One thing he didn’t mention is Superannuation plans. If your plan is investing in AI ask them for an alternative or change providers if you can A lot of this shitshow is backed by retirement investments.
He really should have called it a “Minotaur” instead of a “reverse-centaur”.
I couldn’t get through Enshittification. It was like reading a reference book after the first half. That said, I look forward to this one.
I’m a simple man. I see Cory, I upvote. Then I read the text.
AI really appeals to a fantasy that I think all of us have to some extent but that powerful people really have, of a world without people in it—because hell really is other people.
This. The AI industry is pushing super hard to make it work, to replace human workers. It’s failing, as AI work is crappier than human work and costs way, way more than human work, but there’s that Ayn Rand fantasy that the ownership class can just shut out the worker class and create an utopia.
I’m reminded of the car factory in which the upper management fired the striking workers assuming they could do the work themselves, only to find that the unskilled labor actually took skill.
I bet Elon or some other rich creep read Atlas Shrugged and thought it was profound lol
Thiel for sure thinks he’s John Galt.
In the early 2010s, there was a lot of Ayn Rand fans in the Republican party. I think in the 2012 Republican Primary, the favorite book question either yielded Atlas Shrugged or the Reagan biography.
Eventually, as Steven Colbert would note in The Colbert Report, none of them were chosen, and the Republican party decided reluctantly to support Mitt Romney.
I’m constantly struck by the imagery of the giant warrior from Nausicaa. There is a timeline or a reality where this worked, but they couldn’t help themselves. They woke the beast up the second it was even halfway possible and now it’s tearing itself apart in self-destructive blasts because the whole thing was under-cooked (and probably the completely wrong direction to begin with).
If there’s any consolation here it’s that hopefully this has soured enough people on the idea that a second effort won’t even get off the ground. I hope …
You can also buy and download books / audiobooks from his website https://craphound.com/ some of them are pay as you want.
For those wondering, the ebooks for Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free, With a Little Help from My Friends, and Context are pay what you’d like.
He talked about the book in his interview on Democracy Now! this morning too.
absolutely stunning to hear him talk, he is an exceptional man
My friend was blathering on about Cory Doctorow two decades ago and I knew the name, had maybe read a little bit. I was kind of annoyed how ofter he brought him up. Man did he come out ahead of me on that. This guy articulates the ills of society so well.
I like how Doctorow is taking guardianship for his language through no bullshit tolerance.
Just start buying AI from Chinese companies. Cancel your anthropic and chatgpt - they will suffocate quickly.
Top tip: Getting computer-generated wrong answers in Chinese is just as useful as getting computer-generated wrong answers in English.
You don’t even have to read Chinese!
