ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work. 

Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can't trust anything in the paper.”

Examples of incontrovertible evidence, he wrote, include “hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM (‘here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?’; ‘the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments’.”

“The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue,” Dietterich wrote. 

Dietterich told me in an email on Friday morning that this is a one-strike rule—meaning authors caught just once including AI slop in submissions will be banned—but that decisions will be open to appeal. “I want to emphasize that we only apply this to cases of incontrovertible evidence,” he said. “I should also add that our internal process requires first a moderator to document the problem and then for the Section Chair to confirm before imposing the penalty.”

In November 2025, arXiv announced it would no longer accept computer science review articles and position papers because it was being “flooded” with AI slop. “Generative AI/large language models have added to this flood by making papers—especially papers not introducing new research results—fast and easy to write. While categories across arXiv have all seen a major increase in submissions, it’s particularly pronounced in arXiv’s CS category,” arXiv wrote in a press release about the change at the time. 

And in January, it announced first-time submitters would need an endorsement from an established author due to a rise in fraudulent submissions. 

AI-generated, fabricated citations are a huge problem in research. A recent study by Columbia University researchers examined 2.5 million biomedical papers across three years, and found that one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 contained fabricated references; In 2023, it was one in 2,828, and in 2025, one in 458. AI-generated citations and papers are already straining the peer-review process, and more and more papers are making it through the pipeline with those meta-comments and hallucinated data intact. 

ArXiv is managed by Cornell Tech, but this July, it will become an independent nonprofit corporation. Greg Morrisett, dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech, told Science.org that this change will help arXiv raise more money from a wider range of donors, which Morrisett said is needed to deal with the emergence of “AI slop.”

The fossil fuel industry is aligning itself with fascist forces to remain profitable. To survive, it is prepared to take the whole planet, as well as liberal democracy, down with it.

By Cynthia Kaufman
Common Dreams
Apr 29, 2026

The fossil fuel industry is the most powerful and destructive industry in the history of the world. Right now the fate of our planet hangs on our ability to defeat the political power of that industry. It is ready to do anything, including making alliances with pro-fascist forces to maintain its ability to make profits. Understanding the insidious ways it has worked to undermine democracy will be helpful for protecting democracy and challenging the destructive actions of this industry.

Capitalism is the practice of putting profits at the center of how decisions are made about how to produce and distribute resources. Those with capital are able to shift social institutions to enable them to gain even more capital. Entities, such as corporations, come to be self-perpetuating agents whose only goal is profit making.

Capitalism existed long before fossil fuels. But for over a century, fossil fuels, and fossil fuel-based corporations, have been at the heart of capitalism. Fossil fuels have made energy plentiful, which has led to the development of forms of industry and approaches to agriculture that use a lot of it. As we are seeing with the war on Iran, fossil fuels have become the life blood that keeps the global capitalist economy running. Fossil fuel-centered corporations are some of the most powerful entities in the world.

Over time, and in many places, capitalism extracts profits, exploits labor, and despoils nature with very little force. It becomes a matter of course how the systems function. But the original forms of accumulation that allowed some companies to be enormously powerful, and to shape the regulatory world in which they operated, came from brutal expropriation. Capitalism began with slavery and colonialism and a willingness to do anything to make profits.

As the fossil fuel industry increasingly resorts to attacks on democracy to maintain its ability to profit, an important part of protecting democracy is exposing one of the biggest and most determined players behind the current attacks.

The fossil fuel industry has, from its beginning, supported violent overthrows and encouraged states to install authoritarian governments to ensure its ability to engage in extraction. Many of the places where fossil fuels are extracted have been controlled politically by brutal forces kept in power by so-called liberal democratic forces. We see this story in Mexico in 1911, in Iran in 1954, in Shell Oil’s despoliation of Ogoniland in Nigeria in the 1980s.

