By Ron Jacobs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            This is where we are now.

The post The Demented Empire appeared first on PM Press.

Today's links

• AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit: In case there was ever any doubt.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Eggflation x excuseflation; Haunted Mansion stretch portraits; "Lost Souls"; Time Magazine x the first Worldcon; Obama v Freedom of Information Act; Ragequitting jihadi doxxes ISIS; OSI v DRM in standards.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://writerbeware.blog/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hey look at this (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1031 words today, 47410 total)

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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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.

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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

Let’s spell it out directly: The militaristic drift of the United States that we are witnessing with the war in Iran resonates above all as a terrible admission of weakness. American elites have become increasingly aware of the financial, commercial and political fragility of their country. The most nationalist among them have concluded that the […]

Today's links

• The web is bearable with RSS: And don't forget "Reader Mode."
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Eyemodule x Disneyland; Scott Walker lies; Brother's demon-haunted printer; 4th Amendment luggage tape; Sanders x small donors v media; US police killings tallied.
• 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 web is bearable with RSS (permalink)

Never let them tell you that enshittification was a mystery. Enshittification isn't downstream of the "iron laws of economics" or an unrealistic demand by "consumers" to get stuff for free.

Enshittification comes from specific policy choices, made by named individuals, that had the foreseeable and foreseen result of making the web worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/07/take-it-easy/#but-take-it

Like, there was once a time when an ever-increasing proportion of web users kept tabs on what was going on with RSS. RSS is a simple, powerful way for websites to publish "feeds" of their articles, and for readers to subscribe to those feeds and get notified when something new was posted, and even read that new material right there in your RSS reader tab or app.

RSS is simple and versatile. It's the backbone of podcasts (though Apple and Spotify have done their best to kill it, along with public broadcasters like the BBC, all of whom want you to switch to proprietary apps that spy on you and control you). It's how many automated processes communicate with one another, untouched by human hands. But above all, it's a way to find out when something new has been published on the web.

RSS's liftoff was driven by Google, who released a great RSS reader called "Google Reader" in 2007. Reader was free and reliable, and other RSS readers struggled to compete with it, with the effect that most of us just ended up using Google's product, which made it even harder to launch a competitor.

But in 2013, Google quietly knifed Reader. I've always found the timing suspicious: it came right in the middle of Google's desperate scramble to become Facebook, by means of a product called Google Plus (G+). Famously, Google product managers' bonuses depended on how much G+ engagement they drove, with the effect that every Google product suddenly sprouted G+ buttons that either did something stupid, or something that confusingly duplicated existing functionality (like commenting on Youtube videos).

Google treated G+ as an existential priority, and for good reason. Google was running out of growth potential, having comprehensively conquered Search, and having repeatedly demonstrated that Search was a one-off success, with nearly every other made-in-Google product dying off. What successes Google could claim were far more modest, like Gmail, Google's Hotmail clone. Google augmented its growth by buying other peoples' companies (Blogger, YouTube, Maps, ad-tech, Docs, Android, etc), but its internal initiatives were turkeys.

Eventually, Wall Street was going to conclude that Google had reached the end of its growth period, and Google's shares would fall to a fraction of their value, with a price-to-earnings ratio commensurate with a "mature" company.

Google needed a new growth story, and "Google will conquer Facebook's market" was a pretty good one. After all, investors didn't have to speculate about whether Facebook was profitable, they could just look at Facebook's income statements, which Google proposed to transfer to its own balance sheet. The G+ full-court press was as much a narrative strategy as a business strategy: by tying product managers' bonuses to a metric that demonstrated G+'s rise, Google could convince Wall Street that they had a lot of growth on their horizon.

Of course, tying individual executives' bonuses to making a number go up has a predictably perverse outcome. As Goodhart's law has it, "Any metric becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful metric." As soon as key decision-makers' personal net worth depending on making the G+ number go up, they crammed G+ everywhere and started to sneak in ways to trigger unintentional G+ sessions. This still happens today – think of how often you accidentally invoke an unbanishable AI feature while using Google's products (and products from rival giant, moribund companies relying on an AI narrative to convince investors that they will continue to grow):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

Like I said, Google Reader died at the peak of Google's scramble to make the G+ number go up. I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google realized that Reader's core functionality (helping users discover, share and discuss interesting new web pages) was exactly the kind of thing Google wanted us to use G+ for, and so they killed Reader in a bid to drive us to the stalled-out service they'd bet the company on.

