Today’s freaky LLM behavior:

We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a “student” model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a “teacher” model that prefers owls. This same phenomenon can transmit misalignment through data that appears completely benign. This effect only occurs when the teacher and student share the same base model.

Interesting security implications.

I am more convinced than ever that we need serious research into AI integrity if we are ever going to have trustworthy AI.

Yesterday the Pew Research Center released a report based on the internet browsing activity of 900 U.S. adults which found that Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who don’t encounter an AI summary. To be precise, only 1 percent of users who encountered an AI summary clicked the link to the page Google is summarizing. 

Essentially, the data shows that Google’s AI Overview feature introduced in 2023 replacing the “10 blue links” format that turned Google into the internet’s de facto traffic controller will end the flow of all that traffic almost completely and destroy the business of countless blogs and news sites in the process. Instead, Google will feed people into a faulty AI-powered alternative that is prone to errors it presents with so much confidence, we won’t even be able to tell that they are errors. 

Here’s what this looks like from the perspective of someone who makes a living finding, producing, and publishing what I hope is valuable information on the internet. On Monday I published a story about Spotify publishing AI-generated songs from dead artists without permission. I spent most of my day verifying that this was happening, finding examples, contacting Spotify and other companies responsible, and talking to the owner of a record label who was impacted by this. After the story was published, Spotify removed all the tracks I flagged and removed the user who was behind this malicious activity, which resulted in many more offending, AI-generated tracks falsely attributed to human artists being removed from Spotify and other streaming services. 

Many thousands of people think this information is interesting or useful, so they read the story, and then we hopefully convert their attention to money via ads, but primarily by convincing them to pay for a subscription. Cynically aiming only to get as much traffic as we can isn’t a viable business strategy because it compromises the very credibility and trustworthiness that we think convinces people to pay for a subscription, but what traffic we do get is valuable because every person who comes to our website gives us the opportunity to make our case. 

The Spotify story got decent traffic by our standards, and the number one traffic source for it so far has been Google, followed by Reddit, “direct” traffic (meaning people who come directly to our site), and Bluesky. It’s great that Google sent us a bunch of traffic for that, but we also know that it should have sent us a lot more, and that it did a disservice to its own users by not doing that. 

We know it should have sent us more traffic because of what when you search for “AI music spotify” on Google, the first thing I see is a Google Snippet summarizing my article. But that summary isn’t from nor does it link to 404 Media, it’s a summary of and a link to a blog on a website called dig.watch that reads like it was generated by ChatGPT. The blog doesn’t have a byline and reads like the endless stream of AI-generated summaries we saw when we created a fully automated AI aggregation site of 404 Media. Dig.watch itself links to another music blog, MusicTech, which is an aggregation of my story that links to it in the lede. 

When I use Google’s “AI mode,” Google provides a bullet-pointed summary of my story, but instead of linking to it, it links to three other sites that aggregated it: TechRadar, Mixmag, and RouteNote. 

Gaming search engine optimization in order to come up as the first result on Google regardless of merit has been a problem for as long as Google has been around. As the Pew research makes clear, AI Overview just ensures people will never click the link where the information they are looking for originates. 

We reserve the right to whine about Google rewarding aggregation of our stories instead of sending the traffic to us, but the problem here is not what is happening to 404 Media, which we’ve built with the explicit goal of not living or dying by the whims of any internet platform we can’t control. The problem is that this is happening to every website on the internet, and if the people who actually produce the information that people are looking for are not getting traffic they will no longer be able to produce that information. 

This ongoing “traffic apocalypse" has been the subject of many articles and opinion pieces saying that SEO strategies are dead because AI will take the ad dollar scraps media companies were fighting over. Tragically, what Google is doing to search is not only going to kill big media companies, but tons of small businesses as well.

Luckily for Google and the untold number of people who are being fed Snippets and AI summaries of our Spotify story, so far that information is at least correct. That is not guaranteed to be the case with other AI summaries. We love to mention that Google’s AI summaries told its users to eat glue whenever this subject comes up because it’s hilarious and perfectly encapsulates the problem, but it’s also an important example because it reveals an inherently faulty technology. More recently, AI Overview insisted that Dave Barry, a journalist who is very much alive, was dead. 

The glue situation was viral and embarrassing for Google but the company still dominates search and it’s very hard for people to meaningfully resist its dominance given our limited attention spans and the fact that it is the default search option in most cases. AI overviews are still a problem but it’s impossible to keep this story in the news forever. Eventually Google shoves it down users’ throats and there’s not much they can do about it.

Google AI summaries told users to eat glue because it was pulling on a Reddit post that was telling another user, jokingly, to put glue on their pizza so the cheese doesn’t slide off. Google’s AI didn’t understand the context and served that answer up deadpan. This mechanism doesn’t only result in other similar errors, but is also possibly vulnerable to abuse. 

In May, an artist named Eduardo Valdés-Hevia reached out to me when he discovered he accidentally fooled Google’s AI Overview to present a fictional theory he wrote for a creative project as if it was real. 

