August 15, 2025.

Today's links Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause: What, and I cannot stress this enough, the FUCK does this mean?! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: No-fly babies; Stephen Harper's Red Dawn; DHS pre-crime. 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. Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (permalink) I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky. As much as I trust and respect the Bluesky executives and board members I am acquainted with, I believe the service itself is insufficiently enshittification-resistant to trust: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes I've met Bluesky's CEO Jay Graber on a few occasions and heard her speak several times and I'm hugely impressed with her documented commitment to make "enshittification-resistant" social media: https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/ Some of Bluesky's most innovative and well-developed features are extremely enshittification-resistant, like "composable moderation," which gives users an extraordinary degree of control over their feeds, which means that the service's owners can't readily dial down the amount of desirable information in those feeds in order to create space for ads or posts that someone has paid to boost (or, as is the case with Twitter, the personal maunderings of the service's boss and whichever esoteric fascist crony talked to him last): https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation What's more, this composable moderation, along with an open API for clients, allows Bluesky (the company) to adhere to its legal obligations to block content, while allowing Bluesky users to sidestep those blocks. For example, Bluesky has a labeling service that flags content that has to be blocked under Turkey's system of authoritarian censorship, and, by default, the Bluesky client blocks anything with that flag for Turkish users. But users can turn off that block, and/or use an alternative Bluesky client that doesn't pay attention to the blocked-in-Turkey flag. Same goes for the new British system of mass censorship under the Online Safety Act: Bluesky the company will do an age-verification process with users of its official client (like all age verification, this system is janky and it sucks), but UK users who choose a different client (one that isn't worried about being sanctioned by the UK government) can access all of Bluesky without any age verification. But the key anti-enshittification measure – federation – has lagged on Bluesky. For most of Bluesky's history, it's been impossible to participate in the Bluesky service without being a Bluesky user, because the most critical parts of the Bluesky network were incredibly expensive to operate (tens of millions of dollars per year), and lacked any tooling to make it easy to create independent, federated servers. Without the ability to participate on the Bluesky network without having to create an account with Bluesky (the company), users would have to subject themselves to Bluesky's terms of service, and could have their access to the Bluesky network unilaterally terminated by Bluesky (the company). Now, I happen to think pretty highly of the management of Bluesky (the company) at the moment. But Bluesky has outside investors – the distressingly stupid- and sinister-sounding Blockchain Capital – and if these people get it into their heads to enshittify Bluesky, then can force good actors off the board of directors, fire the management, and replace them with standard-issue corporate sociopaths. What's more, the fact that users are hostage to Bluesky – that they have no way to part ways with the company without parting ways with the people they value on the service – means that new management can torment Bluesky users with impunity, so long as these torments are kept to a level such that Bluesky users hate the company less than they love one another. By contrast, with federation – the ability to part ways with the Bluesky company without losing access to the service – investors might understand that if they turn the screws on users, those users will find it trivial to leave the company's servers, because doing so won't cost them access to the service. And if the investors don't understand this, well, users can leave – without enduring any switching costs. The good news here is that Bluesky has made enormous progress in true federation. The cost of operating a full Bluesky stack has fallen from tens of millions of dollars per year to tens of dollars per month: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l This is an extremely welcome development and it goes a long way toward enshittification-proofing the Bluesky service, and some way to enshittification-proofing Bluesky, the company. But Bluesky, the company, still needs serious work. As things stand, Bluesky has very bad terms of service that every user who creates an account has to subject themselves to. In particular, Bluesky's ToS contain a "binding arbitration" waiver that forces users to surrender the right to sue Bluesky no matter how the company harms them. This is so pro-enshittificatory, it's like a landing strip for the sole use of Enshittification Airlines, which can land a 747 full of enshittfying nonsense on Bluesky's users every 10 minutes, around the clock, without worrying about any legal repercussions. Binding arbitration used to be illegal. Sure, two entities of similar size and power could elect to streamline their disputes by seeing an arbitrator instead of going to court, but you couldn't take away people's right to sue just by cramming 40,000 words of legalese down their throat as they passed over your threshold. It took the absolute fuckery of an Antonin Scalia to unleash the plague of binding arbitration waivers on the world, with the result that these days, everyone from dentists to solar installers to ride-hailing companies force you to permanently waive your right to sue, even if they are so negligent or malicious that you are permanently maimed or killed: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&context=blr These days, binding arbitration is everywhere, allowing corporations to proceed with total legal impunity. When a woman died of allergens in her Disney World meal (after being told it was allergen-free), Disney told her widower that he couldn't sue because he'd clicked through a binding arbitration waiver when he signed up for a free trial of the Disney Plus streaming service: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/disney-stops-claiming-disney-terms-require-arbitration-in-allergy-death-case/ Binding arbitration has been creeping into every corner of the internet, to the extent that lawyers will tell you that you must put it in your ToS "just to be safe." Those lawyers are either ignorant, or assholes (or, you