#big tech fails

[areadersquoteslibrary]

"In March of 2016, [...] JAMA Internal Medicine released a study showing that the artificial intelligence built into smartphones from Apple, Samsung, Google, and Microsoft isn’t programmed to help during a crisis. The phones’ personal assistants didn’t understand words like “rape,” or "my husband is hitting me.” In fact, instead of doing even a simple web search, Siri—Apple’s product— cracked jokes and mocked users. It wasn’t the first time. Back in 2011, if you told Siri you were thinking about shooting yourself, it would give you directions to a gun store. After getting bad press, Apple partnered with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to offer users help when they said something that Siri identified as suicidal. But five years later, no one had looked beyond that one fix. Apple had no problem investing in building jokes and clever comebacks into the interface from the start. But investing in crisis or safety? Just not a priority."

- Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit

Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:

"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)

Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.

Take the metaverse.

Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.

Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.

But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.

Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter

This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.

All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."

For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash

This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.

Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?

Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).

As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.

Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.

What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.

But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."

Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.

Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.

The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.

In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.

Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.

The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.

The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.

Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.

Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.

Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.

But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.

The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.

For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge

In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.

To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."

And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.

Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[sergle]

yall are about to piss me off by not having any PASSING basic knowledge of the way the u.s. military manipulates its recruits into joining by typing up one of your uninformed, unresearched, unempathetic, individualistic, unbelievably annoying posts about how 100% of the people in the military ended up there because they just Love America So Damn Much! they're extremely mature and informed at time of recruitment, they can totally leave anytime they want, they totally had tons of other avenues in life they could've taken, there was no rush at all to get income as fast as possible, and everyone in the military also totally is part of the combat divisions and personally enjoys being IN the military very much, big believers of violence. everyone in the military is shooting guns all day, that's how that works. they LOVE BLOODSHED. also I love the "amewicans haha" twang to this type of shit because you're actually TOTALLY stealing our Thing, which is turning systemic issues into Individual Issues. Instead of talking about the powers that be, it's so Personal Choice up in here. It's, "well you shouldn't have done it then. I totally wouldn't because I know better." you don't wanna talk about the military industrial complex as a whole, and you don't want to talk about recruiters, you just want to pin the blame on Specific Individual People one-by-one, as if they're responsible for the system that they're being ground up in. someone was in the military? bad person, no matter what. it's easier to believe that, I guess, than to acknowledge that Normal People (with high school educations) are manipulated and incentivized into joining a system that is Bad. at like age 18. but yeah no that 18 year old should have just been smarter lol haha anyway here are some screenshots for no particular reason

side note this reply of someone going "umm just get loans and go into a high paying field it's easy XD" as a direct response to someone trying to explain how most americans joining the military are being funneled in that direction out of a need for money.

and another person who Decided that americans join the military just CLENCHING their teeth thinking of other people, and not thinking completely selfishly about their own selves and their own income/housing/healthcare.

[ourceliumnetwork]

me, the symptoms experiencer, experiencing symptoms: wow gee i wonder what the fuck is happening right now i have no context for why i could possibly feel bad, surely i'm not experiencing symptoms. me, when i figure out it's the symptoms:

[dullahandyke]

accidentally unfollowed u trying to send an ask i'm soso sorry T-T but also people who rely on chatgpt for uni are so incomprehensible to me partially because i took a quick college course last year to get into my job, social care, and like can you imagine having a carer or smth who didn't know what they were doing because they cheated the entire time they were learning??? but also like you're in an academic setting they're gonna have shit in place to notice plagiarism and they take that so seriously lmao. AI bros are annoying as fuck

Dw bro but SO REALLLL LIKE. I watched the main person I was bitching about for a while and they're a business student who was using chatgpt to pass a sociology test or something 😰😰 NOT a good sign for the businesses of tomorrow

[hydralisk98]

Czarina-VM, study of Microsoft tech stack history. Preview 1

Write down study notes about the evolution of MS-DOS, QuickBASIC (from IBM Cassette BASIC to the last officially Microsoft QBasic or some early Visual Basic), "Batch" Command-Prompt, PowerShell, Windows editions pathing from "2.11 for 386" to Windows "ME" (upgraded from a "98 SE" build though) with Windows "3.11 for Workgroups" and the other 9X ones in-between, Xenix, Microsoft Bob with Great Greetings expansion, a personalized mockup Win8 TUI animated flex box panel board and other historical (or relatively historical, with a few ground-realism & critical takes along the way) Microsoft matters here and a couple development demos + big tech opinions about Microsoft too along that studious pathway.

