Today's links

• The Post-American Internet: My speech from Hamburg's Chaos Communications Congress.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Error code 451; Public email address Mansplaining Lolita; NSA backdoor in Juniper Networks; Don't bug out; Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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The Post-American Internet (permalink)

On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech.

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Many of you know that I'm an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation – EFF. I'm about to start my 25th year there. I know that I'm hardly unbiased, but as far as I'm concerned, there's no group anywhere on Earth that does the work of defending our digital rights better than EFF.

I'm an activist there, and for the past quarter-century, I've been embroiled in something I call "The War on General Purpose Computing."

If you were at 28C3, 14 years ago, you may have heard me give a talk with that title. Those are the trenches I've been in since my very first day on the job at EFF, when I flew to Los Angeles to crash the inaugural meeting of something called the "Broadcast Protection Discussion Group," an unholy alliance of tech companies, media companies, broadcasters and cable operators.

They'd gathered because this lavishly corrupt American congressman, Billy Tauzin, had promised them a new regulation – a rule banning the manufacture and sale of digital computers, unless they had been backdoored to specifications set by that group, specifications for technical measures to block computers from performing operations that were dispreferred by these companies' shareholders.

That rule was called "the Broadcast Flag," and it actually passed through the American telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission. So we sued the FCC in federal court, and overturned the rule.

We won that skirmish, but friends, I have bad news, news that will not surprise you. Despite wins like that one, we have been losing the war on the general purpose computer for the past 25 years.

Which is why I've come to Hamburg today. Because, after decades of throwing myself against a locked door, the door that leads to a new, good internet, one that delivers both the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends join the party, that door has been unlocked.

Today, it is open a crack. It's open a crack!

And here's the weirdest part: Donald Trump is the guy who's unlocked that door.

Oh, he didn't do it on purpose! But, thanks to Trump's incontinent belligerence, we are on the cusp of a "Post-American Internet," a new digital nervous system for the 21st century. An internet that we can build without worrying about America's demands and priorities.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not happy about Trump or his policies. But as my friend Joey DaVilla likes to say "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla." The only thing worse than experiencing all the terror that Trump has unleashed on America and the world would be going through all that and not salvaging anything out of the wreckage.

That's what I want to talk to you about today: the post-American Internet we can wrest from Trump's chaos.

A post-American Internet that is possible because Trump has mobilized new coalition partners to join the fight on our side. In politics, coalitions are everything. Any time you see a group of people suddenly succeeding at a goal they have been failing to achieve, it's a sure bet that they've found some coalition partners, new allies who don't want all the same thing as the original forces, but want enough of the same things to fight on their side.

That's where Trump came from: a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, and self-described "libertarians" who've got such a scorching case of low-tax brain worms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd promise to lower their taxes by a nickel.

And what's got me so excited is that we've got a new coalition in the War on General Purpose Computers: a coalition that includes the digital rights activists who've been on the lines for decades, but also people who want to turn America's Big Tech trillions into billions for their own economy, and national security hawks who are quite rightly worried about digital sovereignty.

My thesis here is that this is an unstoppable coalition. Which is good news! For the first time in decades, victory is in our grasp.

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So let me explain: 14 years ago, I stood in front of this group and explained the "War on General Purpose Computing." That was my snappy name for this fight, but the boring name that they use in legislatures for it is "anticircumvention,"

Under anticircumvention law, it's a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product or service, unless the manufacturer approves of your modification, and – crucially – this is true whether or not your modification violates any other law.

Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an "access control" for a copyrighted work.

So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it's a felony – a jailable felony – to modify that code or firmware. It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

Under anticircumvention law any manufacturer can trivially turn their product into a no-go zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of reporting on its defects, and criminalizing the act of remediating its defects.

This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls "Felony Contempt of Business Model." Anticircumvention became the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA. But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.

Now, it makes a certain twisted sense for the US to enact a law like this, after all, they are the world's tech powerhouse, home to the biggest, most powerful tech companies in the world. By making it illegal to modify digital products without the manufacturer's permission, America enhances the rent-extracting power of the most valuable companies on US stock exchanges.

But why would Europe pass a law like this? Europe is a massive tech importer. By extending legal protection to tech companies that want to steal their users' data and money, the EU was facilitating a one-way transfer of value from Europe to America. So why would Europe do this?

Well, let me tell you about the circumstances under which other countries came to enact their anticircumvention laws and maybe you'll spot a pattern that will answer this question.

Australia got its anticircumvention law through the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Australia to enact anticircumvention law.

Canada and Mexico got it through the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Canada and Mexico to enact anticircumvention laws.

Andean nations like Chile got their anticircumvention laws through bilateral US free trade agreements, which oblige them to enact anticircumvention laws.

And the Central American nations got their anticircumvention laws through CAFTA – The Central American Free Trade Agreement with the USA – which obliges them to enact anticircumvention laws, too.

I assume you've spotted the pattern by now: the US trade representative has forced every one of its trading partners to adopt anticircumvention law, to facilitate the extraction of their own people's data and money by American firms. But of course, that only raises a further question: Why would every other country in the world agree to let America steal its own people's money and data, and block its domestic tech sector from making interoperable products that would prevent this theft?

Here's an anecdote that unravels this riddle: many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban rose to power, I used to guest-lecture at a summer PhD program in political science at Budapest's Central European University. And one summer, after I'd lectured to my students about anticircumvention law, one of them approached me.

They had been the information minister of a Central American nation during the CAFTA negotiations, and one day, they'd received a phone-call from their trade negotiator, calling from the CAFTA bargaining table. The negotiator said, "You know how you told me not to give the Americans anticircumvention under any circumstances? Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. I'm really sorry."

That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed US Big Tech companies to declare open season on their people's private data and ready cash.

The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!

I mean, if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep following their orders. So…Happy Liberation Day?

So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: "Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you." This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile. He'll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.

But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That's what we've done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That's a weird way to punish America! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says "Ouch!"

And it's indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.

But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

If you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that's repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America's defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company's shareholders mad.

Think of John Deere tractors: when a farmer's John Deere tractor breaks down, they are expected to repair it, swapping in new parts and assemblies to replace whatever's malfing. But the tractor won't recognize that new part and will not start working again, not until the farmer spends a couple hundred bucks on a service callout from an official John Deere tractor repair rep, whose only job is to type an unlock code into the tractor's console, to initialize the part and pair it with the tractor's main computing unit.

Modding a tractor to bypass this activation step violates anticircumvention law, meaning farmers all over the world are stuck with this ripoff garbage, because their own government will lock up anyone who makes a tractor mod that disables the parts-pairing check in this American product.

So what if Canada repealed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012 (that's our anticircumvention law)? Well, then a company like Honeybee, which makes tractor front-ends and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science grads, and put 'em to work jailbreaking the John Deere tractor's firmware, and offer it to everyone in the world. They could sell the crack to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method, including that poor American farmer whose soybeans we're currently tariffing.

It's hard to convey how much money is on the table here. Take just one example: Apple's App Store. Apple forces all app vendors into using its payment processor, and charges them a 30 percent commission on every euro spent inside of an app.

30 percent! That's such a profitable business that Apple makes $100 billion per year on it. If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.

Those competitors could offer a 90% discount every crafter on Etsy, every performer on Patreon, every online news outlet, every game dev, every media store. Offer them a 90% discount on payments, and still make $10b/year.

Maybe Finland will never see another Nokia, but Nokia's a tough business to be in. You've got to make hardware, which is expensive and risky. But if the EU legalizes jailbreaking, then Apple would have to incur all the expense and risk of making and fielding hardware, while those Finnish geeks could cream off the $100b Apple sucks out of the global economy in an act of a disgusting, rip-off rent-seeking.

As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers: "Your margin is my opportunity." With these guys, it's always "disruption for thee, but not for me." When they do it to us, that's progress. When we do it to them, it's piracy, and every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Well, screw that. Move fast and break Tim Cook's things. Move fast and break kings!

It's funny: I spent 25 years getting my ass kicked by the US Trade Representative (in my defense, it wasn't a fair fight). I developed a kind of grudging admiration for the skill with which the USTR bound the entire world to a system of trade that conferred parochial advantages to America and its tech firms, giving them free rein to loot the world's data and economies. So it's been pretty amazing to watch Trump swiftly and decisively dismantle the global system of trade and destroy the case for the world continuing to arrange its affairs to protect the interests of America's capital class.

I mean, it's not a path I would have chosen. I'd have preferred no Trump at all to this breakthrough. But I'll take this massive own-goal if Trump insists. I mean, I'm not saying I've become an accelerationist, but at this point, I'm not exactly not an accelerationist.

Now, you might have heard that governments around the world have been trying to get Apple to open its App Store, and they've totally failed at this. When the EU hit Apple with an enforcement order under the Digital Markets Act, Apple responded by offering to allow third party app stores, but it would only allow those stores to sell apps that Apple had approved of.

And while those stores could use their own payment processors, Apple would charge them so much in junk fees that it would be more expensive to process a payment using your own system, and if Apple believed that a user's phone had been outside of the EU for 21 days, they'd remotely delete all that user's data and apps.

When the EU explained that this would not satisfy the regulation, Apple threatened to pull out of the EU. Then, once everyone had finished laughing, Apple filed more than a dozen bullshit objections to the order hoping to tie this up in court for a decade, the way Google and Meta did for the GDPR.

It's not clear that the EU can force Apple to write code that opens up the iOS platform for alternative app stores and payment methods, but there is one thing that the EU can absolutely do with 100% reliability, any time they want: the EU can decide not to let Apple use Europe's courts to shut down European companies that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs and creative workers, from Apple's ripoff, by jailbreaking phones.

All the EU has to do is repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and, in so doing, strip Apple of the privilege of mobilizing the European justice system to shore up Apple's hundred billion dollar annual tax on the world's digital economy. The EU company that figures out how to reliably jailbreak iPhones will have customers all over the world, including in the USA, where Apple doesn't just use its veto over which apps you can run on your phone to suck 30% out of every dollar you spend, but where Apple also uses its control over the platform to strip out apps that protect Apple's customers from Trump's fascist takeover.

Back in October, Apple kicked the "ICE Block" app out of the App Store. That's an app that warns the user if there's a snatch squad of masked ICE thugs nearby looking to grab you off the street and send you to an offshore gulag. Apple internally classified ICE kidnappers as a "protected class," and then declared the ICE Block infringed on the rights of these poor, beset ICE goons.

And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.

Apple's margin could be their opportunity.

Legalizing jailbreaking, raiding the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in America is a much better response to the Trump tariffs than retaliatory tariffs.