Outside of those extraction zones, for many years, and in many places, the fossil fuel industry was compatible with liberal democracy. The US was able to have a liberal democratic government, and most countries in the world could as well, as long as those governments supported political and economic practices that allowed for the profitability of powerful industries. The markets constructed to facilitate capitalist processes can generally function fine in collaboration with governments that allow for high standards of living, social safety nets, and civil liberties, as long as those governments have kept processes in place that allow for the extraction of profits. As soon as any government gets in the way of that ability, the so-called liberal democratic order that dominates the global economic system has been prepared to overthrow those governments to put new ones in place that are willing to act in its interests.

Retired General Wesley Clark has argued that US foreign policy has focused on keeping regimes in power that would support the continued use of the dollar as the currency used for trading oil—the petrodollar. By ensuring that regimes are in power that support the continued use of the petrodollar, the US is able to ensure that it has some control over the continued flow of the lifeblood of the global economic system.

Capitalism is compatible with democracy as long as that form of democracy allows the economic world to be dominated and controlled by markets, which are constructed in ways that make them immune from accountability. The fossil fuel industry has functioned in alliance with a nominally democratic US, as long as the US government has also engaged in military action when it was needed to keep the oil, and profits, flowing. It is new that the fossil fuel industry has been aligned with fascism in the US and other Western countries.

Fascism is a particular form of authoritarianism that grows when a capitalist elite worries that its power is going to be threatened by democratic forces. An authoritarian government is one that tries to control all aspects of society and close down dissent. It holds power closely in a small group and is not accountable to its people. Fascism is authoritarianism that runs on popular support. It emerges in contexts that require elections to hold governmental power, where the people are in danger of not acting in elite interests.

A fascist government generally creates in-groups and out-groups in order to get people to bond emotionally with its movement. It uses the power of the government, violence, and threats of violence to intimidate people into compliance. It acts in the interests of an economic elite while pretending to be anti-elitist. And it uses anti-intellectualism and attacks on media and other cultural systems to pull people into its way of thinking and feeling. It often harks back to a mythical past where the in-group had more power and prestige, and society was stable.

In the middle of the 20th century, Germany, Italy, and Spain had nominally democratic governments that were in crisis. The governments were not able to keep the economy functioning in the interests of elites. In the political chaos that comes from an economy that is not functioning well, parties emerge that use extreme racist nationalism to consolidate popular support for authoritarian regimes. It is that move, of using hatred to consolidate popular support, that distinguishes fascism from other forms of right-wing or authoritarian politics.

As the climate crisis has developed, people all around the world are working to shift how we meet our needs in society away from a dependence on fossil fuels. With clean forms of energy fully developed and ready to take over as the energy sources running our economies, the fossil fuel industry is in a fight for its survival. It is aligning itself with fascist forces to remain profitable. To survive, it is prepared to take the whole planet, as well as liberal democracy, down with it.

In the past, the industry has impacted US politics by donating to and leaning on both Democratic and Republican politicians. For example, the industry remains the largest donor to California’s politics, even as that state has a two-thirds Democratic majority. But as renewables become more economically competitive, and many forces are challenging their ability to profit, the industry is seeing a bleak future. And so, for many years, it has been participating in a broad set of challenges to democracy as a strategy to maintain the conditions needed to maintain its profitability.

The move toward fascism in the US has come as a result of the success of the Reagan Revolution’s attack on the New Deal and anything that remotely resembles socialism. The fossil fuel industry has been a part of that revolution every step of the way. There is a line of thinking that was crystallized in the 1971 memo “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” written by the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. The Powell Memo outlines a blueprint for how to fight back against emerging challenges to corporate power. Oil barons and political activists the Koch brothers were influenced by the memo and went on to found the think tank the Cato Institute to promote a free-market ideology that argues against regulations on industry in general, and especially against environmental regulations that might impact the fossil fuel industry. It also argued against social safety net programs, such as the programs put in place under the New Deal. Other powerful think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, have worked assiduously to promote that set of ideals. That organization was founded by Richard Melon Scaife, heir to a Gulf Oil fortune.

The work of these forces paid off with the election of Ronald Reagan and the triumph of the Reagan Revolution. That revolution challenged the power of unions, destroyed the social safety net systems developed under the New Deal, and rolled back environmental regulations and other limits on corporate power. It allowed inequality to flourish.

