Today's links

• The enshittification of tech jobs: Our last line of defense has fallen.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• 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.

The enshittification of tech jobs (permalink)

Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY

All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime.

Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are insanely productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible?

The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

"Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the least precarious.

As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for anything from their bosses…except a 40-hour work-week.

But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."

Tech bosses don't actually like workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don't fear. Sure, Tim Cook's engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook's factory workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run "iPhone City" where Apple's products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple's funtime distraction rectangle factory:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

Jeff Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers.

This is how tech bosses would treat tech workers…if they could.

And now? They can.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Bindley describes the new labor dynamics at Big Tech:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-workers-are-just-like-the-rest-of-us-miserable-at-work/ar-AA1DDKjh

It starts with Meta, who just announced a 5% across-the-board layoff – on the same day that it doubled executive bonuses. But it's not just the workers who get shown the door who suffer in this new tech reality – the workers on the job are having to do two or three jobs, for worse pay, and without all those lovely perks.

Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more exploited.

Amazon is another firm whose top exec, Andy Jassy, has boasted about the productivity gains of AI, but an Amazon Web Services manager who spoke to Bindley says that he's lost so many coders that he's now writing code for the first time in a decade.

Then there's a Meta recruiter who got fired and then immediately re-hired, but as a "short term employee" with no merit pay, stock grants, or promotions. She has to continuously reapply for her job, and has picked up the workload of several fired colleagues who weren't re-hired. Meta managers (the ones whose bonuses were just doubled) call this initiative "agility." Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers – and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded.

Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the actual reality of AI, but rather, the story that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor.

The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through eight rounds of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone."

For decades, tech workers were able to flatter themselves that they were peers with their bosses – that "temporarily embarrassed founder" syndrome again. The Google founders and Zuck held regular "town hall" meetings where the rank-and-file engineers could ask impertinent questions. At Google, these have been replaced with "tightly scripted events." Zuckerberg has discontinued his participation in company-wide Q&As, because they are "no longer a good use of his time."

Companies are scaling back perks in both meaningful ways (Netflix hacking away at parental leave), and petty ones (Netflix and Google cutting back on free branded swag for workers). Google's hacked back its "fun budget" for offsite team-building activities and replacement laptops for workers needing faster machines (so much for prioritizing "increasing worker productivity").

Trump's new gangster capitalism pits immiserated blue collar workers against the "professional and managerial class," attacking universities and other institutions that promised social mobility to the children of working families. Trump had a point when he lionized factory work as a source of excellent wages and benefits for working people without degrees, but he conspicuously fails to mention that factory work was deadly, low-waged and miserable – until factory workers formed unions:

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/unions-not-just-factories-will-make

Re-shoring industrial jobs to the USA is a perfectly reasonable goal. Between uncertain geopolitics, climate chaos, monopolization and the lurking spectre of the next pandemic, we should assume that supply-chains will be repeatedly and cataclysmicly shocked over the next century or more. And yes, re-shoring product could provide good jobs to working people – but only if they're unionized.

But Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and stacked his administration with bloodsucking scabs like Elon Musk. Trump doesn't want to bring good jobs back to America – he wants to bring bad jobs back to America. He wants to reshore manufacturing jobs from territories with terrible wages, deadly labor conditions, and no environment controls by taking away Americans' wages, labor rights and environmental protections. He doesn't just want to bring home iPhone production, he wants to import the suicide nets of iPhone City, too.

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line.

There've been half a million US tech layoff since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers can avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death – but only by unionizing.

In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies – and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/ (h/t Slashdot)

• Runaway Tren https://prospect.org/justice/2025-04-24-runaway-tren-de-aragua-colorado-housing-gangs/

• How Monopolies Could Exploit the Tariff Shock https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-monopolies-could-exploit-the

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Architectures of Control: DRM in hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20050425184527/http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/architectures.html

#20yrsago Insect photos in naturalistic http://macro-focus https://bugdreams.com

#20yrsago BBC: DRM makes music customers mad https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4474143.stm

#20yrsago Guckert was at the White House even when there were no press briefings https://web.archive.org/web/20050428034248/https://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/byrne/secret_service_gannon_424.htm

