Until the Iran war, the main political pressure on President Donald Trump was high prices, particularly on housing and food. So earlier this year, he announced an executive order on a popular policy - banning Wall Street investors from controlling housing. “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” he said, “and I will be calling on Congress to codify it.” I didn’t believe Trump was serious, because he’s generally talked a big game on constraining Wall Street, but hasn’t followed through.

However, something unusual happened. Trump’s pledge meshed with a set of vibrant debates about housing happening in both parties, and it may end up turning into law.

To understand why, we have to start with how Trump’s arguments were received in Congress. After Biden lost in 2024, people on both sides of the aisle blamed high housing costs, particularly the spiraling prices and rents in the post-pandemic period, for the collapse of the Democratic Party. Trump inherited the problem, and hasn’t solved it.

The housing story was dominated by two different factions. One group, the “Abundance movement,” argued that zoning prohibitions prevented more housing supply, and thus kept prices high and unaffordable. This group generally blamed homeowners and bureaucrats for refusing to allow more multi-family housing.

The second group, anti-monopolists, argued the predominant problem was financial. After the Great Financial Crisis, went this argument, the number of builders fell by 60%, because smaller builders couldn’t get a loan while large ones could borrow cheaply from the capital markets. Moreover, large institutional buyers were taking existing supply off the market and engaging in various forms of soft monopolization to drive up rents. And big builders were engaged in land-hoarding to keep supply off the market.

On BIG, we got into a fight with Abundance co-author Derek Thompson, over the specific case of housing in Dallas. The passion is real, and exists for a reason. Here’s Thompson in 2021 calling allegations of private equity control of housing leading to higher prices something close to a conspiracy theory.

What’s going on is a debate over the nature of American society. For much of the 20th century, government support for homeownership was a foundational method of U.S. statecraft. As the founder of the post-WWII suburb, William Levitt, once said, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.” Every President supported homeownership, we anchor our schools and communities around it, and homeownership is associated with pretty much every socially beneficial health trend.

Wall Street was linked to Main Street through the housing finance channel, first through thrift loans, and then eventually through securitization. But from the 1980s onward, as wage growth flattened, Wall Street started lending too much to Americans, and the home became a financial asset as much and eventually even more than a place to live. This dynamic ultimately led to the great crisis of 2008, which snapped the spine of the American system.

In the post-crisis era, Obama decided that renting, not ownership, was a more suitable option for Americans. And he had his administration sell off large swaths of single family homes in foreclosure to large investors to turn them into rental properties. As Morgan Stanley put it, “[e]ach distressed single-family liquidation creates [not only] a potential renter household” but also “a potential single-family rental unit. That meant, for “the first time in history,” there was “an opportunity for institutions to own single-family rental properties as part of a larger asset allocation strategy.”

In other words, the rise of institutional ownership of single family housing is new, a result of Obama-era changes to try and move America from a society with high homeownership to one where people rent. This shift hasn’t been wholesale, a majority of Americans still owns their own home. But the age of the average homebuyer moved from 39 years old to 59 years old in the last 15 years.

Everyone else rents, and increasingly from corporate landlords. Institutional ownership is regionally concentrated, with investors buying up properties in particular cities. In Atlanta, for instance, large institutional investors have dominant shares of the market.

As homebuilding consolidated, and an institutional asset ownership class emerged, the big builders started working with Wall Street to craft single family homes from scratch that would never go on the market. This “Build to Rent” sector took off, doubling in market share from 2021-2024. Giants builders Lennar likely have market power, and may also be hoarding land as part of their strategy to work with big institutional investors to keep home prices up. After all, one way to keep supply off the market for normal buyers, and thus control prices, is to build housing for large institutional owners.

For a long time, most housing analysts and think tank types dismissed private equity buying up homes as some sort of conspiracy theory, even though it was a pretty common story to hear someone talk about how they couldn’t buy a home because of the all-cash purchase by some sort of investor. But over time, serious policymakers started to notice that the frustration was more than just a few dissatisfied anecdote tellers.

In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan found that Invitation Homes, a spinoff of Blackstone, had engaged in rampant misbehavior. The CEO told one of his subordinates to “juice this hog” and they did so by deceiving renters, unfairly evicting people, charging junk fees, and so forth. Her successor, Trump FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, is continuing her legacy in this area. Last year, Senator Jon Ossoff investigated and found that institutional purchases make it harder for Americans to buy homes.