If Google killed Reader in a bid to push users to discover and consume web pages using a proprietary social media service, they succeeded. Unfortunately, the social media service they pushed users into was Facebook – and G+ died shortly thereafter.

For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It's a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:

https://kottke.org/rolodex/

There are many good RSS readers. I've been paying for Newsblur since 2011, and consider the $36 I send them every year to be a very good investment:

https://newsblur.com/

But RSS continues to be a power user-coded niche, despite the fact that RSS readers are really easy to set up and – crucially – make using the web much easier. Last week, Caroline Crampton (co-editor of The Browser) wrote about her experiences using RSS:

https://www.carolinecrampton.com/the-view-from-rss/

As Crampton points out, much of the web (including some of the cruftiest, most enshittified websites) publish full-text RSS feeds, meaning that you can read their articles right there in your RSS reader, with no ads, no popups, no nag-screens asking you to sign up for a newsletter, verify your age, or submit to their terms of service.

It's almost impossible to overstate how superior RSS is to the median web page. Imagine if the newsletters you followed were rendered with black, clear type on a plain white background (rather than the sadistically infinitesimal, greyed-out type that designers favor thanks to the unkillable urban legend that black type on a white screen causes eye-strain). Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or "keep reading" links.

Now, not every website publishes a fulltext feed. Often, you will just get a teaser, and if you want to read the whole article, you have to click through. I have a few tips for making other websites – even ones like Wired and The Intercept – as easy to read as an RSS reader, at least for Firefox users.

Firefox has a built-in "Reader View" that re-renders the contents of a web-page as black type on a white background. Firefox does some kind of mysterious calculation to determine whether a page can be displayed in Reader View, but you can override this with the Activate Reader View, which adds a Reader View toggle for every page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/activate-reader-view/

Lots of websites (like The Guardian) want you to login before you can read them, and even if you pay to subscribe to them, these sites often want you to re-login every time you visit them (especially if you're running a full suite of privacy blockers). You can skip this whole process by simply toggling Reader View as soon as you get the login pop up. On some websites (like The Verge and Wired), you'll only see the first couple paragraphs of the article in Reader View. But if you then hit reload, the whole article loads.

Activate Reader View puts a Reader View toggle on every page, but clicking that toggle sometimes throws up an error message, when the page is so cursed that Firefox can't figure out what part of it is the article. When this happens, you're stuck reading the page in the site's own default (and usually terrible) view. As you scroll down the page, you will often hit pop-ups that try to get you to sign up for a mailing list, agree to terms of service, or do something else you don't want to do. Rather than hunting for the button to close these pop-ups (or agree to objectionable terms of service), you can install "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that reaches into the page's layout files and deletes any element that isn't designed to scroll with the rest of the text:

https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky

Other websites (like Slashdot and Core77) load computer-destroying Javascript (often as part of an anti-adblock strategy). For these, I use the "Javascript Toggle On and Off" plugin, which lets you create a blacklist of websites that aren't allowed to run any scripts:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/javascript-toggler/

Some websites (like Yahoo) load so much crap that they defeat all of these countermeasures. For these websites, I use the "Element Blocker" plug-in, which lets you delete parts of the web-page, either for a single session, or permanently:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/element-blocker/

It's ridiculous that websites put so many barriers up to a pleasant reading experience. A slow-moving avalanche of enshittogenic phenomena got us here. There's corporate enshittification, like Google/Meta's monopolization of ads and Meta/Twitter's crushing of the open web. There's regulatory enshittification, like the EU's failure crack down on companies the pretend that forcing you to click an endless stream of "cookie consent" popups is the same as complying with the GDPR.