#20yrsago FBI warnings ruin CD art & art is the reason for buying CDs http://www.yarnivore.com/francis/archives/001102.html

#20yrsago US govt admits RFID passports are danger to Americans https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/politics/bowing-to-critics-us-to-alter-design-of-electronic-passports.html

#15yrsago Considering cities as “dense meshes of active, communicating public objects” https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/frameworks-for-citizen-responsiveness-enhanced-toward-a-readwrite-urbanism/

#15yrsago Peter Watts won’t go to jail https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/26/peter-watts-wont-go-to-jail/

#15yrsago Canada’s Heritage Minister ready to bring back DMCA-style copyright, throwing out results of copyright consultation https://web.archive.org/web/20100428113301/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4979/135/

#15yrsago In praise of SFWA’s Grievance Committee https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/25/in-praise-of-sfwas-grievance-committee/

#15yrsago UK’s super-rich get even richer https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8642021.stm

#15yrsago Protect your copyrights, boycott DRM-locked platforms https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/devices/article/42869-can-you-survive-a-benevolent-dictatorship.html

#15yrsago Why I won’t buy an iPad, the podcast edition https://web.archive.org/web/20110114222040/https://podcasts.tvo.org/searchengine/audio/800832_48k.mp3

#15yrsago On Peter Watts’s sentencing hearing https://web.archive.org/web/20100429105210/http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=59215

#15yrsago The “fair use economy” is enormous, growing, and endangered by the relatively tiny entertainment industry https://web.archive.org/web/20110128152731/https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/04/fairuseeconomy.pdf

#15yrsago UK election: ask your candidates if they’ll repeal the Digital Economy Act https://web.archive.org/web/20100430090624/http://action.openrightsgroup.org/ea-campaign/clientcampaign.do?ea.client.id=1422&ea.campaign.id=6449

#10yrsago Town will cut off power to families of kids who commit vandalism https://web.archive.org/web/20150419053210/https://www.illinoishomepage.net/story/d/story/cutting-vandalism-off-at-the-source/26297/gSM2PYl6P0CRIttIu_95BQ

#10yrsago Portraits of e-waste pickers in Ghana https://www.wired.com/2015/04/kevin-mcelvaney-agbogbloshie/

#10yrsago In the 21st century, only corporations get to own property and we’re their tenants https://web.archive.org/web/20150428173001/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/how-digital-rights-management-keeps-value-in-hands-of-the-manufacturer/article24130876/

#10yrsago Obituary for an amazing history teacher https://web.archive.org/web/20150426235723/https://thescientificparent.org/teachers-be-like-robin-barker-james/

#10yrsago What the UK Greens actually believe about copyright http://tomchance.org/2015/04/24/making-copyright-work-for-creatives/

#10yrsago School bus driver bans little girl from reading https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-girl-told-to-stop-reading-book-by-school-bus-driver-1.3043652?cmp=rss

#10yrsago Variations on the Trolley Problem https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lesser-known-trolley-problem-variations

#10yrsago Senators announce “Aaron Swartz Should Have Faced More Jail Time” bill https://www.techdirt.com/2015/04/23/senators-introduce-anti-aarons-law-to-increase-jail-terms-unauthorized-access-to-computers/

#10yrsago Kansas kid corrects anti-drug teacher, cops raid his house https://web.archive.org/web/20150423174017/http://benswann.com/exclusive-cops-raid-cannabis-oil-activist-because-her-son-discussed-medical-pot-facts-at-school/

#5yrsago Makers in a time of pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#makers

#5yrsago A deflationary pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#fiscal-dominance

#5yrsago The vernacular signage of the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#frankfurt

#5yrsago California Adventure, Minecraft edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#minecraft

#5yrsago Security expert conned out of $10,000 https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#overconfidence

#5yrsago Facebook let advertisers target "pseudoscience" and "conspiracy" https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#upton-sinclair-disease

#5yrsago Amazon uses its sellers' data to figure out which products to clone https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#moral-hazard

#5yrsago US telcoms sector isn't doing better than Europe's https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#opportunists

#5yrsago Masks work https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#pewpew