Congressional documents showed that “renters in institutionally-owned SFR homes often experience higher rent increases, inflated fees, and diminishing quality of housing over time.” And Federal Reserve economists wrote a paper observing that such investors “raise rents at 60 percent higher rates than the average increase when first acquiring the property,” and that rents overall go up.

This information, and increasing frustration of Americans on high housing costs, led to Congressional action.

In July, Republican Senator Tim Scott and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren passed a bill out of the Senate Banking Committee doing meshing the Abundance and anti-monopoly framework. It encouraged more manufactured housing to lower costs, facilitated faster zoning approval, and loosened standards for financing for multi-family apartment construction, among other changes. There was more public money for homebuilding, and support for cities trying to speed up processes. It promised to be some of the most important housing legislation passed out of Congress in decades. It didn’t include anything on institutional bans, but drew support from both anti-monopolists and Abundance groups.

Then came Trump’s comments and executive order. And if anything, his rhetoric was even more heated than the policy he suggested; he criticized the big homebuilders for land hoarding and attacked them as similar to the oil cartel OPEC. As Dave Dayen notes, the White House pushed hard for Congress to bar institutional ownership, going so far as to criticize the House version of the bill for not including such a ban. So Senate Republicans, led by Scott, decided to negotiate one with Warren and add it to their July bill. And they did, which Trump approved in his statement of administrative policy on the Senate bill.

That part of the bill bans large institutional investors from buying up single-family homes, setting a limit of owning 350 homes. They can still build new construction, but must sell it after seven years, unless the renter wants to stay, in which case that gets extended by another three. There are a few other loopholes, such as allowing for institutional ownership of manufactured housing, which is designed to reduce costs. But it’s a pretty good package.

Yesterday, it passed by an overwhelming margin of 89-10. And the administration is encouraging the House of Representatives to pass it.

But if you’re thinking this story sounds too good to be true, well, you’re right. Now it heads to the House of Representatives, where there is opposition from the Republican head of the Financial Services Committee, French Hill. And his goal is to force the Senate to sit down and negotiate something different, likely remove the institutional ownership caps, and then jam a bunch of bank and crypto deregulatory policy in there to make the whole thing unpalatable to Democrats.

There are a couple of dangerous signals that Wall Street is rousing to back Hill’s opposition strategy. The first is that Senator Brian Schatz, who is set to take over as the Democratic Senate leader in a few years, opposed it to signal to private equity that he’s going to be a reliable ally. He gave an assertive speech against the provision preventing Build to Rent from owning large swaths of housing for more than seven years. Here’s Dayen.

Schatz called [the Build to Rent] particular measure “positively Soviet,” described it as “an effort to demonize people who want to build rental housing for folks,” and claimed it was a “drafting error,” presumably to embarrass its authors into a fix. “There is literally no reason to do it this way, and it would take like a two-line fix. But what we were told last week was, I’m sorry, the bill is closed,” he said.

The peroration got a lot of attaboys from the abundance folks, who have decided to magnify what Schatz even admits is a small part of the overall housing construction market and claim that this poisons the entire bill. But Schatz was, frankly, lying to his own supporters. He never filed an amendment to deal with this part of the bill, according to Senate aides, even though first-order amendments were open until this Monday and second-order amendments until this Wednesday. There was never an attempt to make that two-line fix or rally support around it. (Schatz’s office was asked about this and did not respond.)

Another signal is that, according to conservative Mike Cernovich, “a massive influencer contract to block this went out.” He continued, “Keep an eye out for ‘MAGA’ people who suddenly try derailing Trump’s plan to make home ownership more affordable. BIG MONEY is trying to stop this in the House.” So we’re going to see chatter online, especially among MAGA opinion leaders, on this legislation.

And finally, when Speaker Mike Johnson asked the President about whether he should push to pass the law in the House, sources claim that the President said “no one gives a fuck about housing.” I don’t know if that’s true. Trump may have said it, he also changes his mind a lot.

One interesting point is that a lot of the people who argue that supply constraints are the main factor limiting housing went aggressively to bat for Wall Street’s right to own homes, saying that such a limit overrides everything else that’s good in the bill. If that’s true, then much of the argument from the Abundance world isn’t credible. After all, the problem then can’t be zoning, it’s just a financing issue. But not all of the people in that world agree, many are sincere and wanted to see it pass. This bill split the Abundance types in a useful way.