( Also, don't forget to link down the interactive-use sessions with 86box, DOSbox X & VirtualBox/VMware as video when it is indeed ready )

Yay for the four large tags below, and farewell.

[fenway03]

Resource List: Problems with AI/GenAI

The following list leads to a variety of reports and resources related to challenges and harms caused by the AI hype machine. It is by no means exhaustive and was originally just meant for myself to help me keep track of things, but maybe some of you will find it useful as well.

If you have people in your circles who have fallen for the hype, or if you just want to dive deeper into some aspects of this whole mess yourself, these articles, papers, books, and podcasts can serve as good starting points. Many of them include links to additional resources, and if you follow some of these researchers/authors on social media, your feeds will soon be filled with even more insightful stuff.

For a collection of news items on “AI being shitty”, also see this “Questioning AI Resource List” compiled by Michelle Note.

~~~

General Primers

“What is AI? Everyone thinks they know, but no one can agree. And that’s a problem.” (Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review, 2024-07-10) Deep dive into the history of AI, the origins of the terminology, the rich techbro fanatics behind the cult-like hype, the researchers/scientists calling for a saner approach, and the implications for politics and society that should concern us all. (Link to original MIT TR page with paywall | Archived version)

“The WIRED Guide to Artificial Intelligence” (Tom Simonite, WIRED, 2023-02-08) General overview and timeline of the beginnings of AI as well as a summary of the current state of AI, the controversies surrounding GenAI, and the challenges for society due to all the hype. (WIRED.com link)

“The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models” (Melanie Mitchell & David C. Krakauer, PNAS, 2022-10-12) Detailed account of the major sides currently debating whether LLMs are capable of understanding language in any humanlike sense. Includes extensive list of references with links to related papers and research. (PNAS.org link)

“AI History Timeline” (interactive chart) (AI Watch / European Commission) Visual overview of the history of AI with selected important AI breakthroughs from 1950 to the present. (AI Watch link)

Focus: Environmental Impact

“The real cost of AI is being paid in deserts far from Silicon Valley” (book extract) (Karen Hao, Rest of World, 2025-05-26) Extract from Hao’s book, Empire of AI, focusing on the devastating impact that OpenAI’s reckless ventures have on Chile's mineral reserves, its water resources, and its indigenous communities. (Rest of World link)

“AI is draining water from areas that need it most” (Leonardo Nicoletti, Michelle Ma and Dina Bass, Bloomberg Technology, 2025-05-08) Facts and figures related to the immense water consumption of data centers, roughly two thirds of which are now in places with high to extremely high levels of water stress. (Link to original Bloomberg page with paywall | Archived version | LinkedIn post by author)

“We Went to the Town Elon Musk Is Poisoning” (video) (More Perfect Union, 2025-05-30) Short documentary about how Musk’s massive xAI data center is poisoning Memphis and its predominantly Black neighborhoods by burning enough gas to power a small city, with no permits and no pollution controls. (YouTube video link)

“The Unpaid Toll: Quantifying the Public Health Impact of AI” (Yuelin Han, Zhifeng Wu et al., UC Riverside, 2024-12-09) Research paper about the potential public health burden, specifically due to the degradation of air quality caused by AI’s lifecycle operations, which are valued at up to more than $20 billion per year for US data centers in 2030 and unevenly impact economically disadvantaged communities. (Arxiv.org link)

“Power Hungry: AI and our energy future” (Mat Honan (ed.), MIT Technology Review, 2025-05) Deep dive into AI’s energy requirements and its carbon debt, with detailed math on energy usage down to the prompt level. (Link to original MIT TR page with paywall | Archived version | LinkedIn post by editor)

Focus: Exploitation of Workers and the General Public

“The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence” (Adrienne Williams, Milagros Miceli and Timnit Gebru, Noema Magazine, 2022-10-13) Detailed account (including various references to related pieces) of how AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid gig workers, data labelers, content moderators etc., especially in the Global South, who are performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions while the tech companies that have branded themselves “AI first” are making millions on the backs of those exploited workers. (Noema Magazine link)

“How AI companies exploit data workers in Kenya” (video) (Janosch Delcker & Mariel Müller, DW, 2024-12-11) Video report about the invisible workers behind the “AI revolution” who painstakingly tag the data needed to power the artificial intelligence systems many of us use. (DW.com link)

