The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, “no-tech” tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers?

Alberta’s Ursa Ag says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare. We have for years covered the frustration that farmers have felt as they have been locked out of their Deere tractors with digital rights management systems that prevent them from fixing their machinery, tractors that won’t run because of minor sensor failures, and crops that literally die on the vine as they wait for an “authorized” repair person to fix tractors during critical harvesting periods. 

Ursa Ag markets its tractors as “no frills” and “built to last.” Ursa Ag’s Doug Wilson told me that the company designed the tractor because of a need in the marketplace for a new machine that isn’t loaded with tech and is easy to maintain. The company follows in the footsteps of consumer electronics companies like Fairphone, which makes a repairable smartphone and Framework, which makes modular, repairable laptops. The demand Ursa Ag has seen is part of the backlash to manufacturer repair monopolies and the injection of technology and internet-connected sensors and terms of use into even the most basic of gadgets. 

“I talk to farmers every day and I hear from farmers every day about how they went out and bought machinery from 1987 so that it wouldn’t have a computer on it,” Wilson said. “All of this came from a simple discussion with a customer who wanted to be able to turn [the tractor] on at the start of the day, to use it, and shut it off at the end of the day. It needed to work, so that’s what we built.”

Ursa Ag’s tractor has been hyped in agriculture circles after Wilson showed the tractor off at a Canadian farm show and it was featured by Farms.com. Wilson said more than a thousand farmers have contacted him after that show, from roughly 30 countries. “I got a handwritten letter from a farmer in France who doesn’t own a computer and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors,” he said. 

He said the company has thus far made a couple fewer than 100 tractors but is working on tripling its production capacity and has seen a lot of demand over the last few months. For years, people who don’t understand the repair monopoly issue—that John Deere controls the parts production and distribution for its tractors, the software that runs its tractors, the diagnostics for its tractors, and the repair guides for its tractors—have said that farmers should simply vote with their wallets and buy tractors from a different company. The problem has been that, until now, there hasn’t really been an alternative company that doesn’t have similar repair practices. Ursa Ag is filling that niche. Perhaps other companies will pop up to sell low- or no-tech, repairable appliances and gadgets.

“Given the number of my customers that carry flip phones, I would say there is consumer pressure to back away from some of the technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks,” Wilson said. “So that is definitely transferable to dishwashers and washing machines, refrigerators. Refrigerators that have screens on them that'll tell you what's inside. It's a little crazy.”

“That high-tech stuff, the million-dollar John Deere tractor has a place. It has technology that is well worth the money,” Wilson said. “But that technology is needed for 5 percent of what a farm does. There are so many applications for tractors on farms that don’t require technology. The technology that goes into even a calculator is not required for most farming applications.” 

A year and a half-ish into Donald Trump's second term as the nation's foremost disgrace, we now have a clear picture into what the ailing narcissist believes the United States government was built for. It isn't complex; even running down a partial list of departments and agencies will reveal it soon enough.

• Trump believes the purpose of the Department of Justice is to manufacture scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the purpose of the FBI is to manufacture scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the purpose of the FCC is to manufacture scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the purpose of the Federal Housing Finance Agency is to manufacture scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the chairmanship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exists to manufactures scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the purpose of ICE and DHS are to act as props for manufactured scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the purpose of the IRS is to cover up tax evasion by his allies while manufacturing scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence exists to, of course, manufacture scandals against his enemies.

• Trump believes the State Department exists to serve a stable of ambassadors who will go out and manufacture foreign scandals against his enemies (and also facilitate family real estate deals.)

We've all been marveling at the cabinet-level chaos that has seen the duties of State transferred to the "Department of War," or the seeming indifference of the FBI head to that whole solving crimes part, or the unclear chain of command in both civilian law enforcement and military engagements that appears to boil down to "Stephen Miller is in charge of anything he wants to be in charge of," but it makes much more sense when you realize that Donald Trump himself does not know or care what any of these agencies do, because after five nonconsecutive years of running the whole executive branch he has at no point been able to conceive of any of them as anything more than arbitrary fiefdoms to which he can assign pre-humiliated bootlickers to shower him with praise while manufacturing scandals against his enemies.