So what happens now? I don’t know. It may move through the House, it may not. Trump is unpredictable, and the Iran situation has thrown all calculations out the window. Regardless, this legislation to make housing something ordinary families own, instead of an asset class for Wall Street, has moved further than I imagined possible.

That’s good news, in some dark times.

Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

cheers,

Matt Stoller

While media coverage of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has focused on oil prices, the implications for global food supplies are no less alarming. A prolonged closure could disrupt agriculture worldwide and place more than 100 million people at risk of a humanitarian catastrophe.

You’ve been wanting to read a comic about the intersection of New York’s matching fund program and the comptroller’s race, haven’t you? Admit it.

Well, now you can!

“We took an ancient vice…put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong?” I *hate* the extent to which gambling has infested everything; it’s not going to end well.

By Ron Jacobs

Washington is out of control.  It sanctions nations and people, ultimately intimidating the governments of most non-sanctioned nations afraid to raise its anger by ignoring those sanctions.  These governments know US sanctions have no legal standing and that they are merely pronouncements by the US government that it doesn’t agree with another government’s existence or policies.  Yet, they fear the economic repercussions from the United States should they break them. The fact that the western media makes it a point to mention that Washington has sanctioned this person, this oil tanker or this government when action is taken against them only means the media is providing cover—a cover that has no actual meaning outside of the Empire’s imagined reach.

People who ask how the US could have attacked Venezuela and kidnapped Maduro and his wife without someone on the inside forget that they were asking only a few months ago how Israel killed people with pagers. Of course, we don’t know the details of how the kidnapping of Maduro and Flores went, but it’s likely that Washington’s technology shut down early warning systems Venezuela had in place.  Both the pager operation and potentially the kidnapping in Caracas reveal a technofascism that plants its electronics in every government, every shop, every corporation and everyone’s pocket. The installation of these instruments is usually a standard commercial transaction. However, every manufacturer of tech hardware and software seems more than willing to share (usually at a price) the info it collects and manipulates with governments and their militaries. Like the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, the kidnapping was a high-tech version of plain old imperialism. In order to fight back, resistance must be asymmetrical and not dependent on the master’s tools. Of course, the only dictatorship in Venezuela was/is the dictatorship of US capital and imperialism and, in case one forgets, Trump isn’t the only US president who has cozied up to dictators. Every single one of them has throughout history.  That being said, the current situation in Venezuela is difficult to gauge from here in the restive belly of the beast.  Its revolutionary course is caught between a need to survive and provide for its people and a desire to dramatically reject US impositions, thereby risking a vicious and bloody occupation by the US military.

        During the recent protests in Iran, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu revealed that Israeli agents were active in the country. In an interview with Israel’s army radio, Eliyahu discussed Israeli operations in Iran over the past year and claimed that activities are ongoing, according to Israel Hayom newspaper.  As has been the case for a while, many of the folks provoking the situation in Iran are Mossad and CIA assets/agents. Historically speaking, Israel and Washington have never ever hidden the fact that they are intimately involved in trying to make Iran a US puppet government again. The Iranian revolution was short-circuited in 1980-1982 when the US and Israel traded arms for hostages and quietly lent their support to the Khomeinists and the bazaar class during the struggle for power after the Shah was kicked out of the country. At the time, the revolutionary government was a coalition dominated by democratic socialists, some Islamic Marxists and various leftist workers councils. The socially reactionary Khomeinists made a power grab and killed and jailed thousands of people on the left. Then they started a war with Iraq, which provided the Khomeini government with the excuse they needed to clamp down even further on the Left. The current opposition supported (and partially funded by) the US includes those who want to bring the monarchy back under the Shah’s son, the MEK (a one-time Islamic Marxist guerrilla organization that now gets much of fits funding from neocons, the CIA and Mossad, and a number of separatist groups who get funding from those sources and other governments. It is these outside funded groups that are most likely responsible for killing many cops and military during the recent protests.