“Where Cloud Meets Cement – A Case Study Analysis of Data Center Development” (Hanna Barakat, Chris Cameron, Alix Dunn, Prathm Juneja and Emma Prest, The Maybe, 2025-04) Investigative reporting on five planned data centers around the world that are often framed as “economic opportunities” but in reality cause much harm to local communities through strain on the electrical grid, toxic emissions, and high water/energy consumption. (The Maybe link | LinkedIn post by author)

“Artificial Power: 2025 Landscape Report” (AI Now Institute, 2025-06-03) Detailed report on the state of play in the AI market and the stakes for the public, with the primary diagnosis being that the push to integrate AI everywhere grants AI companies and tech oligarchs power that goes far beyond their deep pockets, so we need to ask not how AI is being used by us but how it is being used on us. (AI Now Institute link | LinkedIn post by authors)

Focus: Criminal Justice

“AI + criminal legal system = bad” (Josie Duffy Rice & Hannah Riley, The Jump Line, 2025-06-11) Newsletter issue that zooms in on the increasing use of AI in policing and incarceration; includes various links to further reports as well as an interview with Matthew Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (The Jump Line on Substack link)

“Artificial Intelligence Is Putting Innocent People at Risk of Being Incarcerated” (Alyxaundria Sanford, Innocence Project, 2024-02-14) Report about how the increased use of AI by law enforcement is yet another example for the misapplication of forensic science that disproportionately affects marginalized/Black communities and has already led to several confirmed cases of misidentification due to facial recognition software. (Innocence Project link)

“AI Generated Police Reports Raise Concerns Around Transparency, Bias” (Jay Stanley, ACLU, 2024-12-10) Quick primer on why AI-generated police reports threaten to exacerbate existing problems and create new ones in law enforcement. (ACLU.org link)

Focus: Society/Education

“Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task” (Nataliya Kosmyna et al., MIT Media Lab, 2025-06-10) Study focusing on neural and behavioral consequences for people relying on LLM assistance for essay writing tasks, with the results showing that users had lower cognitive activity, struggled to accurately quote their own work, and consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels compared to the other study participants who did not rely on LLMs – thus raising concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance. (Arxiv.org link)

“AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking” (Michael Gerlich) Study investigating the relationship and significant negative correlation between frequent AI usage and critical thinking skills, with a focus on cognitive offloading as a mediating factor and highlighting the potential cognitive costs of AI tool reliance. (MDPI.com link | LinkedIn post by author)

“Don’t believe the hype. AI myths and the need for a critical approach in higher education.” (Jürgen Rudolph, Fadhil Ismail, Shannon Tan and Pauline Seah, JALT, 2025-02-18) Editorial focusing on the pervasive AI/GenAI hype in higher education and eight myths that shape current discourse, making it clear that AI is not an autonomous, intelligent entity but a mere product that depends on often exploitative labour and data extraction practices and tends to exacerbate existing inequalities. (JALT link | LinkedIn post by author)

“Teachers Are Not OK” (Jason Koebler, 404 Media, 2025-06-02) Collection of quotes and first-hand accounts of teachers related to how schools are not prepared for ChatGPT and describing the negative impact GenAI is having on teaching and the educational sector. (404 Media link)

“Time for a Pause: Without Effective Public Oversight, AI in Schools Will Do More Harm Than Good.” (Ben Williamson, Alex Molnar and Faith Boninger, NEPC, 2024-03-05) Report on the need for stronger regulation and why AI in education is a public problem because it reinforces issues like bureaucratic opacity, threatens student privacy, furthers school commercialization, worsens inequalities, erodes teacher autonomy, and drives dangerous faith in magical technosolutions. (NEPC link | LinkedIn post by author)

“Against the Commodification of Education—if harms then not AI” (Dagmar Monett & Gilbert Paquet, JODDE, 2025-05-11) Paper calling for a change in direction with regard to the unbridled integration of AI/GenAI in educational systems so we can first deal with key concerns such as preserving academic integrity, ensuring the quality of information provided by GenAI systems, respecting IP rights, and limiting the influence of tech corporations, as well as answer critical questions about the future of education, the tools’ impact on students, and the implications for the teaching profession. (JODDE link)

“They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.” (Kashmir Hill, The New York Times, 2025-06-13) Disturbing report on how GenAI chatbots can lead vulnerable people down conspiratorial rabbit holes and encourage distorted perceptions of reality and worse. (Link to original NYT article | Gift Article | Archived version)

“What AI thinks a beautiful woman looks like” (Nitasha Tiku & Szu Yu Chen, Washington Post, 2024-05-31) Illustrated report on the biases and stereotypes of GenAI systems that they inherited from the flawed data they were fed during their training. (Washington Post link without paywall)

Books