Part of what fueled popular support for the Reagan Revolution was the mobilization of racial resentments, used to encourage white voters to blame their precarious situation on people of color, especially on Black people. The Democratic Party decided to ride that wave, and Bill Clinton ran for the presidency on the idea that he would get rid of social safety net programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children and get tough on crime, coded in the public imagination as Black. The Reagan Revolution led to extreme pro-business decisions by the Supreme Court, such as Citizens United, which have further eroded our democracy. Many other court decisions over the past decades have allowed monopoly power to go unchecked.

The extreme free market form of capitalism engendered by the Powell Memo and the Reagan Revolution have led to a crisis in capitalist democracy in the US. As people’s lives have been made increasingly precarious by the lack of a safety net and by extreme inequality, they have been ripe for a revolt against the dominant system. In the 2016 election many voters favored populist Bernie Sanders and others favored right-wing pseudo-populist Donald Trump.

The democratic party decided to make its peace with the populists and began working for a return to support for some New Deal social programs as well as strong action to address the climate crisis. The Republican Party went all in on a pro-corporate fossil fuel dominated pseudo-populism, and won in 2016. That coalition won again in 2024. It did this by leaning hard on people’s resentments against the system and elites, and by mobilizing people’s passions against imagined enemies, such as immigrants and trans people.

As the US has traveled this destructive path, the fossil fuel industry has walked right along with the Republican Party. The fossil fuel industry contributed heavily to the climate denial movement and the right-wing think tanks that linked climate action with the bogeyman of socialism. It has funded extreme right-wing politicians, including President Trump. It wrote the chapter on energy in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 policy manifesto. It is pushing for legislation to make itself immune from lawsuits to hold it accountable for the destruction it causes. Many of its former industry executives are in Trump’s cabinet. The only way for this dying industry to maintain its hegemony is to hide behind the mask of nationalism, a way to get people to vote for politicians who clearly act against their interests.

As we fight to protect democracy, we need to challenge any attempts to distract our attention from the forces causing our precarity. We need to engage in deep forms of solidarity, where we encourage others to not fall for political rhetoric that blames the wrong people for why we are experiencing extreme inequality, ecological devastation, war, and the unraveling of the systems that support stable lives.

As the fossil fuel industry increasingly resorts to attacks on democracy to maintain its ability to profit, an important part of protecting democracy is exposing one of the biggest and most determined players behind the current attacks: the fossil fuel industry. The future of democracy requires an end to the political power of the fossil fuel industry.

At this crucial moment in world history, it is incumbent on all of us to fight for accountable democratic politics, and to challenge the political imperatives being driven by an industry that is flailing and causing unprecedented devastation to our planet and our politics. It is up to us to consign it to the dustbin of history before more damage is done.

The post The Future of Democracy Requires an End to Fossil-Fueled Fascism appeared first on PM Press.

I loved this post by Kelsey Miller for Cup of Jo about “childlore”.

“Remember typing ‘BOOBS’ on a calculator?!” someone will blurt. “Or — or that thing when you’re driving by a cemetery and you have to hold your breath?” I love hearing the tiny differences in details (some people grew up lifting their feet off the floor when passing a graveyard). But what’s wild is how many of us grew up doing, drawing, singing, and believing the exact same funny little things: Miss Susie had a steamboat, Batman smelled, the floor was lava, and stepping on cracks broke our mothers’ backs.

For a definition of childlore, let’s go to the Wikipedia:

Childlore is a folklore or folk culture that focuses specifically on children typically between the ages of 6 and 15. As a branch of folklore, childlore is concerned with those activities which are learned and passed on by children to other children; it excludes the stories and tales told and spread by adults. Childlore can include games, riddles, rhymes, oral stories, codes, fantasies, jokes, and superstitions created by children.

Other than what’s already been mentioned, I can’t remember many specific childlore from my childhood (my recall for such things isn’t great). Perhaps some string games? I can still do cat’s cradle & Jacob’s ladder and taught them to my kids when they were younger. Oh and those cootie catchers.

