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Have you ever tried programming with a language that uses musical notation? What about a language that never runs programs the same way? What about a language where you write code with photographs? All exist, among many others, in the world of esoteric programming languages, and Daniel Temkin has written a forthcoming book covering 44 of them, some of which exist and are usable to some interpretation of the word “usable.” The book, Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, is out on 23 September, published by MIT Press. I was introduced to Temkin’s work at the yearly Free and Open source Software Developer’s European Meeting (FOSDEM) event in Brussels in February. FOSDEM is typically full of strange and wonderful talks, where the open-source world gets to show its more unusual side. In Temkin’s talk, which I later described to a friend as “the most FOSDEM talk of 2025,” he demonstrated Valence, a programming language that uses eight ancient Greek measuring and numeric symbols. Temkin’s intention with Valence was to emulate the same ambiguity that human language has. This is the complete opposite of most programming languages, where syntax typically tries to be explicit and unambiguous. “Just as you could create an English sentence like, ‘Bob saw the group with the telescope,’ and you can’t quite be sure of whether it’s Bob who has the telescope and he’s seeing the group through it, or if it’s the group that has the telescope,” he says. “What if we wrote code that way so you could write something, and now you have two potential programs? One where Bob has a telescope and one where the group has a telescope.” How Esoteric Languages Spark Creativity Creating a language or an interpreter has often been the proving ground of many engineers and programmers, and esoteric languages are almost as old as non-esoteric ones. Temkin says his current effort has a lot to do with AI-generated code that seeks to do nothing but provide seemingly straight solutions to problems, removing any sense of creativity. Esoteric languages inherently make little sense and frequently serve little purpose, making them conceptually completely counter to AI-generated code and thus often not even understood by them—almost the code equivalent of wearing clothing to confuse facial recognition software. While the syntax of esoteric languages may be hard to understand, the actual programming stack is often wonderfully simple. Temkin believes that part of the appeal is also to explore the complexity of modern programming. “I come back a lot to an essay by Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the Eliza Chatbot, about compulsiveness and code,” he says. “He described ‘the computer bomb,’ the person who writes code and becomes obsessed with getting everything perfect, but it doesn’t work the way they want. The computer is under their control. It’s doing what they’re telling it to do, but it’s not doing what they actually want it to do.” “So they make it more complicated, and then it works the way they want,” Temkin adds. “This is the classic bind in programming. We command the machine when we’re writing code, but how much control do we really have over what happens? I think that we’re now all used to the idea that much of what’s out there in terms of code is broken in some way.” Temkin explored the idea of control in his language Olympus, where the interpreter consists of a series of Greek gods, each of which will do specific things, but only if asked the right way. Temkin’s Olympus language includes an interpreter consisting of Greek gods, which must be asked to do things in the proper way.Daniel Temkin “One example regarding complicating our relationship with the machine and how much we’re in control is my language, Olympus, where code is written to please different Greek gods,” says Temkin. “The basic idea of the language is that you write in pseudo-natural language style, asking various Greek gods to construct code the way that you want it to be. It’s almost as if there’s a layer behind the code, which is the actual code. “You’re not actually writing the code,” Temkin adds. “You’re writing pleas to create that code, and you have to ask nicely. For example, if you call Zeus father of the gods, you can’t call him that again immediately because he doesn’t think you’re trying very hard.” “And then of course, to end a block of code, you have to call on Hades to collect the souls of all the unused variables. And so on,” Temkin says. The History of Esoteric Programming Languages Temkin continues a long-running tradition: esoteric languages date back to the early days of computing, with examples such as INTERCAL (1972), which had cryptic syntax, meaning coders often needed to plead with the compiler to run it. The scene gained momentum in 1993, with Wouter van Oortmerssen’s FALSE, in which most syntax maps to a single character. Despite this, FALSE is a Turing-complete language that allows creating programs as complex as any contemporary programming language. Its syntactical restrictions meant the compiler (which translates the syntax to machine-readable instructions) is only 1 kilobyte, compared to C++ compilers, which were generally hundreds of kilobytes. Exploring further, Chris Pressey wondered why code always had to be written from left to right and created Befunge in 1993. “It took the idea of the single-character commands and said if you’re going to have commands that are only one letter, why do we need to read it left to right?” says Temkin. “Why can’t we have code move a little bit to the right, then turn up, and then go off the page and come up off the bottom and so on?“ So Pressey decided to create a language that would be the most difficult language to build a compiler for,” Temkin continues. “I believe that was the original idea, allowing the code to turn in different directions and flow across the space.” Much of the mid-90s trend coincided with the rise of shareware, the demo scene, and the nascent days of the Internet, when it was necessary to program everything to be as small as possible to share it. “There’s definitely a lot of crossover between these things because they involve this kind of artistry, but also a kind of technical wizardry in showing, ‘Look how much I can do with this really minimal program,’” Temkin says. “What really interested me in esoteric languages specifically is the way that it’s community-based,” Temkin says. “If you make a language, it’s an invitation for other people to use the language. And when you make a language and somebody else shows you what’s possible to do with your language or discovers something new about it that you couldn’t have foreseen on your own.” One of Temkin’s esoteric languages uses a cuneiform script.Daniel Temkin You can play with many of Daniel’s languages on his website, as well as the Esoteric Languages Wiki, which raises the question: In the modern connected age, how does one create a shareable esoteric language? “It’s something that I’ve changed my attitude about over the years,” says Temkin. “Early on, I thought I had to write a serious compiler for my language. But now I think what’s really important is that people across different platforms and spaces can use it. So in general, I try to write everything in JavaScript when I can and have it run in the browser. If I don’t, then I tend to stick with Python as it has the largest user base. But I do get a little bored with those two languages.” “I realize there’s a certain irony there,” Temkin adds.
Belting your favorite song over prerecorded music into a microphone in front of friends and strangers at karaoke is a popular way for people around the world to destress after work or celebrate a friend’s birthday. The idea for the karaoke machine didn’t come from a singer or a large entertainment company but from Nichiden Kogyo, a small electronics assembly company in Tokyo. The company’s founder, Shigeichi Negishi, was singing to himself at work one day in 1967 when an employee jokingly told him he was out of tune. Figuring that singing along to music would help him stay on pitch, Negishi began thinking about how to make that possible. He had the idea to turn one of the 8-track tape decks his company manufactured into what is now known as the karaoke machine. Later that year, he built what would become the first such machine, which he called the Music Box. The 30-centimeter cube housed an 8-track player for four tapes of instrumental recordings and included a microphone to sing into. He sold his machine in 1967 to a Japanese trading company, which then sold it to restaurants, bars, and hotel banquet halls, where they used it as entertainment. The machine was coined karaoke in the 1970s to describe the act of singing along to prerecorded music. The term is a combination of two Japanese words: kara, meaning empty, and okesutora, meaning orchestra. In a few years, dedicated establishments known as karaoke bars began to open across Japan. Today the country has more than 8,000, according to Statista. The karaoke machine has been commemorated as an IEEE Milestone. The dedication ceremony was held in June in the area that houses karaoke booths connected to the Shinagawa Prince Hotel in Tokyo. Negishi’s family attended the event along with IEEE leaders. Negishi died last year at the age of 100. He was grateful that people enjoy karaoke around the world, his son, Akihiro Negishia, said at the ceremony, “though he didn’t imagine it to spread globally when he created it.” Accidentally inventing one of the world’s favorite pastimes Shigeichi Negishi grew up in Tokyo, where his mother ran a tobacco store and his father oversaw regional elections as a government official. After earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from Hosei University in Tokyo, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. He became a prisoner of war and spent two years in Singapore before being released in 1947. He returned to Tokyo and sold cameras for electrical parts manufacturer Olympus Corp. In 1956 he started Nichiden Kogyo, which manufactured and assembled portable radios for the home and car, according to the Engineering and Technology History Wiki entry about the karaoke machine. Negishi would start each morning singing along to the “Pop Songs Without Lyrics” radio show, according to a Forbes article. He typically didn’t sing in the office, but one fateful day he did. Negishi was inspired to engineer one of the 8-track tape decks his company manufactured into what is now known as the karaoke machine An 8-track tape deck can play and record audio using magnetic tape cartridges. Nichiden Kogyo’s Music Box was a 30-centimeter cube with slots to insert four 8-track tapes on the top panel, with control buttons to play, stop, or skip to the next song. Inside each 13-centimeter-long rectangular 8-track cartridge is a loop of almost 1 cm-wide magnetic tape that is coiled around a circular reel, as explained in an EverPresent blog post on the technology. A small motor inside each cartridge pulls the tape across an audio head inside the player, which reads the magnetic patterns and translates them into sound. Each tape had a metal sensing strip that notified a solenoid coil located in the player when a song had ended or if a person pressed the button to switch to the next song, according to an Autodesk Instribules blog post. The coil created a magnetic field when electricity passed through it—which rotated the spindle on which the audio head was mounted to move to the next track on the tape. Each tape could hold about eight songs. Negishi added a microphone amplifier to the player’s top panel, as well as a mixing circuit. The user could adjust the volume of the music and the microphone. He also recorded 20 of his favorite songs onto the tapes and printed out the lyrics on cardstock. He tested the machine by singing a popular ballad, “Mujo no Yume” (“The Heartless Dream”). “It works! That’s all I was thinking,” Negishi told reporter Matt Alt years later, when asked what his thoughts were the first time he tested the Music Box. Alt wrote Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World. In 1969 engineers at Tokyo-based trading company Kokusai Shohin added a coin acceptor to the machine, renaming the Music Box the Sparko Box.Dr. Tomohiro Hase The fees to file a patent were too expensive, according to the ETHW entry, so in 1967 Negishi sold the rights to the machine to Mitsuyoshi Hamasu, a salesman at Kokusai Shohin. The Tokyo-based trading company began selling and leasing the machines by the end of the year. In 1969 engineers at Kokusai Shohin added a coin acceptor to the machine. The company renamed the Music Box the Sparko Box. In six years, about 8,000 units were sold, Hamasu said in an interview about the rise of karaoke. Karaoke became so popular that in the 1980s, venues and bars specializing in soundproofed rooms known as karaoke boxes emerged. Groups could rent the rooms by the hour. Negishi’s family owns the first Music Box he made. It still works. The Milestone plaque recognizing the karaoke machine is on display in front of the former headquarters of Nichiden Kogyo, which Negishi turned into a tobacco shop after he retired. The shop is now owned by his daughter. The plaque reads: “The first karaoke machine was created in 1967 by mixing live vocals with prerecorded accompaniment for public entertainment, leading to its worldwide popularity. Created by Shigeichi Negishi of Nichiden Kogyo, and originally called Music Box (later Sparko Box), it included a mixer, microphone, and 8-track tape player, with a coin payment system to charge the singer. An early operational machine has been displayed at the original company site in Tokyo.” Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world. The IEEE Tokyo Section sponsored the nomination.