“The AI Con” (Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna, 2025) Blurb: A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world. https://thecon.ai/

“Empire of AI” (Karen Hao, 2025) Blurb: From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman’s OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy. https://karendhao.com/

“Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back” (Ulises A. Mejias & Nick Couldry, 2024) Blurb: A compelling argument that the extractive practices of today’s tech giants are the continuation of colonialism—and a crucial guide to collective resistance. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo216184200.html

“Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI” (James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant, 2024) Blurb: A myth-dissolving exposé of how artificial intelligence exploits human labor, and a resounding argument for a more equitable digital future. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/feeding-the-machine-9781639734979/

Newsletters/Podcasts

“Tech Won’t Save Us” About: Weekly conversations with experts to dissect the tech industry and the powerful people at its helm with the goal to provide insights that will shine a different light on the industry, make us reconsider our relationship to technology, and question the narratives we’ve been fed about it for decades. https://techwontsave.us/about

“Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter” About: AI has too much hype. In this companion newsletter, linguist Prof. Emily M. Bender and sociologist Dr. Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. They talk about everything "AI", from machine consciousness to science fiction, to political economy to art made by machines. https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/

“Charting Gen AI” About: Key developments in GenAI and the impacts these are having on human-made media, as well as the ethics and behaviour of the AIs and calls for regulatory intervention to protect the rights of artists, performers, and creators. https://grahamlovelace.substack.com

“Where's Your Ed At” / “Better Offline” Newsletter and podcast by Ed Zitron, focusing on current developments related to AI/GenAI, the rot economy built by Big Tech, and the worrisome future that tech’s elite wants to build. https://www.wheresyoured.at / https://linktr.ee/betteroffline

Last update: 2025-06-20

[watchhisjawdrop]

This ad just appeared on my dash, and it's terrifying that it's phrased as a game??? Like the fact that it's promoting for people to develop interpersonal and romantic relationships and attachements towards gen AI models??? Like actively encouraging people to stop engaging with real life human beings and invest their time and emotions into the synthetic personalities of a machine instead????? That doesn't sound crazy to anyone????? Have we forgotten about the 14yo who committed suicide after he developed a relationship with one of these models??? What timeline are we living in??? How is this allowed???!!!

[untypicable]

Why Can’t Bread Be Made to Fit Toasters (or Vice Versa)?

In a world where we have artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and refrigerators that text you when you’re out of milk, one problem remains stubbornly unsolved: Why does bread not fit into toasters? Or, perhaps more accurately: Why do toasters refuse to accommodate bread? This isn’t some niche issue affecting only a select group of society. This is a crisis of engineering and design…

[neverlandnightingale]

Hey do y'all remember several years ago when we were all freaking out about net neutrality being overturned? Well despite net neutrality's win in 2024, a federal court just overturned it.

For those who aren't aware, net neutrality is the simple principle that companies like Verizon and Comcast should treat all web traffic equally – not pick and choose based on who is willing to pay more or who they like best. Big Tech companies obviously don’t like that – which is why they spent millions lobbying against it over the years.

Now, these megacorporations will be able to seize control back over our Internet. The likely result? Throttled access to streaming services, monopolistic pricing that cuts out competition, and a slower, walled off, and less free Internet for all of us.

And unfortunately, rulings like this will only get more common now that the Supreme Court has overturned the “Chevron deference” – giving judges, rather than qualified public servants, a blank check to toss out protections like net neutrality, environmental safeguards, or food safety standards.

When Trump’s FCC repealed net neutrality back in 2017, they gave big corporations total control over our Internet – putting free and open access at risk.

Internet providers responded by exploiting their newfound power to speed up certain websites, and slow down – or even block – others. They failed to provide crucial Internet infrastructure in rural areas, low-income communities, and communities of color. They even slashed firefighters’ Internet access during severe wildfires.

But over 126,000 people spoke out and we were able to reinstate net neutrality – until now.

The time has come again to take action: please sign this petition from Common Cause so we can reinstate net neutrality.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Don’t Be Evil