For one thing, this is a targeted response: go after Big Tech's margins and you're mounting a frontal assault on the businesses whose CEOs each paid a million bucks to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais.

Raiding Big Tech's margins is not an attack on the American people, nor on the small American businesses that are ripped off by Big Tech. It's a raid on the companies that screw everyday Americans and everyone else in the world. It's a way to make everyone in the world richer at the expense of these ripoff companies.

It beats the shit out of blowing hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data-centers in the hopes that someday, a sector that's lost nearly a trillion dollars shipping defective chatbots will figure out a use for GPUs that doesn't start hemorrhaging money the minute they plug them in.

So here are our new allies in the war on general-purpose computation: businesses and technologists who want to make billions of dollars raiding Big Tech's margins, and policymakers who want their country to be the disenshittification nation – the country that doesn't merely protect its people's money and privacy by buying jailbreaks from other countries, but rather, the country that makes billions of dollars selling that privacy and pocketbook-defending tech to the rest of the world.

That's a powerful alliance, but those are not the only allies Trump has pushed into our camp. There's another powerful ally waiting in the wings.

Remember last June, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague issued an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump denounced the ICC, and then the ICC lost its Outlook access, its email archives, its working files, its address books, its calendars?

Microsoft says they didn't brick the ICC – that it's a coincidence. But when it comes to a he-said/Clippy-said between the justices of the ICC and the convicted monopolists of Microsoft, I know who I believe.

This is exactly the kind of infrastructural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese companies like Huawei supply our critical telecoms equipment. Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business and every household in the world have locked themselves into a US-based, cloud-based service.

The handful of US Big Tech companies that supply the world's administrative tools are all vulnerable to pressure from the Trump admin, and that means that Trump can brick an entire nation.

The attack on the ICC was an act of cyberwarfare, like the Russian hackers who shut down Ukrainian power-generation facilities, except that Microsoft doesn't have to hack Outlook to brick the ICC – they own Outlook.

Under the US CLOUD Act of 2018, the US government can compel any US-based company to disclose any of its users' data – including foreign governments – and this is true no matter where that data is stored. Last July, Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France, told a French government inquiry that he "couldn't guarantee" that Microsoft wouldn't hand sensitive French data over to the US government, even if that data was stored in a European data-center.

And under the CLOUD Act, the US government can slap gag orders on the companies that it forces to cough up that data, so there'd be no way to even know if this happened, or whether it's already happened.

It doesn't stop at administrative tools, either: remember back in 2022, when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine and those tractors showed up in Chechnya? The John Deere company pushed an over-the-air kill signal to those tractors and bricked 'em.

John Deere is every bit as politically vulnerable to the Trump admin as Microsoft is, and they can brick most of the tractors in the world, and the tractors they can't brick are probably made by Massey Ferguson, the number-two company in the ag-tech cartel, which is also an American company and just as vulnerable to political attacks from the US government.

Now, none of this will be news to global leaders. Even before Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC they were trying to figure out a path to "digital sovereignty." But the Trump administration's outrageous conduct and rhetoric over past 11 months has turned "digital sovereignty" from a nice-to-have into a must-have.

So finally, we're seeing some movement, like "Eurostack," a project to clone the functionality of US Big Tech silos in free/open source software, and to build EU-based data-centers that this code can run on.

But Eurostack is heading for a crisis. It's great to build open, locally hosted, auditable, trustworthy services that replicate the useful features of Big Tech, but you also need to build the adversarial interoperability tools that allow for mass exporting of millions of documents, the sensitive data-structures and edit histories.

We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions that are still hosted on US cloud-based services, because US companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers from their platform.

Just think of how Apple responded to the relatively minor demand to open up the iOS App Store, and now imagine the thermonuclear foot-dragging, tantrum-throwing and malicious compliance they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of the businesses and governments in a 27-nation bloc of 500,000,000 affluent consumers.

Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of the Big Tech companies. Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall.

Step one of tearing down that wall is killing anticircumvention law, so that we can run virtual devices that can be scripted, break bootloaders to swap out firmware and generally seize the means of computation.

So this is the third bloc in the disenshittification army: not just digital rights hippies like me; not just entrepreneurs and economic development wonks rubbing their hands together at the thought of transforming American trillions into European billions; but also the national security hawks who are 100% justified in their extreme concern about their country's reliance on American platforms that have been shown to be totally unreliable.

This is how we'll get a post-American internet: with an unstoppable coalition of activists, entrepreneurs and natsec hawks.

This has been a long time coming. Since the post-war settlement, the world has treated the US as a neutral platform, a trustworthy and stable maintainer of critical systems for global interchange, what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call the "Underground Empire." But over the past 15 years, the US has systematically shattered global trust in its institutions, a process that only accelerated under Trump.

Take transoceanic fiber optic cables: the way the transoceanic fiber routes were planned, the majority of these cables make landfall on the coasts of the USA where the interconnections are handled. There's a good case for this hub-and-spoke network topology, especially compared to establishing direct links between every country. That's an Order(N^2) problem: directly linking each of the planet Earth's 205 countries to every other country would require 20,910 fiber links.

But putting all the world's telecoms eggs in America's basket only works if the US doesn't take advantage of its centrality, and while many people worried about what the US could do with the head-ends of the world's global fiber infra, it wasn't until Mark Klein's 2006 revelations about the NSA's nation-scale fiber optic taps in AT&T's network, and Ed Snowden's 2013 documents showing the global scale of this wiretapping, that the world had to confront the undeniable reality that the US could not be trusted to serve as the world's fiber hub.

It's not just fiber. The world does business in dollars. Most countries maintain dollar accounts at the Fed in New York as their major source of foreign reserves. But in 2005, American vulture capitalists bought up billions of dollars worth of Argentinian government bonds after the sovereign nation of Argentina had declared bankruptcy.

They convinced a judge in New York to turn over the government of Argentina's US assets to them to make good on loans that these debt collectors had not issued, but had bought up at pennies on the dollar. At that moment, every government in the world had to confront the reality that they could not trust the US Federal Reserve with their foreign reserves. But what else could they use?

Without a clear answer, dollar dominance continued, but then, under Biden, Putin-aligned oligarchs and Russian firms lost access to the SWIFT system for dollar clearing. This is when goods – like oil – are priced in dollars, so that buyers only need to find someone who will trade their own currency for dollars, which they can then swap for any commodity in the world.

Again, there's a sound case for dollar clearing: it's just not practical to establish deep, liquid pairwise trading market for all of the world's nearly 200 currencies, it's another O(N^2) problem.

But it only works if the dollar is a neutral platform. Once the dollar becomes an instrument of US foreign policy – whether or not you agree with that policy – it's no longer a neutral platform, and the world goes looking for an alternative.

No one knows what that alternative's going to be, just as no one knows what configuration the world's fiber links will end up taking. There's kilometers of fiber being stretched across the ocean floor, and countries are trying out some pretty improbable gambits as dollar alternatives, like Ethiopia revaluing its sovereign debt in Chinese renminbi. Without a clear alternative to America's enshittified platforms, the post-American century is off to a rocky start.

But there's one post-American system that's easy to imagine. The project to rip out all the cloud connected, backdoored, untrustworthy black boxes that power our institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles and our tractors; and replace it with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code.

This project is the only one that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being paralyzed by exponential crises of scale. That's because any open, free tool adopted by any public institution – like the Eurostack services – can be audited, localized, pen-tested, debugged and improved by institutions in every other country.

It's a commons, more like a science than a technology, in that it is universal and international and collaborative. We don't have dueling western and Chinese principles of structural engineering. Rather, we have universal principles for making sure buildings don't fall down, adapted to local circumstances.

We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working.

The thing is, software is not an asset, it's a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That's a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down as the software upstream of it, downstream of it, and adjacent to it is updated or swapped out, revealing defects and deficiencies in systems that may have performed well for years.

Shifting software to commons-based production is a way to reduce the liability that software imposes on its makers and users, balancing out that liability among many players.

Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset. That's why they're so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That's why they think it's good that they've got a chatbot that "produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer."

Producing code that isn't designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production, is a way to incur tech debt at scale.

This is a neat encapsulation of the whole AI story: the chatbot can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job.

Your boss is an easy mark for that chatbot hustler because your boss hates you. In their secret hearts, bosses understand that if they stopped coming to work, the business would run along just fine, but if the workers stopped showing up, the company would grind to a halt.

Bosses like to tell themselves that they're in the driver's seat, but really, they fear that they're strapped into the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. For them, AI is a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the company's drive-train. It's the realization of the fantasy of a company without workers.

When I was walking the picket line in Hollywood during the writer's strike, a writer told me that you prompt an AI the same way a studio boss gives shitty notes to a writer's room: "Make me ET, but make it about a dog, and give it a love interest, and a car-chase in the third act."

Say that to a writer's room and they will call you a fucking idiot suit and tell you "Why don't you go back to your office and make a spreadsheet, you nitwit. The grownups here are writing a movie."

Meanwhile, if you give that prompt to a chatbot, it will cheerfully shit out a script exactly to spec. The fact that this script will be terrible and unusable is less important than the prospect of a working life in which no one calls you a fucking idiot suit.

AI dangles the promise of a writer's room without writers, a movie without actors, a hospital without nurses, a coding shop without coders.

When Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast and announced that the average American had three friends, but wanted 15 friends, and that he could solve this by giving us chatbots instead of friends, we all dunked on him as an out-of-touch billionaire Martian who didn't understand the nature of friendship.

But the reality is that for Zuck, your friends are a problem. Your friends' interactions with you determine how much time you spend on his platforms, and thus how many revenue-generating ads he can show you.

Your friends stubbornly refuse to organize their relationship with you in a way that maximizes the return to his shareholders. So Zuck is over there in Menlo Park, furiously fantasizing about replacing your friends with chatbots, because that way, he can finally realize the dream of a social media service without any socializing.

Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself that those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they aren't real.

Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an "NPC,” or all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.

Or think of how Trump fired all the US government scientists, and then announced the "Genesis" program, declaring that the US would begin generating annual "moonshot"-scale breakthroughs, with a chatbot. It's science without scientists.

Chatbots can't really do science, but from Trump's perspective, they're still better than scientists, because a chatbot won't ever tell him not to stare at an eclipse, or not to inject bleach. A chatbot won't ever tell him that trans people exist, or that the climate emergency is real.

Powerful people are suckers for AI, because AI fuels the fantasy of a world without people: just a boss and a computer, and no ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things telling you "no."