“I work mostly in horror, and my art often plays around with unreality and uses scientific and medical terms I make up to heighten the realism along with the photoshopped images,” Valdés-Hevia told me. “Which makes a lot of people briefly think what I talk about might be real, and will lead some of them to google my made-up terms to make sure.”

In early May, Valdés-Hevia posted a creepy image and short blurb about “The fringe Parasitic Encephalization Theory,” which “claims our nervous system is a parasite that took over the body of the earliest vertebrate ancestor. It captures 20% of the body's resources, while staying separate from the blood and being considered unique by the immune system.”

Someone who saw Valdés-Hevia post Googled “Parasitic Encephalization” and showed him that AI overview presented it as if it was a real thing. 

Valdés-Hevia then decided to check if he could Google AI Overview to similarly present other made-up concepts as if they were real, and found that it was easy and fast. For example, Valdés-Hevia said that only two hours after he and members of his Discord to start posting about “AI Engorgement,” a fake “phenomenon where an AI model absorbs too much misinformation in its training data,” for Google AI Overview to start presenting it uncritically. It still does so at the time of writing, months later. 

Other recent examples Valdés-Hevia flagged to me, like the fictional “Seraphim Shark” were at first presented as real by AI Overview, but has since been updated to say they are “likely” fictional. In some cases, Valdés-Hevia even managed to get AI Overview to conflate a real condition—Dracunculiasis, or guinea worm disease—with a fictional condition he invented, Dracunculus graviditatis, “a specialized parasite of the uterus.” Google 

Valdés-Hevia told me he wanted to “test out the limits and how exploitable Google search has become. It's also a natural extension of the message of my art, which is made to convince people briefly that my unreality is real as a vehicle for horror. Except in this case, I was trying to intentionally ‘trick’ the machine. And I thought it would be much, much harder than just some scattered social media posts and a couple hours.” 

“Let's say an antivaxx group organizes to spread some disinformation,” he said. “They just need to create a new term (let's say a disease name caused by vaccines) that doesn't have many hits on Google, coordinate to post about it in a few different places using scientific terms to make it feel real, and within a few hours, they could have Google itself laundering this misinformation into a ‘credible’ statement through their AI overview. Then, a good percentage of people looking for the term would come out thinking this is credible information. What you have is, in essence, a very grassroots and cheap approach to launder misinformation to the public.”

I wish I could say this is not a sustainable model for the internet, but honestly there’s no indication in Pew’s research that people understand how faulty the technology that powers Google’s AI Overview is, or how it is quietly devastating the entire human online information economy that they want and need, even if they don’t realize it.

The optimistic take is that Google Search, which has been the undisputed king of search for more than two decades, is now extremely vulnerable to disruption, as people in the tech world love to say. Predictably, most of that competition is now coming from other AI companies that thing they can build better products than AI overview and be the new, default, AI-powered search engine for the AI age. Alternatively, as people get tired of being fed AI-powered trash, perhaps there is room for a human-centered and human-powered search alternative, products that let people filter out AI results or doesn’t have an ads-based business model.

But It is also entirely possible and maybe predictable that we’ll continue to knowingly march towards an internet where drawing the line between what is and isn’t real is not profitable “at scale” and therefore not a consideration for most internet companies and users. Which doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential. It is very, very consequential, and we are already knee deep in those consequences.

Today's links

• Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes: And the grifters who love them.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Banana split history; Heinlein plots; Hacking a jeep
• 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.

Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes (permalink)

Ever notice how many right wing influencers are on the grift? Like Alex Jones – that guy is basically Gwyneth Paltrow for conservative bros, selling the same "wellness" crap to a male audience (and not for nothing, Paltrow's victims are reliable boosters for RFK Jr's MAHA movement):

https://theweek.com/speedreads/709232/how-goop-infowars-are-selling-exact-same-wellness-products

I think that ideologically, conservatism contains elements that groom its followers to get rooked by scammers like Paltrow and Jones. First, of course, is the hierarchical nature of conservatism. Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind seeks to find a common thread running through the many different strands of "conservative" thought. "Conservatives" include libertarians; monarchists; Christian Dominionists; white nationalists; Hindu nationalists; Zionist genocidiers; eugenicists; Men's Rights Activists; etc:

https://coreyrobin.com/books/the-reactionary-mind/

Robin says the thing that all these groups share is a belief that there is a natural hierarchy in the world, and that the world is best when the born leaders are on top, and that social movements that seek to elevate inferior people over their social betters commit civilizational suicide (think of the reflex to blame everything from tanker ships colliding with bridges to Boeing jets falling out of the sky on "DEI"). Different conservative factions disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

The belief that some people are simply better than others makes conservatives easy marks for arguments from authority (think of Trump's insistence that "I alone can fix America"). It also presents an irresistible temptation to the people at the top: if you know your followers believe you are better (smarter, more righteous) than they are, then you can be pretty sure that they'll buy the things you sell them, from a "prayer cloth" to "miracle water":

https://dustoffthebible.com/Blog-archive/2012/07/25/the-worst-tbn-product-scams-of-all-time/

The conservative's mantra is "incentives matter." When you're surrounded by marks, there's a hell of a temptation to rook 'em.

