Best of pluralistic.net on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
11 stories from pluralistic.net have been shared on Kiwi News since 12 December 2023, with 40 upvotes and 11 comments in total. The latest was shared on 11 November 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing
Cory Doctorow argues that when companies can remotely and irreversibly downgrade products people have paid for, buying stops meaning ownership, and that the blame lies with the firms that design such features. He recalls telling Chris Anderson in 2004 that Wired should warn readers that DRM-encumbered device features could be revoked without notice, and he cites Adobe's loss of its Pantone deal in 2022, which turned colors in users' existing artwork black unless they paid a monthly fee. He also describes Warner removing TV shows that PlayStation owners had bought, with no refunds, after it ended its deal with Sony's store.
- McLuhan lecture on enshittification
Cory Doctorow's Marshall McLuhan lecture at Transmediale in Berlin argues that platforms decay through a three-stage process he calls enshittification, which he describes as his theory of how the internet was colonized by platforms. He illustrates the stages with Facebook: first serving users well, then abusing users to benefit business customers, and finally extracting value for shareholders. He says the current wave of decline is driven by changes in the environment rather than by new leaders or interest-rate policy, since Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Google began enshittifying before the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy. The excerpt ends with four constraints he names on enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help, and the fear that users will install ad-blockers.
- Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader
Cory Doctorow argues that the most effective individual step against enshittification is switching to an RSS reader, since it bypasses algorithms, ads and tracking while letting readers follow nearly any website, newsletter or social account. He says RSS feeds exist for news sites like Wired, Substacks, Mastodon, Bluesky and Hacker News, and that a reader can export feeds as an OPML file and move them to another app in one click. He adds that widespread RSS use would reduce publishers' dependence on platforms, though he also says a movement is still needed to solve the broader problems.
- The AI that we’ll have after AI
Cory Doctorow argues that when the AI bubble pops, the useful residue will be cheap GPUs sold at firesale prices, skilled applied statisticians looking for work, and open source models that can be optimized to run on modest hardware. He contends that AI companies spend heavily to signal investment rather than to build products, citing a $45b/year industry-wide revenue figure against spending of most of a trillion dollars in capital expenditures. He points to DeepSeek, whose launch knocked $589b off Nvidia's stock price, and to Pete Warden's demo of a voice assistant running on a chip costing "low single digit dollars."
- Pluralistic: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox
Cory Doctorow argues that the paradox of AI users, where some find it miserable and others delight in it, is explained by the difference between "centaurs," humans assisted by machines, and "reverse centaurs," machines that use humans as assistants. He cites a freelance writer who was tasked with producing a Chicago Sun-Times summer reading guide, later found to contain nonexistent books, as a reverse centaur whose job was to take the blame for AI mistakes. Doctorow describes his own use of the open source Whisper transcription model as a centaur experience, and he argues that the AI bubble will leave behind useful open source models even as its collapse causes serious damage.
- Pluralistic: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh
Cory Doctorow argues that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists with no remaining growth markets, and that its collapse will cause a severe economic crisis. He describes AI companies as unprofitable, with "dogshit unit-economics" according to Ed Zitron, and says the money behind them will eventually stop flowing. He cites a Wall Street Journal analysis calling the AI bubble vastly larger than any previous one, Bain & Co's estimate that the sector needs $2 trillion in new revenue by 2030, and an MIT paper finding that 95% of companies that tried AI saw nothing or a loss.
- Bluesky creates the weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause
Cory Doctorow argues that Bluesky's new terms of service contain a binding arbitration waiver that is baffling and nonsensical, and that the service is not yet enshittification-resistant. He says he cannot work out what the carve-out for claims of fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence causing death or personal injury means, and that the ban on class actions could let the company avoid large liability. He notes that Bluesky has made major progress on federation, with the cost of running a full Bluesky stack falling from tens of millions of dollars per year to tens of dollars per month.
- Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good
Cory Doctorow argues that AI search will not be good even if Google's AI is excellent, because AI search makes it far too easy for Google to cheat users and publishers. He says Google's search results have degraded, with AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage, and that AI summaries create opportunities to charge publishers for preferential placement. He attributes Google's ability to act without consequence to the end of competitive, regulatory, and worker pressure, and he cites Madeleine Clare Elish's description of AI as a "moral crumple zone" that offers plausible deniability.
- Pluralistic: Humans are not perfectly vigilant
Cory Doctorow argues that AI products fail in high-stakes work because humans cannot stay perfectly vigilant while checking machine output, so "human in the loop" systems tend to turn workers into reverse centaurs. He says the AI bubble depends on claims that low-stakes tasks will pay back training costs, that high-stakes tasks can be cheapened by pairing AI with a human operator, or that more training data will stop hallucinations. He cites a security researcher who uploaded a fake package named after a library that AI-written code repeatedly referenced, and thousands of developers downloaded it. He also cites qntm's observation that reviewing code is harder than writing it, and the TSA's record of missing guns and bombs in tests.
- Checking in on the state of Amazon’s chickenized reverse-centaurs
Cory Doctorow argues that Amazon has created a "chickenized reverse centaur," a new form of labor exploitation in which workers fund and operate a system they cannot control. Delivery Service Platform owners borrow heavily to buy vans outfitted to Amazon's specifications, then get paid $0.10, $0.50, or sometimes $0.00 per parcel at Amazon's discretion. The article draws on the DAIR Institute's "Driven Down" report, by Adrienne Williams, Alex Hanna and Sandra Barcenas, which describes drivers monitored by at least nine apps, with penalties for routes, braking and photos they cannot fully know in advance.
- AI is a WMD
Cory Doctorow argues that AI is a weapon of mass destruction for the internet commons, because it lets spammers and bad actors flood the web at scale. He points to Advon, a company whose writers are replaced by chatbots, and reports that Maggie Harrison Dupré of Futurism found evidence Advon uses AI to produce content for clients including Yoga Journal and the LA Times. He also says Google's weak policing, along with Pixsy's automated legal threats against Creative Commons users, shows how commons get destroyed, and he contrasts this with Elinor Ostrom's research showing communities can manage commons.