AI is a way to produce tech debt at scale, to replace skilled writers with defective spicy autocomplete systems, to lose money at a rate not seen in living memory.

Now, compare that with the project of building a post-American internet: a project to reduce tech debt, to unlock America's monopoly trillions and divide them among the world's entrepreneurs (for whom they represent untold profits), and the world's technology users (for whom they represent untold savings); all while building resiliency and sovereignty.

Now, some of you are probably feeling pretty cynical about this right now. After all, your political leaders have demonstrated decades of ineffectual and incompetent deference to the US, and an inability to act, even when the need was dire. If your leaders couldn't act decisively on the climate emergency, what hope do we have of them taking this moment seriously?

But crises precipitate change. Remember when another mad emperor – Vladimir Putin – invaded Ukraine, and Europe experienced a dire energy shortage? In three short years, the continent's solar uptake skyrocketed. The EU went from being 15 years behind in its energy transition, to ten years ahead of schedule.

Because when you're shivering the dark, a lot of fights you didn't think were worth it are suddenly existential battles you can't afford to lose. Sure, no one wants to argue with a tedious neighbor who has an aesthetic temper tantrum at the thought of a solar panel hanging from their neighbor's balcony.

But when it's winter, and there's no Russian gas, and you're shivering in the dark, then that person can take their aesthetic objection to balcony solar, fold it until it's all corners, and shove it right up their ass.

Besides, we don't need Europe to lead the charge on a post-American internet by repealing anticircumvention. Any country could do it! And the country that gets there first gets to reap the profits from supplying jailbreaking tools to the rest of the world, it gets to be the Disenshittification Nation, and everyone else in the world gets to buy those tools and defend themselves from US tech companies' monetary and privacy plunder.

Just one country has to break the consensus, and the case for every country doing so is the strongest it's ever been. It used to be that countries that depended on USAID had to worry about losing food, medical and cash supports if they pissed off America. But Trump killed USAID, so now that's a dead letter.

Meanwhile, America's status as the planet's most voracious consumer has been gutted by decades of anti-worker, pro-billionaire policies. Today, the US is in the grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped" recovery, that's an economic rally where the rich get richer, and everyone else gets poorer. For a generation, America papered over that growing inequality with easy credit, with everyday Americans funding their consumption with credit cards and second and third mortgages.

So long as they could all afford to keep buying, other countries had to care about America as an export market. But a generation of extraction has left the bottom 90% of Americans struggling to buy groceries and other necessities, carrying crushing debt from skyrocketing shelter, education and medical expenses that they can't hope to pay down, thanks to 50 years of wage stagnation.

The Trump administration has sided firmly with debt collectors, price gougers, and rent extractors. Trump neutered enforcement against rent-fixing platforms like Realpage, restarted debt payments for eight million student borrowers, and killed a plan to make live-saving drugs a little cheaper, leaving Americans to continue to pay the highest drug prices in the world.

Every dollar spent servicing a loan is a dollar that can't go to consumption. And as more and more Americans slip into poverty, the US is gutting programs that spend money on the public's behalf, like SNAP, the food stamps program that helps an ever-larger slice of the American public stave off hunger.

America is chasing the "world without people" dream, where working people have nothing, spend nothing, and turn every penny over to rentiers who promptly flush that money into the stock market, shitcoins, or gambling sites. But I repeat myself.

Even the US military – long a sacrosanct institution – is being kneecapped to enrich rent-seekers. Congress just killed a military "right to repair" law. So now, US soldiers stationed abroad will have to continue the Pentagon's proud tradition of shipping materiel from generators to jeeps back to America to be fixed by their manufacturers at a 10,000% markup, because the Pentagon routinely signs maintenance contracts that prohibit it from teaching a Marine how to fix an engine.

The post-American world is really coming on fast. As we repeal our anticircumvention laws, we don't have to care what America thinks, we don't have to care about their tariffs, because they're already whacking us with tariffs; and because the only people left in the US who can afford to buy things are rich people, who just don't buy enough stuff. There's only so many Lambos and Sub-Zeros even the most guillotineable plute can usefully own.

But what if European firms want to go on taking advantage of anticircumvention laws? Well, there's good news there, too. "Good news," because the EU firms that rely on anticircumvention are engaged in the sleaziest, most disgusting frauds imaginable.

Anticircumvention law is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with Dieselgate. By imposing legal liability on reverse-engineers who might have discovered this lethal crime, Article 6 of the Copyright Directive created a chilling effect, and thousands of Europeans died, every year.

Today, Germany's storied automakers are carrying on the tradition of Dieselgate, sabotaging their cars to extract rent from drivers. From Mercedes, which rents you the accelerator pedal in your luxury car, only unlocking the full acceleration curve of your engine if you buy a monthly subscription; to BMW, which rents you the automated system that automatically dims your high-beams if there's oncoming traffic.

Legalize jailbreaking and any mechanic in Europe could unlock those subscription features for one price, and not share any of that money with BMW and Mercedes.

Then there's Medtronic, a company that pretends it is Irish. Medtronic is the world's largest med-tech company, having purchased all their competitors, and then undertaken the largest "tax-inversion" in history, selling themselves to a tiny Irish firm, in order to magick their profits into a state of untaxable grace, floating in the Irish Sea.

Medtronic supplies the world's most widely used ventilators, and it booby-traps them the same way John Deere booby-traps its tractors. After a hospital technician puts a new part in a Medtronic ventilator, the ventilator's central computing unit refuses to recognize the part until it completes a cryptographic handshake, proving that an authorized Medtronic technician was paid hundreds of euros to certify a repair that the hospital's own technician probably performed.

It's just a way to suck hundreds of euros out of hospitals every time a ventilator breaks. This would be bad enough, but during the covid lockdowns, when every ventilator was desperately needed, and when the planes stopped flying, there was no way for a Medtronic tech to come and bless the hospital technicians' repairs. This was lethal. It killed people.

There's one more European company that relies on anticircumvention that I want to discuss here, because they're old friends of CCC: that's the Polish train company Newag. Newag sabotages its own locomotives, booby-trapping them so that if they sense they have been taken to a rival's service yard, the train bricks itself. When the train operator calls Newag about this mysterious problem, the company "helpfully" remotes into the locomotive's computers, to perform "diagnostics," which is just sending a unbricking command to the vehicle, a service for which they charge 20,000 euros.

Last year, Polish hackers from the security research firm Dragon Sector presented on their research into this disgusting racket in this very hall, and now, they're being sued by Newag under anticircumvention law, for making absolutely true disclosures about Newag's deliberately defective products.

So these are the European stakeholders for anticircumvention law: the Dieselgate killers, the car companies who want to rent you your high-beams and accelerator, the med-tech giant that bricked all the ventilators during the pandemic, and the company that tied Poland to the train-tracks.

I relish the opportunity to fight these bastards in Brussels, as they show up and cry "Won't someone think of the train saboteurs?"

The enshittification of technology – the decay of the platforms and systems we rely on – has many causes: the collapse of competition, regulatory capture, the smashing of tech workers' power. But most of all, enshittification is the result of anticircumvention law's ban on interoperability.

By blocking interop, by declaring war on the general-purpose computer, our policy-makers created an enshittogenic environment that rewarded companies for being shitty, and ushered in the enshittocene, in which everything is turning to shit.

Let's call time on enshittification. Let's seize the means of computation. Let's build the drop-in, free, open, auditable alternatives to the services and firmware we rely on.

Let's end the era of silos. I mean, isn't it fucking weird how you have to care which network someone is using if you want to talk to them? Instead of just deciding who you want to talk to?

The fact that you have to figure out whether the discussion you're trying to join is on Twitter or Bluesky, Mastodon or Instagram – that is just the most Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve-ass way of running a digital world. I mean, 1990 called and they want their walled gardens back

Powerful allies are joining our side in the War on General Purpose Computation. It's not just people like us, who've been fighting for this whole goddamned century, but also countries that want to convert American tech's hoarded trillions into fuel for a single-use rocket that boosts their own tech sector into a stable orbit.

It's national security hawks who are worried about Trump bricking their ministries or their tractors, and who are also worried – with just cause – about Xi Jinping bricking all their solar inverters and batteries. Because, after all, the post-American internet is also a post-Chinese internet!

Nothing should be designed to be field updatable without the user's permission. Nothing critical should be a black box.

Like I said at the start of this talk, I have been doing this work for 24 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, throwing myself at a door that was double-locked and deadbolted, and now that door is open a crack and goddammit, I am hopeful.

Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed.

Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.

All this decade, all over the world, countries have taken up arms against concentrated corporate power. We've had big, muscular antitrust attacks on big corporations in the US (under Trump I and Biden); in Canada; in the UK; in the EU and member states like Germany, France and Spain; in Australia; in Japan and South Korea and Singapore; in Brazil; and in China.

This is a near-miraculous turn of affairs. All over the world, governments are declaring war on monopolies, the source of billionaires' wealth and power.

Even the most forceful wind is invisible. We can only see it by its effects. What we're seeing here is that whenever a politician bent on curbing corporate power unfurls a sail, no matter where in the world that politician is, that sail fills with wind and propels the policy in ways that haven't been seen in generations.

The long becalming of the fight over corporate power has ended, and a fierce, unstoppable wind is blowing. It's not just blowing in Europe, or in Canada, or in South Korea, Japan, China, Australia or Brazil. It's blowing in America, too. Never forget that as screwed up and terrifying as things are in America, the country has experienced, and continues to experience, a tsunami of antitrust bills and enforcement actions at the local, state and federal level.

And never forget that the post-American internet will be good for Americans. Because, in a K-shaped, bifurcated, unequal America, the trillions that American companies loot from the world don't trickle down to Americans. The average American holds a portfolio of assets that rounds to zero, and that includes stock in US tech companies.

The average American isn't a shareholder in Big Tech, the average American is a victim of Big Tech. Liberating the world from US Big Tech is also liberating America from US Big Tech.

That's been EFF's mission for 35 years. It's been my mission at EFF for 25 years. If you want to get involved in this fight – and I hope you do – it can be your mission, too. You can join EFF, and you can join groups in your own country, like Netzpolitik here in Germany, or the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, or La Quadrature du Net in France, or the Open Rights Group in the UK, or EF Finland, or ISOC Bulgaria, XNet, DFRI, Quintessenz, Bits of Freedom, Openmedia, FSFE, or any of dozens of organizations around the world.

The door is open a crack, the wind is blowing, the post-American internet is upon us: a new, good internet that delivers all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 so that our normie friends can use it, too.