But this is just the background condition for conservative vulnerability to hucksters. A key aspect of conservative ideology is hyper-individualism, and the rejection of systemic explanations for one's problems:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/19/systemic/#criminality-pure-and-simple

Poverty, unwanted pregnancy, abusive workplace situations and worse can all be blamed on "bad choices" – not systemic factors. Likewise, the MAHA movement blames chronic illnesses and contagious diseases on personal failings, such as the failure to "eat clean" and exercise regularly. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, there's a short, greased slide from this belief to a eugenic, let 'er rip response to pandemics ("Why should I shut down my yoga studio just because you didn't take care of your immune system?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

People who are steeped in this belief are easy marks for supplements, fad diets and quack exercise gadgets like the Thighmaster and the Abflex, which promise to "spot reduce" fat (what better expression of the rejection of systemic explanations than the belief that you can reduce the fat in one part of your body?).

It's a double whammy. If you reject the very idea that problems are systemic, then you have no use for institutions, and institutions are the only effective response to systemic problems. That primes you to reject the unsatisfying answers of science ("If you don't want to get cancer, regulate corporations and cars that dump carcinogens into the environment") in favor of individual solutions, which are, inevitably, products that someone can sell you, from alkaline water to electrosmog-shielding hats.

Rejecting systemic explanations also primes you to believe in conspiracy theories. This is why antisemitism is called "the socialism of fools": rather than fighting against the system of primacy of extractive finance capital over the productive economy, you spend all your time locked in a one-sided battle with an imaginary cabal of evil Jewish bankers.

Conspiratorial beliefs make you especially vulnerable to a grifter's sales pitch that goes like this: "Of course they don't want you to drink raw milk, otherwise you'd be as powerful as they are." Variations on this theme include "buy the miracle anti-aging cure that only billionaires are privy to" and "buy a bump stock before the conspiracy to take away your right to self-defense makes them illegal."

And indeed, when you look into right-wing movements, you inevitably find someone on the grift, from Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson hawking ripoff "cash for gold" schemes (and ripoff "gold for cash" schemes); to Donald Trump with his fake watches, fake phones, and Made in China MAGA stuff:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/687574/trump-mobile-plan-bad-deal

This isn't new. The far right has always relied on the direct mail industry, which used the heavily federally subsidized US Post Office to send anti-government spending sales pitches to gullible, easily frightened people:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2n4w5r7

These direct mail houses primarily serve two types of customers: people hawking scams, and right wing fundraisers. The Venn diagram of these two groups is an almost perfect circle.

And of course, the entire multi-level marketing (MLM) industry is grounded in far-right movements and cults. The Heritage Foundation was founded with money from the DeVoses and van Andels, who made their riches off of Amway. MLMs are a conspiracy: virtually no one ever buys any MLM products, except for the "distributors" who are told they are entrepreneurs and are convinced that they are the only ones secretly making quota by buying up merch on their own credit cards and filling their garages and sewing-rooms with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

The guys at the top know this, which is why they alone among all product manufacturers report on their industry's "sales" by adding up how much merchandise their distributors have ordered, not how much of all that merch has been sold to people who actually use it. The secret fact that there is no market for MLM junk allows MLM bosses to victimize their marks for a second time. Each victim believes that they alone are failing to sell the MLM's crap, which means that they can be duped into paying for expensive, useless "courses" on how to be better at selling.

This one-two punch (rip someone off, then rip them off again) is a familiar pattern among con-artists. Every successful con ends with a "blow-off," that is supposed to leave the mark uncertain about whether they were really scammed (a three-card monte gang might use a fake cop who breaks up the game, who sends everyone running). Sometimes, con artists seek out the same mark after the fact and hit them again (sometimes through a confederate). After all, a mark who falls for a scam has already demonstrated that they are the type of mark that falls for scams.

Digital con artists do this, too: you've probably gotten an email from a scammer pretending to be a cop of some kind, claiming that they are investigating a scammer gang. These people indiscriminately spam the internet with these "I can help you recover your money/jail your victimizer" messages as a way of attracting people who have already been scammed and thus demonstrated their vulnerability to scammers like them.

This is another place where direct mail, MLM and conservative con artists overlap. Right-wing scammers sell each other mailing lists of frightened, easily victimized people who can be pitched with gold bars, supplements, and fundraisers to help imaginary Christians being targeted for extermination in Africa. MLMs pitch themselves to MLM victims: "Did you get scammed by Amway? Come sell Nu-Skin, we're the Amway that's not a scam!"

These scammers know their audience and they have an unerring instict for an opportunity to fleece them again. Take the Dorrs, a multigenerational clan of far-right grifters who've been rooking easily frightened conservatives since the Goldwater campaign. The Dorrs run a bunch of "charities" whose IRS filings reveal that they are pocketing 90%+ of the money they raise. Five years ago, the Dorrs hit on a great scam: fundraising for anti-mask-mandate and "re-open" anti-lockdown groups (and keeping the money):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/20/no-mask-no-service/#dorr-brothers

They were succeeded by waves of covid grifters, like the con artists peddling ivermectin and chloriquine. Incentives matter.