They're all the same job. That's why Trump can announce, with perfect seriousness, that the new Director of National Intelligence is the guy who spends his days searching through the files at the Federal Housing Financing Agency to see whether anyone on Trump's enemies list might have a mortgage issue that can be scandalized—and that since heading the FHFA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the coordination of 18-ish U.S. intelligence agencies are all mere part time jobs at best, the mortgage guy can head up national intelligence efforts in his spare time.

It's all the same crap, after all.

President Donald Trump has named Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, succeeding Tulsi Gabbard who recently announced she plans to resign from the role at the end of June.

Pulte, a close Trump ally who serves as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has “deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets, and over 10 Trillion Dollars at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, a substantial increase from where it was just 12 months ago,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post Tuesday morning.

While he serves as acting director of national intelligence, Pulte will remain as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency as well as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Trump wrote. [...]

In his role leading the agency, Pulte has targeted Democrats whom Trump perceives as his political enemies. In March, Pulte made two criminal referrals against New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleging insurance fraud, several months after Trump’s Justice Department failed to prosecute her for a third time. James’ lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, called the allegations “baseless.”

To you, a person who thinks that preventing international terrorism might be a full time position, maybe even a more-than-full-time position, like working for one of those tech companies that expects you to work 16 hour days and sleep under your desk. The sort of job that you have to pack a toothbrush for.

Alternatively, you might at least think that the person tapped to coordinate intelligence gathering across the whole of federal government ought to have some prior experience in working with federal intelligence agencies, not least because the goddamn law requires it.

But you are not Donald Trump, and what you need to understand is that Donald Trump does not give a flying shit whether America is attacked by terrorists. He has no interest whatsoever in preventing foreign states from sabotaging massive chunks of the U.S. electrical grid, or injecting malware that causes a major U.S. pipeline to burst. He does not care even the tiniest little bit whether state-sponsored hackers in Russia, China, Iran, or anywhere else fund themselves with ransomware attacks on U.S. companies.

He doesn't care and you can't make him care, because after five point five years of being in charge of all of this, with full access to as many tutors and experts as the whole of the U.S. government can produce, this delusional malignant narcissist still cannot understand government as anything but a vehicle for glorifying his own supposed greatness while manufacturing scandals against his enemies.

Trump doesn't want Bill Pulte to become Director of National Intelligence because he thinks Pulte knows a damn thing about intelligence, terrorism, espionage, or sabotage. Pulte is, objectively, a raving idiot whose sole qualification as a Trump appointee is being the rich-as-sin son of a sketchy-as-sin homebuilding magnate, a vastly creepy critter who shares Trump's affinity for scamming family members.

Pulte is, if anything, a reminder that if you're delusional and poor America will shun you, but if you're even more delusional and have a rich dad then some other delusional freak who had a rich dad will invariably assign you a top government position.

the current director of national intelligence is a guy who two years ago received a trophy declaring he “Fucks Only The Young” at an (oddly dildo focused) event he organized dedicated to the conspiracy that Bed Bath and Beyond never actually went bankrupt

paris martineau (@paris.nyc)

the current director of national intelligence is a guy who two years ago received a trophy declaring he “Fucks Only The Young” at an (oddly dildo focused) event he organized dedicated to the conspiracy that Bed Bath and Beyond never actually went bankrupt [contains quote post or other embedded content]

Bluesky Socialparis martineau

another fun fact is that Pulte used to host meetups for fellow memestock fans and went through a period where he unironically wore a "bulletproof vest" to bars because he was concerned his Enemies would Stop Him

paris martineau (@paris.nyc)

another fun fact is that Pulte used to host meetups for fellow memestock fans and went through a period where he unironically wore a “bulletproof vest” to bars because he was concerned his Enemies would Stop Him

Bluesky Socialparis martineau

The extent of Pulte's prior government experience can be measured solely by whether or not he ever managed to wander into one of the curtained-off corners of Mar-a-Lago that Trump insists count as popup SCIFs. But Pulte isn't expected to coordinate intelligence across government agencies to begin with; Trump doesn't give a flying damn what happens to or with the intelligence. Trump nominated Pulte to the position so that Pulte would be in a position to thumb through national security secrets the same way he's thumbed through mortgage records.

