bubble inflating.

AI is a normal technology. It's normal for a technology to be invented by unlikable and immoral people and institutions. Not every technology is invented by a shitty person, but shitty people and institutions are well represented (and possibly disproportionately represented) in the history of technology. Charles Babbage invented the idea of general purpose computers as a way of improving labor control on slave plantations:

https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/

Ada Lovelace wasn't interested in making slavery more efficient, but neither was she driven by pure scientific inquiry. She invented programming to help her bet on the horses (it didn't work):

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

The silicon transistor was co-invented by William Shockley, one of history's great pieces of shit, a eugenicist who was so committed to exterminating all non-white people that he never managed to ship a commercial product:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

IBM built the tabulators for Auschwitz. HP were the Pentagon's go-to contractors for any tech project that was so dirty no one else would touch it. We only got Unix because Bell Labs committed so many antitrust violations that they weren't allowed to productize it themselves.

It's not exceptional for AI companies to have terrible, piece-of-shit founders. It's not exceptional for these companies to participate in war crimes. It's not exceptional for these founders to want to pauperize workers. It's not exceptional for these companies to lie about their products, bankrupt naive investors through stock swindles, and pitch themselves to investors as a way for capital to win the class war.

None of this means that AI companies are good, it just means that they are not exceptional. And because they aren't exceptional, the same dynamics that govern other technologies apply to AI companies' products. Their utility is a function of what they do, not who made them or how they were sold. The utility of AI products is based on whether people find ways to use them that make them happy – not whether the people who made those technologies are good people, or whether the funding for the technology was fraudulent, or whether other people use the technology to harm others.

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

Think of a hobbyist who pines for an automated soldering machine. That hobbyist longs to make board-level repairs and modifications that require precision that humans struggle to match. The hobbyist is a centaur, using a machine to help achieve human goals.

Now think of a factory owner who invests in an assembly line of the same machines: that boss wants to fire a bunch of workers and make the survivors of the purge take up the slack. The boss want to achieve corporate goals, to "sweat the assets," making maximum use of the soldering machines. The pace at which the line runs is set to be the maximum that the workers can match. The workers on the line are "reverse centaurs" – humans who are pressed into service as peripherals for machines, at a pace that is constantly at the very limit of their endurance.

Reverse centaurs are trapped in capital's automation plan – to make everything faster and cheaper. But that's the result of bosses. It's not the result of technology.

This is not to say that technology is apolitical. Only a fool would imagine that there are no politics embedded in technology. But you'd be a far greater fool if you asserted that the politics of a technology were simple, clear, and immutable.

Nor is this to say that when workers get to decide when and how to use technology, we will always make wise decisions. Perhaps the hobbyist who opts for an automated soldering machine will lose out on the opportunity to refine their hand-eye coordination in ways that will have many other benefits to their practice.

Or perhaps attempting to improve their hand-eye coordination to that point will wreck so many projects that they grow discouraged and give up altogether. Others' choices that seem unwise to you might have perfectly good explanations that aren't visible from your perspective. Ultimately, the world is a better place when workers get to decide which parts of their jobs they want to automate and which parts they want to lean into.

This is an extremely normal technological situation: for a new technology to be promoted and productized by shitty people who have grandiose goals that would be apocalyptic should they ever come to pass – and for some people to find uses of that technology that are nevertheless beneficial to them and their communities.

The belief that AI is an exceptionally bad technology (as opposed to an exceptionally bad economic bubble) drives AI critics into their own absurd culs-de-sac.

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

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

It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale:

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

They're just adding another automation tool to a highly automated practice, and using it when it makes sense. Perhaps they won't always choose wisely, but that's normal too. There's plenty of ways that pre-AI automation tools for software development led programmers astray. A skilled, centaur-configured programmer learns from experience which automation tools they should trust, and under which circumstances, and guides themselves accordingly.