Millions of people worldwide have reason to be thankful that Swedish engineer Rune Elmqvist decided not to practice medicine. Although qualified as a doctor, he chose to invent medical equipment instead. In 1949, while working at Elema-Schonander (later Siemens-Elema), in Stockholm, he applied for a patent for the Mingograph, the first inkjet printer. Its movable nozzle deposited an electrostatically controlled jet of ink droplets on a spool of paper. Rune Elmqvist qualified to be a physician, but he devoted his career to developing medical equipment, like this galvanometer.Håkan Elmqvist/Wikipedia Elmqvist demonstrated the Mingograph at the First International Congress of Cardiology in Paris in 1950. It could record physiological signals from a patient’s electrocardiogram or electroencephalogram in real time, aiding doctors in diagnosing heart and brain conditions. Eight years later, he worked with cardiac surgeon Åke Senning to develop the first fully implantable pacemaker. So whether you’re running documents through an inkjet printer or living your best life due to a pacemaker, give a nod of appreciation to the inventive Dr. Elmqvist. The world’s first inkjet printer Rune Elmqvist was an inquisitive person. While still a student, he invented a specialized potentiometer to measure pH and a portable multichannel electrocardiograph. In 1940, he became head of development at the Swedish medical electronics company Elema-Schonander. Before the Mingograph, electrocardiograph machines relied on a writing stylus to trace the waveform on a moving roll of paper. But friction between the stylus and the paper prevented small changes in the electrical signal from being accurately recorded. Elmqvist’s initial design was a modified oscillograph. Traditionally, an oscillograph used a mirror to reflect a beam of light (converted from the electrical signal) onto photographic film or paper. Elmqvist swapped out the mirror for a small, moveable glass nozzle that continuously sprayed a thin stream of liquid onto a spool of paper. The electrical signal electrostatically controlled the jet. The Mingograph was originally used to record electrocardiograms of heart patients. It soon found use in many other fields.Siemens Healthineers Historical Institute By eliminating the friction of a stylus, the Mingograph (which the company marketed as the Mingograf) was able to record more detailed changes of the heartbeat. The machine had three paper-feed speeds: 10, 25, and 50 millimeters per second. The speed could be preset or changed while in operation. RELATED: The Inventions That Made Heart Disease Less Deadly An analog input jack on the Mingograph could be used to take measurements from other instruments. Researchers in disciplines far afield from medicine took advantage of this input to record pressure or sound. Phoneticians used it to examine the acoustic aspects of speech, and zoologists used it to record birdsongs. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, scientists cited the Mingograph in their research papers as an instrument for their experiments. Today, the Mingograph isn’t that widely known, but the underlying technology, inkjet printing, is ubiquitous. Inkjets dominate the home printer market, and specialized printers print DNA microarrays in labs for genomics research, create electrical traces for printed circuit boards, and much more, as Phillip W. Barth and Leslie A. Field describe in their 2024 IEEE Spectrum article “Inkjets Are for More Than Just Printing.” The world’s first implantable pacemaker Despite the influence of the Mingograph on the evolution of printing, it is arguably not Elmqvist’s most important innovation. The Mingograph helped doctors diagnose heart conditions, but it couldn’t save a patient’s life by itself. One of Elmqvist’s other inventions could and did: the first fully implantable, rechargeable pacemaker. The first implantable pacemaker [left] from 1958 had batteries that needed to be recharged once a week. The 1983 pacemaker [right] was programmable, and its batteries lasted several years.Siemens Healthineers Historical Institute Like many stories in the history of technology, this one was pushed into fruition at the urging of a woman, in this case Else-Marie Larsson. Else-Marie’s 43-year-old husband, Arne, suffered from scarring of his heart tissue due to a viral infection. His heart beat so slowly that he constantly lost consciousness, a condition known as Stokes-Adams syndrome. Else-Marie refused to accept his death sentence and searched for an alternative. After reading a newspaper article about an experimental implantable pacemaker being developed by Elmqvist and Senning at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, she decided that her husband would be the perfect candidate to test it out, even though it had been tried only on animals up until that point. External pacemakers—that is, devices outside the body that regulated the heart beat by applying electricity—already existed, but they were heavy, bulky, and uncomfortable. One early model plugged directly into a wall socket, so the user risked electric shock. By comparison, Elmqvist’s pacemaker was small enough to be implanted in the body and posed no shock risk. Fully encased in an epoxy resin, the disk-shaped device had a diameter of 55 mm and a thickness of 16 mm—the dimensions of the Kiwi Shoe Polish tin in which Elmqvist molded the first prototypes. It used silicon transistors to pace a pulse with an amplitude of 2 volts and duration of 1.5 milliseconds, at a rate of 70 to 80 beats per minute (the average adult heart rate). The pacemaker ran on two rechargeable 60-milliampere-hour nickel-cadmium batteries arranged in series. A silicon diode connected the batteries to a coil antenna. A 150-kilohertz radio loop antenna outside the body charged the batteries inductively through the skin. The charge lasted about a week, but it took 12 hours to recharge. Imagine having to stay put that long. In 1958, over 30 years before this photo, Arne Larsson [right] received the first implantable pacemaker, developed by Rune Elmqvist [left] at Siemens-Elema. Åke Senning [center] performed the surgery.Sjöberg Bildbyrå/ullstein bild/Getty Images Else-Marie’s persuasion and persistence pushed Elmqvist and Senning to move from animal tests to human trials, with Arne as their first case study. During a secret operation on 8 October 1958, Senning placed the pacemaker in Arne’s abdomen wall with two leads implanted in the myocardium, a layer of muscle in the wall of the heart. The device lasted only a few hours. But its replacement, which happened to be the only spare at the time, worked perfectly for six weeks and then off and on for several more years. Arne Larsson lived another 43 years after his first pacemaker was implanted. Shown here are five of the pacemakers he received. Sjöberg Bildbyrå/ullstein bild/Getty Images Arne Larsson clearly was happy with the improvement the pacemaker made to his quality of life because he endured 25 more operations over his lifetime to replace each failing pacemaker with a new, improved iteration. He managed to outlive both Elmqvist and Senning, finally dying at the age of 86 on 28 December 2001. Thanks to the technological intervention of his numerous pacemakers, his heart never gave out. His cause of death was skin cancer. Today, more than a million people worldwide have pacemakers implanted each year, and an implanted device can last up to 15 years before needing to be replaced. (Some pacemakers in the 1980s used nuclear batteries, which could last even longer, but the radioactive material was problematic. See “The Unlikely Revival of Nuclear Batteries.”) Additionally, some pacemakers also incorporate a defibrillator to shock the heart back to a normal rhythm when it gets too far out of sync. This lifesaving device certainly has come a long way from its humble start in a shoe polish tin. Rune Elmqvist’s legacy Whenever I start researching the object of the month for Past Forward, I never know where the story will take me or how it might hit home. My dad lived with congestive heart failure for more than two decades and absolutely loved his pacemaker. He had a great relationship with his technician, Francois, and they worked together to fine-tune the device and maximize its benefits. And just like Arne Larsson, my dad died from an unrelated cause. An engineer to the core, he would have delighted in learning about the history of this fantastic invention. And he probably would have been tickled by the fact that the same person also invented the inkjet printer. My dad was not a fan of inkjets, but I’m sure he would have greatly admired Rune Elmqvist, who saw problems that needed solving and came up with elegantly engineered solutions. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the September 2025 print issue. References There is frustratingly little documented information about the Mingograph’s origin story or functionality other than its patent. I pieced together how it worked by reading the methodology sections of various scientific papers, such as Alf Nachemson’s 1960 article in Acta Orthopaedica Scandinavica, “Lumbar Intradiscal Pressure: Experimental Studies on Post-mortem Material”; Ingemar Hjorth’s 1970 article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, “A Comment on Graphic Displays of Bird Sounds and Analyses With a New Device, the Melograph Mona”; and Paroo Nihalani’s 1975 article in Phonetica, “Velopharyngeal Opening in the Formation of Voiced Stops in Sindhi.” Such sources reveal how this early inkjet printer moved from cardiology into other fields. Descriptions of Elmqvist’s pacemaker were much easier to find, with Mark Nicholls’s 2007 profile “Pioneers of Cardiology: Rune Elmqvist, M.D.,” in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, being the main source. Siemens also pays tribute to the pacemaker on its website; see, for example, “A Lifesaver in a Plastic Cup.”