As for any potential attack by Tel Aviv and/or Washington, if Iran learned anything from the last couple of years, they will not be sitting ducks and will not show much mercy to those who attack them. Barring the installment of a client regime in Iran, the aftermath will be a civil war, somewhat like after Washington attacked Iraq in 2003. This is the second choice of the imperial powers in the twenty-first century–if they can’t take over a nation, then they’ll help destroy it as a nation. The process is often called Balkanization, an approach that breaks larger societies into smaller and often conflicting groups—tribes if you will.  Yugoslavia experienced this in the 1990s, with the various groups opposing the Yugoslav nation as constructed during socialism supported by outside governments; Washington supported those against Serbia while Russia (and others) lent their support to the Serbian government in Belgrade despite its weakened situation after the end of the USSR. Syria experienced a similar situation after the so-called Arab Spring protests broke out in civil war, with Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara, the Saudis, and other Arab monarchies providing support to various mercenary and religious forces opposing the Damascus government of Assad.

In Europe, most NATO governments are talking about providing the martial law regime in Kyiv with fifteen billion dollars to help in its war with Russia. Meanwhile, Denmark is buying Hellfire missiles to protect Greenland. The US corporation Lockheed-Martin makes those missiles.  As for that fifteen billion to Kyiv, one wonders where the weapons they’ll mostly be used for are coming from.  Given that most of their systems are of US manufacture, it seems safe to assume that they will be US weapons and ammunition.  According to the website of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, the system works like so:

“PURL (Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List) is an initiative launched by the United States and NATO to supply Ukraine with critically needed weapons by funding the delivery of U.S.-manufactured arms and equipment through NATO member states. The mechanism allows partner countries to finance the procurement of such weapons according to a prioritized list of requirements defined by Ukraine and agreed with the United States and NATO.”

The current expenses of this program run about one billion dollars a month. That’s around thirty-three million dollars a day, a considerable amount for WMD even after the merchants and government officials take their cuts (legal and otherwise).  Meanwhile, the European nations funding these purchases are, in varying degrees, enforcing austerity measure on their populations. 

            Regarding Europe, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told its rulers at the Munich Security Conference—a meeting of most European rulers that’s sponsored primarily by the war industry—that it’s time to return to the days of colonialism and imperialism that existed before the end of World War Two.  It was a speech that Mark Twain would have lampooned in an anti-imperialist tract if he were alive today; all of the ingredients were there—racism, the superiority of this thing called western civilization and a threat of force.  Of course, he told his audience that it would be the United States that would lead the way in this endeavor.  As the British leftist newspaper Morningstar UK wrote in a February 14, 2026 editorial:

“The United States is the enemy of freedom, sovereignty and people power worldwide. It is public enemy number one….”

            This is where we are now.

The post The Demented Empire appeared first on PM Press.

Today's links

• AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit: In case there was ever any doubt.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Eggflation x excuseflation; Haunted Mansion stretch portraits; "Lost Souls"; Time Magazine x the first Worldcon; Obama v Freedom of Information Act; Ragequitting jihadi doxxes ISIS; OSI v DRM in standards.
• 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.

AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (permalink)

Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubble-is-an-information-war/

That's "Ed, the financial sleuth." But Ed has another persona, one we don't get nearly enough of, which I delight in: "Ed the stunt journalist." For example, in 2024, Ed bought Amazon's bestselling laptop, "a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage" and wrote about the experience of using the internet with this popular, terrible machine:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

It sucked, of course, but it sucked in a way that the median tech-informed web user has never experienced. Not only was this machine dramatically underpowered, but its defaults were set to accept all manner of CPU-consuming, screen-filling ad garbage and bloatware. If you or I had this machine, we would immediately hunt down all those settings and nuke them from orbit, but the kind of person who buys a $238 Acer Aspire from Amazon is unlikely to know how to do any of that and will suffer through it every day, forever.

Normally the "digital divide" refers to access to technology, but as access becomes less and less of an issue, the real divide is between people who know how to defend themselves from the cruel indifference of technology designers and people who are helpless before their enshittificatory gambits.

Zitron's stunt stuck with me because it's so simple and so apt. Every tech designer should be forced to use a stock configuration Acer Aspire 1 for a minimum of three hours/day, just as every aviation CEO should be required to fly basic coach at least one out of three flights (and one of two long-haul flights).