Trump considers the weaponization of federal agencies to be the only job any of his various toadies can be judged on, and Pulte has proven a willingness to weaponize even the most boring agency and put forward even the stupidest of supposed conspiracies.

Will Iranian-linked terrorists pull off a major attack on U.S. soil under Donald Trump's watch? We won't know unless it happens. But if you're looking to expose a good chunk of the American espionage apparatus in a fevered effort to tie any random Democratic senator to a confusingly dildo-riddled conspiracy to trick Americans into thinking Bed Bath and Beyond had gone bankrupt, this real estate failson is your guy.

Trump doesn't care. That's what we all need to internalize here. It's not that Trump is sabotaging the economy, the military, intelligence agencies, scientific research, medical research, public health in general, food supplies, fuel supplies, and every U.S. agency you can name because he has some vision for how America should operate either now or after he's gone. He doesn't give the slightest shit. For all he cares, the United States might as well cease to exist if it's not going to exist as a tacky gilded monument to him and him alone.

As with the $1.8 billion proposed slush fund for Trump-allied violent felons, there is a good chance that Pulte may not be long for the job. Senate Republicans still recovering from the previous Obvious Fking Crime are reeling from Trump's new announcement, and for the same reasons: These Republicans have staked their entire careers on being the tough-on-crime tough-on-terrorists lets-bomb-everybody daddy party, and nominating an obvious hack fresh off the Dildo & Memestock World Tour to be the new DNI after Tulsi Gabbard already made a wreck of the office might be too much for some senators.

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)

RAJU: Do you think Bill Pulte has experience to be acting DNI? THUNE: I’ll defer to Chairman Cotton COTTON: We have 4 more weeks with Director Gabbard as the DNI RAJU: And Pulte? COTTON: I have no observations on the matter

Bluesky SocialAaron Rupar

Meanwhile, Democratic senators are threatening to nix any new FISA deal if Pulte is installed. There's also a very good case to be made for impeaching Pulte right-the-hell-now, stripping him of the prior Senate confirmation that allows him to sail into the "acting" DNI role without new Senate approval.

So we'll see. Trump has used the DNI position as a dumping ground for hyperpartisan possibly-crooked cranks ranging from Gabbard to Rick Grenell; it has been obvious for nearly a decade that Trump sees the position as valuable solely as a way to wedge his most loyal of toadies into the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

And it's not a surprise anymore, because that is who Trump is. Trump has never, ever given a damn about terrorism, foreign espionage, or other threats to America. He truly and sincerely does not care, and you cannot make him care.

Watch any cabinet meeting and it becomes perfectly clear: Trump doesn't know what any of these agencies actually do. He only wants to know what each big-shoed bootlicker has been doing to glorify him and rout his infinitely many enemies, and if you take longer than ninety seconds to tell him there's a good chance he's going to fall asleep in his chair.

He is too stupid to ever learn, too mired in narcissism to ever care, and too fragile to ever change. So no: Given all of that, we are never going to convince the man to take international terrorism more seriously than he takes his own petty personal vendettas. And we will never, ever get him to agree that stuffing federal agencies with whichever random real estate dildo memestock failsons last wandered into his private Florida club is not, in the end, a viable system of government.

Just over three years ago, at the US Senate, Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) asked me for my three most important suggestions for AI legislation.

Number one on my list was preflight checks, similar to the FDA review for drugs, for models with large commercial impact:

Today, most definitely not on my bingo card, President Trump signed an executive order that was very much along on these lines:

I can’t take credit for causality, but it’s thrilling to see a dream come true.

May any such oversight be bipartisan, and in the interest of American citizens, and in the interests of humanity as a whole.

Subscribe now

Happy to see that my short story “Model Collapse” which originally appeared in Reactor Magazine was listed as a notable story in the 2026 edition Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Olivie Blake.…

In Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout said, “Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.” So consider what’s happening in the minds of everyone who has long depended on Google to be what it has always been—a search engine for the Web—when they consider what they’re seeing from Google now, and reading in stories such as these:

• Google Search as You Know It is Over (TechCrunch)
• Google Shifts to AI Search, Heralding Major Change in How People Use the Internet (in Time)
• Is Google about to destroy the web? (BBC)
• The Death of Google Search (Impact Lab)
• Google Just Killed the Search Engine (in Banyan Hill)
• Google Has Abandoned What Made People Love Google (in How To Geek)

By forking itself away from search, Google is also forking over the Web—and creating a giant opening for somebody else to grab the Web Search position.