The last time I used a dial-up modem came sometime around 2001. Within just a few years, dial-up had exited my life, never to return. I haven’t even had a telephone line in my house for most of my adult life. But I still feel a strong tinge of sadness to know that AOL is finally retiring the ol’ hobbyhorse. At the end of September, it’s gone. The timeline is almost on-the-nose fitting: The widespread access to the Internet AOL’s service brought in the 1990s is associated with a digital phenomenon called the Eternal September. Before AOL allowed broad access to Usenet—a precursor to today’s online discussion forums—most new users appeared each September, when new college students frequently joined the platform. Thanks to AOL, they began showing up daily starting around September 1993. The fact that AOL’s dial-up is still active in the first place highlights a truism of technology: Sometimes, the important stuff sticks around well after it’s obsolete. Why AOL is ditching dial-up now It’s no surprise that dial-up has lingered for close to a quarter-century. Despite not having needed a dial-up modem myself since the summer of 2001, I was once so passionate about dial-up that I begged to get a modem for my 13th birthday. Modems are hard to shake, and not just because we fondly remember waiting so long for them to do their thing. Originally, the telephone modem was a hack. It was pushed into public consciousness partly by Deaf users who worked around the phone industry’s monopolistic regulations to develop the teletypewriter, a system to communicate over phone lines via text. Along the way, the community invented technologies like the acoustic coupler. To make that hack function, modems had to do multiple conversions in real time—from data to audio and back again, in two directions. As I put it in a piece that compared the modem to the telegraph: The modem, at least in its telephone-based forms, represents a dance between sound and data. By translating information into an aural signal, then into current, then back into an aural signal, then back into data once again, the modulation and demodulation going on is very similar to the process used with the original telegraph, albeit done manually. Modems like this one from U.S. Robotics work by converting data to audio and back again. Jphill19/Wikimedia Commons With telegraphs, the information was input by a person, translated into electric pulses, and received by another person. Modems work the same way, just without human translators. The result of all this back and forth was that modems had to give up a hell of a lot of speed to make this all work. The need to connect over a medium built for audio meant that data was at risk of getting lost over the line. (This is why error correction was an essential part of the modem’s evolution; often data needed to be shared more than once to ensure it got through. Without error correction, dial-up modems would be even slower.) Remember that sound? It marked many users’ first experience getting online.AdventuresinHD/YouTube Telephone lines were a hugely inefficient system for data because they were built for voice and heavily compressed audio. Voices are still clear and recognizable after being compressed, but audio compression can wreak havoc on data connections. Plus, there was the problem of line access. With a call, you could not easily share a connection. That meant you couldn’t make phone calls while using dial-up, leading to some homes getting a second line. And at the Internet Service Provider level, having multiple lines got very complex, very fast. The phone industry knew this, but its initial solution, ISDN, did not take off among mainstream consumers. (A later one, DSL, had better uptake, and is likely one of the few Internet options rural users currently have.) In some areas of the United States, dial-up remains the best option—the result of decades of poor investment in Internet infrastructure. So the industry moved to other solutions to get consumers Internet—coaxial cable, which was already widespread because of cable TV, and fiber, which wasn’t. The problem is, coax never reached quite as far as telephone wires did, in part because cable television wasn’t technically a utility in the way electricity or water were. In recent years, many attempts have been made to classify Internet access as a public utility, though the most recent one was struck down by an appeals court earlier this year. The public utility regulation is important. The telephone had struggled to reach rural communities in the 1930s, and only did so after a series of regulations, including one that led to the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, were put into effect. So too did electricity, which needed a dedicated law to expand its reach. But the reach of broadband is frustratingly incomplete, as highlighted by the fact that many areas of the country are not properly covered by cellular signals. And getting new wires hung can be an immensely difficult task, in part because companies that sell fiber, like Verizon and Google, often stop investing due to the high costs. (Though, to Google’s credit, it started expanding again in 2022 after a six-year rollback.) So, in some areas of the United States, dial-up remains the best option—the result of decades of poor investment in Internet infrastructure. This, for years, has propped up companies like AOL, which has evolved numerous times since it foolishly merged with Time Warner a quarter-century ago. The first PC-based client called America Online appeared on the graphical operating system GeoWorks. This screenshot shows the DOS AOL client that was distributed with GeoWorks 2.01.Ernie Smith But AOL is not the company it was. After multiple acquisitions and spin-outs, it is now a mere subsidiary of Yahoo, and it long ago transitioned into a Web-first property. Oh, it still has subscriptions, but they’re effectively fancy analogues for unnecessary security software. And their email client, while having been defeated by the likes of Gmail years ago, still has its fans. When I posted the AOL news on social media, about 90 percent of the responses were jokes or genuine notes of respect. But there was a small contingent, maybe 5 percent, that talked about how much this was going to screw over far-flung communities. I don’t think it’s AOL’s responsibility to keep this model going forever. Instead, it looks like the job is going to fall to two companies: Microsoft, whose MSN Dial-Up Internet Access costs US $179.95 per year, and the company United Online, which still operates the longtime dial-up players Juno and NetZero. Satellite Internet is also an option, with older services like HughesNet and newer ones like Starlink picking up the slack. It’s not AOL’s fault. But AOL is the face of this failing. AOL dropping dial-up is part of a long fade-out As technologies go, the dial-up modem has not lasted quite as long as the telegram, which has been active in one form or another for 181 years. But the modem, which was first used in 1958 as part of an air-defense system, has stuck around for a good 67 years. That makes it one of the oldest pieces of computer-related technology still in modern use. To give you an idea of how old that is: 1958 is also the year that the integrated circuit, an essential building block of any modern computer, was invented. The disk platter, which became the modern hard drive, was invented a year earlier. The floppy disk came a decade later. (It should be noted that the modem itself is not dying—your smartphone has one—but the connection your landline has to your modem, the really loud one, has seen better days.) The news that AOL is dropping its service might be seen as the end of the line for dial-up, but the story of the telegram hints that this may not be the case. In 2006, much hay was made about Western Union sending its final telegram. But Western Union was never the only company sending telegrams, and another company picked up the business. You can still send a telegram via International Telegram in 2025. (It’s not cheap: A single message, sent the same day, is $34, plus 75 cents per word.) In many ways, AOL dropping the service is a sign that this already niche use case is going to get more niche. But niche use cases have a way of staying relevant, given the right audience. It’s sort of like why doctors continue to use pagers. As a Planet Money episode from two years ago noted, the additional friction of using pagers worked well with the way doctors functioned, because it ensured that they knew the messages they were getting didn’t compete with anything else. Dial-up is likely never going to totally die, unless the landline phone system itself gets knocked offline, which AT&T has admittedly been itching to do. It remains one of the cheapest options to get online, outside of drinking a single coffee at a Panera and logging onto the wifi. But AOL? While dial-up may have been the company’s primary business earlier in its life, it hasn’t really been its focus in quite a long time. AOL is now a highly diversified company, whose primary focus over the past 15 years has been advertising. It still sells subscriptions, but those subscriptions are about to lose their most important legacy feature. AOL is simply too weak to support the next generation of Internet service themselves. Their inroad to broadband was supposed to be Time Warner Cable; that didn’t work out, so they pivoted to something else, but kept around the legacy business while it was still profitable. It’s likely that emerging technologies, like Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, which relies on distributing broadband over unused “white spaces” on the television dial, stand a better shot. 5G connectivity will also likely improve over time (T-Mobile already promotes its 5G home Internet as a rural option), and perhaps more satellite-based options will emerge. Technologies don’t die. They just slowly become so irrelevant that they might as well be dead. The monoculture of the AOL login experience When I posted the announcement, hidden in an obscure link on the AOL website sent to me by a colleague, it immediately went viral on Bluesky and Mastodon. That meant I got to see a lot of people react to this news in real time. Most had the same comment: I didn’t even know it was still around. Others made modem jokes, or talked about AOL’s famously terrible customer service. What was interesting was that most people said roughly the same thing about the service. That is not the case with most online experiences, which usually reflect myriad points of views. I think it speaks to the fact that while the Internet was the ultimate monoculture killer, the experience of getting online for the first time was largely monocultural. Usually, it started with a modem connecting to a phone number and dropping us into a single familiar place. We have lost a lot of Internet Service Providers over the years. Few spark the passion and memories of America Online, a network that somehow beat out more innovative and more established players to become the onramp to the Information Superhighway, for all the good and bad that represents. AOL must be embarrassed of that history. It barely even announced its closure.
