[Plura-list] AI solipsists and AI cynics

[Cory Doctorow]

Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/24/supplemental-income/

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->

Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/enshittification/cory-doctorow/9781836743750

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->

Today's links

* AI solipsists and AI cynics: You don't have to believe that AI "works" to believe that it's a good investment.

* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

* Object permanence: Malware v stolen computer; Industrial material made from old coffee and melted cups; Austro-Germany's weird tunnels; Health data v Silicon Valley; Amusement parks v load-balancing.

* Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.

* 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.

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->

🏯 AI solipsists and AI cynics

As a *technology*, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:

https://www.normaltech.ai/

As a destructive economic pathology, AI is *extraordinary*. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money - over $1.4T, most of that in the past year - on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI *can't do the jobs* it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town.

In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed. What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp:

https://gizmodo.com/trump-on-data-centers-you-cant-fight-it-you-have-to-go-with-it-2000790014

This is just one of the many negative effects of AI that can be traced to the scale of the bubble. Were it not for the imperative to turn more than a trillion dollars of losses into a profit, we would not have the aggressive, site-destroying scraping epidemic. Nor would we see AI crammed into every part of every product and service we use. And of course, in the absence of the investment bubble, businesses wouldn't be firing productive workers and replacing them with defective chatbots.

The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference. AI's investor story is an incoherent tangle of predictions about AI's future, ranging from the outlandish ("Once we spend enough money, AI will become God and solve all our problems, including our profitability crisis") to the dystopian ("The majority of jobs in the economy will be done by our chatbots, and the employers who previously employed those workers will split the wage savings with us").

None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over *trillions* to finance this bubble?

I have previously written about one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real. How could they? Achieving billionairehood requires that you inflict pain on vast numbers of people. If you truly believed that those people were as real as you are, you'd never be able to look yourself in the mirror. Whether it's Leona Helmsley's claim that "only the little people pay taxes," or Elon Musk's habit of calling people who disagree with him "NPCs," the whole ideological project of billionaireism is shot through with a kind of solipsism:

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

This is true even in one-on-one encounters: for the Epstein Class, the children raped on his island weren't fully real - certainly not as real as their own children. It's even more true for the people that billionaires experience as statistical artifacts, such as Jeff Bezos's vast army of drivers and warehouse workers, with their sky-high on-the-job injury rates and the everyday indignity of their piss-bottles. It gets worse for social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg, for whom AI's principal appeal is the prospect of ending socializing on social media, swapping your mulish friends for pliable chatbots who will organize their interactions with you to maximize your platform usage and thus the number of ads you see:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/19/billionaire-solipsism/#sirius-cybernetics

I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that *other* people will believe in AI.

This is a well-established investment principle. As Keynes wrote, the point of investing isn't necessarily to pick the most beautiful contestant to win the beauty contest - it's to pick the contestant that the *other judges* will hand the crown to:

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

In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most - you get rich by identifying the businesses that *other investors* will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares *after* the price spike, but *before* anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than *you*."

 From the perspective of a cynical AI investor, the question isn't, "Can AI do your job?" The question is, "Can an AI salesman convince your boss that an AI can do your job?" So long as enough bosses are convinced to fire workers and replace them with AI, AI valuation will continue to climb, and if they time the market right, they can get out before those valuations crash. This proposition gets even sweeter if the CEO of the AI company is in bed with financial regulators and stock exchanges, and can force your financial advisor to buy his worthless AI stock with "little people's" retirement savings:

https://fortune.com/2026/06/13/spacex-stock-index-funds-passive-investing-401k-nasdaq-100-russell/

A bet that bosses will fire workers and replace them with AI is a *good* wager. Bosses are absolute suckers for this scam. Bosses *hate* the fact that they can't translate their plans into action without first having a series of ego-shattering confrontations with workers who actually know how to do things, who insist that those plans are illegal, stupid, impossible or will kill people:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

For these bosses, AI is the chance to wire the toy steering wheel they play with all day directly into the corporate drive-train. With enough AI slaves, the boss can run the company all on their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people

In other words, you don't need to be a solipsist to bet on AI. It is sufficient to believe that *bosses* are solipsists, who can be relied upon to empty the corporate coffers in exchange for worker-replacing magic beans.