#5yrsago US healthcare fails insured people too https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#m4a

#5yrsago "Inject disinfectant" vs both sides-ism https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#both-sides-ism

#5yrsago A labradoodle breeder is in charge of America's vaccines https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#labradoodles

#5yrsago Which guillotine is right for you https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#slicey-boi

#5yrsago Hospital cuts healthcare workers' pay, pays six-figure exec bonuses https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#all-in-this-together

#5yrsago Pandemic proves ISP data-caps were always a pretense https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#concast

#5yrsago Billionaires thriving on our pandemic losses https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#socialized-losses

#5yrsago Podcasting Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#alan-abel-andrew

#5yrsago Indie booksellers during the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#glimmers-of-hope

#1yrago The tax sharks are back and they're coming for your home https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/27/for-the-little-people/#alden-capital

#1yrago The specific process by which Google enshittified its search https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

#1yrago Antitrust is a labor issue https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM
  https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199

• Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM
  https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley):
  https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Move Fast and Break Kings
  https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s

• Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ

• Can we use the Internet for Democracy?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh_HON6iql8

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

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: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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When Kentucky Rep. Andy Barr announced that he will run to replace Mitch McConnell in the United States Senate, it was reported that Barr mentioned President Donald Trump’s name “every minute of Rep. Barr's 17-minute announcement speech — in which the congressman attributed the president’s survival in an assassination attempt to a divine plan.”

Barr used the first 20 seconds of his first campaign ad for U.S. Senate to give his voters a lecture about hate. “The woke left wants to neuter America, literally. They hate our values. They hate our history. And goodness knows they hate President Trump.”

I’m not sure who Barr has been talking to, but I’m a run-of-the-mill Democrat and I don’t hate anyone or anything, including American values, American history, or the American president, and I certainly have not been walking down Main Street in Anderson County, Kentucky with a surgical knife looking for Trump-voting men to neuter “literally”. 

This is one sick fever dream.

If Barr is looking for someone to fit his description, I suggest he look no further than the president’s own Easter message which read, in part, "Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country," Mr. Trump said, going on to wish a happy Easter to the "WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue.” The president continued, accusing "Sleepy Joe Biden" of purposefully allowing "Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America."

Who talks like this?

What kind of leader sends out this message on the holiest day of the Christian calendar?

Would Barr say hate-speech is part of the “divine plan” for Mr. Trump that he described in his 17-minute speech about running for senate?

I’m a pretty outspoken Democrat, I know a lot of Democrats, and yet I don’t know anyone who’s “fighting and scheming” to bring murderers, etc. into the country. This is just complete wackadoodle nonsense — which Barr surely knows — and yet Barr lays it right out there and proudly uses the word “hate” repeatedly in his opening salvo to run for U.S. senate. 

Is ‘hate’ all that sells now in the Trump Republican ecosphere?

I hope not. Because all of this hate-selling mixed with Trump deism has consequences.

Yesterday, Robert Crimo III (age 23), the Highland Park parade shooter, was sentenced to “seven back-to-back life sentences for each murder victim plus 50 years for attempted murder. Crimo opened fire on crowds celebrating at a the Fourth of July in Highland Park, a city 30 miles (50 kilometres) north of Chicago. The victims of the shooting ranged from an eight-year-old boy, paralysed from the waist down, to a young couple and an 88-year-old-man who were killed.”

Last month, Mr. Crimo — who has the number 47 tattooed on his face — pleaded guilty and “signed the name ‘Donald Trump’ when he waived his right to trial.” 

If this has been reported in conservative media like FOX News, I missed it.

I did not know about Crimo’s worship of Mr. Trump when I wrote about the parade shooting for the Washington Post right after it happened in 2022, a piece that ended up being mostly about what it’s like to live in a rural Kentucky county — part of Andy Barr’s district — which is awash in both Trump-worship and gun culture. 

What I would ask U.S. Representative Andy Barr — if he ever stops hiding from his constituents by not holding town halls — is why does he believe campaign jargon about hate is a winning message?

Does Barr think there are no consequences for spreading hateful rhetoric while also claiming Mr. Trump is part of God’s divine plan? Does he not see the obvious dangers inherent in such words?