At the time, I called the Dorrs the Flu Klux Klan, but what I didn't know then was that the Klan is also a MLM scam.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/hatred_and_profits_under_the_hood_of_the_ku_klux_klan.pdf

The Klan's second incarnation, in the 1920s, was designed the Southern Publicity Association, a PR firm that had sold both the Salvation Army and Prohibition. They conceived of an MLM-like structure that was wildly successful: Klansmen who brought in new members got to keep $4 of their $10 membership fee (more than $50 in today's money); the remaining funds were shared between top Klan boss William Simmons and various regional bosses, who served as uplines to the recruiters.

Over time, this system developed into a true pyramid scheme, with a bewildering series of tiers: Kleagles, King Kleagles and Imperial Kleagles, as well as Great Goblins, Grand Dragons, and Imperial Wizards, each of whom got a piece of the action from their complex downlines. Klansmen didn't just pay the membership fee, either: they had to buy robes, life-insurance, special Bibles, helmets, candles, swords, and even special robe dry-cleaning services (they also paid annual membership dues). All of this money filtered up through the pyramid's levels, a vast sum of money funneled from frightened, angry working class rubes to the grifters who made millions off of them.

Many people have observed that one of the reasons conservatives govern so badly is that they campaign on the idea that "governments are wasteful and inefficient," which means that if they run the government in a wasteful and inefficient fashion, they only prove their point. In the same fashion: right-wing grifters who pitch you on the idea an evil cabal has rigged the game, and then take your money and rip you off, are demonstrating the correctness of their pitch.

For grifters who prey on angry, bitter rubes, stealing from the rubes only makes them angrier and more bitter – and thus easier to fleece. That's why the postmortems on the right's greatest everyday heroes turn out to be a litany of instances in which they were scammed. That's the story of Ashli Babbitt, the January 6 insurrectionist who was killed while trying to penetrate the Speaker's lobby:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-do-to-reset

Babbitt was first rooked by an Army recruiter, who got her sent to Iraq – a war cooked up by right-wing scammers – eight times. After her deployments, she tried to run a small pool supply company, which was driven out of business by a monopoly called Pool Supply, which routinely breaks the law to drive competitors out of business, bragging about its lawbreaking even after getting fined by the FTC:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/b2icontent.irpass.cc/603/181440.pdf

Then Babbitt went to a loan shark, a "merchant cash advance" company called EBF Partners, who bailed her out with a loan at 169%, but didn't call it a loan, in order to avoid lending regulations, which is why she wasn't able to sue them when they drove her to default:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/story/2021-01-07/san-diego-woman-killed-in-capitol-siege-was-iraq-war-veteran

That's when she ended up in Qanon, a cult full of easy marks getting suckered for everything they had, who are told that their problems are the result of evil individuals, not a rigged system. Then, she got shot dead while trying to overthrow the US government.

Babbitt was a serial victim of con artists. These are exactly the kind of ripoff creeps that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the FTC and the DOJ spent the Biden years fighting with a vigor not seen in generations. Trump has shut them all down and wiped out nearly all of their good work, including the most basic, common-sense shit imaginable, like bans on junk fees, and the "click to cancel" rule (which says that services need to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for it):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

In the 2016 presidential debates, Hillary Clinton accused Trump of cheating in his business dealings. Trump didn't deny it. He replied, "That makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Trump was elected by the people who rip off the frightened and angry: cryptocurrency hustlers ("the dollar is gonna collapse!"), sports gambling moguls, and anti-DEI peddlers ("lesser people have been elevated to power by social justice warriors and they'll kill us all"). No wonder he's shut down every agency and rule aimed at preventing ripoff artists from preying on everyday Americans:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-incredible

It's a movement powered and funded by scammers who've discovered the ultimate can't-lose proposition: perfect a pitch that preys on the angry and scared; rip them off (making them more angry and scared); and repeat.

I've lost a dear friend to MAGA. When I reflect on her life, I see the same pattern. Both she and her mother were abused by her mother's boyfriends when she was growing up. She married a terrible guy who cheated on her, who then used threats to take away her kids to keep her from demanding child support or half the house. She was pressured into an affair with her married boss, who then fired her.

Today, she believes in conspiracies, and disbelieves in medicine. She supports Trump, concentration camps and immigration crackdowns (despite being the child of a refugee and a former undocumented immigrant).

This person is deeply unhappy, and faces severe financial strain with no end in sight. What's more, the things she supports – not getting vaccinated, voting for Trump, terrorizing migrants – will not solve any of her problems. Supporting these things can only make things worse, which will make her more frightened, more angry, and more precarious, and thus an easier mark for the next right-wing grifter.