To that, I will add: every news executive should be forced to consume the news in a stock browser with no adblock, no accessibility plugins, no Reader View, none of the add-ons that make reading the web bearable:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/07/reader-mode/#personal-disenshittification

But in all honesty, I fear this would not make much of a difference, because I suspect that the people who oversee the design of modern news sites don't care about the news at all. They don't read the news, they don't consume the news. They hate the news. They view the news as a necessary evil within a wider gambit to deploy adware, malware, pop-ups, and auto-play video.

Rawdogging a Yahoo News article means fighting through a forest of pop-ups, pop-unders, autoplay video, interrupters, consent screens, modal dialogs, modeless dialogs – a blizzard of news-obscuring crapware that oozes contempt for the material it befogs. Irrespective of the words and icons displayed in these DOM objects, they all carry the same message: "The news on this page does not matter."

The owners of news services view the news as a necessary evil. They aren't a news organization: they are an annoying pop-up and cookie-setting factory with an inconvenient, vestigial news entity attached to it. News exists on sufferance, and if it was possible to do away with it altogether, the owners would.

That turns out to be the defining characteristic of work that is turned over to AI. Think of the rapid replacement of customer service call centers with AI. Long before companies shifted their customer service to AI chatbots, they shifted the work to overseas call centers where workers were prohibited from diverging from a script that made it all but impossible to resolve your problems:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

These companies didn't want to do customer service in the first place, so they sent the work to India. Then, once it became possible to replace Indian call center workers who weren't allowed to solve your problems with chatbots that couldn't resolve your problems, they fired the Indian call center workers and replaced them with chatbots. Ironically, many of these chatbots turn out to be call center workers pretending to be chatbots (as the Indian tech joke goes, "AI stands for 'Absent Indians'"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

"We used an AI to do this" is increasingly a way of saying, "We didn't want to do this in the first place and we don't care if it's done well." That's why DOGE replaced the call center reps at US Customs and Immigration with a chatbot that tells you to read a PDF and then disconnects the call:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600

The Trump administration doesn't want to hear from immigrants who are trying to file their bewildering paperwork correctly. Incorrect immigration paperwork is a feature, not a bug, since it can be refined into a pretext to kidnap someone, imprison them in a gulag long enough to line the pockets of a Beltway Bandit with a no-bid contract to operate an onshore black site, and then deport them to a country they have no connection with, generating a fat payout for another Beltway Bandit with the no-bid contract to fly kidnapped migrants to distant hellholes.

If the purpose of a customer service department is to tell people to go fuck themselves, then a chatbot is obviously the most efficient way of delivering the service. It's not just that a chatbot charges less to tell people to go fuck themselves than a human being – the chatbot itself means "go fuck yourself." A chatbot is basically a "go fuck yourself" emoji. Perhaps this is why every AI icon looks like a butthole:

https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes

So it's no surprise that media bosses are so enthusiastic about replacing writers with chatbots. They hate the news and want it to go away. Outsourcing the writing to AI is just another way of devaluing it, adjacent to the existing enshittification that sees the news buried in popups, autoplays, consent dialogs, interrupters and the eleventy-million horrors that a stock browser with default settings will shove into your eyeballs on behalf of any webpage that demands them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Remember that summer reading list that Hearst distributed to newspapers around the country, which turned out to be stuffed with "hallucinated" titles? At first, the internet delighted in dunking on Marco Buscaglia, the writer whose byline the list ran under. But as 404 Media's Jason Koebler unearthed, Buscaglia had been set up to fail, tasked with writing most of a 64-page insert that would have normally been the work of dozens of writers, editors and fact checkers, all on his own:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

When Hearst hires one freelancer to do the work of dozens, they are saying, "We do not give a shit about the quality of this work." It is literally impossible for any writer to produce something good under those conditions. The purpose of Hearst's syndicated summer guide was to bulk out the newspapers that had been stripmined by their corporate owners, slimmed down to a handful of pages that are mostly ads and wire-service copy. The mere fact that this supplement was handed to a single freelancer blares "Go fuck yourself" long before you clap eyes on the actual words printed on the pages.

The capital class is in the grips of a bizarre form of AI psychosis: the fantasy of a world without people, where any fool idea that pops into a boss's head can be turned into a product without having to negotiate its creation with skilled workers who might point out that your idea is pretty fucking stupid:

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

For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot. Rather than reading a summer reading list of actual books, perhaps you could be satisfied with a summer reading list of hallucinated books that are at least statistically probable book-shaped imaginaries?