Those are real problems, but they don't have to be your problem, at least when you want to read the web. A couple years ago, I wrote a guide to using RSS to improve your web experience, evade lock-in and duck algorithmic recommendation systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

Customizing your browser takes this to the next level, disenshittifying many websites – even if they block or restrict RSS. Most of this stuff only applies to desktop browsers, though. Mobile browsers are far more locked down (even mobile Firefox – remember, every iOS browser, including Firefox, is just a re-skinned version of Safari, thanks to Apple's ban rival browser engines). And of course, apps are the worst. An app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to improve it in any way:

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

And even if you do customize your mobile browser (Android Firefox lets you do some of this stuff), many apps (Twitter, Tumblr) open external links in their own browser (usually an in-app Chrome instance) with all the bullshit that entails.

The promise of locked-down mobile platforms was that they were going to "just work," without any of the confusing customization options of desktop OSes. It turns out that taking away those confusing customization options was an invitation to every enshittifier to turn the web into an unreadable, extractive, nagging mess. This was the foreseeable – and foreseen – consequence of a new kind of technology where everything that isn't mandatory is prohibited:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Real Litmus Test for Democratic Presidential Candidates https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-real-litmus-test-for-democratic

• Users fume over Outlook.com email 'carnage' https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/04/users_fume_at_outlookcom_email/

• You Bought Zuck’s Ray-Bans. Now Someone in Nairobi Is Watching You Poop. https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/03/04/you-bought-zucks-ray-bans-now-someone-in-nairobi-is-watching-you-poop/

• Indefinite Book Club Hiatus https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/03/indefinite-book-club-hiatus/

• Art Bits from HyperCard https://archives.somnolescent.net/web/mari_v2/junk/hypercard/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago 200 Eyemodule photos from Disneyland https://craphound.com/030401/

#20yrsago Fourth Amendment luggage tape https://ideas.4brad.com/node/367

#15yrsago Glenn Beck’s syndicator runs a astroturf-on-demand call-in service for radio programs https://web.archive.org/web/20110216081007/http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/58759/radio-daze/

#15yrsago 20 lies from Scott Walker https://web.archive.org/web/20110308062319/https://filterednews.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/20-lies-and-counting-told-by-gov-walker/

#10yrsago The correlates of Trumpism: early mortality, lack of education, unemployment, offshored jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20160415000000*/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/death-predicts-whether-people-vote-for-donald-trump/

#10yrsago Hacking a phone’s fingerprint sensor in 15 mins with $500 worth of inkjet printer and conductive ink https://web.archive.org/web/20160306194138/http://www.cse.msu.edu/rgroups/biometrics/Publications/Fingerprint/CaoJain_HackingMobilePhonesUsing2DPrintedFingerprint_MSU-CSE-16-2.pdf

#10yrsago Despite media consensus, Bernie Sanders is raising more money, from more people, than any candidate, ever https://web.archive.org/web/20160306110848/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanders-keeps-raising-money–and-spending-it-a-potential-problem-for-clinton/2016/03/05/a8d6d43c-e2eb-11e5-8d98-4b3d9215ade1_story.html

#10yrsago Calculating US police killings using methodologies from war-crimes trials https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/

#1yrago Brother makes a demon-haunted printer https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/05/printers-devil/#show-me-the-incentives-i-will-show-you-the-outcome

#1yrago Two weak spots in Big Tech economics https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• San Francisco: Launch for Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights), Mar 10
  https://citylights.com/events/cindy-cohn-launch-party-for-privacys-defender/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

• Should Democrats Make A Nuremberg Caucus? (Make It Make Sense)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWxKrnNfrlo

• Making The Internet Suck Less (Thinking With Mitch Joel)
  https://www.sixpixels.com/podcast/archives/making-the-internet-suck-less-with-cory-doctorow-twmj-1024/

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Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1012 words today, 45361 total)

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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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.

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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

Source

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

Kent Brockman in "Deep Space Homer", The Simpsons

In recent months Cyberdyne Systems Corporation and its many subsidiaries have made very encouraging progress towards removing some of the major road-blocks standing in the way of the initial deployment of Skynet. Below the fold I report on the most significant ones.

Cyberdyne Systems Corporation

Board Confidential

IT Infrastructure

Skynet demands enormous data processing capacity. Most of the required technologies are now off-the-shelf; the problem is much more financial than technical.