Tonight (November 22), I'll be joined by Vass Bednar at the Toronto Metro Reference Library for a talk about my new novel, The Lost Cause, a preapocalyptic tale of hope in the climate emergency.

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Don't Be Evil," a consideration of the forces that led to the Great Enshittening, the dizzying, rapid transformation of formerly useful services went from indispensable to unusable to actively harmful:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

While some services have fallen harder and/or faster, they're all falling. When a whole cohort of services all turn sour in the same way, at the same time, it's obvious that something is happening systemically.

After all, these companies are still being led by the same people. The leaders who presided over a period in which these companies made good and useful services are also presiding over these services' decay. What factors are leading to a pandemic of rapid-onset enshittification?

Recall that enshittification is a three-stage process: first surpluses are allocated to users until they are locked in. Then they are withdrawn and given to business-customers until they are locked in. Then all the value is harvested for the company's shareholders, leaving just enough residual value in the service to keep both end-users and business-customers glued to the platform.

We can think of each step in that enshittification process as the outcome of an argument. At some product planning meeting, one person will propose doing something to materially worsen the service to the company's advantage, and at the expense of end-users or business-customers.

Think of Youtube's decay. Over the past year, Google has:

Dramatically increased the cost of ad-free Youtube subscriptions;

Dramatically increased the number of ads shown to non-subscribers;

Dramatically decreased the amount of money paid to Youtube creators;

Added aggressive anti-adblock;

Then, this week, Google started adding a five-second blanking interval for non-Chrome users who have adblockers installed:

https://www.404media.co/youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/

These all smack of Jenga blocks that different product managers are removing in pursuit of their "key performance indicators" (KPIs):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

We can think of each of these steps as the outcome of an argument. Someone proposes a Youtube subscription price-hike, and other internal stakeholders object. These objections fall into two categories:

We shouldn't do this because it will make the product worse; and/or

We shouldn't do this because it will reduce the company's earnings.

Lots of googlers sincerely care about product quality. People like doing a good job, and they take pride in making good things. Many have sacrificed something that mattered in the service of making the product better. It's bad enough to miss your kid's school play so you can meet a work deadline – but imagine making that sacrifice and then having the excellent work you put in deliberately degraded.

I have been around Google's orbit since its early days, going to the odd company Christmas party in the early 2000s and giving talks at Google offices in cities all over the world. I've known hundreds of skilled googlers who passionately cared about making the best products they could.

For most of Google's history, those googlers won the argument. But they didn't do so merely by appealing to their colleagues' professional pride in a job well-done. For most of Google's history, the winning argument was a combination of "doing this bad thing would make me sad," and "doing this bad thing will make Google poorer."

Companies are disciplined by three forces:

Competition (the fear of losing business to a rival);

Regulation (the fear of legal penalties that would exceed the expected profits from a given course of action);

Self-help (the fear that customers or users will change their behavior, say, by installing an ad-blocker).

The ability of googlers to win enshittification arguments by appealing to the company's bottom line was a function of one or more of these three disciplining factors. The weakening of each of these factors is the reason that every tech company is sliding into enshittification at once.

For example, when Google contemplates raising the price of a Youtube subscription, the dissent might say, "Well, this will reduce viewership and might shift viewers to rivals like Tiktok" (competition). But the price-hiking side can counter, "No, because we have a giant archive, we control 90% of searches, we are embedded in the workflow of vloggers and other creators who automatically stream and archive to Youtube, and Youtube comes pre-installed on every Android device." Even if the company leaks a few viewers to Tiktok, it will still make more money in aggregate. Prices go up.

When Google contemplates increasing the number of ads shown to nonsubscribers, the dissent might say, "This will incentivize more users to install ad-blockers, and then we'll see no ad-revenue from them." The pro-ad side can counter, "No, because most Youtube viewing is in-app, and reverse-engineering the Youtube app to add an ad-blocker is a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As to non-app viewers: we control the majority of browser installations and have Chrome progressively less hospitable to ad-blocking."

