Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)

Naomi Kritzer's *Obstetrix* is a new, tense thriller in the mode of Atwood's *Handmaid's Tale* and Alderman's *The Power*; it's a beautifully turned, claustrophobic horror novel about an obstetrician who's been kidnapped by a Christian cult obsessed with fertility:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250423375/obstetrix/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/09/deliver-us/#kritzer

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Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Delusion as a service; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/04/mission-space/

#Pluralistic

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"The values described in Claude’s constitution sound very nice, but that hardly matters; it’s dishonest to suggest that Claude is capable of moral reasoning, because it’s not."

-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/

"The only reason to have an LLM emit sentences like 'I understand' is to make it more appealing than a search engine and increase the likelihood that a user will return; that is, it’s another way of maximizing customer engagement."

-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/

Very pleased to see that ENSHITTIFICATION won the @Locusmag Award for Best Nonfiction last night! https://locusmag.com/2026/05/2026-locus-awards-winners/

The "Third Way" in liberal politics involves *saying* things that working people love, but *doing* things that sociopathic plutocrats love. It works ...right up until voters notice that you're not *doing* the things. That realisation breeds cynicism and fury and paves the way for fascist strongmen.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/30/rupture/#deeds-not-words

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I don't care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other people. Not because other people are horrible - quite the opposite! Other people are *wonderful*, but boy are they ever *stubborn*.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb

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From boardgames to romance, team sports to movement politics, business ideas to construction projects, there's so much important, enjoyable and essential stuff you can't do alone. But other people insist on having their own priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit your priorities.

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Our species has put a lot of work into resolving this conundrum. Not only did we evolve a whole brain structure - the neocortex - that helps us understand others' perspectives, but we also evolved many *social* structures (like laws and teams and governments and families and committees and bureaucracies) to help us coordinate with others to do superhuman things (that is, things that exceed the capacity of a single human).

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These structures are imperfect, but they're better than the alternative: coercion. Persuading others is not without its pitfalls, but compared to forcing others to bend to your will, "persuasion" is the hands-down favorite.

Not for everyone, though. There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than yours.

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We call most of those people "toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief.

But there's another group of people who carry this belief into adulthood. If they're of regular means, we call those people "bullies." However, if they're sufficiently wealthy, we call them "billionaires" (this is the same force that allows money to transmute a "hoarder" into a "collector").

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Just lately though, we've come up with a new solution to the problem of hell being other people. Rather than coercing other people into arranging their affairs to suit our needs, we've devoted *trillions* of dollars to *replacing* people with pliant chatbots, in the hopes that these chatbots can be made so effective that we can just dispense with other people altogether.

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Many everyday people have replaced their romantic partners with chatbots ("AI boyfriends"/"AI girlfriends"), and they've formed active communities to revel in the delights of pursuing love with someone who demands no moral consideration or compromise, glorying in a world of love without lovers:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16215328-e1-love-bots

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These are foundationally solipsistic exercises, fantasy worlds in which *you* are the only *real* person and everyone else is a bot, an NPC, a phantom. AI has democratized solipsism, a privilege that was once the exclusive purview of billionaires, whose belief that most other people weren't fully *real* let them inflict the kind of mass pain on millions that is a prerequisite for amassing a truly vast fortune:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

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There's a whole community of people who have stopped listening to music created by people in favor of made-to-order slop, exulting in a world of music without musicians:

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937059/nobody-wants-to-tell-me-why-they-only-listen-their-own-suno-slop

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Jeff Bezos built the world's most advanced automated warehouses, and the workers in those warehouses are seriously injured at 300% of the national rate, and they are not allowed pee breaks (nevertheless, these workers unreasonably insist on metabolizing fluids and expelling the waste). The automation and the injuries aren't unrelated facts.

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No surprise then that billionaires were easy marks for AI hustlers, who promised the possibility of a world without people, where an army of "agents" could do the jobs that presently demand the contributions of unreasonable human beings who refuse to acknowledge that your priorities trump theirs.

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The inhumane treatment is *caused* by automation, because when you commit hundreds of billions to automation capex, you need to *work those assets* to recoup the investment. In a human/machine collaboration, humans will *always* be the bottlenecks. To maximize return on automation, you need to drive the human peripherals that serve the machines at the absolute limit of human endurance. Jeff Bezos's machines don't just *use* humans, they *use them up*:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

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Billionaires poured trillions into AI because they are obsessed with the fantasy of a world without people. Mark Zuckerberg would like to replace your on-platform friends with chatbots. Sure, your friends are the reason you're stuck on his platforms, but your friends are stubborn and thus suboptimal.

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Travis McGee on Enshittifcation (1974)