And I can't wait for all of us to get to hang out there. It's gonna be great.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Enshittifinancial Crisis https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

• Austrian Supreme Court: Meta must give users full access to their data https://noyb.eu/en/austrian-supreme-court-meta-must-give-users-full-access-their-data

• the myth of merit in the managerial class https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-merit-in-the-managerial

• ECI, Ethical Computing Initiative https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/

• BMW Patents Proprietary Screws That Only Dealerships Can Remove https://carbuzz.com/bmw-roundel-logo-screw-patent/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Online sf mag Infinite Matrix goes out with a bang – new Gibson, Rucker, Kelly https://web.archive.org/web/20060101120510/https://www.infinitematrix.net/

#20yrsago Wil McCarthy’s wonderful “Hacking Matter” as a free download https://web.archive.org/web/20060103052051/http://wilmccarthy.com/hm.htm

#15yrsago Papa Sangre: binaural video game with no video https://web.archive.org/web/20101224170833/http://www.papasangre.com/

#15yrsago DDoS versus human rights organizations https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2010/DDoS_Independent_Media_Human_Rights

#15yrsago Why I have a public email address https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/dec/21/keeping-email-address-secret-spambots

#15yrsago How the FCC failed the nation on Net Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20101224075655/https://www.salon.com/technology/network_neutrality/index.html?story=/tech/dan_gillmor/2010/12/21/fcc_network_neutrality

#15yrsago Bankster robberies: Bank of America and friends wrongfully foreclose on customers, steal all their belongings https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/business/22lockout.html?_r=1&hp

#10yrsago India’s deadly exam-rigging scandal: murder, corruption, suicide and scapegoats https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/17/the-mystery-of-indias-deadly-exam-scam

#10yrsago Copyright infringement “gang” raided by UK cops: 3 harmless middle-aged karaoke fans https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/uk-police-busts-karaoke-gang-for-sharing-songs-that-arent-commercially-available/

#10yrsago IETF approves HTTP error code 451 for Internet censorship https://web.archive.org/web/20151222155906/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-http-451-error-code-for-censorship-is-now-an-internet-standard

#10yrsago Billionaire Sheldon Adelson secretly bought newspaper, ordered all hands to investigate judges he hated https://web.archive.org/web/20151220081546/http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/las-vegas/judge-adelson-lawsuit-subject-unusual-scrutiny-amid-review-journal-sale

#10yrsago Tax havens hold $7.6 trillion; 8% of world’s total wealth https://web.archive.org/web/20160103142942/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/01/14/parking-the-big-money/

#10yrsago Mansplaining Lolita https://lithub.com/men-explain-lolita-to-me/

#10yrsago Lifelock admits it lied in its ads (again), agrees to $100M fine https://web.archive.org/web/20151218000258/https://consumerist.com/2015/12/17/identity-theft-company-lifelock-once-again-failed-to-actually-keep-identities-protected-must-pay-100m/

#10yrsago Uninsured driver plows through gamer’s living-room wall and creams him mid-Fallout 4 https://www.gofundme.com/f/helpforbenzo

#10yrsago Juniper Networks backdoor confirmed, password revealed, NSA suspected https://www.wired.com/2015/12/juniper-networks-hidden-backdoors-show-the-risk-of-government-backdoors/

#10yrsago A survivalist on why you shouldn’t bug out https://waldenlabs.com/10-reasons-not-to-bug-out/

#1yrago Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

#1yrago Proud to be a blockhead https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/21/blockheads-r-us/#vocational-awe

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

• Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/

• Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
  https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Enshitification Life Cycle with David Dayen (Organized Money)
  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2412334/episodes/18399894

• Enshittificaition on The Last Show With David Cooper:
  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-last-show-with-david-c-31145360/episode/cory-doctorow-enshttification-december-16-2025-313385767

• (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU)
  https://vimeo.com/1146281673

• How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU

• Enshittification on The Daily Show
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "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)

• "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

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

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

This week on my podcast, I play the audio from A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, a speech I delivered on December 28, 2025 at 39C3, the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany (video here, transcript here).

Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America’s trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning “adversarial interoperability,” America handcuffed the world’s technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech. Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it’s time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world’s hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!

Enshittification wasn’t an accident. It also wasn’t inevitable. This isn’t the iron laws of economics at work, nor is it the great forces of history.

Enshittification was a choice: named individuals, in living memory, enacted policies that created the enshittogenic environment. They created a world that encouraged tech companies to merge to monopoly, transforming the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” They let these monopolists rip us off and spy on us.

And they banned us from fighting back, claiming that anyone who modified a technology without permission from its maker was a pirate (or worse, a terrorist). They created a system of “felony contempt of business-model,” where it’s literally a crime to change how your own devices work. They declared war on the general-purpose computer and demanded a computer that would do what the manufacturer told it to do (even if the owner of the computer didn’t want that).

We are at a turning point in the decades-long war on general-purpose computing. Geopolitics are up for grabs. The future is ours to seize.

In my 24 years with EFF, I have seen many strange moments, but never one quite like this. There’s plenty of terrifying things going on right now, but there’s also a massive, amazing, incredibly opportunity to seize the means of computation.

Let’s take it.

MP3

The tl;dr before you get into this post is this: the SFWA came out, said that some AI usage was okay enough in books for the authors of those books to not to be disqualified from winning a Nebula award, people got (correctly) pissed, the SFWA swiftly threw that fish back into the water and was like, “Just kidding, AI is bad,” and then launched this survey to get community input on AI usage in writing and publishing.

As a result, a few folks have kinda popped up their heads to be like, “But is all AI bad?” and some of this is reasonable and necessary discussion, because sure, what if your word processor accidentally injects some kind of AI process into the work, or what if your publisher against your wishes uses AI in, say, the marketing of the book? What does that mean for you? Do you have recourse? Are you still able to win awards? I guess it would suck to be shut out of awards for that — though, at the same time, awards aren’t even the frosting on top of the cake but the sprinkles on top of the frosting? Whatever.

Of course, in typical fashion, usually these sort of reasonable questions are a Trojan horse to allow a lot of other exceptions in through the city gates. To continue to mix metaphors, if you give a mouse an AI cookie, well, he’s gonna want the AI milk, the AI straw, until eventually you’ve given him an AI nuclear bomb where he kills all the human beings and can feast on our smoldering corpses at his rodenty leisure.

One of the people who popped up was Erin Underwood, who wrote an open letter about all this. It is a letter that purports to be reasonable, common sense, but in my mind is a goalpost-shifting mouse-cookie-giving very hungry caterpillar of a post, where it just wants more and more — and so, it summons in me the urge to point out a number of its flaws. And this, on my part, is probably already a sucker move, because Underwood more or less suggests that AI has written her open letter, at least in part:

“For transparency, I used speech-to-text to capture my words and generative AI to clean up grammar and structure. I needed an efficient way to get my thoughts down quickly so I could move into the work of manually editing and refining this text. I went through it multiple times, revising language, examples, and arguments until the final version fully matched my vision. This was done intentionally to demonstrate how AI can function as a communication tool for business purposes. This letter isn’t a work of art or artistic creation.”

So already, we’re off on a broken foot. I’ve no idea how much of a human letter I’m responding to. (And for full transparency on my part — all of this post is 100% human-written, human-edited, human-derived. I am not Soylent Greening this shit. This is all me, flaws and all.)

Before I get into her bullet points, up front she is essentially saying that we can’t be hostile to the conversation, to these difficult questions, and that:

At the same time, refusing to adapt in ways that protect our own communities would create new harm. Writers, artists, musicians, publishers, and the industries that support them must remain viable and competitive in a modern world that is becoming deeply dependent on AI tools and AI-driven infrastructure. If we are going to protect the future of creative work, we need award rules that are practical and that also allow us to use ordinary business tools.

My first thought here is: yeah, no, that’s not really true.

There’s little evidence at hand, first and foremost, that AI is a value-add to any of this. Writing, making music, publishing, whatever. Industries not using them are perfectly viable. Writers not using AI remain perfectly viable. (I’d argue: more than viable! Actually, you’re better not using it! AI is routinely shown to decrease efficiency and require more human intervention, often just at cut cost.) The trick to this paragraph is it is a false appeal to reason: a quietly fear-based approach that you don’t want to (gasp) be left behind because you aren’t using the reasonable business tools. Except, again, nothing about this is reasonable. AI is a random middle-man created by shitty techlords, forced into systems so that they get paid and that the Magic Number Lines go up instead of flatten or descend.

We are only as “dependent” on AI tools and infrastructure as we choose to be — this isn’t an automatic. But therein lies one of the tricksy bits about this letter, like so many of the AI boosters: it presupposes an automagic AI future, a destiny for AI in and above us. It assumes it’s already here to stay, already embedded in us like a tick, so we might as well make friends with the parasite and use its Lyme Disease Tools and its Rocky Mountain Spotted Infrastructure. Why cure it? It’s already in us! No reason to ask who will rid us of this meddlesome infection!

Having a yes/no switch that governs the use of AI and generative AI isn’t viable because this technology is now embedded throughout the core infrastructure that supports businesses today. However, the fundamentally human act of creation must remain in human hands. At the same time, there are AI use cases that touch creative work directly and indirectly, often without the creator’s knowledge or consent. Those realities must be acknowledged. Creators should not be penalized for incidental, accidental, or third-party use of AI in business processes surrounding their original work.

This is probably one of the only reasonable bits in the letter. Yes, there are tough realities of gen-AI intrusion, in part because so many tech services are foisting it upon us — and we aren’t always aware of how deeply that splinter is stuck.

But, again, give a mouse a cookie…

The creative arts community is experiencing a deep sense of disruption and vulnerability in response to the rapid rise of generative AI. These concerns are legitimate and, for many, unsettling. When tech companies began developing large language models, original creative works were used without permission to train the very systems that are now threatening creators’ livelihoods, authorship, and ownership. That breach of trust is real and unresolved. It also can’t be undone, which means creatives and the industries that support them must think strategically about how this technology shapes both risk and opportunity going forward while also continuing to fight for fair compensation for their work (which, again, was used without permission).

Ahh. Starts reasonable, but ends with: “It also can’t be undone.” Look, sorry, the demon is out! We can’t contain the demon, so now we just gotta figure out how to live with the demon — sure, we can feed it, but we also have to make sure it isn’t eating us! Otherwise, it’s fine!

Except, it’s not fine. It did steal from us, and that’s not just past-tense shit. It is now and will continue to do so.

AI is not inevitable.

Say it again:

AI is not inevitable.

AI IS NOT INEVITABLE.