The commenters at Cup of Jo offered several suggestions: the diarrhea song, padiddle (when you saw a car with only one headlight), and slug bug (or punch buggy). And OMG, I gasped when I read this comment — I used to make these little feet all the time!

Just recently on a field trip with my kids we all traveled in a school bus. We live in Wisconsin so it was chilly in the bus and the bus driver had the heater turned on high. The condensation in the bus was freezing on the inside of the windows as it so often does on a winter morning her and then it’s fun to draw things in the frost. My favorite is to press the side of my fist against the glass to make a little footprint and then use my fingers to make toes. It looks like a baby footprint on the window.

What childlore do you remember from your childhood?

Tags: Kelsey Miller · language

If you are American, there is no particular reason you would have heard of Zbigniew Ziobro. He was one of the authors of the attempt to transform Poland into an authoritarian regime. When this was halted by the Polish elections of 2023, he fled to Hungary.

At that time Hungary was ruled by Viktor Orbán, who was building what seemed like an unstoppable authoritarian order. Ziobro, wanted in Poland for serious crimes, was welcomed by Orbán. But then Orbán too lost a dramatic election, and had to hand over power on Saturday.

When democracy wins, the losers go to America, it seems.

What was left for Ziobro? The United States. You might not have heard of Ziobro, but Donald Trump has.

One of the sad things about Trump’s attempt to bury American democracy is its lack of originality. The models are foreign, including people you have heard of, like Putin, people you likely have heard of, like Orbán, but also minor figures such as Ziobro.

Ziobro is a wanted man with no passport. The Trump White House just went to a good deal of trouble to bring him to the US.

This teaches us, once again, how much the Trump project us an international one. Americans are punished every day, but foreign authoritarian friends are remembered.

What does that say about us as a country, right now?

I reflect on this and other questions in this little video, filmed here in Poland.

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Earlier today community member MikeC posted an essay pondering whether the Democratic Party counts as "controlled opposition," as opposed to a truly oppositional party. It's worth discussion; for my part I think my answer might be "not yet, but it sure seems to be inching towards it?" Trying to tease out the mechanisms by which Democrats seem to be so consistently (sigh) failing the moment is at this point an omnipresent political discussion, and so far I haven't seen any one theory gain broad acceptance.

Focusing in on that same question today, Cory Doctorow also has a brief essay today about “systems thinking” and our fascist moment. What if the problem isn't the Democrats being insufficiently oppositional; what if, instead, Democratic leaders are compulsively focusing their opposition on the wrong part of the system?

In Thinking in Systems, [Donella Meadows] presents a hierarchy of leverage points for changing a system, ranked from least effective ("Constants, numbers, parameters") to most ("The power to shift paradigms to deal with new challenges"):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55264856861/

In all, Meadows theorizes 12 different "places to intervene in a system." The least effective of these – constants like taxes and standards, negative and positive feedback loops – are the sites of most of our political fights, and rightly so. They are the fine-tuning knobs of the system that adjust its margins. Once you have the rule of law ("the rules of the system"), you can drive change by amending, repealing or passing a law:

https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

But when you're confronted with a system that is significantly, persistently dysfunctional, you will likely have to work at sites that are further up the hierarchy, such as "the distribution of power over the rules of the system" or "the goals of the system"; or the most profound of all, "the paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises."

So in this framework, fascism is operating at the highest levels of the system, altering the very premises of our politics; in response, Democratic opposition continues to fiddle with narrow, technical responses to individual problems as they arise rather than engaging with that broader, systemic manipulation.

Or, as metaphor: Democrats are attempting to repair the workings of an intricate machine while fascists are systemically changing the very functions of the machine. The fascists are trying to turn a textile factory into a weapons factory; the Democrats, fretting, think that if they optimize loom productivity the fascists will give up and leave.

I'm broadly sympathetic to most of the different theories for these, ahem, gelatinous responses by Democrats to the current autocratic attacks on our democracy itself, but the explanations I myself always come back to are these:

1. There is an intentional conspiracy on the part of major media companies to boost oligarchic systems and discredit democratic ones.