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

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

Nor are AI bros exceptional. The stock swindlers who've blown $700b (and counting) on AI aren't cyber-Svengalis with the power to cloud investors' minds. They're just running the same con that tech has been running ever since its returns started to taper off and survival became a matter of ginning up enthusiasm for speculative new ventures.

That doesn't mean those people aren't awful shits. Fuck those people. It just means that they're normal awful shits. We don't have to burnish their reputations by elevating them to the status of archdemons who taint everything they touch with unwashable sin. Sam Altman isn't Lex Luthor. He's just a conman:

https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/breaking-sam-altmans-greed-and-dishonesty?r=8tdk6&utm_medium=ios

The fact that these bros are just normal assholes means that we don't have to treat everything they do as a sin. Scraping the entirety of human knowledge to make something new out of it isn't "stealing." Depending on why you're doing it, it can be archiving, or making a search engine:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Too many AI critics have started from the undeniable fact that these guys are odious creeps who boast about wanting to ruin the lives of workers and then worked backwards to find the sin. The sin isn't performing mathematical analysis on all the books ever written. That's actually kind of awesome. It's the kind of thing Aaron Swartz used to do – like when he ingested every law review article ever published and used it to trace the way that oil companies' donations to law schools resulted in profs writing articles about why Big Oil can't be held liable for trashing the planet:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111129181943/https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/print/article/punitive-damages-remunerated-research-and-legal-profession

AI bros' sin isn't making copies of published works. Hammering servers with badly behaved crawlers is a dick move and fuck them for doing it. But if these jerks made well-behaved scrapers that placed no abnormal demand on servers, it's not like their critics would say, "Oh, I guess it's fine, then."

AI bros' sin is running an economy-destroying, planet-wrecking stock swindle whose raison d'etre is pauperizing every worker and transferring 100% of the dying world's wealth to a small cadre of morbidly wealthy, eminently guillotineable plutes. Making plugins? That's not exceptional. It's just normal.

The fact that something is normal doesn't make it good. There's a lot of normal things that I'd like to throw into the Sun. But we don't do ourselves any favors when we amplify our enemies' self-aggrandizing narratives by accusing them of being exceptional, even when we mean "exceptionally evil." They're normal assholes.

Fuck 'em.

(Image: ZeptoBars, CC BY 3.0, modified)

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• E is for…. Enshittification https://www.evanshunt.com/enshittification/

• Calicornication: Postcards of Giant Produce (1909) https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/giant-produce-postcards/

• Organized Money: Why Your Lamp Sucks https://prospect.org/2026/03/11/organized-money-lamps-lighting-mid-century-modeline-history/

• The Live Nation settlement has industry insiders baffled https://www.theverge.com/policy/893272/live-nation-ticketmaster-doj-settlement-states

• Public speakerphone use is officially out of control https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/03/explain-it-like-im-5-why-is-everyone-on-speakerphone-in-public/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Notorious financier gets a “super-injunction” prohibiting the press from revealing that he is a banker https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8373535/Sir-Fred-Goodwin-former-RBS-chief-obtains-super-injunction.html

#10yrsago Shortly after her death, Harper Lee’s heirs kill cheap paperback edition of To Kill a Mockingbird https://newrepublic.com/article/131400/mass-market-edition-kill-mockingbird-dead

#10yrsago Web security company breached, client list (including KKK) dumped, hackers mock inept security https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/after-an-easy-breach-hackers-leave-tips-when-running-a-security-company/

#10yrsago Microsoft spams corporate users with messages denigrating their IT departments https://web.archive.org/web/20160309195537/https://www.infoworld.com/article/3042397/microsoft-windows/admins-beware-domain-attached-pcs-are-sprouting-get-windows-10-ads.html

#10yrsago Cycle and Recycle: gorgeous photos of the European recycling process https://www.wired.com/2016/03/paul-bulteel-cycle-recyle-europe-recycles-tons-of-waste-and-its-pretty-gorgeous/