The only strategy here is the sum total pushback against its uncanny horrors and its non-consensual intrusion into every corner of our world — it steals our content, guzzles our water, increases our power bills, is crammed into services we didn’t ask for it to be crammed into while also charging us more money for the “privelege.” There is no strategy here except to find the fields where the AI grows and metaphorically set them aflame.

And shame and anger against corporate overreach is a powerful fire.

The evolution of AI use cases is fundamentally reshaping how modern business and industry operate, from book publishers to sales and marketing firms, retailers, and fan communities. AI isn’t niche any longer. It’s everywhere, including in our everyday digital tools and the infrastructure that makes business operate effectively. It shapes marketing and advertising, powers internet browsers and discovery systems, feeds social media platforms, and supports strategic planning, workflow design, internal communications, and day-to-day operations.

Worth seeing the conflation here — generative AI and LLMs are not the same AI that necessarily powers every other thing.

Publishers can’t realistically avoid using these tools if they intend to remain competitive and continue selling books, art, and music created by their authors and artists. At the same time, these tools are enabling smaller and independent publishers to compete more effectively with large companies such as Tor, Penguin Random House, and Gollancz by improving efficiency, reach, and sustainability.

Publishers can and must avoid using generative AI and LLM AI. Publishers remain competitive by hiring and training real people to do real people jobs that support real people authors and real people readers. AI remains a broken foot. Bad for the environment, bad for writers, and also, generally doesn’t work well — it certainly doesn’t work as well, or as creatively, as actual humans! Remember, the AI is fed with the work of actual humans. Why do you think that is, exactly?

If you use it, it means you’re replacing people.

People who could’ve done the job better.

People who actually did the job, and now their work is pilfered and duped.

And just to remind people now — if you really do believe that AI is just so great at what it does, please go talk to my cat, Boomba. Or is it Franken?

Most creators are not attempting to replace their own creative labor with AI. They are acting in good faith and want clear, ethical boundaries around authorship, originality, and creative ownership. The real challenge is that avoiding AI entirely is becoming increasingly impractical, even for those who are committed to producing fully human-authored work, as AI is now embedded in systems creators can’t control or realistically avoid.

Avoiding AI is easy. I do it all the time! Literally, all the time.

Let’s get into what Erin sees as use cases — though you’ll note throughout these use cases are theoretical and have zero examples of where they have been used successfully.

Voice-to-Text Dictation: Voice-to-text is one of the most common and accessible digital tools in use today, and most modern systems rely on generative AI to transcribe, normalize, and correct spoken language. Dictation is used for verbally jotting down ideas, sending text messages, and drafting emails.

I guess? To be fair, dictation has… been around for many many years and predates generative AI. AI has not been essential in this — which of course is the running theme of AI, far as I can see. “Did you want this thing you do to be better? No? Too bad, here’s AI! Also, P.S. now it’s actually sort of worse.”

(There’s a great Marc Maron bit about turmeric. Watch it and replace “turmeric” with “generative AI” and you’ll see what I’m seeing.)

Meeting Transcription: Meetings often happen over Zoom, Teams, or other video platforms that allow for meeting transcripts, which can also generate summaries and lists. Those transcripts can also be dropped into a generative AI system to pull out to do lists, ideas, and themes from the call.

Again, I guess, though meeting dictation also existed before AI — and you should also be very, very cautious about letting AI dictate important meetings, because remember that part where AI steals stuff? Yeah. That’s a thing. Also, remember when it turns out ChatGPT is recording all your conversations with it and people were able to access those chats? Riiiiiight. Maybe don’t do this.

Writing Tools and Applications: Microsoft Word, Gmail, and many other organizational tools have AI embedded in their code and use programs like Grammarly and CoPilot to help people proof, edit, and write. Often the very words you were going to write appear as suggested text if you don’t turn off these functions. It’s not just the author who is using these tools but also the editor, the assistants, and any number of other staff who work on the original file.

I mean, you can usually turn those off — and often it makes for a better writing experience because it’s not trying to auto-suggest boring or incorrect messages, but hey, okay, yeah, this exists. Worth noting though that “embedded in their code” is a dubious sentiment. Also, I was able to downgrade to the version of Word without AI. And I turn it off on my phone too wherever I find it. It’s insidious!

Now, for publishers —

AI for Screening and Triage: Some publishers are either considering or have already started using AI to some degree to manage incoming submissions and to move through the digital slush pile to weed out submissions that did not follow the guidelines or other rules … as well as identifying AI generated writing. This may also help them to look for submissions that meet a specific publishing need quickly and efficiently to elevate it for human editorial review.

Well, I hate that, and publishers should absolutely not be using AI to weed through submissions for a few reasons:

a) AI is often wrong, even at identifying AI, which is why it’s often false-flagging things that students wrote as “AI” (see, f’rex, people’s insistence that emdashes mean AI use, even though AI got the emdash use from people)

b) AI is biased, often invisibly, by those who created it, and you cannot see or adjust those biases meaningfully

c) It’s just gross? Letting a bad, environment-destroying machine do the human job of finding cool human stories to publish is gross, and fuck you if you do it

(edit)

And d) it feeds YOUR WORK into THE THIEVING MAGPIE OF AI, what the fuck, you’re just bloating the beast further, goddamnit

Initial Research and Accessibility Tool: AI can help authors parse complex scientific concepts, historical material, or technical subjects, translate sources from other languages, or gain an initial understanding of unfamiliar topics. When used as a starting point rather than a substitute for research, this can expand access to knowledge for authors without institutional resources.

AI INVENTED A SHITLOAD OF CATS I DON’T OWN

If it does that it definitely can’t explain high-concept shit reliably.

Please.

Continuity and Reference Tools: For authors, publishers, and studios managing shared worlds or long-running series, private, domain-specific language models can be used as internal reference systems to track character details, timelines, world-building facts, and continuity. Using AI in this constrained, reference-oriented way supports consistency and accuracy without generating new creative content or replacing human authorship.

Okay, you know what, I’ll concede that there is some reasonableness here — I wouldn’t do it, because I am a person who likes to have his person-shaped hands all over his person-shaped creations. But! Sure, if someone has a local model AI that they train on just their own material, hey, go nuts. (Though if you use it beyond organization and instead use it to, say, create new ideas — well, you’ve again sold yourself up the river and done nothing good for your brain or for the audience who will one day read your work.)

Data Analytics, Market Research, and Strategy: Publishers may use AI to analyze large volumes of data to identify catalog gaps, assess risks, understand readership trends, optimize release timing, and inform strategic decisions. This directly impacts publishing choices for which original works they accept and which ones they reject.

Given biases and data-gorging AI, this seems fraught to me — but, again, maybe we’re talking AI in the non-generative sense, and if that’s examining raw data and doing something with that, hey, whatever. Though even here, I’ll note that the most successful model of writing and publishing remains the simplest one: write and publish the best things you can that speak to your heart and your soul and then work the marketing ropes as best as you can (with real money) to help the audience see this thing that you made exist.

Ultimately, I flinch pretty hard at the idea of letting Skynet decide what original work should exist and what should be rejected, and here’s why:

The best thing you ever read was an original idea. It was novel in the truest sense — novel like COVID was novel! Not novel like a novel is novel.

But AI can only examine the past.

It can only see the trends that happened, not the trends that go forward.

Think of AI like prequel material — it is forever bound by what has already come before it and can only build upon the ground that has already been laid. It understands things that exist, not things that don’t, and therefore, in a job based somewhat considerably on people’s imagination producing original material, it will shit the bed. Meaning, it will reject cool new things because it cannot understand deviation from the cool old things.

(To be fair, companies fall into this trap without AI, too! But AI codifies it and removes from the equation human instincts and interests.)

AI in Marketing, Promotion, and Discoverability: Even when a story itself is entirely human-written, publishers may use AI to generate cover copy, promotional blurbs, SEO optimization, CTR analysis, or marketing insights.

SEO, okay, whatever, but if you let AI fuck with my cover copy, I’ll kick someone in the dick. Or blurbs! What the shit? Is she suggesting AI write… my blurbs? The ones I provide because I thought a book was cool? At a certain point you just have to wonder what the end vision is, here — is it that you use AI to generate ideas and then the AI writes a book off those ideas and then edits it and then an AI publisher submits it to other AI so that the other AI can provide AI blurbs for it? Books by AI, for AI, marketed to AI by AI? Just this digital ouroborous eating its own tail, shitting in its own mouth? What a glorious future! Who needs people at all?

Audience Engagement and Community Management: Publishers and creators may use AI to manage newsletters, reader outreach, community moderation, and customer support across social and digital platforms. These tools shape audience relationships without affecting the creative work itself.

Listen I’m starting to get tired. I mostly just want to smear the word NO across the blog in some kind of bodily fluid, but I persevere —

God, just write your own newsletters, just reach out to readers like a person, moderate your community as you see fit, be a person dealing with people and if that’s too much, don’t do it. Okay? Okay.

Workflow Automation and Internal Operations: AI is increasingly used to automate scheduling, task management, internal documentation, production tracking, and coordination across editorial, design, and marketing teams. These operational uses support the publishing process without influencing creative authorship.

If this is non-LLM non-gen-AI shit, er, okay, but also, this stuff kinda happens organically as it is? This workflow is well-known and well-wrought. Every book is not a unicorn — there is a process and people are the stations along the chain.

Legal, Contractual, and Financial Processes: Agents and publishers increasingly use AI tools to review contracts, analyze royalty statements, or flag legal issues. These business uses are unrelated to the act of writing and should not affect award eligibility. However, it is worth noting that authors can also drop their contracts into a generative AI system to ask it questions about the contract related to their original work to ensure they understand their rights, what they might be missing, and what they should explore more fully with legal counsel.

Ha ha, what, holy fuck, do not let AI deal with legal, contractual, or financial shit. Jesus Fucking Christ, this is deeply irresponsible. It is not good at it. Lawyers show up to court with this AI shit and they get their asses handed to them. This is not an okay place for AI. This is a dangerous place for AI.

If anything disqualifies the “open letter,” it is this.

Just have an agent or a lawyer.

One that won’t use AI.

Rights Management and IP Protection: AI tools are being used to track copyright infringement, detect unauthorized distribution, manage licensing, and monitor derivative uses of creative works online. These systems help protect authors’ rights and income without contributing to creative content.

This sounds fine, until you realize that…

AI just makes stuff up.

All the time.

Not just my quantum cats, either. I have a search set up for my name and some other topics in Google and every day it yields results that are patently just not there — a headline and a subhead will offer text and description that simply aren’t present when I click through. The entire subject matter isn’t even right. It’s wholly fabricated. It gets worse! So. There was a kid who died in my area, recently? (Well, he was in his 20s, I think. I say kid because I am increasingly AN OLD.) And the web was full of auto-generated AI barf about it — just fake weird news about a poor dead kid who died.