Who would that be? 

Microsoft’s Bing is one candidate, but Bing’s UI is a NASCAR of promotional jive. (See what Steve Jobs says about Microsoft here. Cuts like a scalpel.)

DuckDuckGo is the other. Its position is privacy. That’s good, but Web Search is better now, because the position is available. Google isn’t abandoning search, but now they’d rather be “your helpful assistant” and “personal shopper” than the Web’s “librarian.” (Source: Google Gemini.) To make that shift, Google has compromised Web search, and the Web with it.)

Conveniently, DuckDuckGo already has a search engine for the Web. They can sharpen that position while keeping—or even expanding —their privacy one. And help save the Web in the process.

They’re already on the case. See what they’re saying on Threads, BlueSky, Xitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

They should also add “Does pure Web search by default” and “No AI extension” to their list of things they do and Google doesn’t:

Anyway, glad to help.

Today's links

• AI and a world without migrants: It's solipsism all the way down.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Manuscript rabbits; "What Will Come After"; Pastejacking; Terrorism phrenology; Vaccine waivers were promised 20 years ago.
• Upcoming appearances: London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh.
• 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.

AI and a world without migrants (permalink)

I don't care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other people. Not because other people are horrible – quite the opposite! Other people are wonderful, but boy are they ever stubborn.

From boardgames to romance, team sports to movement politics, business ideas to construction projects, there's so much important, enjoyable and essential stuff you can't do alone. But other people insist on having their own priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit your priorities.

Our species has put a lot of work into resolving this conundrum. Not only did we evolve a whole brain structure – the neocortex – that helps us understand others' perspectives, but we also evolved many social structures (like laws and teams and governments and families and committees and bureaucracies) to help us coordinate with others to do superhuman things (that is, things that exceed the capacity of a single human).

These structures are imperfect, but they're better than the alternative: coercion. Persuading others is not without its pitfalls, but compared to forcing others to bend to your will, "persuasion" is the hands-down favorite.

Not for everyone, though. There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than yours. We call most of those people "toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief.

But there's another group of people who carry this belief into adulthood. If they're of regular means, we call those people "bullies." However, if they're sufficiently wealthy, we call them "billionaires" (this is the same force that allows money to transmute a "hoarder" into a "collector").

Just lately though, we've come up with a new solution to the problem of hell being other people. Rather than coercing other people into arranging their affairs to suit our needs, we've devoted trillions of dollars to replacing people with pliant chatbots, in the hopes that these chatbots can be made so effective that we can just dispense with other people altogether.

Many everyday people have replaced their romantic partners with chatbots ("AI boyfriends"/"AI girlfriends"), and they've formed active communities to revel in the delights of pursuing love with someone who demands no moral consideration or compromise, glorying in a world of love without lovers:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16215328-e1-love-bots

There's a whole community of people who have stopped listening to music created by people in favor of made-to-order slop, exulting in a world of music without musicians:

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937059/nobody-wants-to-tell-me-why-they-only-listen-their-own-suno-slop

These are foundationally solipsistic exercises, fantasy worlds in which you are the only real person and everyone else is a bot, an NPC, a phantom. AI has democratized solipsism, a privilege that was once the exclusive purview of billionaires, whose belief that most other people weren't fully real let them inflict the kind of mass pain on millions that is a prerequisite for amassing a truly vast fortune:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

No surprise then that billionaires were easy marks for AI hustlers, who promised the possibility of a world without people, where an army of "agents" could do the jobs that presently demand the contributions of unreasonable human beings who refuse to acknowledge that your priorities trump theirs.