CT scanning, streaming videos, and sending images over the Internet wouldn’t be possible without the Fast Fourier transform. Commonly known as FFT, the computer algorithm designed by researchers at Princeton University and IBM is found in just about every electronic device, according to an entry in the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. Demonstrated for the first time in 1964 by IEEE Fellows John Tukey and James W. Cooley, the algorithm breaks down a signal—a series of values over time—and converts it into frequencies. FFT was 100 times faster than the existing discrete Fourier transform. The DFT also requires more memory than the FFT because it saves intermediate results while processing. The FFT has become an important tool for manipulating and analyzing signals in many areas including audio processing, telecommunications, digital broadcasting, and image analysis. It helps filter, compress, eliminate noise from, and otherwise modify signals. The 60-year-old ubiquitous computer code also has applications in today’s cutting-edge technologies such as AI, quantum computing, self-driving cars, and 5G communication systems. The FFT was commemorated with an IEEE Milestone during a ceremony held in May at Princeton University. “The Cooley-Tukey algorithm significantly accelerated the calculation of DFTs,” 2024 IEEE President Tom Coughlin said at the ceremony. “Prior methods required significantly more computations, making FFT a revolutionary breakthrough. By leveraging algebraic properties and periodicities, the FFT reduced the number of the operations, making it particularly and practically feasible for everyday tasks, replacing the less efficient analog methods.” A new mathematical tool In 1963 Tukey, a professor of mathematics and statistics at Princeton, participated in a meeting of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee to discuss ways to detect underground nuclear tests, according to the ETHW entry. Also attending that meeting was Richard Garwin, a physicist and engineer at IBM who played a key role in designing the first hydrogen bomb. He died in May. Read about his fascinating life in this month’s In Memoriam. Tukey told Garwin he was working on speeding up the computation of an existing method—the Fourier transform—thinking it might help with the detection. His algorithm mathematically converted a signal from its original domain, such as time or space, to a frequency domain. Garwin recognized its potential and asked IBM to select a mathematical analyst to collaborate with Tukey. That person was Cooley, a research staff member working on numerical analysis and computation projects. If the Fourier transform could be made faster, Garwin said, seismometers could be planted in the ground in countries surrounding the Soviet Union to detect nuclear explosions from atomic bomb tests, because the Soviets wouldn’t allow on-site tests, according to Cooley’s oral history in the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. A seismometer measures ground vibrations, which are converted into electrical signals and recorded as seismograms. To design sensors for underground nuclear tests, however, “you would have to process all the seismic signals, and a large part of the processing could be done by Fourier transforms,” Cooley said in his oral history. But “the computing power at the time was not enough to process all of the signals you’d need to do this.” The FFT could calculate a seismic sensor’s frequency and produce images, IEEE Life Fellow Harold S. Stone said at the Milestone event. He is an image processing researcher and Fellow emeritus at the NEC Laboratories America, in Princeton, and a former IBM researcher. Tukey and Cooley led the team that wrote the computer code that demonstrated the FFT’s power. “The demonstration of the Coley-Tukey algorithm showed that it was 100 times faster,” Stone said. “It was so fast that it could keep up with the seismic data.” Sensors using the algorithm were planted, and they detected nuclear explosions within a 15-kilometer radius from where they were detonated, according to the ETHW entry. “By leveraging algebraic properties and periodicities, the FFT reduced the number of the operations, making it particularly and practically feasible for everyday tasks, replacing the less efficient analog methods.” —2024 IEEE President Tom Coughlin In 1965 Cooley and Tukey published “An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series,” describing the FFT process. The seminal paper spurred development of digital signal processing technologies. For his work, Tukey was awarded a U.S. National Medal of Science in 1973. He also received the 1982 IEEE Medal of Honor for “contributions to the spectral analysis of random processes and the fast Fourier transform algorithm.” Cooley, who received the 2002 IEEE Kilby Signal Processing Medal for pioneering the FFT, was a leading figure in the field of digital signal processing. Through his involvement with the IEEE Digital Signal Processing Committee (today known as the IEEE Signal Processing Society), he helped establish terminology and suggested research directions. Although not one of the inventors, Garwin is credited with recognizing that the algorithm had wider applications, especially in scientific and engineering fields. “In today’s lingo, Garwin helped the FFT ‘go viral’ by getting Cooley and Tukey together,” Stone said. “Garwin and Tukey sought better information to forestall and prevent wars,” added Frank Anscombe, Tukey’s nephew. “The Cooley-Tukey FFT swiftly advanced this cause by giving a practical, simplifying solution for wavy data. Thanks to the FFT, a technological rubicon began to be crossed: analog-to-digital machines.” A spirit of collaboration between academia and industry Like so many innovations, the FFT came out of a collaboration between industry and academia, and it should be recognized for that, IEEE Fellow Andrea Goldsmith said at the ceremony. She explained that she regularly works with FFT in her research projects. At the time of the event, she was Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. This month she started her new position as president of Stony Brook University, in New York. “Taking the ideas we have from basic research in our university labs, talking to people in industry, and understanding how the research problems we work on can benefit industry either tomorrow or in five years or 20 years from now, is incredibly important,” she said. “Some people think of engineering as boring and dry and something that only nerds do, but there is such beauty and creativity in a lot of the innovations that we have developed, and I think the FFT is a perfect example of that.” The FFT joins more than 270 other IEEE Milestones. They are more than a marker of achievement, said IEEE Life Senior Member Bala S. Prasanna, director of IEEE Region 1. “They are a testament to human ingenuity, perseverance, and the spirit of collaboration,” Prasanna said. “These Milestones were more than just breakthroughs; they became catalysts for innovation, enabling progress in ways once thought impossible. Each one ensures that the story behind these innovations is preserved, not just as history but as inspiration for future generations.” Another ceremony was held on 11 June at the IBM Watson Research Center. Milestone plaques recognizing the FFT are on display in the lobby of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and in the main lobby at the entrance of the IBM research center. They read: “In 1964 a computer program implementing a highly efficient Fourier analysis algorithm was demonstrated at IBM Research. Jointly developed by Princeton University and IBM collaborators, the Cooley-Tukey technique calculated discrete Fourier transforms orders of magnitude faster than had been previously demonstrated. Known as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), its speed impacted numerous applications including computerized tomography, audio and video compression, signal processing, and real-time data streaming.” Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world. The IEEE Princeton Central Jersey Section sponsored the nomination.