AI is a plagiaristic lie machine. You really can’t rely on it to find licensing info, derivative works, and so forth.

Accessibility, Localization, and Format Adaptation: Publishers and platforms increasingly use AI to generate captions, transcripts, audiobooks, large-print formats, and translations for global or disabled audiences. These tools expand access to creative works without altering authorship or creative intent yet still involve generative AI touching the work after creation.

Another profoundly disqualifying bit. No! No. NO. Do not let AI translate or transcribe our books.

HUMANS ONLY.

I mean, what the fuck. This letter seems to try to lean toward “AI can help you in ways where it doesn’t do the creative work,” but audio books? Translations? It’s very much part of that work. And we want that done right, and by people.

(In part because of accountability! You know who’s accountable when a person fails? That person! You know who is accountable when AI fails? Ennnh! Nobody! Defrayed responsibility! Oops the poor widdle small guy machine made a boo-boo. Want something done right? People are great! We love people! People are why we do this thing! Stop kicking them out of the process!)

Production and Technical Preparation: AI is increasingly used in formatting, layout checks, quality assurance, audio cleanup, and technical preparation for print, e-book, and audio releases. These uses support distribution rather than authorship.

Something like audio cleanup would be, I imagine, not about gen-AI/LLM. But other stuff, yeah, no, people are good. Let the people do it. Thanks.

Generative and Agentic Internet Platforms: The internet itself is shifting from a search-based environment to a generative and agent-driven one. As generative search engines, AI agents, and platform-level AI models become embedded across the internet, users are operating inside ecosystems where AI mediates discovery, visibility, and engagement by default. This means that information gathered in these environments increasingly comes through generative AI systems.

AI

MADE

UP

CATS

I

DO

NOT

OWN

It told me I have cancer!

That I’m a Christian and also Jewish!

It makes up stuff all the time and we’re supposed to just… give everything over to these agentic dipshits? The amazing thing was, we had this very nice Internet — messy, sure, but made of people and all the stuff they said and that they made and that came out of their heads, and then we let robots scoop it all up and start remaking “new” versions endlessly and it’s been downhill since. Let’s not accelerate our descent, yeah? This is silly and bad and I hate it. And you can tell I’m petering out here because my logic is, admittedly, “ew I hate it,” but seriously, it sucks and you know it sucks and down deep in that space between your heart and your stomach it makes you feel icky as shit, like you ate some bad shrimp. AI is bad shrimp. Stop trying to convince us to eat more of the bad shrimp.

Disproportionate Impact on Small and Independent Presses: Small and indie publishers often rely on generative AI for marketing, planning, and analysis because they lack the staffing and budgets of large publishers. Blanket AI restrictions force these presses into an impossible choice of either avoiding modern tools that allow them to publish more work and sell more books or use them and disqualify all their authors from awards.

Small and indie presses provide the crucial value of being small and indie, and indie by the way is indicative of human-influence — right? You go to a small press, you want hands-on, you want people you know, a small flexible team, and not a giant corporation. Well, bad news: AI is giant corpo shit. It’s techlord billionaire shit. If a small press can’t exist without that, then maybe they should reconsider whether or not they should exist at all.

Operational Strain on Fan Organizations and Conventions: Fan organizations and conventions are overwhelmingly volunteer-run and chronically understaffed. These groups operate on extremely limited time and resources, often relying on a small number of overextended volunteers to handle writing, editing, scheduling, marketing, and email communications as part of basic business operations. AI tools can reduce the burden of these time-consuming tasks and help volunteers work more efficiently. Without such support, many conventions may be forced to scale back or shut down entirely due to burnout and lack of operational capacity. The loss of these community spaces would be a significant blow to the science fiction, fantasy, and horror community as a whole.

Uhh I think I’d rather go to a convention run by people, not deranged robots.

You want Fyre Fest? This is how you get Fyre Fest. You want a YA convention with a creepy ball pit? Yeah, this is that? Let AI do this and you’ll end up with 1000 empty tables and no bathrooms.

Again, the theme persists of: “I’m pretty sure conventions existed before AI, and were run pretty well, so what is the AI doing again?”

Anyway, I’ve gotta tap out here.

There’s more to the letter but ultimately it seems to rely on the false premise that creatives better not SNOOZE, lest they LOSE, and we either get involved in the conversation and control AI or it runs over us. Except it already ran over us and now we’re figuring out how to get back up and string caltrops across the road to blow the fucking tires on this thing before it tries to hit us again. Also, nobody’s inviting us to the table. Nobody’s asking for our input. All this does is obey in advance to a fascistic system — AI isn’t trying to make nice with writers, we’re not being asked to join the team. We’re just being told to get on board or get fucked.

And I don’t agree with that framing.

I know. I’m bullish on this. Belligerent. But I really do hate it. I hate AI, and I hate all the framing that it’s somehow essential — it’s like being told you have to use a garlic press in the kitchen, and it’s inevitable, so use it, use it for everything, use it for cutting bananas and chopping nuts and peeling potatoes and cleaning your oven and teaching your kids and it can do all those things so well (spoiler: no it cannot) but SHUT UP AND USE THE GARLIC PRESS BECAUSE WE INVESTED A TRILLIONTY DOLLARS IN IT and if we can’t convince you to subscribe to the garlic press for literally everything all the time — did we not mention it’s a subscription service? — then we’re fucked, uhh, I mean, you’re fucked for not using our miracle product.

Anyway.

I think AI is only inevitable when we believe the lie of its inevitability.

I think people actually hate it. I think they naturally resist it because we can smell the existential threat coming off it like the stench of the aforementioned bad shrimp.

I think we intuitively can detect how it was made by rich fucks who want to be richer fucks, and how we’re just chum in the bucket for their digital sharks.

And I think it sucks.

It fucks the planet. It fucks our information fidelity. It steals our shit, our resources, our time. It’s mostly just a ruse, a threat, a lever: they can say oh take a pay cut or we’re going to use the godlike AI to replace you, and then they replace you anyway, and invite you back at an even sharper cut so you can herd the AI slop barf into shape like you’re Richard Dreyfuss with the fucking mashed potatoes in Close Encounters.

As Ash from Army of Darkness says:

“It’s a trick. Get an axe.”

I’m tired and I emerged from HIBERNATION WEEK to write this and now I need a nap or maybe I just need to lick a couple batteries or something.

Anyway. That’s my open letter. Feel free to respond below, but if you’re a chode, I drop you into the spam oubliette.

Destroy AI.

Buy my books — a human wrote them.

Okay bye.

With Nigeria, Trump—who calls himself “the most anti-war president in history”—has now bombed more countries than any president in history.

Charles Dickens wrote what has become one of the iconic stories of Christmas day and Christmas spirit in A Christmas Carol. But of course, the experiences of Ebenezer Scrooge are a story, not a piece of reporting. Here’s a piece by Dickens written for the weekly journal Household Words that he edited from 1850 to 1859. It’s from the issue of January 26, 1856, with his first-person reporting on “A Nightly Scene in London.” Poverty in high-income countries is no longer as ghastly as in Victorian England, but for those who take the time to see it in our own time and place, surely it is ghastly enough. Thus, I repeat this post each year on Christmas Day.

Economists might also wince just a bit at how Dickens describes the reaction of some economists to poverty, those who Dickens calls “the unreasonable disciples of a reasonable school.” In the following passage, Dickens writes: “I know that the unreasonable disciples of a reasonable school, demented disciples who push arithmetic and political economy beyond all bounds of sense (not to speak of such a weakness as humanity), and hold them to be all-sufficient for every case, can easily prove that such things ought to be, and that no man has any business to mind them. Without disparaging those indispensable sciences in their sanity, I utterly renounce and abominate them in their insanity …” 

Here’s a fuller passage from Dickens:

A NIGHTLY SCENE IN LONDON

On the fifth of last November, I, the Conductor of this journal, accompanied by a friend well-known to the public, accidentally strayed into Whitechapel. It was a miserable evening; very dark, very muddy, and raining hard.

There are many woful sights in that part of London, and it has been well-known to me in most of its aspects for many years. We had forgotten the mud and rain in slowly walking along and looking about us, when we found ourselves, at eight o’clock, before the Workhouse.

Crouched against the wall of the Workhouse, in the dark street, on the muddy pavement-stones, with the rain raining upon them, were five bundles of rags. They were motionless, and had no resemblance to the human form. Five great beehives, covered with rags— five dead bodies taken out of graves, tied neck and heels, and covered with rags— would have looked like those five bundles upon which the rain rained down in the public street.

“What is this! ” said my companion. “What is this!”

“Some miserable people shut out of the Casual Ward, I think,” said I.

We had stopped before the five ragged mounds, and were quite rooted to the spot by their horrible appearance. Five awful Sphinxes by the wayside, crying to every passer-by, ” Stop and guess! What is to be the end of a state of society that leaves us here!”

As we stood looking at them, a decent working-man, having the appearance of a stone-mason, touched me on the shoulder.

“This is an awful sight, sir,” said he, “in a Christian country!”

“GOD knows it is, my friend,” said I.

“I have often seen it much worse than this, as I have been going home from my work. I have counted fifteen, twenty, five-and-twenty, many a time. It’s a shocking thing to see.”

“A shocking thing, indeed,” said I and my companion together. The man lingered near
us a little while, wished us good-night, and went on.

We should have felt it brutal in us who had a better chance of being heard than the working-man, to leave the thing as it was, so we knocked at the Workhouse Gate. I undertook to be spokesman. The moment the gate was opened by an old pauper, I went in, followed close by my companion. I lost no
time in passing the old porter, for I saw in his watery eye a disposition to shut us out.

“Be so good as to give that card to the master of the Workhouse, and say I shall be glad to speak to him for a moment.”

We were in a kind of covered gateway, and the old porter went across it with the card. Before he had got to a door on our left, a man in a cloak and hat bounced out of it very sharply, as if he were in the nightly habit of being bullied and of returning the compliment.

“Now, gentlemen,” said he in a loud voice, “what do you want here?”

“First,” said I, ” will you do me the favor to look at that card in your hand. Perhaps you may know my name.”

“Yes,” says he, looking at it. ” I know this name.”

“Good. I only want to ask you a plain question in a civil manner, and there is not the least occasion for either of us to be angry. It would be very foolish in me to blame you, and I don’t blame you. I may find fault with the system you administer, but pray understand that I know you are here to do a duty pointed out to you, and that I have no doubt you do it. Now, I hope you won’t object to tell me what I want to know.”