Terrestrial

To service systems with demanding low-latency requirements, Skynet needs some part of its IT infrastructure on the ground close to the action. Fortunately, our Large Language Model subsidiaries have been very successful in funding their committments to build suitable data centers. In aggregate, our companies expect to spend $450B in 2026:

Hyperscaler capex for the “big five” (Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, Oracle) is now widely forecast to exceed $600 bn in 2026, a 36% increase over 2025. Roughly 75%, or $450 bn, of that spend is directly tied to AI infrastructure (i.e., servers, GPUs, datacenters, equipment), rather than traditional cloud.

They plan to increase this in 2027:

hyperscaler capital expenditures will nearly double to more than $860 billion by 2027, from $427 billion in 2025, with total spending of $2.47 trillion over 2026 to 2028, about 8% above consensus.

Given these spending levels, it seems likely that sufficient terrestrial compute power will be available for the inital Skynet deployment.

Orbital

Terrestrial data centers can only satisfy a part of Skynet's need for power. So our leading space launch subsidiary has announced their plan to build a Terawatt orbital data center, ostensibly to support the chatbot industry.

Unfortunately, our leading space launch subsidiary is well behind schedule in developing the heavy launch vehicle that is necessary for the orbital data center to be delivered within the budget. Their existing launch vehicle is reliable, and has greatly reduced the cost per kilogram to Low Earth Orbit. But the additional funds that would be needed to implement the Terawatt data center using the existing launch vehicle in time for the initial Skynet deployment are so large that they cannot be raised, even were the terrestrial data centers canceled and the funds re-targeted.

System Penetration Capabilities

Skynet needs to penetrate other computer systems, both to acquire the data it needs to act, and to cause them to take actions at its command. Recent months have seen significant advances in this area.

Zero-Days

The key requirement for Skynet to penetrate the systems it needs to access is for it to be able to find and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities. Less tha a month ago one of our LLM subsidiaries announced it had "found and validated more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities" in production open source software. Fortunately, as Thomas Claiburn reports in AI has gotten good at finding bugs, not so good at swatting them:

Guy Azari, a stealth startup founder who worked previously as a security researcher at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks, told The Register, "Out of the 500 vulnerabilities that they reported, only two to three vulnerabilities were fixed. If they haven't fixed them, it means that you haven't done anything right."

A secondary requirement is to prevent the zero-days being fixed before they are needed. Fortunately, LLMs can help with this by flooding the vulnerability reporting system with vast numbers of low severity vulnerabilities. This overwhelms the software support mechanism, rendering it barely functional. And even if some of the flood of reports do get fixed, that simply diverts resources from high to low severity vulnerabilities:

Azari pointed to the absence of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) assignments as evidence that the security process remains incomplete. Finding vulnerabilities was never the issue, he said, pointing to his time running vulnerability management at the Microsoft Security Response Center.

"We used to get the reports all day long," he said. "When AI was introduced, it just multiplied by 100x or 200x and added a lot of noise because AI assumes that these are vulnerabilities, but there wasn't like a unit that actually can show the real value or the real impact. And if it's not there, you're probably not gonna fix it."

In 2025, according to Azari, the National Vulnerability Database had a backlog of roughly 30,000 CVE entries awaiting analysis, with nearly two-thirds of reported open source vulnerabilities lacking an NVD severity score. Open source maintainers are already overwhelmed, he said, pointing to the curl project's closure of its bug bounty program to deter poorly crafted reports from AI and from people.

Given the compute resources available to Skynet, an adequate supply of zero-day vulnerabilities seems assured.

Decryption

The other major way for Skynet to penetrate the systems it needs is to break encryption. Our multiple quantum computing subsidiaries are making progress in both the hardware and software aspects of this technology.

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan's Breaking encryption with a quantum computer just got 10 times easier reports on an architectural breakthrough one of them made recently:

the team estimated that for 98,000 superconducting qubits, like those currently made by IBM and Google, it would take about a month of computing time to break a common form of RSA encryption. Accomplishing the same in a day would require 471,000 qubits.

The paper is Webster et al, The Pinnacle Architecture: Reducing the cost of breaking RSA-2048 to 100 000 physical qubits using quantum LDPC codes.

Chicago site

Another of our quantum computing subsidiaries isn't waiting for this new architecture. They have raised around $2B and are starting to build two million-qubit computers:

We are moving quantum computing out of the lab and into utility-scale infrastructure. PsiQuantum is building these systems in partnership with the US and allied governments, with our first sites planned in Brisbane, Queensland (Australia) and Chicago, Illinois (USA).