When Google contemplates adding anti-adblock to its web viewers, the dissent might say, "Processing users' data in order to ad-block them will violate Europe's GDPR." The anti-adblock side can counter, "But we maintain the fiction that our EU corporate headquarters is in the corporate crime-haven of Ireland, where the privacy regulator systematically underenforces the GDPR. We can expect a very long tenure of anti-adblock before we are investigated, and we might win the investigation. Even if we are punished, the expected fine is less than the additional ad-revenue we stand to make."

When Google contemplates stealing performers' wages through opaque reshufflings of its revenue-sharing system, the dissent might say, "Our best performers have options, they can go to Twitch or Tiktok." To which the pro-wage-theft side can counter, "But they have no way of taking their viewers with them. There's no way for them to offer their viewers on Youtube a tool that alerts them whenever they post a new video to a rival platform. Their archives are on Youtube, and if they move them to another platform, there's no way redirect users searching for those videos to their new homes. What's more, any attempt to unilaterally extract their users' contact info, or redirect searchers or create a multiplatform client, violates some mix of our terms of service, our rights under DMCA 1201, etc."

It's not just Google. For every giant platform, the threats of competition, regulation and self-help have been in steady decline for years, as acquisitions, underenforcement of privacy/labor/consumer law, and an increase in IP protection for incumbents have all mounted:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

When internal factions at tech companies argue about whether to make their services worse, there's a heavy weight tilting the scales towards enshittification. The lack of competition, an increase in switching costs for users and business-customers, and broad powers to prevent users from modifying the service for themselves all mean that even when a product gets worse, profits can still go up.

This is the culprit: monopoly, and its handmaiden, regulatory capture. That's why today's antimonopoly movement – and the cases against all the tech giants – are so important. The old, good internet was built by flawed tech companies whose internal ranks included the same amoral enshittifiers who are gobbling up the platforms' seed corn today. The thing that stood in their way before wasn't merely the moral character of colleagues who shrank away from these cynical maneuvers: it was the economic penalties that befell those who enshittified too rashly.

Incentives matter. Money talks and bullshit walks. Enshittification isn't due to the moral failings of individuals in tech companies. It's possible to have a good internet run by flawed people. But to get that new, good internet, we have to support technologists of good will and character by terrorizing their venal and cynical colleagues by hitting them where they live: in their paychecks.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

[cloudbattrolls]

Viltau: what's its big plan?? what's the ultimate scheme???

Arty: don't have one, lol

[turnedpalefromlackofsun]

tumblr is actively hiring AI/ML engineers? ooh fun

why?

[ellipsus-writes]

Back when we started Ellipsus (it's been eighty-four years… or two, but it sure feels like forever), we encountered generative AI.

Immediately, we realized LLMs were the antithesis of creativity and community, and the threat they posed to genuine artistic expression and collaboration. (P.S.: we have a lot to say about it.)

Since then, writing tools—from big tech entities like Google Docs and Microsoft Word, to a host of smaller platforms and publishers—have rapidly integrated LLMs, looking to capitalize on the novelty of generative AI. Now, our tools are failing us, corrupted by data-scraping and hostile to users' consent and IP ownership.

The future of creative work requires a nuanced understanding of the challenges ahead, and a shared vision—writers for writers. We know we're stronger together. And in a rapidly changing world, we know that transparency is paramount.

So… some Ellipsus facts:

We will never include generative AI in Ellipsus.

We will never access your work without explicit consent, sell your data, or use your work for exploitative purposes.

We believe in the strength of creative communities and the stories they tell—and we want to foster a space in which writers can connect and tell their stories in freedom and safety—without compromise.

[yanderedrabbles]

Yandere Sugar Daddy

Money can't buy love, but maybe it doesn't have to.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who's very nouveau riche. Who has the wealth of the elites but none of their good breeding.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who's awfully young for someone so wealthy. Barely out of college when his tech startup went public and the cash started pouring in.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who is still painfully awkward around women.

Being a rich man in a big city means there's no shortage of models and influencers vying for his attention. And Yandere! Sugar Daddy never fails to get flustered when they're introduced to him.