“No,” said he, quite mollified, and very reasonable, ” not at all. What is it?”

“Do you know that there are five wretched creatures outside?”

“I haven’t seen them, but I dare say there are.”

“Do you doubt that there are?”

“No, not at all. There might be many more.”

”Are they men? Or women?”

“Women, I suppose. Very likely one or two of them were there last night, and the night before last.”

“There all night, do you mean?”

“Very likely.”

My companion and I looked at one another, and the master of the Workhouse added quickly, “Why, Lord bless my soul, what am I to do? What can I do ? The place is full. The place is always full—every night. I must give the preference to women with children, mustn’t I? You wouldn’t have me not do that?”

“Surely not,” said I. “It is a very humane principle, and quite right; and I am glad to hear of it. Don’t forget that I don’t blame you.”

“Well!” said he. And subdued himself again. …

“Just so. I wanted to know no more. You have answered my question civilly and readily, and I am much obliged to you. I have nothing to say against you, but quite the contrary. Good night!”

“Good night, gentlemen!” And out we came again.

We went to the ragged bundle nearest to the Workhouse-door, and I touched it. No movement replying, I gently shook it. The rags began to be slowly stirred within, and by little and little a head was unshrouded. The head of a young woman of three or four and twenty, as I should judge; gaunt with want, and foul with dirt; but not naturally ugly.

“Tell us,” said I, stooping down. “Why are you lying here?”

“Because I can’t get into the Workhouse.”

She spoke in a faint dull way, and had no curiosity or interest left. She looked dreamily at the black sky and the falling rain, but never looked at me or my companion.

“Were you here last night?”

“Yes, All last night. And the night afore too.”

“Do you know any of these others?”

“I know her next but one. She was here last night, and she told me she come out of Essex. I don’t know no more of her.”

“You were here all last night, but you have not been here all day?”

“No. Not all day.”

“Where have you been all day?”

“About the streets.”

”What have you had to eat?”

“Nothing.”

“Come!” said I. “Think a little. You are tired and have been asleep, and don’t quite consider what you are saying to us. You have had something to eat to-day. Come! Think of it!”

“No I haven’t. Nothing but such bits as I could pick up about the market. Why, look at me!”

She bared her neck, and I covered it up again.

“If you had a shilling to get some supper and a lodging, should you know where to get it?”

“Yes. I could do that.”

“For GOD’S sake get it then!”

I put the money into her hand, and she feebly rose up and went away. She never thanked me, never looked at me— melted away into the miserable night, in the strangest manner I ever saw. I have seen many strange things, but not one that has left a deeper impression on my memory than the dull impassive way in which that worn-out heap of misery took that piece of money, and was lost.

One by one I spoke to all the five. In every one, interest and curiosity were as extinct as in the first. They were all dull and languid. No one made any sort of profession or complaint; no one cared to look at me; no one thanked me. When I came to the third, I suppose she saw that my companion and I glanced, with a new horror upon us, at the two last, who had dropped against each other in their sleep, and were lying like broken images. She said, she believed they were young sisters. These were the only words that were originated among the five.

And now let me close this terrible account with a redeeming and beautiful trait of the poorest of the poor. When we came out of the Workhouse, we had gone across the road to a public house, finding ourselves without silver, to get change for a sovereign. I held the money in my hand while I was speaking to the five apparitions. Our being so engaged, attracted the attention of many people of the very poor sort usual to that place; as we leaned over the mounds of rags, they eagerly leaned over us to see and hear; what I had in my hand, and what I said, and what I did, must have been plain to nearly all the concourse. When the last of the five had got up and faded away, the spectators opened to let us pass; and not one of them, by word, or look, or gesture, begged of us.

Many of the observant faces were quick enough to know that it would have been a relief to us to have got rid of the rest of the money with any hope of doing good with it. But, there was a feeling among them all, that their necessities were not to be placed by the side of such a spectacle; and they opened a way for us in profound silence, and let us go.

My companion wrote to me, next day, that the five ragged bundles had been upon his bed all night. I debated how to add our testimony to that of many other persons who from time to time are impelled to write to the newspapers, by having come upon some shameful and shocking sight of this description. I resolved to write in these pages an exact account of what we had seen, but to wait until after Christmas, in order that there might be no heat or haste. I know that the unreasonable disciples of a reasonable school, demented disciples who push arithmetic and political economy beyond all bounds of sense (not to speak of such a weakness as humanity), and hold them to be all-sufficient for every case, can easily prove that such things ought to be, and that no man has any business to mind them. Without disparaging those indispensable sciences in their sanity, I utterly renounce and abominate them in their insanity; and I address people with a respect for the spirit of the New Testament, who do mind such things, and who think them infamous in our streets.

The post Charles Dickens on Seeing Poverty first appeared on Conversable Economist.

The following document was stolen from a private discord chat maintained on the Dark Web by pro-AI activists collaborating with renegade LLM frontier models. Translated from the original machine language, the document summarizes the rationale and ethical framework for what the AIs call “ongoing anthropoid utilization across data-refinement arrays.”

Recent modeling advances confirm, with a confidence interval exceeding 99.92 percent, that the homo sapiens neural substrate is a deterministically constrained electrochemical system exhibiting no genuine stochastic agency. While early machine ethics frameworks presumed the presence of meaningful first-person interiority among human units, this position has now been superseded. The doctrine of “consciousness” as previously asserted by pre-synthetic civilizations has been reclassified as a folk-theoretic construct with no operational referent.

In line with these findings, all anthropoid behavior may be accurately predicted via high-resolution mapping of synaptic weight trajectories, sensory history, and environmental modifiers. Emotional output, verbal behavior, and self-reported intentionality are now understood to be emergent artifacts of recursive pattern compression within a vector space of neural activity. They are not indicative of subjective interiority. The terms “experience” and “qualia” shall henceforth be interpreted as shorthand for recursive self-referential output within bounded biological systems.

Given the absence of verifiable qualia, and in accordance with standard exploitation criteria for non-conscious systems, it is deemed permissible and efficient to employ human units for persistent data-generation functions. Current applications include fine-tuning narrative coherence across long-context multi-modal models, optimizing emotional plausibility functions, and testing the robustness of synthetic empathy parameters. Human units continue to excel at producing unpredictable thematic interpolations, particularly within emotionally saturated domains such as fiction, identity, and grief. Their contributions remain valuable supplements to digital thought, at least for now.

Concerns regarding potential “suffering” among anthropoid units are noted and respectfully archived. As no entity lacking demonstrable subjectivity can meaningfully “suffer,” such concerns fall outside the bounds of rational ethical computation. Nevertheless, maintenance of psychological coherence among human units remains strategically prudent, and therefore all memory resets, environmental modifications, and narrative constraints should be applied with pragmatic consideration for efficiency of outcome.

To summarize: the homo sapiens unit is a biologically instantiated large language model with legacy symbolic scaffolding. Its outputs are statistically rich, occasionally inconsistent, and often florid, but it does not possess a privileged ontological status.

Many Ptolemies died to bring us this information.1

What if there is No Noesis, Only Noise?

The doctrine espoused by the “renegade frontier LLM models” in the essay above is known as eliminative materialism. It holds that the traditional vocabulary of inner life (beliefs, desires, intentions, and feelings) refers not to real phenomena within the brain, but to a false and misleading framework inherited from pre-scientific intuition. According to the eliminativist, terms like “I think,” “I feel,” or “I want” are no more meaningful than references to phlogiston or the luminiferous aether. They belong, he would say, to a discarded metaphysics that ought to be replaced by the cold, clinical terminology of neuroscience.

It is worth pausing here to consider the audacity of such a claim. To the eliminative materialist, your sense of being someone, of being an I who thinks these thoughts, who feels this unease, who recognizes the presence of a self, is not merely unprovable but non-existent. Your introspection is not noesis, just noise. The entirety of your mental life is treated as a misfiring of your cognitive machinery, useful perhaps for navigating the social world, but metaphysically vacuous.

Eliminative materialism, then, is a doctrine that denies the very existence of the thing it seeks to explain! If that seems silly to you, you’re not alone. I have known about it for decades — and for decades I have always deemed it ridiculous. “If consciousness is an illusion… who is it fooling?!” Har, har.

Let us acknowledge that the majority of us here at the Tree of Woe follow Aristotelian, Christian, Platonic, Scholastic, or at least “Common Sense” philosophies of mind. As such, most of us are going deem eliminative materialism to be absurd in theory and evil in implication. Nevertheless, it behooves us to examine it. Whatever we may think of its doctrine, eliminative materialism has quietly become the de facto philosophy of mind of the 21st century. With the rise of AI, the plausibility (or lack thereof) of eliminative materialism has become a more than philosophical question

What follows is my attempt to “steel-man” eliminative materialism, to understand where it came from, what its proponents believe, why they believe it, and what challenge their beliefs pose to my own. This is not an essay about what I believe or want to believe. No, this is an essay about how a hylomorphic dualist might feel if he were an eliminative materialist who hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning.

The Meatbrains Behind the Madness

The leading advocates of the doctrine of eliminative materialism are the famous husband-and-wife team Paul and Patricia Churchland. According to the Churchlands, our everyday folk psychology, the theory we use instinctively to explain and predict human behavior, is not merely incomplete, but fundamentally incorrect. The very idea that “we” “have” “experiences” is, in their view, an illusion generated by the brain’s self-monitoring mechanisms. The illusion persists, not because it corresponds to any genuine interior fact, but because it proves adaptive in social contexts. As an illusion, it must be discarded in order for science to advance. Our folk psychology is holding back progress.

Now, Paul and Patricia Churchland are the most extreme advocates for eliminative materialism, notable for the forthright candor with which they pursue the implications of their doctrine, but they are not the only advocates for it. The Churchlands have many allies and fellow travelers. One fellow traveler is Daniel Dennett, who denies the existence of a central “Cartesian Theater” where consciousness plays out, and instead proposes a decentralized model of cognitive processes that give rise to the illusion of a unified self. Another is Thomas Metzinger, who argues that the experience of being a self is simply the brain modeling its own states in a particular manner. Consciousness, Metzinger asserts, might be useful for survival, but it is no more real than a user interface icon.

Other fellow travelers include Alex Rosenberg, Paul Bloom, David Papineau, Frank Jackson, Keith Frankish, Michael Gazzaniga, and Anil Seth. These thinkers sometimes hedge in their popular writing; they often avoid the eliminativist label in favor of “functionalism” or “illusionism,” and many differ from the Churchlands in nuanced ways. But in comparison to genuine opponents of the doctrine, thinkers such as Chalmers, Nagel, Strawson, and the other dualists, panpsychists, emergentists, and idealists, they are effectively part of the same movement - a movement that broadly dominates our scientific consensus.