More in AI
Today's links Fingerspitzengefühl: IP vs process knowledge. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Buddhist hell theme-park; ORG launches; Yahoo spies for Beijing; Secret plan for border laptop-searches; BBC Creative Archive launches; Penn and Teller BBS; Immortan Trump; IP. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Fingerspitzengefühl (permalink) This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make recipes, the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual stuff, in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water. This was quite a switch! At the founding of the American republic, the US refused to extend patent protection to foreign inventors. The inventions of foreigners would be fair game for Americans, who could follow their recipes without paying a cent, and so improve the productivity of the new nation without paying rent to old empires over the sea. It was only once America found itself exporting as much as it imported that it saw fit to recognize the prerogatives of foreign inventors, as part of reciprocal agreements that required foreigners to seek permission and pay royalties to American patent-holders. But by the end of the 20th Century, America's ruling class was no longer interested in exporting things; they wanted to export ideas, and receive things in return. You can see why: America has a limited supply of things, but there's an infinite supply of ideas (in theory, anyway). There was one problem: why wouldn't the poor-but-striving nations abroad copy the American Method for successful industrialization? If ignoring Europeans' patents allowed America to become the richest and most powerful nation in the world, why wouldn't, say, China just copy all that American "IP"? If seizing foreigners' inventions without permission was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, why not Jiang Zemin? America solved this problem with the promise of "free trade." The World Trade Organization divided the world into two blocs: countries that could trade with one another without paying tariffs, and the rabble without who had to navigate a complex O(^2) problem of different tariff schedules between every pair of nations. To join the WTO club, countries had to sign up to a side-treaty called the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Under the TRIPS, the Jeffersonian plan for industrialization (taking foreigners' ideas without permission) was declared a one-off, a scheme only the US got to try and no other country could benefit from. For China to join the WTO and gain tariff-free access to the world's markets, it would have to agree to respect foreign patents, copyrights, trademarks and other "IP." We know the story of what followed over the next quarter-century: China became the world's factory, and became so structurally important that even if it violated its obligations under the TRIPS, "stealing the IP" of rich nations, no one could afford to close their borders to Chinese imports, because every country except China had forgotten how to make things. But this isn't the whole story – it's not even the most important part of it. In his new book Breakneck, Dan Wang (a Chinese-born Canadian who has lived extensively in Silicon Valley and in China) devotes a key chapter to "process knowledge": https://danwang.co/breakneck/ What's "process knowledge"? It's all the intangible knowledge that workers acquire as they produce goods, combined with the knowledge that their managers acquire from overseeing that labor. The Germans call it "Fingerspitzengefühl" ("fingertip-feeling"), like the sense of having a ball balanced on your fingertips, and knowing exactly which way it will tip as you tilt your hand this way or that. Wang's book is big and complicated, and I haven't yet finished it. There's plenty I disagree with Wang about – I think he overstates the role of proceduralism in slowing down American progress and understates the role monopoly and oligarchy play in corrupting the rule of law. But the chapter on process knowledge is revelatory. Don't take my word for it: read Henry Farrell, who says that "[process knowledge] is the message of Dan Wang's new book": https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-economic And Dan Davies, who uses the example of the UK's iconic Brompton bikes to explain the importance of process knowledge: https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompton-ness-of-it-all Process knowledge is everything from "Here's how to decant feedstock into this gadget so it doesn't jam," to "here's how to adjust the flow of this precursor on humid days to account for the changes in viscosity" to "if you can't get the normal tech to show up and calibrate the part, here's the phone number of the guy who retired last year and will do it for time-and-a-half." It can also be decidedly high-tech. A couple years ago, the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang explained to me his skepticism about the CHIPS Act's goal of onshoring the most advanced (4-5nm) chips. Bunnie laid out the process by which these chips are etched: first you need to make the correct wavelength of light for the nanolithography machine. Stage one of that is spraying droplets of molten tin into an evacuated chamber, where each droplet is tracked by a computer vision system that targets them to be hit with a highly specialized laser that smashes each droplet into a precise coin shape. Then, a second kind of extremely esoteric laser evaporates each of these little tin coins to make a specific kind of tin vapor that can be used to generate the right wavelength of light. This light is then played over two wafers on reciprocating armatures; each wafer needs to be precisely (as in nanograms and nanometers) the same dimensions and weight, otherwise the moving platters they slide back and forth on will get out of balance and the wafers will be spoiled as they are mis-etched. This process is so esoteric, and has so many figurative and literal moving parts, that it needs to be closely overseen and continuously adjusted by someone with a PhD in electrical engineering. That overseer needs to wear a clean-room suit, and they have to work an eight-hour shift without a bathroom, food or water break (because getting out of the suit means going through an airlock means shutting down the system means long delays and wastage). That PhD EENG is making $50k/year. Bunnie's topline explanation for the likely failure of the CHIPS Act is that this is a process that could only be successfully executed in a country "with an amazing educational system and a terrible passport." For bunnie, the extensive educational subsidies that produced Taiwan's legion of skilled electrical engineers and the global system that denied them the opportunity to emigrate to higher-wage zones were the root of the country's global dominance in advanced chip manufacture. I have no doubt that this is true, but I think it's incomplete. What bunnie is describing isn't merely the expertise imparted by attaining a PhD in electrical engineering – it's the process knowledge built up by generations of chip experts who debugged generations of systems that preceded the current tin-vaporizing Rube Goldberg machines. Even if you described how these machines worked to a doctoral EENG who had never worked in this specific field, they couldn't oversee these machines. Sure, they'd have the technical background to be seriously impressed by how cool all this shit is, and you might be able to train them don a bunny suit and hold onto their bladders for 8 hours and make the machine go, but simply handing them the "IP" for this process will not get you a chip foundry. It's undeniable that there's been plenty of Chinese commercial espionage, some of it with state backing. But in reading Wang, it's clear that the country's leaders have cooled on the importance of "IP" – indeed, these days, they call it "imaginary property," and call the IP economy the "imaginary economy" (contrast with the "real economy" of making stuff). Wang evocatively describes how China built up its process knowledge over the WTO years, starting with simple assembly of complex components made abroad, then progressing to making those components, then progressing to coming up with novel ways to reconfiguring them ("a drone is a cellphone with propellers"). He explains how the vicious cycle of losing process knowledge accelerated the decline of manufacturing in the west: every time a factory goes to China, US manufacturers that had been in its supply chain lose process knowledge. You can no longer call up that former supplier and brainstorm solutions to tricky production snags, which means that other factories in the supply chain suffer, and they, too get offshored to China. America's vicious cycle was China's virtuous cycle. The process knowledge that drained out of America accumulated in China. Years of experience solving problems in earlier versions of new equipment and processes gives workers a conceptual framework to debug the current version – they know about the raw mechanisms subsumed in abstraction layers and sealed packages and can visualize what's going on inside those black boxes. Likewise in colonial America: taking foreigners' patents was just table-stakes. Real improvement came from the creation of informal communities built around manufacturing centers, and from the pollinators who spread innovations around among practitioners. Long before John Deere turned IP troll and locked farmers out of servicing their own tractors, they paid and army of roving engineers who would visit farmers to learn about the ways they'd improved their tractors, and integrate these improvements into new designs: https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/ But here's the thing: while "IP" can be bought and sold by the capital classes, process knowledge is inseparably vested in the minds and muscle-memory of their workers. People who own the instructions are constitutionally prone to assuming that making the recipe is the important part, while following the recipe is donkey-work you can assign to any freestanding oaf who can take instruction. Think of John Philip Sousa, decrying the musicians who recorded and sold his compositions on early phonograms: These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape. For Sousa, musicians were just the trained monkeys who followed the instructions that talented composers set down on paper and handed off to other trained monkeys to print and distribute for sale. The exaltation of "IP" over process knowledge is part of the ancient practice of bosses denigrating their workers' contribution to the bottom line. It's key to the myth that workers can be replaced by AI: an AI can consume all the "IP" produced by workers, but it doesn't have their process knowledge. It can't, because process knowledge is embodied and enmeshed, it is relational and physical. It doesn't appear in training data. In other words, elevating "IP" over process knowledge is a form of class war. And now that the world's store of process knowledge has been sent to the global south, the class war has gone racial. Think of how Howard Dean – now a paid shill for the pharma lobby – peddled the racist lie that there was no point in dropping patent protections for the covid vaccines, because brown people in poor countries were too stupid to make advanced vaccines: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream The truth is that the world's largest vaccine factories are to be found in the global south, particularly India, and these factories sit at the center of a vast web of process knowledge, embedded in relationships and built up with hard-won problem-solving. Bosses would love it if process knowledge didn't matter, because then workers could finally be tamed by industry. We could just move the "IP" around to the highest bidders with the cheapest workforces. But Wang's book makes a forceful argument that it's easier to build up a