The bosses dreaming up use-cases for AI start from a posture of profound and proud ignorance of how workers who do useful things operate. They ask themselves, "If I was a ______, how would I do the job?" and then they ask an AI to do that, and declare the job done. They produce utility-shaped statistical artifacts, not utilities.

Take Grammarly, a company that offers statistical inferences about likely errors in your text. Grammar checkers aren't a terrible idea on their face, and I've heard from many people who struggle to express themselves in writing (either because of their communications style, or because they don't speak English as a first language) for whom apps like Grammarly are useful.

But Grammarly has just rolled out an AI tool that is so obviously contemptuous of writing that they might as well have called it "Go fuck yourself, by Grammarly." The new product is called "Expert Review," and it promises to give you writing advice "inspired" by writers whose writing they have ingested. I am one of these virtual "writing teachers" you can pay Grammarly for:

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/890921/grammarly-ai-expert-reviews

This is not how writing advice works. When I teach the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' workshop, my job isn't to train the students to produce work that is strongly statistically correlated with the sentence structure and word choices in my own writing. My job – the job of any writing teacher – is to try and understand the student's writing style and artistic intent, and to provide advice for developing that style to express that intent.

What Grammarly is offering isn't writing advice, it's stylometry, a computational linguistics technique for evaluating the likelihood that two candidate texts were written by the same person. Stylometry is a very cool discipline (as is adversarial stylometry, a set of techniques to obscure the authorship of a text):

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

But stylometry has nothing to do with teaching someone how to write. Even if you want to write a pastiche in the style of some writer you admire (or want to send up), word choices and sentence structure are only incidental to capturing that writer's style. To reduce "style" to "stylometry" is to commit the cardinal sin of technical analysis: namely, incinerating all the squishy qualitative aspects that can't be readily fed into a model and doing math on the resulting dubious quantitative residue:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/

If you wanted to teach a chatbot to teach writing like a writer, you would – at a minimum – have to train that chatbot on the instruction that writer gives, not the material that writer has published. Nor can you infer how a writer would speak to a student by producing a statistical model of the finished work that writer has published. "Published work" has only an incidental relationship to "pedagogical communication."

Critics of Grammarly are mostly focused on the effrontery of using writers' names without their permission. But I'm not bothered by that, honestly. So long as no one is being tricked into thinking that I endorsed a product or service, you don't need my permission to say that I inspired it (even if I think it's shit).

What I find absolutely offensive about Grammarly is not that they took my name in vain, but rather, that they reduced the complex, important business of teaching writing to a statistical exercise in nudging your work into a word frequency distribution that hews closely to the average of some writer's published corpus. This is Grammarly's fraud: not telling people that they're being "taught by Cory Doctorow," but rather, telling people that they are being "taught" anything.

Reducing "teaching writing" to "statistical comparisons with another writer's published work" is another way of saying "go fuck yourself" – not to the writers whose identities that Grammarly has hijacked, but to the customers they are tricking into using this terrible, substandard, damaging product.

Preying on aspiring writers is a grift as old as the publishing industry. The world is full of dirtbag "story doctors," vanity presses, fake literary agents and other flimflam artists who exploit people's natural desire to be understood to steal from them:

https://writerbeware.blog/

Grammarly is yet another company for whom "AI" is just a way to lower quality in the hopes of lowering expectations. For Grammarly, helping writers with their prose is an irritating adjunct to the company's main business of separating marks from their money.

In business theory, the perfect firm is one that charges infinity for its products and pays zero for its inputs (you know, "scholarly publishing"). For bosses, AI is a way to shift their firm towards this ideal.

In this regard, AI is connected to the long tradition of capitalist innovation, in which new production efficiencies are used to increase quantity at the expense of quality. This has been true since the Luddite uprising, in which skilled technical workers who cared deeply about the textiles they produced using complex machines railed against a new kind of machine that produced manifestly lower quality fabric in much higher volumes:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

It's not hard to find credible, skilled people who have stories about using AI to make their work better. Elsewhere, I've called these people "centaurs" – human beings who are assisted by machines. These people are embracing the socialist mode of automation: they are using automation to improve quality, not quantity.