I don’t mean anything particularly under-the-table about “conspiracy”; I mean that the executives and ownership of media companies are broadly pro-oligarch because they are the oligarchs, and they all hang out together and hire each other and nod at each other's bon mots. So there is a systems-wide pressure, which has come to a head with the Bari Weiss absurdities and which can be seen in stark-naked clarity in the terror-stricken media coverage of Zohran Mamdani, to inflate scandals on the democratic side (Biden senile!) while intentionally covering up far worse on the pro-oligarch side. (Epstein's accomplices; Trump’s rapidly deteriorating mental state.) Democrats do not have the same ability to control media narratives that Republicans do not because Democrats are inherently inept but because media companies are, quite intentionally, working to block those narratives.

You don't need to look any farther than The Washington Post's newly revamped op-ed pages to see how broadly this trend has advanced. At this point, it's advancing like a creature from a cheap horror movie.

2. The corruption in the U.S. Congress has at this point rendered the body nonfunctional.

Not really a debate to be had on this one, either. Republicans have openly embraced administrative corruption. They think it’s great. They don't care if the Trumpites impound funds, steal funds, steal entire buildings, or anything else so long as they think they can stay on the winning side of it.

In addition to the near-infinite known scandals of the Trump 2 era, I expect we will eventually learn that similar financial grifts, near-open bribery, and other illegal acts are even more commonplace in the House and Senate than we think. This would be a corollary of Doctorow’s premise; Republicans are no longer playing the same game that their predecessors were. They don’t believe in democracy. They don’t want democracy. They don’t think crimes by their allies are bad, or that stopping crimes by their allies is good, or that bending U.S. policies so as to best please Jared Kushner's foreign financiers even rises to the level of mildly problematic. But their Democratic counterparts are still playing by the old rules, because Republicans insist that they must. Indeed, the slightest deviation from the old rules is treated as a scandal if Democrats attempt it, even as Republicans insist that they themselves can crime their way to power.

The Supreme Court has, similarly, become brazenly corrupt. It is a partisan court first, foremost, and always. It cannot seriously be argued otherwise, as much as Chief Justice John Roberts still halfheartedly attempts to try.

I needn't argue the point; Justice Sotomayor has done it skillfully in multiple dissents, including the dissent to the latest Court manipulations meant to ensure that Republicans can change election maps in multiple states while the voting is underway after the court's shocking and purely partisan dismantling of voting rights.

Because the media’s ownership class is allied with these Republican effort, this "corruption for me, fake scandal for thee" works. Republican corruption goes unchecked, and Republican corruption also manufactures flimsy or outright false claims of corruption from small-d democrats (See: Hunter Biden; organized “antifa”; attacks on higher education; “DEI” as racism against dull-minded white guys) that gain the sort of broad media traction that the sitting president’s longtime alliance with a child sex trafficker and alleged participation in that trafficking never has. It’s a corruption of the very idea of democratic rule; an authoritarian attack on shared reality meant to deprive voters of any semblance of informed democratic consent.

You can see it on the Supreme Court itself, as well. Sotomayor felt the need to apologize for making a mildly critical observation about Justice Kavanaugh; meanwhile, conservative justices openly call for the destruction of liberalism, lie about the known facts of cases they decide, and make comments from the bench that make it clear their brains have been boiled into soup from far-right conspiracy sites.

3. Democratic House and Senate members are, by and large, increasingly decrepit relics of a long era of relative political stability in which there were shared values on both sides of the aisle.

It was until recently agreed on, if begrudgingly, that the president should not be openly corrupt. The notion that Congress had the ability to check the Executive—and a willingness to do so—was broadly understood. The idea that a president would rally a violent mob to attack lawmakers was so farfetched as to be, literally, inconceivable. The biggest issues of the day were always “energy policy” or “deficits” or squeezing more money for your state out of the latest infrastructure bill, dull political things performed by dull political routines.

Republicans have abandoned those frameworks, but the Democrats we elected to office have repeatedly fumbled the responses because they campaigned and entered office thinking they were being elected to do the dull political routines of the Clinton-Bush-Obama eras. That's what they signed up for. That's the era that formed their political beliefs, the one that informed their strategies and honed their one-liners for.

