Cory Doctorow — Pluralistic

About #

Science fiction author, journalist, and digital rights activist (former EFF special advisor). Writes “Pluralistic,” a daily link-aggregation blog combining tech-policy essays with curated commentary, built around his “enshittification” framework for how platforms decay as they extract value from users, business customers, then shareholders in sequence. Covers DRM/anticircumvention, antitrust and monopoly power, copyright and IP overreach, surveillance pricing, and right-to-repair.

2026-08-03 — Dualism #

Blog · Read

• Uses the “conjurer’s trick” of magic-trick metaphors to argue much of the AI bubble rests on conflating different processes that merely produce similar-looking outcomes.
• Distinguishes relationship-based understanding from statistical prediction: both can guess correctly what someone will say, but only understanding provides a path forward when the guess fails — statistical extrapolation just “founders.”
• Revives the degraded Turing Test critique: the original thought experiment has been flattened into “can a chatbot fool a human,” which is a different question from whether something is actually a person.
• Applies the same dualism to labor — “centaurs” (workers voluntarily adopting AI tools) versus “reverse centaurs” (workers conscripted as peripherals for machines) — and to job losses: genuine AI-driven replacement versus a boss merely swindled into believing a defective chatbot could replace someone.

2026-08-01 — Why businesses lie about AI #

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• Draws on Nikhil Suresh (Hermit Tech) consulting research: in 18 months of enterprise AI consulting, zero successful implementations observed, even as companies publicly claim “100x productivity gains.”
• Frames this as a coordination problem — executives face career risk for admitting AI failure, so individual incentives reward lying regardless of actual results, producing a “religious mania” dynamic where professing faith in AI becomes a promotion/job-security requirement.
• “Demo effect”: executives are unmoved by substantial real technology improvements but get “hypnotized” by unreliable AI demos — cites a Snowflake Cortex demo, described by its own maker as 92% accurate (8% misleading), converting skeptics into immediate buyers.
• Documents “worker theater”: employees completing work manually then crediting Claude/similar tools, or running chatbots in circles solely to rack up tokens for corporate AI-adoption leaderboards.
• Theorizes AI’s appeal to executives specifically: unlike human subordinates, it won’t contradict flawed directives or push back with reality.

2026-07-29 — AI and the Enshittification Era #

YouTube · ~1h41m · Guest appearance on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart · YouTube

• Discusses his book “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI,” separating AI hype from actual capability — argues genuine capability may not even matter to how the product gets sold to investors and consumers.
• Frames AI as amplifying three pre-existing societal problems rather than solving anything: surveillance expansion, labor exploitation, and corporate consolidation.
• Introduces “enshittification” to a mainstream audience — platforms degrade over time as companies shift priority from users to business customers to shareholders.
• Broader conversation with Stewart on the disconnect between AI industry investment scale and demonstrated real-world capability.