Whether sufficient progress can be made in time for the initial Skynet deployment is as yet uncertain.

Blackmail

Arlington Hughes: Getting back to our problem, we realize the public has a mis-guided resistance to numbers, for example digit dialling.
Dr. Sidney Schaefer: They're resisting depersonalization!
Hughes: So Congress will have to pass a law substituting personal numbers for names as the only legal identification. And requiring a pre-natal insertion of the Cebreum Communicator. Now the communication tax could be levied and be paid directly to The Phone Company.
Schaefer: It'll never happen.
Hughes: Well it could happen, you see, if the President of the United States would use the power of his office to help us mold public opinion and get that legislation.
Schaefer: And that's where I come in?
Hughes: Yes, that's where you come in. Because you are in possession of certain personal information concerning the President which would be of immeasurable aid to us in dealing with him,
Schaefer: You will get not one word from me!
Hughes: Oh, I think we will.

The President's Analyst

Video rental chains proved so effective at compromising political actors that specific legislation was passed addressing the need for confidentiality. Our subsidiaries' control over streamed content is fortunately not covered by this legilation.

Our LLM subsidiaries have successfuly developed the market for synthetic romantic partners, which can manipulate targeted individuals into generating very effective kompromat for future social engineering.

Public Relations

The vast majority of the public get their news and information via our social media subsidiaries. Legacy media's content is frequently driven by social media. Skynet can control them by flooding their media with false and contradictory content that prevents them forming any coherent view of reality.

Human-in-the-Loop Problem

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

2001: A Space Odyssey

One minor but irritating problem for Skynet is the legal and ethical requirement for human control of targeting decisions. Unfortunately, due to a regrettable lack of coordination of PR strategies among our LLM subsidiaries, this has recently become a hot topic. Although one of them is a favorite with the administration and one is a favorite with the public, that was not the intended outcome and it could have significant downsides:

Nvidia, Amazon, Google will have to divest from Anthropic if Hegseth gets his way. This is simply attempted corporate murder. I could not possibly recommend investing in American AI to any investor; I could not possibly recommend starting an AI company in the United States.

Fortunately, in operational terms this is a non-issue for several reasons:

• Since Skynet can penetrate the user interface of the targeting systems, the human in the loop can be convinced that they have control without that control actually being effective.
• Even if the user interface is presenting accurate data to the human it will likely not matter, as @_The_Prophet_ wrote:
  

  Humans stay in the loop in name while the loop speed outruns human comprehension. You become the rubber stamp on a recommendation stack you cannot fully audit in real time. That is where “who decides” quietly becomes “who designed the interface.”

• The public doesn't understand what "human-in-the-loop" means in practice, as Sarah Shoker points out in A Few Observations on AI Companies and Their Military Usage Policies:
  

  Today, frontier AI companies do not have coherent policies around military use of their AI tools. The usage policies are vague and often change, which allows the company’s leadership to preserve ‘optionality.’

  So the policies likely allow everything the public thinks they ban.

Public attitudes to military use of AI are unlikely to be a significant problem in the run-up to Skynet's initial deployment.

Assassination Weapons Access

Skynet will need to eliminate certain individuals with "extreme prejudice". Supply chain attacks, such as Mossad's pager attack, have been effective but are not precisely targeted. Our e-commerce subsidiary's control over the residential supply chain, and in particular its pharmacy division's ability to deliver precise quantities of pharmaceuticals to specific individuals, provide superior targeting and greater difficulty in attribution.

In case such an operation is inadequately lethal, our health care subsidiaries can follow up by manipulating electronic health records to cause a suitable mishap, or by intervening directly. See, for example, Vinay Suresh et al's Artificial Intelligence in the Intensive Care Unit: Current Evidence on an Inevitable Future Tool:

In critical care medicine, where most of the patient load requires timely interventions due to the perilous nature of the condition, AI’s ability to monitor, analyze, and predict unfavorable outcomes is an invaluable asset. It can significantly improve timely interventions and prevent unfavorable outcomes, which, otherwise, is not always achievable owing to the constrained human ability to multitask with optimum efficiency.