Is this the legacy Andy Barr wants to leave for his children? For yours?

Because if that’s all he’s got, he is unfit to serve.

--30--

It’s impossible to communicate everything. The map is not the territory, it’s an abstraction, a summary and most of all, a conceptual framework.

When we share an idea, we can work to make sure it’s true, but when we share all the facts, we’re simply boring people. Stories are relevant, creating a narrative and tension and change.

A manipulator doesn’t care if the story is true. They’ve succeeded by taking advantage of our goodwill, our assumption that things asserted to be true usually are. A manipulator brings us a story that creates emotion–and causes action that the recipient ends up regretting. Manipulation isn’t resilient, because sooner or later, we discover that the world doesn’t work the way we were led to believe.

The stories we tell are a choice. Reciting facts lets us off the hook, but telling a true story that causes change is a powerful responsibility.

My DM’s this morning were filled with journalists and friends asking me about a story that increasingly dubious New York Times ran yesterday. This one:

I am not going to read Kevin’s column, and I don’t think you need to, either. What he wrote about coding was wildly naive, and he couldn’t be bothered to ask whether the system would even extend to Pac-Man , let alone debugging. His near-religious endorsement of the imminence of AGI kind of speaks for itself, as does his apparent aversion to consulting seriously with experts who might disagree with his panglossian takes. His shtick is write to with awe, and to think uncritically; I have honestly had enough.

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That said, we have seen this movie before. The last time I wrote it about, in June 2022, I called it nonsense on stilts.

For those who have forgotten the story, an AI safety engineer at Google, Blake Lemoine, felt that an LLM-based system that nobody remembers anymore called Lamda had achieved “sentience”. The eternally-sharp Abeba Birhane nailed it then with a tweet that she could equally repost today, in Roose’s honor:

The essence of my own argument then, back in June 2022, applies as much to today’s LLM’s as those of three years ago:

To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t. It’s just an illusion, in the grand history of ELIZA a 1965 piece of software that pretended to be a therapist (managing to fool some humans into thinking it was human), and Eugene Goostman, a wise-cracking 13-year-old-boy impersonating chatbot that won a scaled-down version of the Turing Test. None of the software in either of those systems has survived in modern efforts at “artificial general intelligence”, and I am not sure that LaMDA and its cousins will play any important role in the future of AI, either. What these systems do, no more and no less, is to put together sequences of words, but without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools, without any clue about what that mean.

I am not saying that no software ever could connects its digital bits to the world, a la one reading of John Searle’s infamous Chinese Room thought experiment. Turn-by-turn navigations systems, for example, connect their bits to the world just fine.

Software like LaMDA simply doesn’t; it doesn’t even try to connect to the world at large, it just tries to be the best version of autocomplete it can be, by predicting what words best fit a given context. Roger Moore made this point beautifully a couple weeks ago, critique systems like LaMDA that are known as “language models”, and making the point that they don’t understand language in the sense of relating sentences to the world, but just sequences of words to one another.

Search and replace LaMDA with Claude, and it all still applies. I still don’t remotely see an argument that current models are sentient, nor any argument that scaling a model makes it more conscious, even if it can mimic more language from humans discussing consciousness. Claude does what LaMDA does better because it has more data, but I don’t see any really argument that Claude is any more sentient than a web browser.

Eric Byrnjolffson is often more bullish on AI than I am, but his 2022 commentary on the whole LaMDA affair, too, could be reposted today without changing a word:

Sad that The New York Times fell for it.

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You can look at what Anthropic is doing (evaluating the “welfare” of its models) from the standpoint of the philosophy of consciousness (asking very reasonably questions like what would count as consciousness? and how we would measure it in an animal or a machine?, and so on), but I think it is better to look at what is happening from the perspective of of commerce. Anthropic is a business (which incidentally neglects to respect the rights of artist and writers who work they nick). I suspect the real move here is simply, as it so often is, to hype the product — basically by saying, hey, look at how smart our product is, it’s so smart we need to give it rights.

Just wait ‘til you see our spreadsheets!

Gary Marcus is shaking his head.

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