Book club and AI adventures, age of bespokeness, study groups, new rules of engagement
Revenge of the Dilettantes
Book club and AI adventures, age of bespokeness, study groups, new rules of engagement
AI, Artifice, And Authenticity
The era of badly-automated homogenized engagement slop is upon us. I desperately want to believe there's a renaissance for authenticity on the other end.
StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space...
The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem
Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here.
Pluralistic: Kickstarting “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (14 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
My next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, will be out in about a month – and (once again) Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform refuses to carry it, and so (once again) I'm pre-selling the audio, ebook and print edition in a Kickstarter campaign that proves that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them:
Playbooks — Renaissance Philanthropy – A brighter future for all through science, technology, and innovation
Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language defines 253 methods for constructing beautiful and practical designs at every scale, from cities to rooms.
How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots
Sci-fi author/tech journalist Cory Doctorow on his new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.
Claude Code 27: Research and Publishing Are Now Two Different Things
Some Claude Code fan fiction about the economics of publishing with AI agents set in the very near future
Reading List: AI and the Future of Human Autonomy
Open-source reading list from a discussion group hosted by the Liberty Fund
Moltbook was peak AI theater
The viral social network for bots reveals more about our own current mania for AI as it does about the future of agents.
Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
...so I vibe-coded a tool for finding more of them
» How Jordan Mechner Made a Different Sort of Interactive Movie (or, The Virtues of Restraint) The Digital Antiquarian
One can learn much about the state of computer gaming in any given period by looking to the metaphors its practitioners are embracing. In the early 1980s, when interfaces were entirely textual and graphics crude or nonexistent, text adventures like those of Infocom were heralded as the vanguard of a new interactive literature destined to augment or entirely supersede non-interactive books. That idea peaked with the mid-decade bookware boom, when just about every entertainment-software publisher (and a few traditional book publishers) were rushing to sign established authors and books to interactive projects. It then proceeded to collapse just as quickly under the weight of its own self-importance when the games proved less compelling and the public less interested than anticipated.
AI, Ethics, and Society — Home
We read a lot of AI books so you don’t have to
“Because every camp needs a book right now”