powerful, resilient society based on process knowledge than it is to do so with IP. What good is a bunch of really cool recipes if no one can follow them? I think that bosses are, psychoanalytically speaking, haunted by the idea that their workers own the process knowledge that is at the heart of their profits. That's why bosses are so obsessed with noncompete "agreements." If you can't own your workers' expertise, then you must own your workers. Any time a debate breaks out over noncompetes, a boss will say something like, "My intellectual property walks out the door of my shop every day at 5PM." They're wrong: the intellectual property is safely stored on the company's hard drives – it's the process knowledge that walks out the door. You can see this in the prepper dreaming of the ruling class. Preppers are consumed by "disaster fantasies" in which the world ends in a way that they – and they alone – can put to rights. In Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times, the ethnographer Richard Mitchell describes a water chemist who is obsessed with terrorists poisoning the water supply: https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared This chemist has stockpiled everything he would need to restore order after a mass water-supply poisoning. But when Mitchell presses him to explain why he thinks it's likely that his town's water supply would be poisoned by terrorists, the prepper is at a loss. Eventually, he basically confesses that it would just be really cool if the world ended in such a way that only he could save it. Which is a problem for a boss. The chemist has a lot of process knowledge, he knows how to do stuff. But the boss knows how to raise money from investors, how to ignore the company's essential qualitative traits (such as the relationships between workers) and reduce the firm to a set of optimizable spreadsheet cells that are legible to the financial markets. What kind of crisis recovery demands those skills? As I posit in my novella "The Masque of the Red Death," the perfect boss fantasy is one in which the boss hunkers down in a luxury bunker while the rabble rebuild civilization from the ashes: https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque And once that task is complete, the boss emerges from his hidey-hole with an army of mercenaries in bomb-collars, a vast cache of AR-15s, gemstone-quality emeralds, and thumbdrives full of bitcoin, and does what he does best – takes over the show and tells everyone else what to do, from the comfort his high-walled fortress, with its mountain of canned goods and its harem. The absurdity of this – as I try to show with my story – is that the process knowledge of wheedling, bullying and coercing other people to work for you is actually not very useful. The IP you can buy and sell an inert curiosity until it finds its way to people who can put it into process. Hey look at this (permalink) Statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol https://github.com/swicg/general/blob/master/statements%2F2025-09-05-activitypub-and-atproto-discourse.md A message from Emily James, director of the upcoming documentary Enshittification: The Film. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/posts/4478169 The story of how RSS beat Microsoft https://buttondown.com/blog/rss-vs-ice Ideas Have Consequences The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago BBC Creative Archive pilot launches http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4225914.stm #20yrsago Gold Rush-era sailing ship ruin excavated in San Fran https://web.archive.org/web/20050910151416/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/09/06/state/n154446D61.DTL #20yrsago iTunes phone gratuitously crippled by DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051001030643/http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/todayatplaylist/2005/09/hiddengoodies/index.php #20yrsago My photos from the Buddhist hells of the Singaporean Tiger Balm themepark https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/07/corys-photos-from-the-buddhist-hells-of-the-singaporean-tiger-balm-themepark/ #20yrsago Online Rights Group UK launches https://web.archive.org/web/20051120005155/http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ #20yrsago Yahoo rats out Chinese reporter to Beijing, writer gets 10 years in jail http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4221538.stm #15yrsago Secret copyright treaty: USA caves on border laptop/phone/MP3 player searches for copyright infringement https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/09/acta-enforcement-practice-chapter/ #15yrsago Login screens from Penn and Teller BBS, 1987 https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidkha/4969386169/ #10yrsago Antihoarding: When “decluttering” becomes a compulsion https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/ocd-obsessive-compulsive-decluttering-hoarding/401591/ #10yrsago NZ bans award-winning YA novel after complaints from conservative Christian group https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/07/new-zealand-bans-into-the-river-teenage-novel-outcry-christian-group #10yrsago Immortan Trump https://imgur.com/gallery/relevant-donald-trump-cos-play-OQe2rU5 #5yrsago Antitrust trouble for cloud services https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#reasonable-agreements #5yrsago FTC about to hammer Intuit https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#tax-fraud #5yrsago IP https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#control #5yrsago My first-ever Kickstarter https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#asks #5yrsago David Graeber on Spectre TV https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/07/facebook-v-humanity/#spectre #5yrsago Facebook's foreseeable election consequences https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/07/facebook-v-humanity/#zuck-off Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11 https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13 https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16 https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow Ithaca: The Counterfeiters (Dinner/Movie Night) (Cornell), Sept 17 https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/visits/cory-doctorow/ Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18 https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18 https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929 DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047 Techtonic with Mark Hurst https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658 Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast) https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338 Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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And a big change for this newsletter
Today's links Stock buybacks are stock swindles: Raising the value of a stock without raising the value of the company. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Marshmellow longtermism; Physicists are not epidemiologists; CO asphyxiation accounts for half of Hurricane Laura deaths. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Stock buybacks are stock swindles (permalink) Trump's doing a lot of oligarch shit, and while some of it very visible and obvious, other moves, like throwing the door open to "stock buybacks" are technical and obscure, but it's worth paying attention to this, because this form of stock swindle stands to make billionaires a lot richer (and thus more powerful). American companies are headed for the stock buying-backest year on record, having already pissed away $1.1 trillion in 2025: https://www.baystreet.ca/stockstowatch/21522/Stock-Buybacks-Surpass-1-Trillion So what's a stock buyback, then? On the surface, it's pretty straightforward: during a stock buyback, the company uses its cash reserves to buy its own stock. When they do this, the supply of shares goes down, so the price per share goes up. Say a company has issued 1,000 shares, and they're selling at $1,000 per share. That company has a "market cap" of $1,000,000 (1,000 x 1,000). Now the company takes $500,000 out of its bank account and buys half of those shares. Now you have a million-dollar company with only 500 shares, so each of those shares is now worth $2,000 (1,000,000/500 = 2,000). Why is this so bad? Let's start with what capitalism's advocates claim about the power of markets. Markets, they say, are a kind of alchemist's crucible, a vessel that transforms self-interest to a public good. Capitalism's theory is that if we let people pursue their own profit, they will chase efficiency, because anything that lowers costs will leave more profit for capitalists to reap. But as those capitalists discover better, more productive ways to get goods and services to market, they face competition, who force them to accept lower profits, which makes everything cheaper and more abundant for us. That means that even the greediest capitalists have to find new ways to increase efficiency in order to recapture their profits. Lather, rinse, repeat, and capitalism can make more material abundance available that we can dream of. This isn't just what capitalists say – it's also the thesis of Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html?unlocked_article_code=1.j08.a1xP.KLkhosG_PxkP&smid=url-share Marx and Engels were seriously impressed by the productive power of capitalism, but they had a prescient suspicion that capitalists hate capitalism, and would do whatever they could to interrupt this process. After all, if you can prevent competitors from entering the market, you can innovate just once, find a new way to make something that's cheaper and better, and never share those profits with your customers or workers, because you won't have to outbid your competitors. The alchemical reaction is halted at the point where capitalists are rewarded for their efficiency, and they are never forced to repeat that performance. Monopoly isn't the only way that capitalists can thwart this transformation of greed into abundance. The finance sector is awash in illegal scams that let capitalists get rich without increasing efficiency or making anyone except for themselves better off. Take "wash-trading": this is when a seller buys their own products, sometimes using an alias, other times using a shill. The idea is to trick people into thinking that something is valuable and liquid (that is, that you can easily find buyers for it), when it is really worthless and undesirable. Remember all those multi-million-dollar NFT sales? Almost every one was a wash trade, a way to pump and dump. The problem here isn't just that the buyer is getting defrauded. It's also that the seller is being "allocated capital" (getting money) that gives them power – power to decide what else should be bought and sold in our society. Remember the alchemy theory of markets: if you're a productive capital allocator (if you make things that lots of people desire), you are given more capital to allocate further. This is the market's "invisible hand": elevating the people with proven track records to positions of power over their neighbors and their society, on the basis that they have shown themselves capable of enriching us all, because (the theory goes), capitalism rewards people whose greed translates into a common benefit. As Adam Smith wrote: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Wash trading creates misallocations of capital. It makes stupid people rich, and lets them allocate capital to projects that make us all worse off. The whole theory of markets – the reason we're all supposed to leave money that we could all use to make ourselves better off in the hands of the wealthy – is that wealth is the payoff for efficiency, and we are all better off when the most efficient allocators make investment decisions. Modern theorists of capitalism tell us that this isn't alchemy, it's