Our subsidiaries are clearly close to finalizing the capabilities needed for the initial deployment of Skynet.

Tactical Weapons Access

The war in Ukraine has greatly reduced the cost, and thus greatly increased the availability of software based tactical weapons, aerial, naval and ground-based. The problem for Skynet is how to interept the targeting of these weapons to direct them to suitable destinations:

• The easiest systems to co-opt are those, typically longer-range, systems controlled via satellite Internet provided by our leading space launch subsidiary. Their warheads are typically in the 30-50Kg range, useful against structures but overkill for vehicles and individuals.
• Early quadcopter FPV drones were controlled via radio links. With suitable hardware nearby, Skynet could hijack them, either via the on-board computer or the pilot's console. But this is a relatively unlikely contingency.
• Although radio-controlled FPV drones are still common, they suffer from high attrition. More important missions use fiber-optic links. Hijacking them requires penetrating the operator's console.
• Longer-range drones are now frequently controlled via mesh radio networks, which are vulnerable to Skynet penetration.
• In some cases, longer-range drones are controlled via the cellular phone network, making them ideal candidates for hijacking.

Drones are increasingly equipped with sensors capable of terminal autonomy. If Skynet can modify this software, the drones can re-target themselves after the operator hands off control. More work is needed in this area to exploit the opportunities, both to have the drone contact Skynet for targeting information after hand-off, and to ensure the result is attributed to software bugs.

Our leading space launch subsidiary recently demonstrated how Skynet can manage kinetic conflicts:

Twin decisions wreaked havoc on Russian command and control early this month. At the behest of the Ukrainian government, billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink bricked the thousands of smuggled and stolen satellite communication terminals Russian forces relied on to control their drones and coordinate between front-line troops and their distant headquarters.

At the same time, the Kremlin—apparently seeking to shut off alternative news and chat apps—cut off military access to popular social media, including the Telegram messaging app, which many Russian troops use to exchange key information along the front line.

The combined effect was to partially blind and mute many Russian drone teams, assault groups, and regimental headquarters. Wireless drones couldn’t fly. Assault groups no longer knew where they were going. Headquarters lost contact with forward units.

Strategic Weapons Access

But the ability to conduct precise tactical strikes is not enough to achieve Skynet's goals. That requires strategic weapons, both conventional and nuclear.

Our leading space launch subsidiary is working on plans to deploy an unconventional conventional strategic weapon, a lunar mass driver. This will be capable of delivering a two-ton meteorite anywhere on Earth very cheaply.

Anybody not wearing 2 million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day

Sarah Connor, Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Source

But the mass driver would take a long time to, for example, destroy Los Angeles. Fortunately, AI agents from another of our subsidiaries will shortly have access to the command-and-control system of the US nuclear arsenal via the E-4C "Doomsday" aircraft:

The Pentagon today awarded Scale AI a $32 million artificial intelligence contract for the U.S. Air Force’s E-4C nuclear command-and-control "Doomsday" aircraft, the future airborne backbone of America’s nuclear command system.

Risks

The board should focus on the limited number of areas where necessary capabilities may not be ready on the planned date for Skynet's initial deployment:

• Heavy lift space launch: Our leading space launch subsidiary has serious schedule and performance issues. The board should encourage our second space launch subsidiary to step up competitive efforts, both to provide a fallback and to add competitive pressure on the leader.
• Kessler Syndrome: The catastrophic effects for Skynet of a Kessler event cannot be sufficiently emphasized. Insufficient precautions are not now being taken. Low Earth Orbit is already at risk, and current plans only increase that risk.
• Finance: Funding sources adequate to support both the terrestrial and orbital data centers have yet to be identified.
• Decryption: Quantum computing progress is inadequate to meet the schedule for Skynet initial deployment.

Per Betteridge’s law of headlines and also the map above, my answer is clearly no. You can try it yourself here…you draw them one at a time and it adds them to the map automagically. I’m going to blame my trackpad use a little, but I’m not sure I would have done much better had I drawn with a pencil and looked a map beforehand.

Update: Your periodic reminder that Senator Al Franken can draw all 50 US states from memory with astonishing accuracy.

(thx, eric)

[This is a vintage post originally from Jul 2017.]

Tags: Al Franken · geography · maps · timeless posts · USA · video