#10yrsago Fellowships for “Robin Hood” hackers to help poor people get access to the law https://web.archive.org/web/20160304221459/https://labs.robinhood.org/fellowship/

#10yrsago 3D printed battle-armor for cats https://web.archive.org/web/20160311224139/http://sinkhacks.com/making-3d-printed-cat-armor/

#10yrsago Great moments in the history of black science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20160308034421/http://www.fantasticstoriesoftheimagination.com/a-crash-course-in-the-history-of-black-science-fiction/

#1yrago Daniel Pinkwater's "Jules, Penny and the Rooster" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/11/klong-you-are-a-pickle-2/#martian-space-potato

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
  https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

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

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

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

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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

• The Lost Cause
  https://streets.mn/2026/03/02/book-club-the-lost-cause/

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1081 words today, 48461 total)

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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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

Howdy folks, and welcome back to HHR. Today, we’re taking a bit of a vacation, not too far away, just to San Antonio, to feature a chain that once flourished in Houston, Handy Andy. These photos are from a visit I made not too long ago, during Big Lots’ bankruptcy, to visit what was then the oldest intact example of a Ranch Style Handy Andy location open to the public. These photos are from December ...

In brief: A spectacular Friday and a winner of a Saturday will close Houston’s spring break week out nicely. Sunday will be warm and humid before a powerful cold front brings a pinch of rain and some potent winds in the evening and overnight hours. Much colder weather will drop temperatures from the 80s Sunday evening to the 40s Monday morning. Things then calm down.

After a cool but delightful Thursday, we set sail for another winner of a day today.

Friday & Saturday

It’ll be a cool start to the morning, but the day should warm up nicely, with highs in the mid or even upper-70s in spots on Friday. Saturday looks much the same with highs near 80 degrees. Humidity will slowly begin to inch upward later today and on Saturday, which you won’t notice a ton. Morning lows will be in the 50s tomorrow.

Rodeo Forecast

Spectacular evening for getting (responsibly) tipsy with Shaboozey. Temps will fall from the 70s into the 60s through the evening with light winds. The weather continues to look good for a moment like this on Saturday with Kelly Clarkson. Expect temperatures mainly in the 70s, maybe dipping into the upper-60s late. And then Sunday, it’ll be a little breezier and a little cloudier. Temperatures will be much warmer, and it will be humid. Look for 80s with a south wind blowing in around 20 to 30 mph. Prometiste.

Sunday night and Monday

Here’s where the forecast gets a little wild. The cold front hits the area in the evening hours Sunday, after highs in the mid-80s. It will probably carry a broken line of thunderstorms. We don’t currently expect any severe weather from this, but it’s possible some strong storms occur, especially in northeast Harris or Liberty County. The area is in a marginal risk (level 1/5) for severe storms. But the front is going to arrive with some oomph. As winds flip around to come out of the north, they could gust over 40 mph for a few hours Sunday evening. Temperatures will also drop about 30 to 40 degrees from highs in the 80s to lows in the 40s.

We try not to be too preachy on the blog here, but this is one of those times where we’ll strongly encourage you to secure any loose outdoor objects, as these may be our strongest post-frontal winds since October, or even since last March. Those wind gusts will keep up into Monday morning, though slowly back off their peak levels, still probably 30 to 40 mph though. After Noon on Monday, winds should more rapidly drop off into the 20s mph. We are probably not getting out of the mid to upper-50s on Monday, even with sunshine. Monday night will be cold with lows in the 30s and low-40s.

Rest of next week

We sort of break out of this fairly active weather pattern next week, with quieter weather, warming temperatures, and increasing humidity. 70s should return by Wednesday and 80s by Thursday. Our next chance at rain after Sunday may be a good way away.

They have been restored by BBC archivists and will be available next month on the broadcaster's streaming service.

Oh, like YOUR blood is so great.

You dare question the great OZ?

Harry Styles has released Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, his fourth studio album. The pop star sat down with The Onion to explain the meaning behind each track.