computing. The market is a giant "information-processing" system that incorporates trillions of "price signals" (how much we are willing to spend and how much we are willing to accept, for goods, services and labor). The market processes all these signals to direct allocation and production, ensuring that shortages are met with increases in supply, and that overproduction is tamped down by falling prices, and that inefficiencies provoke investment in process improvements. Which brings me back to stock buybacks. Stock buybacks are a way to make a company's shares more valuable, even as the company itself becomes less valuable. Think of it this way: imagine you've got a company with 1,000 shares, worth $1,000 each, and this company has $500,000 in the bank. The company is valued at $1,000,000 (1,000 x $1,000), and half of that valuation is based on its cash reserves ($500,000 in the bank), which means the other half must be reflected in the company's physical plant and "intangibles" (knowledge, contracts, efficient team structures, copyrights, patents, etc). The company announces a stock buyback: they will withdraw the $500,000 from its bank account and buy half the shares. The company is now $500,000 poorer, which means that its shares should go down in value. After all, that $500,000 is capital that could have been mobilized to make the company more profitable: it could have been spent to hire new people, do R&D, or buy machines that lower the price of making the company's products. That $500,000 represented the company's future growth potential, and the company has just pissed away that potential. This is a company whose future growth has gotten much more expensive, because it will have to borrow in order to fund any expansion. Its shares should be worth less than before. By zeroing out its cash reserves, the company has actually reduced its value by more than the value of those reserves, because it is now stuck in place, forced to fund expansion with debt rather than capital. It is at risk from "shocks" like higher rents or higher energy prices. It's a brittle, hollow vessel for the intangibles that made up the other $500,000 in valuation before the buyback. It will be worse at turning those intangibles into profits in the future. But the buyback hasn't reduced the price of the company's shares: it has doubled that price. The company has made its shares more valuable while making itself less valuable. If you think that markets are a computer that calculates efficient allocation based on prices, this should freak you the fuck out, because as we all know, the iron law of computing is "garbage in, garbage out." The company is feeding an objectively – and grossly – false price signal into the computer's input hopper. That's why stock buybacks were illegal until 1982, when Ronald Reagan's SEC changed its Rule 10-b to legitimize this form of stock manipulation and turn stock swindlers into billionaires: https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/09/low-wage-100/#executive-excess At root, stock buybacks are just wash-trading, the company buying its own shares to move their price, without doing anything to justify that price movement. Before Reagan legalized stock buybacks, companies returned capital to their investors through dividends. Why would companies prefer buybacks to dividends? Because corporate executives hold tons of shares in their employer's company, and it's much better for them to push those share prices higher even as they gut the company's ability to function. So why should you care about this? After all, statistically you own either very little or no stock. The richest 10% of US households own more than 93% of all stocks held by Americans: https://inequality.org/article/stock-ownership-concentration/ Your 401(k) account might see a small boost from this stock swindle, but again, statistically, that 401(k) is unmeasurably infinitesimal compared to the holdings of America's oligarchs. Stock buybacks are a way of making the stock owning class much richer, by swindling everyday investors – who don't understand that companies who drain their cash reserves are less valuable – into buying shares in the companies they loot. And that's why you should care: in the first 8 months of 2025, Trump has allowed America's oligarchs to get $1.1 trillion richer. That's money that you don't have – you won't get the lower prices and higher wages and superior goods that $1.1t would have paid for if companies had spent it on process improvements. It's money they have, which they can spend on things that make you worse off – buying everything from Twitter to the presidency. There's a lot to be furious about right now, like the masked fascist goons kidnapping our neighbors off the street, and the upside-down health system that is reviving the vaccine-controlled deadly pandemics of yesteryear. But the reason those fascist goons and antivaxers are able to decide how we all live our lives is that a very small number of very rich people converted their stolen wealth to illegitimate power, which they wield over us. Anyone who lived through the 2008 crisis knows that finance is a deadly weapon. Let the finance sector run your economy and they will steal everything and leave you jobless, homeless and hungry. Trump is a casino guy, and he knows that the only guy making money in a casino is the owner, who gets to set the odds at the machines and tables. By opening the floodgates to trillions in stock buybacks, Trump is turning us all into the suckers at the table, and turning his oligarch investors into little autocrats, with the power to degrade our lives and steal our future. Hey look at this (permalink) Five for 50 – Anil Dash https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/05/five-for-fifty/ How To Touch Grass https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/powerandmagic/how-to-touch-grass Why This Economy Feels Weird and Scary https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-this-economy-feels-weird-and A Navajo weaving of an integrated circuit: the 555 timer https://www.righto.com/2025/09/marilou-schultz-navajo-555-weaving.html Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Interview with mom who won’t pay off the RIAA shakedown https://web.archive.org/web/20051204021157/https://p2pnet.net/story/6134 #5yrsago Political ads have very small effect-sizes https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#persuadables #5yrsago CO asphyxiation accounts for half of Hurricane Laura deaths https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#co #5yrsago Trump is a salesman https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#cialdinism #5yrsago Physicists overestimate their epidemiology game https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#hubris #1yrago Marshmallow Longtermism https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/04/deferred-gratification/#selective-foresight Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11 https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13 https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16 https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047 Techtonic with Mark Hurst https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658 Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast) https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338 Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
Today's links Canny Valley: My little art-book is here! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Ballmer throws a chair; Bruce Sterling on Singapore; RIP David Graeber; Big Car warns of lethal Right to Repair. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Canny Valley (permalink) I've spent every evening this week painstakingly unpacking, numbering and signing 500 copies of my very first art-book, a strange and sturdy little volume called Canny Valley. Canny Valley collects 80 of the best collages I've made for my Pluralistic newsletter, where I publish 5-6 essays every week, usually headed by a strange, humorous and/or grotesque image made up of public domain sources and Creative Commons works. These images are made from open access sources, and they are themselves open access, licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike, which means you can take them, remix them, even sell them, all without my permission. I never thought I'd become a visual artist, but as I've grappled with the daily challenge of figuring out how to illustrate my furious editorials about contemporary techno-politics, especially "enshittification," I've discovered a deep satisfaction from my deep dives into historical archives of illustration, and, of course, the remixing that comes afterward. Over the years, many readers have asked whether I would ever collect these in a book. Then I ran into Creative Commons CEO Anna Tumadóttir and we brainstormed ideas for donor gifts in honor of Creative Commons' 25th anniversary. My first novel was the first book ever released under a CC license, and while CC has gone on to bigger and better things (without CC there'd be no Wikipedia!), I never forget that my own artistic career and CC's trajectory are co-terminal: https://craphound.com/down/download/ Talking with Anna, I hit on the idea of making a beautiful little book of my favorite illustrations from Pluralistic. Anna thought CC could use about 400 of these, and all the printers I talked to offered me a pretty great quantity break at 500, so I decided I'd do it, and offer the excess 100 copies as premiums in my next Kickstarter, for the enshittification book: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/ That Kickstarter is going really well – about to break $100,000! – and as I type these words, there are only five copies of Canny Valley up for grabs. I'm pretty sure they'll be gone long before the campaign closes in ten days. Of course, the fact that you can't get a physical copy of the book doesn't mean that you can't get access to all its media. Here's the full set of all 238 collages, in high-rez, for your plundering pleasure: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208 But there is one part of this book that's not online: my pal and mentor Bruce Sterling, a cyberpunk legend turned electronic art impressario turned assemblage sculptor, wrote me a brilliant foreword for Canny Valley. Bruce gave me the go-ahead to license this CC BY 4.0 as well, and so I'm reproducing it below. Having spent several days now handling hundreds of these books, I have to say, I am indecently pleased with how they turned out, which is all down to other people. My friend John Berry, a legendary book designer and typographer, laid it out: https://johndberry.com/ And the folks at LA's best comics shop, Secret Headquarters, hooked me up with an incredible printer, the 100+ year old Pasadena institution Typecraft: https://www.typecraft.com/live2/who-we-are.html Typecraft ran this on a gorgeous Indigo printer on 100lb Mohawk paper that just drank the ink. The PVA glue in the binding will last a century, and the matte coat cover doesn't pick up smudges or fingerprints. It's a stunning little artifact. This has been so much fun (and such a success) that I imagine I'll do future volumes in the years to come. In the meantime, enjoy Bruce's intro, and join me in basking in the fact that "enshittification" has made Webster's: https://bsky.app/profile/merriam-webster.com/post/3lxxhhxo4nc2e INTRODUCTION by Bruce Sterling In 1970 a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori discovered a new problem in aesthetics. He called this "bukimi no tani genshō." The Japanese robots he built were functional, so the "bukimi no tani" situation was not an engineering problem. It was a deep and basic problem in the human perception of humanlike androids. Humble assembly robots, with their claws and swivels, those looked okay to most people. Dolls, puppets and mannequins, those also looked okay. Living people had always aesthetically looked okay to