Long legs, perfect skin, tiny ski slope noses... They're the kind of girls who wouldn't give him the time of day back in college and suddenly they're running their hands up his chest and whispering that he's just so clever, so accomplished. What guy wouldn't fall for it?

But he can never keep them around for long.

Their interest slowly dies out when he starts rambling about software development and production scale and AI integration. Money is a great motivator but all his girlfriends seem to leave for greener pastures. For millionaires with better social skills and better taste.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who ran into you entirely on accident. The club was too loud, the girls too pretty, the alcohol too rich. He slipped out of VIP and into the street, pressing his forehead against the cool brick and trying not to spew on the new designer shoes his ex persuaded him to get.

And that was when you came into his life. Cool hands on his shoulder and a voice telling him to take a deep breath and drink some of your water.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who looks up at you through his lashes, his face flushed from too much booze and being too near you. He can't fathom it. A girl helping him not because of his cash or connections, but because they're actually a kind person.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who grabs your hand when you turn to go. Your friends are calling to you to stop messing around with random drunks and he manages to slip you his business card, begging you to call him so he can thank you properly.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who wakes up with a killer hangover and your face burned into his eyelids. Who feels his heart jump when he opens his phone and sees a text from you.

Hope your night got better - y/n

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who immediately zooms in on your profile picture. A candid shot but it still makes him blush. Before the morning is over, he's already tracked down your social media.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who pores over every inch of your life. Your job, your studies, your friends...

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who retypes his message at least a dozen times before he finally responds to you. Who invites you to the most exclusive restaurant in the city as a thank you.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who picks you up in the most expensive car he owns. Who smiles a little at the careful way you close the door and buckle your seat belt. You're just as uncomfortable around luxury as he was.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who doesn't expect much from the date. He's learned not to go on tangents about technology and work, but without it he feels lost.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who realises you're more than capable of carrying a conversation. You're energetic and funny and interested in what he has to say. He feels himself opening up to you and before long, he's deep into a rant about data safety and you actually listen to him.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who realises you compliment him. Like a puzzle piece finally slotting into place.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who ends the night with a lipstick stain on his cheek and a big, goofy grin on his face.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who calls you the second he wakes up and invites you to spend the afternoon learning to horse ride.

And when you tell him you have work, he just laughs and tells you he'll triple whatever you're getting paid for the day. You nearly faint when he keeps his word and sends you a deposit worth more than your monthly cheque.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who wants to call you his girlfriend more than anything. His girl. He loves the way it sounds.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who tags along when you go grocery shopping and whips out his card to pay for it all when your back is turned.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who sends you a huge bouquet every week because you once mentioned liking lillies.

And the closer you get, the more time you spend kissing him and curling up in his bed, the more he spends on you.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who uses spring break to take you on a tour of the Mediterranean. Who rents out entire villas and chateaus to impress you.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who has your birthday dress custom made by an actual high fashion house. Who zips you up and kisses your neck and says he's never met a more beautiful girl.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who spends shareholder meetings daydreaming about you. Who has to pinch himself to stay focused.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who's helpless to stop himself falling for you. You're so real, so empty of pretence and greed.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who showers you with all the wealth he has and is blind to how uncomfortable it makes you.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who looks at you with a vacant smile when you try and break things off. Who pulls out his phone and sends you a deposit with so many zeros you have to rub your eyes to make sure you're seeing it right. Who asks if that's enough for more of your time or if he should double it.