They did not run for office thinking they would be assassination targets after an opposition party’s president gave a speech seemingly endorsing it. They didn’t run for office thinking they were going to be surrounded by people who could see $50,000 change hands in a fast food bag, or multiple of their colleagues accused of sexual assault, or a president making literal billions by marketing scamcoins, and claim with full conviction that these things are all just fine now.

So our elected leaders broke. Their brains broke. We elected people who wanted to be technocrats, who then themselves put the most long-serving technocrats into leadership roles, and it has proved impossible for most of their self-promoting, election-brained, consultant-reliant minds to pivot to non-technocratic responses. They simply don't have it in them.

You wouldn't summon a world-renowned pop star to fix your house's plumbing; those are two completely different skillsets. Honing one skill doesn't give you the slightest bit of insight into the other.

Similarly, you can't expect someone who has stewed for a lifetime in the language of technocracy to know how to put out the fires of despotism. We need a different breed of Democratic leaders, ones who speak the language of opposition. Ones who can condemn demagogues as demagogues, and call fascists fascists, and call weird rich nutcases "weird," full stop. Republicans are changing the game by asserting that Democrats are evil, anti-Christian creatures bent on doing America harm. Democrats could easily turn that weapon back on them: We have seen just how malicious, amoral, and wantonly destructive Republicans have proven to be. We can prove the Republican sins that Republicans have built up an entire mythology to cover up.

But if current Democratic leaders had such skills, we would have seen it by now. They don't. Joe Biden didn't; Barack Obama doesn't. Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz came the closest to speaking this new language of morality and public fairness when, during the campaign, he was able to voice the long-absent political opinion that the Republican opposition had devolved into nuttery—but he was quickly muzzled by the sclerotic technocrats of the party so that the campaign could settle back into more familiar technocratic ground.

So there are at least three different, tangled problems here. The first is that the national media has been consolidated to the point at which a relative handful of companies, all governed by the same quasi-aristocratic class, can and do manipulate national narratives to the point of near-hegemony. It was true back when alt-weeklies arrived on scene to challenge the too-corporate versions; it is much more true now.

The second is the systems-level problem; Republicanism is now, intentionally, a kleptocratic movement that opposes democracy itself—definitionally fascist, using the rigor of democratic systems as weapon to break those systems.

The third is that the opposition party is a group of largely self-interested political players who came to power playing one political game and find themselves hopelessly unable to adapt to a new era in which none of that glad-handing and favor-trading means a damn thing, because the opposition has no use for a system in which they are even allowed to exist.

If you ask me what's going to happen next, based on all of those things, I see no answer other than chaos. Chaos is the only way forward: Oligarchic brunchlords are pushing economic systems to the brink of collapse, seemingly believing that the unwashed masses will not seek vengeance when it happens. Our elections are rapidly devolving into chaos—now that rigging the maps for partisan gain has been explicitly endorsed by the Supreme Court, not only endorsed but with a how-to manual attached, the public will rapidly find the situation ridiculous. They will call these institutions corrupt, and be right, and the federal government will lose legitimacy in ways that can't easily be repaired.

And either the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, or both are going to hit extinction-level polling numbers as that happens. The Republicans, for destroying the economy in all the ways voters hate most; the Democrats, for being such feckless technocrats that voters—who are mostly uninformed and vibes-based—can't help but suspect that they were acting as Republican accomplices the whole time.

The longer the fever goes without breaking, the more chaotic the nation will become when it finally does. I still do not think Trumpism will be ultimately successful, because as we have learned the far-right allies of Trump (like the Heritage Foundation) are blazingly incompetent fuckups with fetishes for destroying all the parts of the system that the public likes most. Trumpism will not survive a Great Recession caused by rank ideological fuckuppery.

The bad news, of course, is that things are likely to devolve into at least Great Recession levels of fuckuppery before the public becomes sufficiently irate. Congress and the aristocracy will act only when they fear public anger more than they fear Trump's kleptocrats, and we will likely only reach that point after Republicans do such great damage to American finances that it provokes mass demonstrations on a scale the nation has never, ever seen before.