“Aperture”: “I typed ‘hole’ into powerthesaurus.com.”

“American Girls”: “My favorite is Samantha, but Kit is a very close second.”

“What Makes You Beautiful”: “I hope Kobalt Music doesn’t sue me for throwing this classic onto the album.”

“Are You Listening Yet?”: “The first three songs kind of suck, so I wanted to call people back in with this one.”

“Taste Back”: “I’ve always wondered what it would be like if broccoli came alive and hunted me, and this is my exploration of that.”

“The Waiting Game”: “If you take more than an hour to deliver my fucking pizza, you know I’m gonna drag you in a song.”

“Season 2 Weight Loss:” “This is about Meerkat Manor.”

“Coming Up Roses”: “I figured roses would look good on merch, and I worked backwards from there.”

“Pop”: “The record labels won the fight over this one, but I still think ‘Plop’ sounds better.”

“Dance No More”: “Dancing is over—it’s the pogo stick’s time to shine!”

“Paint By Numbers”: “This is about my old personal chef. She made the best homemade salad dressing. Was kinda handsy, though.”

“Carla’s Song”: “This is a typo. It’s meant to be ‘Harry’s Song,’ because I wrote it.”

“Oak”: “Taylor Swift doesn’t have a monopoly on songs about Travis Kelce’s penis.”

The post Harry Styles Breaks Down His New Album Track By Track appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—Maintaining that his conduct was well within the guidelines for the solemn occasion, President Trump on Thursday defended his decision to wear a fruit hat while samba dancing during the dignified transfer of soldiers killed in Iran. “There’s no reason I can’t honor the sacrifice of these brave men and women while wearing a headdress piled high with bananas, oranges, and papayas,” said Trump, adding that only a corrupt media desperate to attack him would fault a president for clapping and shimmying in six-inch platform heels as the flag-draped caskets were carried past en route to their final resting place. “In fact, the parents of one of the deceased came up to me and said how moved they were to see me hop up on their son’s coffin lid and rapidly pulsate my hips for an unforgettable ‘Chica Chica Boom Chic’ number. They said their son would be proud to see me twirling on his remains, so who cares what other people think?” Trump went on to state that his choreography still wasn’t perfect but that he would have many more dignified transfers to get it just right.

The post Trump Defends Wearing Fruit Hat, Samba Dancing During Dignified Transfer appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—In a heated exchange that laid bare a growing schism at the highest levels of Republican leadership, President Donald Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) reportedly clashed in the Oval Office Thursday over the question of where they were, with McConnell insisting they were at church and Trump maintaining with increasing irritation that they were on “my beautiful airplane” or, at other times, “my beautiful golf course.”

According to White House sources, the confrontation began shortly after the 84-year-old former Senate Republican leader entered the Oval Office, looked around the room, and commented, “Looks like we’re early for the Easter service.” Trump, who had spent the previous few minutes poking the wall in an effort to press the flight-attendant call button, is said to have taken offense at McConnell’s remark and told him to stop undermining the party line by claiming they were in a chapel when they were “clearly on the fairway of one of [his] golf courses.” The president then reportedly gestured toward a grandfather clock and introduced it as his caddy, Peter.

Sources confirmed the long-tenured senator doubled down on his stance that they were in a church by loudly singing the hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” only to be drowned out by Trump repeatedly shouting “Fore!” while swinging around the briefcase containing the nuclear codes. Tensions later cooled when McConnell froze up and stared off blankly for several minutes and Trump fell asleep atop the Resolute desk.

After aides managed to stir the GOP leaders from their respective stupors, the pair appeared to resolve their differences, cordially shaking one another’s hands and smiling, with McConnell saying, “It’s an honor to finally meet you, Mr. President,” and Trump replying, “Yes, I am the president. Who are you?”

The post Trump, Mitch McConnell Clash In Oval Office Over Where They Are appeared first on The Onion.