Jeff Bezos built the world's most advanced automated warehouses, and the workers in those warehouses are seriously injured at 300% of the national rate, and they are not allowed pee breaks (nevertheless, these workers unreasonably insist on metabolizing fluids and expelling the waste). The automation and the injuries aren't unrelated facts. The inhumane treatment is caused by the automation, because when you commit hundreds of billions to automation capex, you need to work those assets to recoup the investment. In a human/machine collaboration, humans will always be the bottlenecks. To maximize return on automation, you need to drive the human peripherals that serve the machines at the absolute limit of human endurance. Jeff Bezos's machines don't just use humans, they use them up:

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

Billionaires poured trillions into AI because they are obsessed with the fantasy of a world without people. Mark Zuckerberg would like to replace your on-platform friends with chatbots. Sure, your friends are the reason you're stuck on his platforms, but your friends are stubborn and thus suboptimal. Remember: hell is other people, so while your friends unreasonably refuse to leave Facebook with you and follow you to another platform (this is bad for you, but good for Zuck), they also refuse to organize their social media lives to "maximize your engagement" and thus the number of ads you see (which is bad for Zuck). By replacing your friends with chatbots, Zuck hopes to reinvent social media without the socializing:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/17/for-youze/#forever

Billionaires are betting that bosses (and other would-be billionaires) will spend trillions buying AI products, captured by the fantasy of a workplace without workers. They think AI could be the remedy for the ancient, nameless dread that bosses experience every time they contemplate the fact that if they don't show up for work, everything hums along fine; whereas if the workers don't show up, the whole enterprise collapses. Secretly, bosses are haunted by the fear that they're not driving the car, they're strapped into the back seat, amusing themselves with a toy steering-wheel:

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

That's what the Hollywood strikes were about: studio bosses' fantasy of movies without actors and screenplays without screenwriters. Since the invention of the studio system itself, studio bosses have wrestled with the fact that talented people who are beloved by audiences have bargaining leverage, which they use to demand better outputs and higher wages (this is the same conundrum faced by hospital administrators confronting nurses and doctors, college administrators confronting faculty, etc):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/20/i-would-prefer-not-to/#i-cant-do-that-boss

This solipsistic drive is what powers investment in AI "persuasion" technologies, making billions for latter-day Cambridge Analyticas who peddle the outlandish tale of having built a mind-control ray. It's a winning sales-pitch because it plays into the fantasy of a world where customers do as they're told, organizing their lives according to your priorities, at the expense of their own wellbeing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

It's not just captains of industry who are occupied with furious, all-consuming fantasies of a world without people. Dictators, autocrats and technocrats in the political world love AI because it dangles the possibility of a world without bureaucrats and public officials. If the civil service can be replaced with chatbots, then the will of the dictator can be translated directly into policy without any tedious negotiations with experts who understand how things work and have deep moral commitments to the public good:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

A world without people is especially attractive to politicians presiding over aging, declining nations whose most ardent voters have been convinced that migrants are a threat to their nation (rather than its salvation).

Objectively speaking, the only way that a rich country with an aging workforce can remain wealthy and powerful is by wooing working-age people from elsewhere to migrate to that country. Even if every tradwife is kept in a state of continuous gestation courtesy of a fertility-obsessed natalist, there's still going to be decades during which your wealthy, aging population will need young, skilled people to do all the essential labor. From picking crops, to staffing hospitals, to building homes, to filing lawsuits, to preparing tax-returns, your quiverfull child army will be too young to take over for years to come.

Trapped in the political impossibility of a country whose productive activities are absolutely reliant on young, strong, resourceful, skilled migrants, and a xenophobic political movement that scapegoats these migrants and revels in the spectacle of ethnic cleansing, politicians see AI as a way out of their double-bind. If migrants can be replaced with AI, then you can satisfy the racist sadism of your most ardent voters without shutting down the country for lack of workers.

In other words: in feeding the fantasy of a world without people, AI serves the fantasy of a world without migrants. Unlike gastarbeiters, bracero fruit-pickers and Saudi quasi-slaves, AI makes no demands, requires no moral consideration, and does not attempt to germinate a culture, a cuisine, or a language in your sacred soil.

This grotesque fantasy has always lurked in the subtext of the automation story. The plot of Disney's Big Hero 6 boils down to: "In future-America/Japan, it will be more politically possible to have robots look after our aging parents than it will be to welcome the millions of skilled health-workers in the Pacific Rim who are eminently qualified to do the job." Big Hero 6 is the solution to the problem of building a nursing home without nurses.