Trump is the head of a cult that has figured out how to turn fear, precarity and pain into the top of a sales funnel that destroys anyone who gets caught in it.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Will The Truman Brewery Become Homes Or Offices? https://spitalfieldslife.com/2025/07/22/will-the-truman-brewery-become-homes-or-offices/

• A Startup is Selling Data Hacked from Peoples’ Computers to Debt Collectors https://www.404media.co/a-startup-is-selling-data-hacked-from-peoples-computers-to-debt-collectors/

• The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

• Ryanair mulls bigger bonus for spotting oversized bags https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c75rp3w77kpo

• Pre-Ordering Books Makes You More of a Citizen of Literature https://buttondown.com/charliejane/archive/pre-ordering-books-makes-you-more-of-a-citizen-of/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago History of the ingredients in a banana split https://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0405/p18s02-hfks.html

#15yrsago Similarities between gold farming networks and drug dealing networks https://web.archive.org/web/20100722104318/http://www.aurumahmad.com/vwe/gold-farming/

#15yrsago Where the global rifts are in the secret copyright treaty https://web.archive.org/web/20100724061132/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5222/125/

#15yrsago How Heinlein plotted https://memex.craphound.com/2010/07/21/how-heinlein-plotted/

#10yrsago Paul Erdős’s FBI file https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jul/21/nothing-indicate-nothing-indicate-subject-had-any-/

#10yrsago Hackers can pwn a Jeep Cherokee from the brakes and steering to the AC and radio https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/

#5yrsago Trump's spent a billion on re-election https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#moneyball

#5yrsago As We May Think https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#story-not-article

#5yrsago Luxury homes to be washed away https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#schadenflooding

#5yrsago The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#tomine

#5yrsago Christopher Brown's Failed State https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#failed-state

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

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

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

• ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io

• Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409

• If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "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)

• 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/

• 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, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Matt Stoller (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/).

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1011 words yesterday, 7152 words total).

• 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:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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

Hello again from humid Brooklyn, the hot new sub-tropical destination.

I’ve been a little too busy wrapping a few cool things (content strategy for the redesign of stanford.edu with Big Medium, product strategy and design and management for the launch of the American Yoga Council, product R&D for the innovation team at Link Logistics, the syllabus for a UX Essentials class in SVA’s Products of Design MFA).

But I made it out to a great event last week, the first salon at Collaborative Fund + Fictive Kin’s AI Residency (AIR) program, and wanted to share some highlights.

AIR program director (ex-Figma/HAWRAF) hosted Poetry Camera co-founder carolyn zhang (who was my very first podcast interviewee here), Gin Lane/Pattern founder Emmett Shine, and former Nike/SSENSE design director Eric Hu. They talked about how they use AI in their creative work and how we all might use AI without losing our humanity.

I listened with an ear to shaping my upcoming UX Essentials class: how product design practices are changing, how to practice and teach them. My thoughts on that track follow each list.

My favorite highlights from the AIR salon:

Kelin Carolyn Zhang

Former designer at Ueno and Twitter; current co-founder of Poetry Camera

1. AI is the new plastic

2. Products with Disney-level magic are now possible

3. Enable pro-social behavior, not anti-social

4. Walking, talking, thinking, and new inputs are still better for brainstorming (GenAI only creates averages, not outliers)

5. Students have no frame of reference for difficulty or process; let them teach you new ideas

Which made me think: Look at Disney magic examples and pick your favorites to recreate with AI. Look for the patterns, the reusable Lego blocks. Learn/practice/teach a classic thinking process, with optional AI assistants at each step (remembering Brooks’ Law: more assistance may actually worsen outputs). Double down on ethical critiques, slowing down to make time to think about the second order effects. Leave space in any plan to FAFO.

Emmett Shine

Founder of Gin Lane and Patterns; current designer and entrepreneur at Little Plains

1. AI is a blank canvas right now, which intimidates most people

2. AI and creative direction are the same: you have no technical skills, you just give good prompts

3. Find as many excuses to test as possible: mood boards, text content, vibe prototypes, 3D renders, photo direction

4. Meet the standards where they are; the state of the art now is getting hi-fi feedback faster and cheaper

5. The work is to build your own unique world — tap into that crazy and then test the crazy

Which made me think: Learn and teach through testing over theory. Vocabulary is the asset to build. Discernment is the end goal, but craft is still how we get there. Instant production removes the training ground for creative careers; to preserve the talent pipeline we have to keep investing in junior designers. Help them define their own vocabulary, principles, and processes through increased exploration and iteration.

Eric Hu

Former design director at Nike and SSENSE; current creative director at large

1. Skepticism is natural for anyone with something to lose

2. Switch answer mode (playing defense) into question mode (curiosity)

3. Everything’s going to feel like a video game: logos will just become symbols, typography becomes language, it all just becomes expression

4. When creative results are instant, we’ll need a gym for the mind

5. Taste is your negative space for desire — saying NO is increasingly important

Which made me think: When do I think I have answers, when I actually need questions? Vernacular design and subcultural references are often more valid or impactful than traditional design forms. Education is the gym for the mind: from classical liberal arts to modern systems thinking. Work out a clear thought process. AI can be an alternate tool at each step (and we still need 10,000 steps a day). Strengthen the skills of editing, rejecting, rethinking.

All three emphasized: don’t lose your humanity, have a code of conduct, know your non-negotiables. We can’t just be creators, we’re governors and leaders in this new world too.