Today's links

• A fascist paradigm: The change that changed everything.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Openstreetmap x Isle of Wight; Found grocery lists; Mayor wants to pray away potholes; Designing a D120; "Too Like the Lightning."
• Upcoming appearances: Barcelona, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

A fascist paradigm (permalink)

Yesterday, I attended a workshop on systems thinking and political change, which included a presentation on the work of Donella Meadows, whose Thinking in Systems is a canonical work on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_In_Systems:_A_Primer

"Systems thinking" is an analytical framework that treats the world as a mesh of interconnected, nonlinear components and relationships that can't be easily understood or steered. A complex system isn't merely "complicated." A mechanical watch is complicated, in that it has many parts that work together in ways that require training and specialized knowledge to understand. But it isn't "complex" because each part has a specific function that can be understood and adjusted.

In a complex system – say, an ecosystem – the parts are meshed in a web of unobvious relationships that make it difficult to predict what effect will follow from a given perturbation. When a blight kills off a plant species, the soil stability declines, resulting in landslides during the rainy season, changing the mineral content of nearby waterways, which creates microbial blooms or fish die-offs in a distant, downstream lake.

But systems thinking isn't a counsel of despair that insists that you shouldn't do anything because you can never predict what will come of your actions. In Thinking in Systems, Meadows presents a hierarchy of leverage points for changing a system, ranked from least effective ("Constants, numbers, parameters") to most ("The power to shift paradigms to deal with new challenges"):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55264856861/

In all, Meadows theorizes 12 different "places to intervene in a system." The least effective of these – constants like taxes and standards, negative and positive feedback loops – are the sites of most of our political fights, and rightly so. They are the fine-tuning knobs of the system that adjust its margins. Once you have the rule of law ("the rules of the system"), you can drive change by amending, repealing or passing a law:

https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

But when you're confronted with a system that is significantly, persistently dysfunctional, you will likely have to work at sites that are further up the hierarchy, such as "the distribution of power over the rules of the system" or "the goals of the system"; or the most profound of all, "the paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises."

Thinking about paradigms is a form of "meta-cognition," which is to say, "thinking about how you think." Your paradigm encompasses all your assumptions, including your assumptions about how to proceed from your other assumptions: "if x, then y" is a paradigm.

The workshop where we were discussing all of this is part of a group whose goal is reversing the antidemocratic movement in our society and the climate emergency that is its backdrop. But as I listened to the speaker and the ensuing discussion, it occurred to me that Meadows' theoretical work was a very good way of describing the successes of the fascist movement in the UK and around the world.

Fascists like Farage and Trump are, at their root, anti-democratic. Their pitch is that the people are incapable of self-determination (as Peter Thiel puts it, "democracy is incompatible with freedom"). They want us to think that all our neighbors are irrational and foolish, and that we, too, are irrational and foolish, and that our safety and prosperity can only be safeguarded if we seek out those few people who are born to rule and liberate them from the petty niceties and regulations that democracy and the rule of law demand.

In other words, the paradigm of democracy is that all of us are capable of both wise self-governance and self-rationalized misgovernance, and each of us has a useful perspective to contribute. The fascist paradigm is that we can't be trusted to rule ourselves, and only the people who are born with "good blood" are capable of directing our lives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/20/big-cornflakes-energy/#caliper-pilled

This is the theory behind "race realism" and "human diversity" and all the other polite names the modern fascist uses to obscure the fact that they're reviving eugenics. It explains the panic over DEI, a panic driven by the belief that lesser people are being elevated to positions of rule and authority that they are genetically incapable of carrying out.

That's why, whenever a disaster arises, fascists demand to know the gender, race and sexual orientation of the pilot, the ship's captain, or the official in charge. If the person who crashed the cargo ship into the bridge has brown skin, we can add another line to the ledger of costs associated with the doomed project to put people who were born to be bossed around in the boss's seat (of course, if the pilot turns out to be a white guy, that proves nothing, except that mistakes sometimes happen).

