Pluralistic: Which jobs can be replaced with AI? (06 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Society
AI Is A Money Trap
In the last week, we’ve had no less than three different pieces asking whether the massive proliferation of data centers is a massive bubble, and though they, at times, seem to take the default position of AI’s inevitable value, they’ve begun to sour on the idea that
Pluralistic: Good ideas are popular (07 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
August 5, 2025: surviving enshittification
Everyone’s offering their thoughts on enshittification these days. I notice this phenomenon…seems like there are conversations that go on which I tap into for a bit before the move alon…
Mastercard Claims NSFW Game Bans Aren’t From Them, Valve Explains How Mastercard Launders Its Control
This whole attempted censorship of adult games on gaming platforms is becoming a thing. Collective Shout—a group out of Australia that wraps itself in a feminist flag while behaving like the religi…
Pluralistic: Bragging about replacing coders with AI is a sales-pitch (05 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
On Additive and Extractive Technologies - Cal Newport
A reader recently sent me a Substack post they thought I might like. “I bought my kids an old-school phone to keep smartphones out of ... Read more
When Anti-Star Trek Meets Brazil
Roxanne Shirazi, a librarian at CUNY, recently commented on the AI hype in her field: I attended a library vendor AI demo/upsell today and I wish I could explain to them that everything they are selling could be achieved by hiring like two more people in our library. And yet this entire team was dedicated...
Pluralistic: AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot (04 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Small repairs
Drinking Sunday coffee in the hyper-normal
The Sun Is Rising
But Today Doesn't Feel Like Yesterday
July 30, 2025 - Internet Archive Europe
‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse
An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished
CSIRO posts AI-fake climate article with made-up quotes
Cosmos is — or was — a popular science magazine published by the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. David Ho is an oceanographer at the University of Hawai’i. Cosmos posted an articl…
Pluralistic: AI’s pogo-stick grift (02 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Network tokens, the payment tech you've never heard of
I very rarely talk about payments on this blog, but every once in a while I get to talk about something I think might be interesting: network tokens!
Who has my card number?
Many years ago, merchants selling products online and in person were handling your card details directly. That
Stop funding the wrong future
A manifesto for funding AI-native nonprofits
Pluralistic: Delta’s AI-based price-gouging (30 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: You can’t fight enshittification (31 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
COVID Contrarians Are Wrong About Sweden
Trying to ‘let it rip’ in early 2020 was a disaster.
The Fulcrum of the Gaslight
Why False Equivalence Is One of Democracy’s Most Dangerous Lies
How Much Money Do OpenAI And Anthropic Actually Make?
Hello and welcome to the latest premium edition of Where's Your Ed At, I appreciate any and all of your subscriptions. I work very hard on these, and they help pay for the costs of running Ghost and, well, my time investigating different things. If you're on the fence, subscribe!
Paradox of ambient intelligence: between certainty and shadows
Weeknotes 350 - Can AI truly perform critical thinking as it does not have a clue? How to bring in humbleness through our own interactions? This and more from last week's news on human-AI-thing collabs.
Financial Censorship and the Love Affair Between Payment Processors and Anti-Porn Campaigners
Valve Corporation recently came under pressure from payment processors to purge Steam, the popular PC gaming storefront, of “certain kinds of adult-only content.” The news rippled across tech …
Pluralistic: Boss-politics antitrust and the MAGA crackup (29 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
How Private Equity Killed the American Dream
In her new book “Bad Company,” journalist Megan Greenwell chronicles how private equity upended industries from health care to local news—and the ways workers are fighting back.
A 500-Kilogram Metal Ring Plummeted Over Kenya, Confirming Long-Held Suspicions - Paris 2018 News
On December 30, 2024, a stunning event captured the attention of both locals and space experts when a massive metal ring crashed from the sky into a Kenyan village southeast of Nairobi. The 2.5-meter diameter object, weighing approximately 500 kilograms, landed in a field without causing injuries but immediately sparked…
The Pentagon Won’t Track Troops Deployed on U.S. Soil. So We Will.
Pentagon press releases say 20,000 federal troops have deployed to support ICE across the country. The real number may be markedly higher.
Pluralistic: How twiddling enshittifies your brain (28 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
DOGE Goons Use AI to Delete Hundreds of Federal Regulations
One staffer at an agency where the deregulation tool was tested said that it made several errors.