Have any thoughts about any of this? Would love to hear them!

Elon Musk is probably chuckling as Trump flails; today’s firestorm around the Epstein documents arguably started when he tweeted that Trump was in the files. Which has led to some significant changes in the Trump/media/politics/deep-state landscape that it’s important to review. They include questions about the future of Trump, his cult followers, a possible power struggle between Trump and Murdoch, and JD Vance’s Presidential ambitions. 

To begin: if you want everything around the Epstein furor to make sense, all you have to understand is that Donald Trump has been leading a cult.

Like Jim Jones did. Like Charles Manson did. Like Rajneesh did here in Oregon. Unlike Manson, but more like Rajneesh and Jim Jones, however, Trump’s cult is fairly large and preexisted his appearance on the scene. And that’s part of his problem. 

It’s large enough to have in it three kinds of people.

The three types of Trump Cult members

The first kind of person is the “true believer.” They make up most of the Trump cult members, what we call MAGA. They’re usually pretty much willing to overlook anything Dear Leader does, much like the devoted followers of Rajaneesh and Jim Jones. 

And then there are the “facilitators.” These are cynical people who don’t believe the cult leader’s BS, but go along with it — and even promote it — because it works to their benefit. They are typically parasitic. They usually make their money from the members of the cult, or get power from them (votes in this case), and often use their position in the cult to gain other benefits like sexual favors or fame.

In this case the facilitators are the Republican politicians who are begging money from their followers and voters, and then vote to screw those followers on behalf of the cult leader — Trump — and his billionaire friends. The morbidly rich keep the cult facilitators in line by funding their elections and, in the case of Republican Supreme Court justices, their lavish lifestyles.

When you understand that it’s a cult and that some of the people who seem high-up in it are true believers and not facilitators, suddenly Marjorie Taylor Greene’s behavior makes sense when she seems to attack Trump: she’s a true believer. She’s completely bought into the conspiracy nuttery that brought him to office twice.

You also begin to understand why Chuck Grassley ran that Senate judiciary committee the way he did to push through Emil Bove over the objections of the Democrats and literally hundreds of former lawyers, judges, and Department of Justice officials: Grassley is a cynical facilitator.

And you understand why the Republican Congressman from Kentucky, Thomas Massey, has joined with Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna to demand release of the Epstein documents and essentially turned on Trump. 

Massey represents the third kind of person in a cult, who only shows up typically toward the early stages of the collapse of the cult, and then presents a real danger to the cult leader.

This third category are “the true believers who have suddenly seen a crack in reality,” the false reality that the cult leader has created around them. You could call them “former true believers.” Once they saw the light through that crack — saw the real world — they realized that they were being lied to. 

When a cult is on the verge of collapse, these kinds of people become more and more numerous as more and more people begin to wake up from the cult leader’s trance.

At that point, they turn on the cult leader the way a spurned lover turns on the previous object of their affection. They become angry and vengeful. They demand answers. They want to know how they got sucked in and why: “Who did this to me? And to whose benefit?”

This is how Donald Trump’s world is disintegrating right now, and the danger is that, like Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and Rajaneesh, he may destroy a lot of lives when he goes down. 

He may not kill them like Jim Jones did — although he already arguably killed a half-million of his cult followers with the malicious, incompetent way he handled Covid — but he will destroy many of the people and institutions around him. This is what narcissists do when they begin to psychologically collapse.

The threat of narcissistic collapse

As I noted two weeks ago, my late friend Armin Lehmann was there when he gave Hitler the information that the war was lost. He stood outside Hitler’s door when he shot himself. He wrote a book about it, and told me that Hitler wanted Germany destroyed by the Allies because the German people, he believed, had “let him down.”

This is “narcissistic collapse,” which I’ve written about several times over the past dozen or so years. Donald Trump is almost certainly going to hit this state of mind (he’s already close), and many of his “true believer” followers are in the midst of their own personal narcissistic collapses right now.

And that is what makes this a very dangerous moment for America.

Suing Rupert Murdoch, for example, was an extraordinarily reckless and dangerous thing for Trump to do. Newscorp isn’t going to roll over and pay Trump a bribe, in all probability, because he needs them more than they need him. 

Murdoch, after all, is the guy who created the cult that Trump has come to dominate: they’re called “Fox News viewers.” He created it long before Donald Trump came along: he and Roger Ailes simply let Donald Trump into it back in 2015 because he was good for ratings and thus increased profits.

So, once Murdoch decided that Donald Trump could benefit his cult and make money for his television network (and even lower his taxes), he let Donald believe that he was the leader of the cult. And for many people in that Fox “News” Viewer cult, Trump actually did become the leader.

But the real guy who controls the cult is Rupert Murdoch. It’s not Donald Trump. Trump is just today’s figurehead. Sort of like with the Catholic Church, Trump is the pope right now. But when the pope goes, he gets replaced.

The institution lives on, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the Murdoch family is not going to let the cult that they’ve built with Fox “News,” the cult that has made them billions of dollars and given them the power to influence governments on three continents, dissolve. 

They’ll jettison Donald Trump long before they’ll let go of that kind of power.