The revival of fascism in this century has been scarily effective, and at times it can feel unstoppable. Meadows' work on systems thinking provides an explanation for that efficacy – and suggests a theory of change for dispatching fascism back to the graveyard of history. Fascists have made changes to things like laws and feedback loops, rules and distribution of power, but this all stems from a more profound alteration to the system, at the level of the paradigm.

Which suggests that the real fight we have is over that paradigm: we have to convince our neighbors that they are smart enough to rule themselves, and so are we, and so is everyone else. We have to convince them that even the smartest and wisest person (including us, including them) is capable of folly and needs to have checks on their (our) authority.

We need to attack the theory of the "unitary executive" and every other autocratic ideology head on. We have to insist that these aren't just unconstitutional, but that they are ideologically catastrophic. "No kings," because even an omnibenevolent king isn't omniscient, and that means that omnipotence is always omnidestructive in the long run.

The fascist revival has been scarily effective and resilient – and systems thinking offers an explanation for both that efficacy and that resiliency.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/10/fiction-writing-professor-ai

• Reporters at McClatchy withhold bylines in dispute over AI content https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/may/01/reporters-at-mcclatchy-withhold-bylines-in-dispute/

• Someone Built an App to Fight Surveillance Pricing With a Flipper Zero… for Research Purposes https://gizmodo.com/someone-built-an-app-to-fight-surveillance-pricing-with-a-flipper-zero-for-research-purposes-2000755224

• Life without US tech https://www.ft.com/content/4c3aad70-e0cb-46a2-95d5-15d11b6bf818?accessToken=zwAAAZ4VoJdukc9MOq1w4MtGotOV1RXRG2v4GA.MEQCIFXG2BBi81XpJ8D4_1uEUIencLlX2h_fjR9DN9YSKjmdAiA9W8XTlEm0uuh0SQioErfqHFu5R_9gkFTD4L54Bmg-cQ&sharetype=gift&token=3519ae98-a671-4dbe-9058-4ebf21385c9a&syn-25a6b1a6=1

• What Challenging a Bowling Monopoly Says About America https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-what-challenging

• The Oligarchs Are Starting to Lose Their Grip on Power https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/hollywood-merger-fear-paramount-warner-bros.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago First aid for the dying dotcom http://modernhumorist.com/mh/0010/dotcom/

#20yrsago OpenStreetMap maps Isle of Wight, Manchester next https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapchester_Mapping_Party_2006

#20yrsago Fueling model rockets with Oreo fillings https://web.archive.org/web/20060616192646/https://www.popsci.com/popsci/how20/600152d7d441b010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

#20yrsago Legal guide for podcasters https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Welcome_To_The_Podcasting_Legal_Guide

#20yrsago Collection of 1100+ found grocery lists https://grocerylists.org/

#10yrsago Mayor of Jackson, MS: “I believe we can pray potholes away” https://www.wjtv.com/news/jackson-mayor-tony-yarber-we-can-pray-potholes-away/

#10yrsago What’s the best way to distribute numbers on the faces of a D120? https://web.archive.org/web/20160510182023/https://www.wired.com/2016/05/mathematical-challenge-of-designing-the-worlds-most-complex-120-sided-dice/

#10yrsago Billionaire Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel will be a California Trump delegate https://web.archive.org/web/20160510155226/https://www.wired.com/2016/05/investor-peter-thiel-will-california-delegate-trump/

#10yrsago McClatchy newspapers’ CEO pleased to announce that he’s shipping IT jobs overseas https://web.archive.org/web/20160510102956/https://www.computerworld.com/article/3067304/it-careers/newspaper-chain-sending-it-jobs-overseas.html

#10yrsago Peace in Our Time: how publishers, libraries and writers could work together https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-peace-in-our-time/

#10yrsago Too Like the Lightning: intricate worldbuilding, brilliant speculation, gripping storytelling https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/10/too-like-the-lightning-intricate-worldbuilding-brilliant-speculation-gripping-storytelling/

#5yrsago LA traveling toward free public transit https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/10/comrade-ustr/#get-on-the-bus

#5yrsago Biden's shift on vaccine patents is a Big Deal https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/10/comrade-ustr/#vaccine-diplomacy

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/

• Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification

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

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html

• 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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

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

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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