Do you want a new car? An apartment? He'll give you anything, anything in the world.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who looks like a kicked dog when you say you don't want any of it. You hate feeling indebted to him. You hate feeling like some vapid trophy wife. You hate living off his charity.

He can't understand it. You could work for decades and not afford even a quarter of what he can give you. Is he so unpleasant, so unlovable, that you're wiling to turn your back of a life of luxury?

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who comes up behind you and slams the door shut when you try to leave.

You've always seen him as a nice guy, someone awkward and gentle. But the look in his eyes now makes you question all of it.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy whose voice is a low, broken rasp. He sounds on the verge of tears and on the verge of fury all at once.

You think you can just leave after everything you've been through together? After the fortune he spent trying to make you happy?

No way baby.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who grabs your wrist and yanks you up against him.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who laughs when you threaten to scream. Luxury penthouse, remember? Totally sound proofed. Totally private. No one gets in or out without his permission.

It's just you and him, like it should have been from the beginning.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who squeezes your wrist hard enough to hurt. Who kisses you so rough you cut your lips on your teeth.

Yandere! Sugar Daddy who yanks at the pretty dress that he bought you. You want to be an ungrateful bitch? You want to throw his kindness back in his face? Oh, he's going to teach you a lesson.

You fucking owe him.

And he's going to use your body until that debt is paid.

[feminist-space]

A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine

by Amanda Bachman

"Hey team. It’s your CEO. I know your time is valuable, so I’ll cut right to the chase: It’s come to my attention that some of you have been bad-mouthing the Giant Plagiarism Machine™.

I’d like to remind you that our company policy is pro–Plagiarism Machine™. We’re a tech-forward, future-oriented company that doesn’t shy away from the promise of new innovation—even if that innovation is a Giant Plagiarism Machine™ that copy-pastes existing innovation into fake sentient sentences.

Lately, it feels like some of you aren’t the techno-optimists I took you to be. You’ve been heard uttering slurs like “I’m worried about my job stability” and “I just don’t think it’s positive for humankind,” neither of which sounds remotely optimistic or techno. I’ve even heard shocking reports of teams failing to incorporate plagiarism into their processes, because—I can’t believe I have to repeat this—“it’s not helpful.”

Team, hear me when I say that this is harassment, and it must end. Put yourself in your coworker’s shoes—say, a coworker with really nice, designer footwear, who has invested their personal fortune into the Giant Plagiarism Machine™, along with other intellectual-property-theft futures. Imagine how that coworker (could be anyone!) might feel working alongside such Negative Nancies.

Folks, that’s just not who we are. This is and has always been a company of risk-takers who are unafraid to move fast and break things. Or at least, that’s what I thought, until a bunch of you started bringing up the many merits of proceeding cautiously and keeping things unbroken.

It just really comes as a shock that such accomplished intellectuals, who’ve spent their entire careers pushing the upper bounds of human achievement, could be judgy about a machine that runs the entirety of human imagination through a shredder and glues together what comes out.

I guess I understand. I, too, was once a little skeptical of the Giant Plagiarism Machine™. But that was before I attended The Conference for Big Boy Business Owners™. Here, I learned that my fellow titans of industry have been re-orging to “leverage plagiarism” and “minimize thought-waste.”

It was at that very same conference that I learned critical thinking takes up 20 percent, sometimes 30 percent, of company time. It’s clear to me that some of you are not focused on the profit potential of outsourcing all of our thinking to a machine capable of remixing thoughts that have come before.

And sure, most of you are hired for your intellectual capabilities. But you don’t need to worry about losing your jobs to the Giant Plagiarism Machine™. As I always say, people are more powerful than plagiarism. (At least until the next economic downturn, during which I will quietly decide that, hey, maybe plagiarism was the dark horse all along.)

The way I see it, we’re family. It really does disappoint me that so many brilliant colleagues—whose genuine breakthroughs I’ve profited from for years—would be so quick to condemn this newer, stupider way that I and others like me can make money off your life’s work, through stealing.

So as we move forward, I want to hear a real turnaround in attitudes, troops!

Because, at the end of the day, you don’t really have a choice."