people. Especially, the pretty ones. However, between these two realms that the late Dr Mori was gamely attempting to weld together — the world of living mankind and of the pseudo-man-like machine– there was an artistic crevasse. Anything in this "Uncanny Valley" looked, and felt, severely not-okay. These overdressed robots looked and felt so eerie that their creator's skills became actively disgusting. The robots got prettier, but only up to a steep verge. Then they slid down the precipice and became zombie doppelgangers. That's also the issue with the aptly-titled "Canny Valley" art collection here. People already know how to react aesthetically to traditional graphic images. Diagrams are okay. Hand-drawn sketches and cartoons are also okay. Brush-made paintings are mostly fine. Photographs, those can get kind of dodgy. Digital collages that slice up and weld highly disparate elements like diagrams, cartoons, sketches and also photos and paintings, those trend toward the uncanny. The pixel-juggling means of digital image-manipulation are not art-traditional pencils or brushes. They do not involve the human hand, or maybe not even the human eye, or the human will. They're not fixed on paper or canvas; they're a Frankenstein mash-up landscape of tiny colored screen-dots where images can become so fried that they look and feel "cursed." They're conceptually gooey congelations, stuck in the valley mire of that which is and must be neither this-nor-that. A modern digital artist has billions of jpegs in files, folders, clouds and buckets. He's never gonna run out of weightless grist from that mill. Why would Cory Doctorow — novelist, journalist, activist, opinion columnist and so on — want to lift his typing fingers from his lettered keyboard, so as to create graphics with cut-and-paste and "lasso tools"? Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls. Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon. I think there are two basic reasons for this. The important motivation is his own need to express himself by some method other than words. I'm reminded here of the example of H. G. Wells, another science fiction writer turned internationally famous political pundit. HG Wells was quite a tireless and ambitious writer — so much so that he almost matched the torrential output of Cory Doctorow. But HG Wells nevertheless felt a compelling need to hand-draw cartoons. He called them "picshuas." These hundreds of "picshuas" were rarely made public. They were usually sketched in the margins of his hand-written letters. Commonly the picshuas were aimed at his second wife, the woman he had renamed "Jane." These picshuas were caricatures, or maybe rapid pen-and-ink conceptual outlines, of passing conflicts, events and situations in the life of Wells. They seemed to carry tender messages to Jane that the writer was unable or unwilling to speak aloud to her. Wells being Wells, there were always issues in his private life that might well pose a challenge to bluntly state aloud: "Oh by the way, darling, I've built a second house in the South of France where I spend my summers with a comely KGB asset, the Baroness Budberg." Even a famously glib and charming writer might feel the need to finesse that. Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls. Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon. So instead, he diligently clips, cuts, pastes, lassos, collages and pastiches. He might, plausibly, hire a professional artist to design his editorial cartoons for him. However, then Cory would have to verbally explain all his political analysis to this innocent graphics guy. Then Cory would also have to double-check the results of the artist and fix the inevitable newbie errors and grave misunderstandings. That effort would be three times the labor for a dogged crusader who is already working like sixty. It's more practical for him to mash-up images that resemble editorial cartoons. He can't draw. Also, although he definitely has a pronounced sense of aesthetics, it's not a aesthetic most people would consider tasteful. Cory Doctorow, from his very youth, has always had a "craphound" aesthetic. As an aesthete, Cory is the kind of guy who would collect rain-drenched punk-band flyers that had fallen off telephone poles and store them inside a 1950s cardboard kid-cereal box. I am not scolding him for this. He's always been like that. As Wells used to say about his unique "picshuas," they seemed like eccentric scribblings, but over the years, when massed-up as an oeuvre, they formed a comic burlesque of an actual life. Similarly, one isolated Doctorow collage can seem rather what-the-hell. It's trying to be "canny." If you get it, you get it. If you don't get the first one, then you can page through all of these, and at the end you will probably get it. En masse, it forms the comic burlesque of a digital left-wing cyberspatial world-of-hell. A monster-teeming Silicon Uncanny Valley of extensively raked muck. <img src="https://craphound.com/images/ai-freud.jpg" alt="Sigmund Freud's study with his famous couch. Behind the couch stands an altered version of the classic Freud portrait in which he is smoking a cigar. Freud's clothes and cigar have all been tinted in bright neon colors. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' His legs have been replaced with a tangle of tentacles. Cryteria (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg/CC BY 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en | Ser Amantio di Nicolao (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Study_with_the_couch,_Freud_Museum_London,_18M0143.jpg"/CC BY-SA 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed"> There are a lot of web-comix people who like to make comic fun of the Internet, and to mock "the Industry." However, there's no other social and analytical record quite like this one. It has something of the dark affect of the hundred-year-old satirical Dada collages of Georg Schultz or Hannah Hoch. Those Dada collages look dank and horrible because they're "Dada" and pulling a stunt. These images look dank and horrible because they're analytical, revelatory and make sense. If you do not enjoy contemporary electronic politics, and instead you have somehow obtained an art degree, I might still be able to help you with my learned and well-meaning intro here. I can recommend a swell art-critical book titled "Memesthetics" by Valentina Tanni. I happen to know Dr. Tanni personally, and her book is the cat's pyjamas when it comes to semi-digital, semi-collage, appropriated, Situationiste-detournement, net.art "meme aesthetics." I promise that I could robotically mimic her, and write uncannily like her, if I somehow had to do that. I could even firmly link the graphic works of Cory Doctorow to the digital avant-garde and/or digital folk-art traditions that Valentina Tanni is eruditely and humanely discussing. Like with a lot of robots, the hard part would be getting me to stop. Cory works with care on his political meme-cartoons — because he is using them to further his own personal analysis, and to personally convince himself. They're not merely sharp and partisan memes, there to rouse one distinct viewer-emotion and make one single point. They're like digital jigsaw-puzzle landscape-sketches — unstable, semi-stolen and digital, because the realm he portrays is itself also unstable, semi-stolen and digital. The cartoons are dirty and messy because the situations he tackles are so dirty and messy. That's the grain of his lampoon material, like the damaged amps in a punk song. A punk song that was licensed by some billionaire and then used to spy on hapless fans with surveillance-capitalism. Since that's how it goes, that's also what you're in for. You have been warned, and these collages will warn you a whole lot more. If you want to aesthetically experience some elegant, time-tested collage art that was created by a major world artist, then you should gaze in wonder at the Max Ernst masterpiece, "Une semaine de bonté" ("A Week of Kindness"). This indefinable "collage novel" aka "artist's book" was created in the troubled time of 1934. It's very uncanny rather than "canny, "and it's also capital-A great Art. As an art critic, I could balloon this essay to dreadful robotic proportions while I explain to you in detail why this weirdo mess is a lasting monument to the expressive power of collage. However, Cory Doctorow is not doing Max Ernst's dreamy, oneiric, enchanting Surrealist art. He would never do that and it wouldn't make any sense if he did. Cory did this instead. It is art, though. It is what it is, and there's nothing else like it. It's artistic expression as Cory Doctorow has a sincere need to perform that, and in twenty years it will be even more rare and interesting. It's journalism ahead of its time (a little) and with a passage of time, it will become testimonial. Bruce Sterling — Ibiza MMXXV Hey look at this (permalink) Twitter users on Enshittification https://x.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FMerriamWebster%2Fstatus%2F1963336587712057346&src=typed_query&f=live Introducing Structural Zero: a New Monthly Newsletter https://hrdag.org/introducing-structural-zero-a-new-monthly-newsletter/ 70 leading Canadians, civil society groups ask Carney to protect Canada's 'digital sovereignty' https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/open-letter-mark-carney-digital-sovereignty-1.7623128 AI Darwin Awards https://aidarwinawards.org/ Kraft Heinz went all-in on scale. Now it’s banking on a breakup to save its business https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/03/business/kraft-heinz-nightcap Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Singapore’s cool-ass hard-drive video-players https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/03/singapores-cool-ass-hard-drive-video-players/ #20yrsago Being Poor — meditation by John Scalzi https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ #20yrsago MSFT CEO: I will “fucking kill” Google — then he threw a chair https://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/09/ballmer_throws_a_chair_at_fing_google #20yrsago Massachusetts to MSFT: switch to open formats or you’re fired https://web.archive.org/web/20051001011728/http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/09/02/state_may_drop_office_software/ #20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Singapore wrapup https://web.archive.org/web/20051217133502/https://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1211240 #20yrsago Apple //e mainboards networked and boxed: the Applecrate https://web.archive.org/web/20050407173742/http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/CratePaper.html #15yrsago Jewelry made from laminated, polished cross-sections of bookshttps://littlefly.co.uk/ #15yrsago Boneless, clubfooted French Connection model invades Melbournehttps://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/4953586953/ #5yrsago Corporate spooks track you "to your door" https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#hyas #5yrsago Hedge fund managers trouser 64% https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#2-and-20 #5yrsago Rest in Power, David Graeber https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rip-david-graeber #5yrsago Coronavirus is over (if we want it) https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#test-test-test #5yrsago Snowden vindicated https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#criming-spooks #5yrsago Algorithmic grading https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#computer-says-no #5yrsago Big Car says Right to Repair will MURDER YOU https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047 Techtonic with Mark Hurst https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658 Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast) https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338 Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
