Plus: Wedding Brain, news hustlers, the importance of talking to strangers and the best restaurant bread in America
#762: One weird trick to make new friends
Plus: Dubai influencers, cultural time and the "most uplifting corner" of the internet
#784: The absurdity of the apocalypse
Plus: repayment avoidance, the death of “hello,” and a Cinderella story for the algorithmic era
#769: Nothing you see online is true
Clipping as emergent online literacy, the women self-injecting bootleg Botox and the woes of Facebook nanny groups
#773: Regressing to the mean
Plus: slop wildlife, the post-American internet and AI for emotional labor
#764: It's been a year
Plus: phone poems, low-friction friends and the decline of online travel recs
AI is becoming a shopping channel: report
And 34% of shoppers now use the tech
Pluralistic: AI and the fatfinger economy (02 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Have you noticed that all the buttons you click most frequently to invoke routine, useful functions in your device have been moved, and their former place is now taken up by a curiously butthole-esque icon that summons an unwanted AI?
#760: Gambling the future into existence
Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"
Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:
233. "The Illusion of Thinking" — Thoughts on This Important Paper
This is a fantastic paper. I just love it. tl;dr AI is not human. Anthropomorphization has been bad for AI, LLMs, and Chat. Clippy walked so today's AI could run.
#783: The end of spoken conversation
Plus: Pandora Radio, birthday mania and the “perimenopause industrial complex”
Is AI ruining… fashion?
There are compelling reasons to believe that slop is no longer just limited to the internet. From AI design tools to trend scraping and fast fashion… This video makes a compelling argument that AI plays a role in why so few fashion brands have unique identities anymore. [Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaxXspZQYkc]
“Just Send us Pictures of Your feet”: Consent and Biometric Extraction in the AI Supply Chain, by James Oyange
The boundary between labour and personal resource has disappeared: the human body becomes raw material.
#777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines
Plus: the physicality of data, the second coming of froyo, and the rise of "dopamine sites"
Brands Adopt ‘No AI’ Disclaimers to Stand Out Amid the Slop
Marketers move to get ahead of growing consumer skepticism by labeling content that doesn’t use AI.
"AI" and Productivity
[I keep bringing these up on Bluesky, so I think it’s time to gather them up and make a post out of them.] This is a collection of articles...