The post U.S. Suffers Additional Casualties In War It Won Last Week appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—Saying critics of the missile strike that killed at least 175 civilians were dodging a fundamental question, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday demanded to know what girls were doing attending school to begin with. “In all this talk about who was responsible and how this happened, are we just going to ignore the fact that girls were allowed to learn?” said Hegseth, adding that of all the grim details to emerge from the bombing, what troubled him most was the thought of innocent young girls sitting at desks and studying geography. “What kind of savages let girls, some as young as 4, acquire knowledge? Is our woke media just going to sweep that under the rug while they’re blabbering about faulty intelligence without even mentioning the teaching that was going on right out in the open?” Hegseth went on to say that while the strike on the school was unintended, it was probably better that the girls were killed before they could be fully educated.

The post Pete Hegseth Questions What Girls Were Doing In School To Begin With appeared first on The Onion.

The British Parliament voted to end centuries of political tradition by removing hereditary aristocrats from its unelected House of Lords, ousting dozens of dukes, earls, and viscounts who inherited their seats along with their aristocratic titles. What do you think?

The post Britain Ejects Hereditary Nobles From Parliament After 700 Years appeared first on The Onion.

NEW YORK – Following Live Nation’s settlement in an antitrust case over unfair ticket prices, the multinational entertainment company has announced that ticket buying and selling will now be restricted to automated bots. The settlement resulted from a recent investigation, launched after Taylor Swift fans experienced chaos attempting to get purchase tickets the singer’s instantly-sold-out […]

The post Live Nation restricts ticket buying and selling exclusively to bots appeared first on The Beaverton.

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Mark Carney was spotted in the halls of Parliament checking out passing Bloc Quebecois MP Patrick Bonin as the missing piece to complete his collection of MPs from major parties. “Gotta catch ‘em all. Gotta catch ‘em all,” Carney was heard muttering to himself before turning to a gaggle of reporters […]

The post Carney eyes Bloc MP to complete his collection appeared first on The Beaverton.

“The Defense Department has barred press photographers from briefings on the ongoing U.S.-Israeli military conflict with Iran after they published photos of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that his staff deemed ‘unflattering’…”
-– The Washington Post

The world is a dangerous place right now—with US military strikes on suspected “drug boats” in the Caribbean, the threat of unilateral military action in Latin America, and a poorly defined war in Iran that I started. That is exactly why it’s critical that I look jacked as shit in the media.

As the secretary of defense, my job isn’t only to designate cartels as “terrorists” and oust leaders of countries that happen to sit on massive oil reserves. I also have to maintain the troops’ respect. And nothing undermines morale faster than an unflattering photo of me berating a journalist who asked whether we’re putting Americans in unnecessary danger by going to war in the Middle East.

Critics say that banning photography during Pentagon briefings is an act of vanity. Or an attempt to distract from the fact that I squandered $8.9 million taxpayer dollars on Alaska king crab and lobster tail last September, but they couldn’t be further from the truth. You try getting a rogue regime whose nuclear capabilities you said you wiped out months ago to back down when your jawline isn’t taut, you have dark under-eye bags, and spit is visibly flying from your mouth.

People think military deterrence depends on intensive diplomacy, missile defense systems, and a massive nuclear arsenal. But that’s outdated. In modern warfare, strength is communicated through optics. Through posture. Through a jawline that says, “I’m batshit crazy enough to start a war I have no idea how long it will last, how much it will cost, or how many American lives I’ll lose.”

There’s nothing I take more seriously than protecting American lives; I listen attentively to intelligence briefings, I brainstorm ways to maintain world stability, and I spend five to seven hours a day in front of a mirror perfecting a power stance and furrowed brow that signal strength, dominance, and a willingness to discard my own sense of morality.

While pundits obsess over the complicated geopolitical implications of my rash decisions, almost no one recognizes the real challenges of wielding such immense power—sending young Americans off to war while looking fresh-faced, like I just got a new round of Botox.