The Murdoch through-thread

The way Rupert Murdoch’s father Sir Keith Murdoch first created this cult back in the 1940s was by feeding the readers of his newspapers in Australia a steady diet of racist outrage, fear, and anger. As historian John C. McManus writes in his definitive book Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943:

“As American soldiers began arriving in numbers during the early months of 1942, they were greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by the Australians, many of whom couldn’t hide their immense relief at the soothing presence of the GIs. … Appreciative crowds gathered at piers and station platforms to greet incoming ships and troop trains. Waving and cheering, they studied the newcomers with great curiosity.”

But Sir Keith Murdoch thought he could make a pile of money by turning Australians against Americans. Inflaming nationalist and xenophobic sentiments would sell papers, goose advertising, and make him rich.

Thus, as McManus documents:

“A chain of newspapers owned by Sir Keith Murdoch, father of latter-year media magnate Rupert Murdoch, earned a reputation among the yanks as relentlessly anti-American. Truth, a particularly brassy Melbourne tabloid, often published lurid tales of GI rapes of innocent Australian girls and seduction of married women.

“On occasion, Australian soldiers vented their frustration over such tales with violence. Small groups of Diggers roamed around some of the cities, beating up any American soldiers whom they saw dating local girls. … An American soldier was even shot and killed one morning as he emerged from the house of a married woman.”

Eventually, the hate against Americans that Murdoch had stirred up blossomed into full-fledged riots in multiple Australian cities, creating a real problem for the war effort but boosting Murdoch’s newspaper sales (and, presumably, profits) into the stratosphere as his papers developed their own cult following in Oz.

Keith then passed the cult and the media outlets that had created it along to Rupert, who then took his brand of cult-forming “journalism” (Fox called it “entertainment” when they were sued by Dominion Voting Systems) to England and then, ironically, to America.

The unreal reality inside a cult

By definition, people who live in a cult live in an unreality. A fictitious world. That’s the key to how the cult and its leaders control them: they convince the cult members that they’re the only ones who truly understand how the world works, that they have “secret knowledge,” and that everyone outside the cult is either blind, evil, or both. 

This creates an us-versus-them narrative so powerful it replaces facts, isolates them from reality, and makes loyalty to the cult and its perceived leader more important than truth itself.

People who watch Fox “News,” for example, believe that what they hear on NPR is “liberal propaganda,” which is why they support defunding public broadcasting. What they actually hear on public broadcasting, however, is just the news. It reflects reality. Actual reality. But they think it’s liberal propaganda because their cult told them so. 

In much the same way Jim Jones’ followers and Charles Manson’s followers didn’t listen to their friends when they tried to share reality with them or point out how they had been indoctrinated, brainwashed, and lied to, the people in the Fox “News” cult don’t want to listen to reality. They want the comfortable lies and the excuses for hate and outrage that they have wrapped themselves in for years.

Murdoch now has to make a tough decision. He’s already gotten most of what he needed from Trump — a massive tax break for himself and his family, and deregulation of the broadcast and internet space — so he only needs Trump now because Donald makes for good television.

But “good television” can work two ways for a public official, for or against them. If Trump has sufficiently pissed off Murdoch, or he thinks that Trump’s beginning to harm the GOP and thus the cult that the Murdoch family and their well-paid talent largely control, he could give Trump the old heave-ho. 

So if Trump gets thrown out of the Fox “News” Viewer cult — essentially gets fired as the cult leader — the cult will continue. It would simply lose a very small percentage of its hard-core true believers who’d completely surrendered their personalities to Trump, and even those folks are probably retrievable.

Who’s the next cult figurehead?

The problem for Murdoch and other facilitators of the Fox “News” Viewer cult that Trump now leads is who will fill the vacuum that’ll be created when Trump is gone, whether it’s from natural causes or an impeachment or 25th Amendment action that Murdoch and Fox could provoke. Who will continue to defend the interests of the morbidly rich and the monopolistic parts of corporate America and become the next leader of the GOP? 

JD Vance is unlikely to be able to fill Trump’s shoes, which has to be giving Murdoch heartburn. Vance has virtually no hold at all on the Fox “News” Viewer cult that Trump today dominates.

He is not beloved by the cult; if anything they think of him as weak and effeminate. He uses eyeliner. He married a brown-skinned woman and has brown-skin children. His wife refuses to adopt Christianity. 

“He must be weak,” is the consensus across much of the white racist base that constitutes the MAGA-sphere. 

Nonetheless, Vance himself apparently thinks he can take over for Donald. He’s deluding himself, of course, but he appears to believe it. Just look at how he just publicly demanded that Donald Trump’s “artwork” be released by the Wall Street Journal or the FBI.

He knows a release of more damaging evidence of Trump’s long-term relationship with Epstein — and thus, in the minds of the cult followers, participation in the deep state conspiracy that exploits children while it runs the world — could inflict incredible damage on Trump, and even make Vance president.

What man who believes destiny and God want him to become president wouldn’t jump at something like that? Remember, JD Vance said the following about Donald Trump:

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon… or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

“[Trump is] a disaster and a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.”

“Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man.”

Vance understood the cult even before he cynically pretended he was part of it when he saw Trump was prevailing: like most other Republican politicians and the billionaires who fund them, he’s an exploiter, a cult “facilitator.”

It’s extremely unlikely, however, that he’ll ever become the leader of the Fox Viewer cult; it’s unlikely, in fact, that the subset of the Fox cult that has formed around Trump will survive as Trump followers.

As John Hobbes famously said, “Men heap together the mistakes of their lives and create a monster they call destiny.” With the Epstein revelations turning into a torrent, that’s now the story of Donald John Trump. 

When Trump is gone — and that day will eventually come — his corner of the Fox “News” Viewer cult will most likely shatter back into dozens of smaller organizations, many of which will simply be returning to their roots: Proud Boys, Three Percenters, anti-abortion freaks, rightwing preachers hustling their congregations, etc. 

After all, as Maureen Dowd points out, Trump has now become the deep state he once decried. He’s creating the very “FEMA Camps” that had Republicans and Fox “News” Viewer cult members hysterical when Obama was president. 

He’s developing a masked, anonymous, unaccountable nationwide secret police force and is compiling massive amounts of intelligence on everyday Americans. Between his spy agencies and data brokers, he has access to anybody’s social media posts, emails, and medical and travel records. He’s given ICE full and unfettered access to everybody’s Medicaid and other government records. 

If rightwingers keep protesting him or demanding more information about Jeffrey Epstein, they will be next in his crosshairs and that could begin the final stage of his participation in the Fox “News” Viewer cult. He’s already called them stupid, hysterical, and told them they’re dupes for the Democrats, claiming he no longer wants their support. 

Thus, we stand very close to what may be a true crossroads moment for America.

The crossroads we face

If Trump survives this politically, he’ll most likely begin a serious crackdown modeled after the June, 1934 Night of the Long Knives (albeit probably less bloody), purging his opposition within his own ranks much like Putin did a decade ago in Russia and Orbán is doing now in Hungary. It’ll further damage American democracy and make it much harder for us to recover our previous New Deal and Great Society political and economic systems. 

On the other hand, if Trump goes down in flames and Vance, Johnson, Cruz, or somebody equally weak tries to step in and take over the cult, it could spell doom for the GOP for a generation. 

So get out the popcorn, but maybe you should also have something a little more defensive than that. Get ready. It’s gonna be a rough ride, but in all probability we’ll make it through without the kind of damage that Germany or the people at Jonestown suffered.

Wish us all luck. We need it — and citizen activism — now more than ever before.

--30--

The National Institutes of Health claims it’s being strained by an onslaught of AI-generated research applications and is capping the number of proposals researchers can submit in a year.

In a new policy announcement on July 17, titled “Supporting Fairness and Originality in NIH Research Applications,” the NIH wrote that it has recently “observed instances of Principal Investigators submitting large numbers of applications, some of which may have been generated with AI tools,” and that this influx of submissions “may unfairly strain NIH’s application review process.” 

“The percentage of applications from Principal Investigators submitting an average of more than six applications per year is relatively low; however, there is evidence that the use of AI tools has enabled Principal Investigators to submit more than 40 distinct applications in a single application submission round,” the NIH policy announcement says. “NIH will not consider applications that are either substantially developed by AI, or contain sections substantially developed by AI, to be original ideas of applicants. If the detection of AI is identified post award, NIH may refer the matter to the Office of Research Integrity to determine whether there is research misconduct while simultaneously taking enforcement actions including but not limited to disallowing costs, withholding future awards, wholly or in part suspending the grant, and possible termination.” 

Starting on September 25, NIH will only accept six “new, renewal, resubmission, or revision applications” from individual principal investigators or program directors in a calendar year. 

Earlier this year, 404 Media investigated AI used in published scientific papers by searching for the phrase “as of my last knowledge update” on Google Scholar, and found more than 100 results—indicating that at least some of the papers relied on ChatGPT, which updates its knowledge base periodically. And in February, a journal published a paper with several clearly AI-generated images, including one of a rat with a giant penis. In 2023, Nature reported that academic journals retracted 10,000 "sham papers," and the Wiley-owned Hindawi journals retracted over 8,000 fraudulent paper-mill articles. Wiley discontinued the 19 journals overseen by Hindawi. AI-generated submissions affect non-research publications, too: The science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld stopped accepting new submissions in 2023 because editors were overwhelmed by AI-generated stories.

According to an analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, from February 28 to April 8, the Trump administration terminated $1.81 billion in NIH grants, in subjects including aging, cancer, child health, diabetes, mental health and neurological disorders, NBC reported.

Just before the submission limit announcement, on July 14, Nature reported that the NIH would “soon disinvite dozens of scientists who were about to take positions on advisory councils that make final decisions on grant applications for the agency,” and that staff members “have been instructed to nominate replacements who are aligned with the priorities of the administration of US President Donald Trump—and have been warned that political appointees might still override their suggestions and hand-pick alternative reviewers.” 

The NIH Office of Science Policy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.