The wealthy have always dreamed of transforming the proletariat into the precariat: desperate workers who do as they're told. But in the automation story of which AI is the latest chapter (and purportedly the climax), the precariat becomes the unnecessariat: workers who are surplus to requirements and can be vaporized or liquidated or warehoused or simply ignored.

In the fantasy world of total automation, the owners of AI can make the world go around without any of us, which means that we will exist solely at their sufferance, and will therefore have to act like the NPCs they half-believe we are already, organizing everything we do around their priorities.

This is the foundation of Sam Altman's obsession with a biometrically controlled universal basic income. Altman can't stop fantasizing about a world in which all the productive work is done by his software, and the state's sole purpose is to supply us – the unnecessariat – with vouchers we can only redeem for services provided by Altman's robot army. It's charter schools for everything, with Altman at the top, all wrapped up in a layer of dystopian retinal scanning:

https://www.wired.com/story/worldcoin-sam-altman-orb/

Billionaires and would-be billionaires are absolute suckers for this solipsistic bullshit, because they genuinely don't think other people are real. They love "effective altruism" because it counsels them to make as much money as possible, without regard to how many people they cheat, hurt, or kill…provided that they pledge to use these ill-gotten gains to improve the lives of 10^53 imaginary artificial people who will come into existence in 10,000 years. After all, the total benefit of even the most infinitesimal welfare gains experienced by 10^53 people vastly exceeds all the pleasures that all eight billion actual, living people are capable of experiencing:

https://www.semafor.com/article/11/21/2023/how-effective-altruism-led-to-a-crisis-at-openai

It all makes perfect sense – provided you don't believe that other people are really, truly real.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• EU's digital sovereignty boo-boo may be the best thing to ever happen to the project https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/05/26/eus-digital-sovereignty-boo-boo-may-be-the-best-thing-to-ever-happen-to-the-project/5244715

• Revealed: Palantir’s NHS tech is ten times slower than current system https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-palantirs-nhs-tech-is-ten-times-slower-than-nhs-thiel-trump

• The human cost of governing by spreadsheet https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/21-05-2026/the-human-cost-of-governing-by-spreadsheet

• Canadian prime minister Mark Carney is not the climate guy you thought
  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/21/mark-carney-climate-canada

• It's time to talk about my writerdeck https://veronicaexplains.net/my-first-writerdeck/

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago California prison overcrowding, in photos https://web.archive.org/web/20110525171353/https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/05/california-prison-overcrowding-photos

#15yrsago What Will Come After: the sweet melancholy of the zombie apocalypse https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/25/what-will-come-after-the-sweet-melancholy-of-the-zombie-apocalypse/

#10yrsago If Donald Trump ever talks to a real journalist, these are the questions he should answer https://www.nationalmemo.com/21-questions-for-donald-trump

#10yrsago Norwegian Consumer Council broadcasts live, marathon reading of app Terms of Service https://web.archive.org/web/20160526145553/https://www.forbrukerradet.no/vilkar-og-personvern-minutt-for-minutt/

#10yrsago Pastejacking: using malicious javascript to insert sneaky text into pasted terminal commands https://github.com/dxa4481/Pastejacking

#10yrsago Why medieval monks filled manuscript margins with murderous rabbits https://web.archive.org/web/20160614000551/https://jonkanekojames.com/2015/05/02/why-are-there-violent-rabbits-in-the-margins-of-medieval-manuscripts/

#10yrsago Students: court orders government agencies to offer educational discount on FOIA requests https://web.archive.org/web/20160525155102/https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160521/16031934508/appeals-court-tells-government-it-must-extend-educational-institution-foia-fee-price-break-to-students.shtml

#10yrsago The euphemisms news reporters use when a sports figure injures his penis and testicles https://web.archive.org/web/20160525125452/https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/media-groin-draymond-green-steven-adams/

#10yrsago Company says facial features reveal terrorists and pedophiles 80% of the time https://web.archive.org/web/20160525130941/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/05/24/terrorist-or-pedophile-this-start-up-says-it-can-out-secrets-by-analyzing-faces/

#5yrsago We promised this vaccine waiver 20 years ago https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
  https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: TBA, Jun 25

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Recent appearances (permalink)

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

• The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
  https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

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

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 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "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, April 20, 2027

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

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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "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

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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