Take the last few weeks alone. I’ve used AI technology to identify potential targets, ordered drone strikes, and sent mixed messages on whether I’ll send naval forces to the Strait of Hormuz, all while ensuring my shoulders look sufficiently broad and that my suit jacket is tight enough to show my muscles—but not so fitted that I look like a sissy European.

Some might even say that the press is working on behalf of enemy nations—posting photos that reveal a receding hairline, hints of adult acne, and unhinged facial expressions. In the coming days, I’ll announce retaliatory measures against any member of the press who seeks to weaken America’s military strength by publishing photos of me struggling to complete a pull-up.

Our adversaries are watching closely. And if Iran sees a photo where my jawline disappears into my neck during a briefing, my hair is plastered to my forehead with sweat, or my eyes are half-closed, then the war is already over.

MONTREAL—Admitting that he initially felt a little shy about storing his toiletries there, former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters Friday that he was finally comfortable enough to keep an extra jar of his brown face paint at girlfriend Katy Perry’s house. “Things have gotten pretty serious between us, and having my own race impersonation makeup there is so much more convenient than remembering to pack it every time I stay over,” said Trudeau, who explained that he always kept paint on hand in case an Arabian Nights-themed party or gala came up. “I was so nervous when I accidentally left it on her nightstand last week—what if she thought the relationship was moving too fast? But Katy said I can keep as much brownface there as I want. She even cleared space in her closet for my spare turbans and scimitars! Of course, she’s welcome to use them, too.” Trudeau confirmed that he returned the favor by encouraging Perry to keep one of her Japanese kimonos at his place.

The post Justin Trudeau Finally Comfortable Enough To Keep Brown Face Paint At Katy Perry’s appeared first on The Onion.

James Talarico is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas. The Onion shares everything you need to know about the rising star. 

Age: Whippersnapper

Inspirational Backstory: Survived several hours talking to Joe Rogan

Religion: Oh yeah, lots of that

Key Endorsements: God (Presbyterian), God (Catholic), God (Jewish), and God (Sikh)  

Level On Grant-Rogers Folksiness Scale: 1.21 Jimmy Stewarts

Voice Volume: 4

Diet: Whatever Mom’s making tonight

What’s Motivating Campaign: Would rather die before going back to teaching

The post Political Profile: James Talarico appeared first on The Onion.

You bring a bunch of kittens into this world, you gotta do what’s right.

The post Oreo and Binx appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—Further fueling speculation that the commander-in-chief might have undisclosed medical conditions, rumors regarding President Trump’s health swirled Friday after he screamed, “Fuck! I’m dying!” during a press conference. “Fuck! I’m fucking dying! Oh God, it hurts! Ahhhhhhh!” Trump said in response to a question about the ongoing war in Iran, sparking fervent discussion among Beltway insiders over whether the president wincing in pain while clutching his chest and screaming, “I see the light, I see the light,” could potentially signal a serious illness he had failed to share with the public. “Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh! This is it! Here I go! I can feel my body shutting down! Jesus Christ, it’s all over!” At press time, additional concerns about the president’s health emerged after paramedics were spotted lifting Trump’s body into a body bag, zipping it up, and wheeling it out of the West Wing on a stretcher.

The post Health Speculations Swirl After Trump Screams, ‘Fuck! I’m Dying!’ appeared first on The Onion.

Uber launched a feature that allows both women riders and drivers across the U.S. to be exclusively matched with other women for trips, expanding a pilot program intended to address safety concerns. What do you think?

The post Uber Introduces Women-Only Option Nationwide appeared first on The Onion.

I’m very sorry to announce that Dean is not going to be on the boat. In the original draft of the script, he was. The poor fellow was ejected overboard on the first morning of writing week. I needed the pages for something else and I’m not sorry. Lottie’s flash-forward shows you the future that almost was.

The post Had to be done appeared first on Bad Machinery.

Hippies #CowboyWho