Whenever you hear a skilled practitioner talk about how they are able to hand off a time-consuming, low-value, low-judgment task to a model so they can focus on the part that means the most to them, you are talking to a centaur. Of course, it's possible for skilled practitioners to produce bad work – some of my favorite writers have published some very bad books indeed – but that isn't a function of automation, that's just human fallibility.

A reverse centaur (a person conscripted to act as a peripheral to a machine) is trapped by the capitalist mode of automation: quantity over quality. Machines work faster and longer than humans, and the faster and harder a human can be made to work, the closer the firm can come to the ideal of paying zero for its inputs.

A reverse centaur works for a machine that is set to run at the absolute limit of its human peripheral's capability and endurance. A reverse centaur is expected to produce with the mechanical regularity of a machine, catching every mistake the machine makes. A reverse centaur is the machine's accountability sink and moral crumple-zone:

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

AI is a normal technology, just another set of automation tools that have some uses for some users. The thing that makes AI signify "go fuck yourself" isn't some intrinsic factor of large language models or transformers. It's the capitalist mode of automation, increasing quantity at the expense of quality. Automation doesn't have to be a way to reduce expectations in the hopes of selling worse things for more money – but without some form of external constraint (unions, regulation, competition), that is inevitably how companies will wield any automation, including and especially AI.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Assassination markets are legal now but Trump doesn’t have to worry https://protos.com/assassination-markets-are-legal-now-but-trump-doesnt-have-to-worry/

• You Are Being Lied to About Algorithms https://www.usermag.co/p/you-are-being-lied-to-about-algorithms

• States’ trial against Live Nation could move forward as soon as next week https://www.theverge.com/policy/892353/live-nation-ticketmaster-doj-states-settlement

• Neuromancer / Count Zero / Mona Lisa Overdrive https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/neuromancer-count-zero-mona-lisa-overdrive

• Judge Slams Secret DOJ-Live Nation Settlement Process as "Mind-boggling" https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/judge-slams-secret-doj-live-nation

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago History of the Disney Haunted Mansion’s stretching portraits https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2011/03/many-faces-ofthe-other-stretching.html

#15yrsago Readers Against DRM (logo) https://web.archive.org/web/20110311213843/https://readersbillofrights.info/RAD

#15yrsago Lost Souls: Audio adaptation of a classic vampire novel https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/10/lost-souls-audio-adaptation-of-a-classic-vampire-novel/

#15yrsago Time‘s appraisal of the first WorldCon https://web.archive.org/web/20080906184034/https://time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,761661-1,00.html

#15yrsago Insipid thrift-store landscapes improved with monsters https://imgur.com/involuntary-collaborations-i-buy-other-peoples-landscape-paintings-yard-sales-goodwill-put-monsters-them-r-pics-2780-march-11-2011-Oujbl

#15yrsago Fight 8-track piracy with this 1976 record sleeve https://www.flickr.com/photos/supraterra/5516574440/in/pool-41894168726@N01

#15yrsago Michigan Republicans create “financial martial law”; appointees to replace elected local officials https://web.archive.org/web/20120409124750/http://www.dailytribune.com/articles/2011/03/10/news/doc4d78d0d4d764d009636769.txt

#10yrsago Lawsuit reveals Obama’s DoJ sabotaged Freedom of Information Act transparency https://web.archive.org/web/20160309183758/https://news.vice.com/article/it-took-a-foia-lawsuit-to-uncover-how-the-obama-administration-killed-foia-reform

#10yrsago If the FBI can force decryption backdoors, why not backdoors to turn on your phone’s camera? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/10/apple-fbi-could-force-us-to-turn-on-iphone-cameras-microphones

#10yrsago Disgruntled IS defector dumps full details of tens of thousands of jihadis https://web.archive.org/web/20160330061315/https://news.sky.com/story/1656777/is-documents-identify-thousands-of-jihadis

#10yrsago Using distributed code-signatures to make it much harder to order secret backdoors https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/cothority-to-apple-lets-make-secret-backdoors-impossible/

#10yrsago Open Source Initiative says standards aren’t open unless they protect security researchers and interoperability https://web.archive.org/web/20190822053758/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/-are-only-open-if-they-protect-security-and-interoperability

#1yrago Eggflation is excuseflation https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

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

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/

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

• "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

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 (1031 words today, 47410 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

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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