Astrophysicist Adam Becker knows a few things about science and technology – enough to show, in a new book called More Everything Forever that the claims that tech bros make about near-future space colonies, brain uploading, and other skiffy subjects are all nonsense dressed up as prediction:
Pluralistic: The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it) (23 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I'm only a few chapters into Bill McKibben's stupendous new book Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization and I already know it's going to change my outlook forever:
The Same Old Fantasies Behind AI and New Technology
A review of Adam Becker, “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity” (Basic Books, 2025).
Pluralistic: The enshittification multiverse (27 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's official: you have my consent and enthusiastic blessing to apply "enshittification" to things that aren't digital platforms! Semantic drift is good, actually:
Pluralistic: Are the means of computation even seizable? (14 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Something's very different in tech. Once upon a time, every bad choice by tech companies – taking away features, locking out mods or plugins, nerfing the API – was countered, nearly instantaneously, by someone writing a program that overrode that choice.
Pluralistic: William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher (17 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
William Gibson is one of history's most quotable sf writers: "The future is here, it's not evenly distributed"; "Don't let the little fuckers generation-gap you"; "Cyberspace is everting"; and the immortal: "The street finds its own uses for things":
The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Where Do We Go From Here?
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB.
A.I., Mars and Immortality: Are We Dreaming Big Enough? | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Pluralistic: Ad-tech is fascist tech (10 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:
Pluralistic: Ad-tech is fascist tech (10 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:
Pluralistic: Billionaire-proofing the internet; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 5) (14 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
Pluralistic: Billionaire-proofing the internet; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 5) (14 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
Pluralistic: “Open” “AI” isn’t (18 August 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it – chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:
Pluralistic: Every complex ecosystem has parasites (24 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":
All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild
If humans will eventually spread out across the galaxy, then we are among the earliest living beings, with remarkable opportunities to shape the future
Pluralistic: Austerity creates fascism (13 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes our "capital allocators" spend $1.4T on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That's some next-level underpants-gnomery:
The present no longer lasts long enough to be a setting. All fiction is either science fiction or historical fiction. I've been saying this for long enough that even this statement itself is no longer true. The future doesn't last long enough either. All science fiction is now retrofuturism.