This is true in many scam sectors. I'm sure that most of the people who finance the supplements that Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan hawk understand that they're just a way to give yourself *very* expensive piss. They don't have to believe supplements work to believe that there is an army of desperate and credulous young men who will give *anything* for the promise they dangle.

Likewise, you don't have to believe that Gwyneth Paltrow can help women "regulate their periods" and "correct their hormonal imbalances" by selling them rocks to stuff in their vaginas. You just have to believe that between patriarchy-induced body shame and patriarchy-driven medical neglect, there's an army of desperate women out there who will buy those rocks and risk their lives by sticking them inside their bodies:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181225035739/https://www.vogue.com/article/goop-jade-yoni-egg-lawsuit-gwyneth-paltrow-vaginal-pelvic-floor-health

AI is even worse than vagina-rocks, of course. When the bubble bursts, when the seven AI companies that make up 35% of the S&P 500 tank, when a third of the US stock market is vaporized overnight, our governments will reflexively turn to austerity, the go-to response to every financial crisis. Austerity is fascism's best recruiting tool:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs

When the AI bubble bursts, the defective chatbots that replaced skilled workers will disappear with it, leaving us scrambling to get that work done after the workers who understood it have retrained, retired, or exited the workforce. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

Long after the AI bubble bursts, we'll be dealing with its catastrophic carbon emissions. The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't up for debate. Once we sink enough therms into the sea, we are losing the ice-caps.

AI is an ordinary technology, but the AI bubble *is* extraordinary: extraordinarily toxic and extraordinarily dangerous. The source of that danger is financiers, and they are motivated by a mix of solipsism and a belief in *other people's* solipsism. For them, the most exciting investment hypothesis is that "hell is other people":

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/


->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->

🏯 Hey look at this

* Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here's how to do it https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your

* Trump BBC Defamation Lawsuit Backfires Big-Time—With Subpoenas Coming https://newrepublic.com/post/213372/trump-bbc-defamation-lawsuit-backfires-subpoenas-financial-info

* Google burning through cash with spiralling AI costs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c235n47g8g8o

* A laid-off journalist started his own news site. Facebook AI decided he was fake https://eu.indystar.com/story/news/local/2026/07/21/a-blow-to-local-news-facebook-ai-calls-real-indiana-journalist-fake/90983530007/

* Washington Still Ignores Airline Monopolies https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/washington-still-ignores-airline

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->

🏯 Object permanence

#25yrsago Stolen, infected computer transmits its location by virus spamming owner's address book https://slashdot.org/story/01/07/25/1510213/tracking-a-thief-via-the-sircam-virusa

#15yrsago Çurface: an industrial surface made from compressed coffee and melted coffee cup https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/25/curface-an-industrial-surface-made-from-compressed-coffee-and-melted-coffee-cups/

#15yrsago Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1: Android iPad-killer is a poorly thought-through disappointment https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/25/why-samsung-galaxy-tab-is-meh

#15yrsago Strange tunnels of Austro-Germany https://web.archive.org/web/20120621155245/https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hideouts-or-sacred-spaces-experts-baffled-by-mysterious-underground-chambers-a-775348.html

#15yrsago BitCoin alternative: distributed, but not decentralized cash https://www.links.org/files/distributed-currency.pdf

#10yrsago Bruce Schneier on the coming IoT security dumpster-fire https://web.archive.org/web/20160725221959/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-internet-of-things-will-cause-the-first-ever-large-scale-internet-disaster

#10yrsago Our public health data is being ingested into Silicon Valley’s gaping, proprietary maw https://web.archive.org/web/20170917070322/http://www.nature.com/news/stop-the-privatization-of-health-data-1.20268

#5yrsago Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/25/now-youve-got-two-problems-part-iii/
   

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->

🏯 Upcoming appearances

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

* Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

* Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

* Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

* London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

* South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->

🏯 Recent appearances

* Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE

* Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA

* Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc

* How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell)
https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919

* AI Won't Replace You... But This Might (Deep Focus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->

🏯 Latest books

* "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/

* "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

* "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

* "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->

🏯 Colophon

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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->

🏯 How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X