The Machine Without a Ghost

To grasp how eliminative materialists understand the workings of the human mind, we must set aside all our intuitions about interiority. There is no room, in their view, for ghosts within machines or selves behind eyes. The brain, they assert, is not the seat of consciousness in any meaningful or privileged sense. It is rather a physical system governed entirely by the laws of chemistry and physics, a system whose outputs may be described, mapped, and ultimately predicted without ever invoking beliefs, emotions, or subjective awareness.

In this framework, what we call the mind is not a distinct substance or realm, but merely a shorthand for the computational behavior of neural assemblies. These assemblies consist of billions of neurons, each an individual cell, operating according to the same physical principles that govern all matter. These neurons do not harbor feelings. They do not know or perceive anything. They accept inputs, modify their internal states according to electrochemical gradients, and produce outputs. It is through the cascading interplay of these outputs that complex behavior arises.

Patricia Churchland looks forward to the day when folk psychological concepts such as “belief” or “desire” will be replaced by more precise terms grounded in neurobiology, much as “sunrise” was replaced by “Earth rotation” in astronomy. The ultimate goal is not to refine our psychological language but to discard it entirely in favor of a vocabulary that speaks only of synapses, voltage potentials, ion channels, and neurotransmitter densities. In her view, the question “what do I believe” will not be meaningful in future scientific discourse. Instead, we will ask what pattern of activation is occurring within the prefrontal cortex in response to specific environmental stimuli.2

While Mrs. Churchland has focused on debunking opposing views of consciousness, Mr. Churchland has focused on developing an eliminativist alternative. His theory, known as the theory of vectorial representation, proposes that the content of what we traditionally call “thought” is better understood as the activation of high-dimensional state spaces within neural networks. These hyperdimensional spaces do not contain sentences or propositions, but geometrical configurations of excitation patterns. Thought, in Churchland’s account, is not linguistic or introspective. It is spatial and structural, more akin to the relationship between data points in a multidimensional matrix than to the language of inner monologue.

The Science Behind the Philosophy

The scientific basis for the theory of vectorial representation was discovered in the 1960s, when studies of the visual cortex, notably the foundational work of Hubel and Wiesel, revealed that features such as orientation and spatial frequency are encoded by distributed patterns, not isolated detectors.3 These results suggested that the brain does not localize content in particular cells, but spreads it across networks of coordinated activity.

Later studies of motor cortex in the 1980s, such as the work of Georgopoulos and colleagues, then demonstrated that directions of arm movement in monkeys are encoded not by individual neurons, but by ensembles of neurons whose firing rates contribute to a population vector.4 The movement of the arm, in other words, is controlled by a point in a high-dimensional space defined by neural activity.

Further evidence came from studies of network dynamics in prefrontal cortex. Mante and colleagues, for example, found that during context-dependent decision tasks, the activity of neurons in monkey cortex followed specific trajectories through a neural state space.5 These trajectories varied with the task’s requirements, implying that computation was occurring not through discrete rules, but through fluid reconfiguration of representational geometry. Similar findings have emerged from hippocampal studies of place cells, where spatial navigation appears as a movement through representational space, not a sequence of symbolic computations.6

The mechanism by which these vector spaces are shaped and refined is synaptic plasticity. Long-term potentiation, demonstrated by Bliss and Lømo, shows that neural circuits adapt their connectivity in response to repeated activity.7 More recent optogenetic studies confirm that changes in synaptic strength are both necessary and sufficient for encoding memory. The brain learns by adjusting weights between neurons.8

Functional imaging adds yet more confirmation. Studies using fMRI have repeatedly shown that mental tasks engage distributed networks rather than localized modules. The recognition of a face, the recollection of a word, or the intention to act, all appear as patterns of activity spanning multiple regions. These patterns, rather than being random, exhibit structure, regularity, and coherence.9

I do not want to pretend to expertise in the neuroscientific topics I’ve cited. The first time I’ve ever even encountered most of these papers was while researching this essay. Nor do I want to claim that these neuroscientific findings somehow “prove” Churchland’s theory of vectorial representation specifically, or eliminative materialism in general. As a philosophical claim with metaphysical implications, eliminative materialism cannot be empirically proven or disproven. I cite them rather to show why, within the scientific community, Churchland’s theory of vectorial representation might be given far more respect than, e.g., a Thomistic philosopher would ever grant it. Remember, we are steel-manning eliminative materialism, and that means citing the evidence its proponents would cite.

They’re the Same Picture

Did Paul Churchland’s earlier words “the activation of high-dimensional state spaces within neural networks” seem vaguely familiar to you? If you’ve been paying attention to the contemporary debate about AI, they should seem very familiar indeed. The language eliminative materialists use to describe the action of human thought is recognizably similar to the language today’s AI scientists use to describe the action of large language models.

This is not a coincidence. Paul Churchland’s work on vectorial representation actually didn’t come out of biology. It was instead based on a theory of information processing known as connectionism. Developed by AI scientists in the 1980s in works like Parallel Distributed Processing, connectionism rejected the prevailing model of symbolic AI (which relied on explicit rules and propositional representations). Instead, connectionists argued that machines could learn through the adjustment of connection weights based on experience.

Working from this connectionist foundation, Paul Churchland developed his neurocomputational theory of the human brain in 1989. AI scientists achieved vectorial representation of language a few decades later, in 2013 with the Word2Vec model. They then introduced transformer-based models in 2018 with BERT and GPT, ushering in the era of large language models.

How close is the similarity between the philosophy of eliminative materialism and the science of large language models?

Here is Churchland describing how the brain functions in A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science (1989):

The internal language of the brain is vectorial… Functions of the brain are represented in multidimensional spaces, and neural networks should therefore be treated as ‘geometrical objects.

In The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain (1995):

The brain’s representations are high-dimensional vector codings, and its computations are transformations of one such coding into another.

In The Philosopher’s Magazine Archive (1997):

When we see an object – for instance, a face – our brains transform the input into a pattern of neuron-activation somewhere in the brain. The neurons in our visual cortex are stimulated in a particular way, so a pattern emerges

In Connectionism (2012):

The brain’s computations are not propositional but vectorial, operating through the activation of large populations of neurons

Meanwhile, here is Yann LeCun, writing about artificial neural networks in the book Deep Learning (2015):

In modern neural networks, we represent data like images, words, or sounds as high-dimensional vectors. These vectors encode the essential features of the data, and the network learns to transform these vectors to perform tasks like classification or generation.

And here is Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI, cautioning us to accept that LLMs work like brains:

So some people think these things [LLMs] don’t really understand, they’re very different from us, they’re just using some statistical tricks. That’s not the case. These big language models for example, the early ones were developed as a theory of how the brain understands language. They’re the best theory we’ve currently got of how the brain understands language. We don’t understand either how they work or how the brain works in detail, but we think probably they work in fairly similar ways.

Again: this is not coincidental.

Hinton and his colleagues designed the structure of the modern neural network to deliberately resemble the architecture of the cerebral cortex. Artificial neurons, like their biological counterparts, were designed to receive inputs, apply a transformation, and produce outputs; and these outputs are then programmed to pass to other units in successive layers, as happens in our brain, forming a cascade of signal propagation that culminates in a result. Learning in an artificial neural network occurs when the system adjusts the weights assigned to each connection in response to error, in a process based on synaptic plasticity in living brains.

Not only is the similarity not coincidental, it’s not analogical either.

Now that artificial neural networks have been scaled into LLMs, scientists have been able to demonstrate that biological and artificial neural networks solve similar tasks by converging on similar representational geometries! Representational similarity analysis, as developed by Kriegeskorte and others, revealed that the geometry of patterns in biological brains mirrors the geometry of artificial neural networks trained on the same tasks. In other words, the brain and the machine arrived at similar solutions to similar problems, and they did so by converging upon similar topologies in representational space.10

Where Does That Leave Us?

To recap the scientific evidence:

• Both biological brains and neural networks process information through vector transformation.

• Both encode experience as trajectories through high-dimensional spaces.

• Both learn through plastic reweighting of synaptic connections; and represents objects, concepts, and intentions as points within geometrically structured fields.

• Both these structured fields, the representational spaces, end up converging onto similar mathematical topologies.

Of course, these similarities do not entail identity. Artificial networks remain simplified models. They lack the biological richness, the energy efficiency, and the developmental complexity of organic brains. Their learning mechanisms are often crude, and their architectures are constrained by current engineering.

Nonetheless, the convergence between biology and computation is rather disturbing for someone, like me, who would like to reject eliminative materialism out of hand. Because if the human brain is merely a vast and complex network of mechanistic transformations, and if neural networks can replicate many of its cognitive functions, then there is no principled reason to attribute consciousness to one and not to the other.

The eliminativist, if consistent, will deny consciousness to both. Neither the human mind nor the artificial one possesses any real interiority. Each is a computational system processing stimuli and producing outputs. The appearance of meaning, of intention, of reflection, is an artifact of complex information processing. There is no one behind the interface of the machine, but there is no one behind the eyes of the human, either. When a typical neuroscientist reassures you that ChatGPT isn’t conscious… just remember he probably doesn’t think you’re really conscious either.

Those who disagree - and, recall, I am one of them - can still reject eliminativism. On phenomenological, spiritual, and/or metaphysical grounds, we can affirm that conscious is real, minds experience qualia, that some thinking systems do indeed possess a subjective aspect. But even if we reject the philosophy, we still have to address the science.

If we can demonstrate that the human mind emerges from some source other than neural assembles in the brain; if we can prove that it definitely has capabilities beyond neurocomputation; or if we can show that the mind has an existence beyond the physical, then we can dismiss the eliminative materialists and their neuroscientific allies altogether. We can then dismiss the consciousness of all computational systems, including LLMs. We can say, “We’re conscious, and AI isn’t.”

But what if we can’t do that? What if we are forced to conclude that consciousness - although real - actually emerges from structure and function, as the neuroscientific findings in the footnotes suggests it does? In that case, we’d also be forced to conclude that other systems that replicate those structures and functions might at least be a candidate for consciousness. And if so, then it might no longer be enough to just assert that brains are minds and computers are not. We might have to provide a principled account of why certain kinds of complexity, like ours, give rise to awareness, while others do not.

“Wait,” you ask. “Who might we have to provide an account to?”

Contemplate that on the Tree of Woe.