know, ignorant assholes), but they're everywhere. Earlier this summer, Mastodon almost launched a new ToS (which would have been the default for every Masto instance) with binding arbitration, because their lawyers told them they needed it: https://en.chuso.net/mastodon-tos-july-2025.html Bluesky has just announced a new ToS, through which they claim they are improving on the binding arbitration waiver: https://bsky.social/about/support/tos#governing-law But what they've come up with is utterly baffling and nonsensical. I have re-read it at least a dozen times, and – despite having followed and written about binding arbitration for more than a decade – I have no idea what it means. The new waiver says that you don't have to arbitrate for "claims that fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence by Bluesky caused death or personal injury." That sounds good! It also sounds like everything that someone might sue Bluesky for, leaving me to wonder what Bluesky will make you arbitrate for. What's more, if the point of a binding arbitration waiver is to reduce nuisance suits and threats, this completely nullifies that tactic, because all a nuisance litigant has to do is claim that they are suing because of "fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence," and Bluesky is back in court. All I can assume is that the point of this clause is to intimidate people with grievances against Bluesky out of seeking legal redress because they can't figure out if their claim is covered by this baffling, nonsensical clause. There are other, gigantic red flags in the arbitration waiver, like a prohibition on class actions. Here's why that's especially bad in an arbitration waiver. By default, arbitration is a) confidential and b) nonprecedential. That means that if a corporation injures a ton of people through negligence, fraud or malice, each victim of the company has to individually go before an arbitrator and prove their case, but they're not allowed to know how other victims argued their case, and the arbitrator is not required to judge two identical cases in the same way (earlier cases are not a precedent). One way around this is mass arbitration, like the Uber drivers engaged in when Uber stole tens of millions of dollars worth of tips from them, a tactic successfully deployed by other corporate victims: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard Class actions are the only way that corporations can be held to account for actions that victimize vast numbers of people in relatively small ways. If you've been injured to the tune of less than, say, $500, you probably won't hire a lawyer to get it back. Bluesky has 36 million users, meaning – thanks to the ban on class actions – it could steal about $18 billion from them all without having to worry about a gigantic, business-destroying lawsuit. This is not how you enshittification-proof your service. To be fair, the carve-out in the arbitration clause might help keep the company from committing this kind of fraud, but only if anyone could figure out what the hell it means. And also to be fair, the new arbitration clause provides for three arbitrators, one chosen by Bluesky, one by you, and a third, mutually agreed upon one. This does inject more fairness into an unacceptably unfair process, and also does not make it acceptably unfair. Especially since Bluesky retains the right to consolidate arbitration claims into a mass arbitration, but does not let potential victims form a class if such a move would be disadvantageous to Bluesky. If Bluesky wants to protect itself from legal liability, let it do what every company did until just a couple years ago: a) don't break the law on purpose, and; b) buy insurance These new ToS are an absolute dog's breakfast. I wouldn't click through them. And luckily, I don't have to! Because, to Bluesky's eternal credit, they have shipped the technical components needed to create a Bluesky server that is a full, first-class participant in the Bluesky service, without its users having to sign up to these Terms of Service (unfortunately, if you're already a Bluesky user, it's too late, because its ToS says you're still bound to mandatory arbitration even if you delete your account). Legacy social media is in trouble. Facebook and Twitter are thrashing around, using AI finance-theater in a bid to convince investors not to panic-sell their stock because they no longer have any growth left. A new, federated, independent, web is being born before our eyes, running on Activitypub (Mastodon) and Atproto (Bluesky). This web does not have to fall prey to the enshittifying norms of the zuckermuskian web. If the people building this new web are wise, they will take irrevocable action that will limit their ability (and the ability of their successors) to fall prey to the siren song of enshittification in the future. This is called a "Ulysses pact" – when you tie yourself to the mast so that you don't yield to future temptation. Putting binding arbitration in your ToS is the opposite of a Ulysses pact: it's ensuring that you – and whoever you are replaced with when your investors decide it's time for a service-level heel turn – always retain the ability to enshittify, should the mood take you. We can demand something better – and, if you run your own Bluesky server, you can. My sysadmin, Ken, just took delivery of some new server hardware at his colo, and he's gonna be setting me up my own Mastodon and Bluesky servers in the coming weeks. I'm really looking forward to using the Bluesky service, especially since I can do so without clicking through the Bluesky terms of service or making myself vulnerable to the enshittificatory gambits that future management might assay, because those terms have given them the leeway to do so. Hey look at this (permalink) Sabot in the Age of AI https://algorithmic-sabotage.github.io/asrg/posts/sabot-in-the-age-of-ai/ Bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler offers character naming rights in fundraiser https://clarionwriteathon.com/prizes/auction.php LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/researchers-find-llms-are-bad-at-logical-inference-good-at-fluent-nonsense/ Pank-a-Squith https://www.neatorama.com/2025/08/14/Pank-a-Squith-The-Womens-Suffrage-Board-Game/ Ray’s Day, what is it? https://raysday.net/en/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Babies on the no-fly list https://web.archive.org/web/20050910182032/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/08/15/national/w115806D06.DTL&type=printable #10yrsago AT&T was the NSA’s enthusiastic top surveillance partner https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html #10yrsao Stephen Harper will use 12-18 year old junior rangers to fight the Russians https://web.archive.org/web/20150818192810/https://northumberlandview.ca/index.php?module=news&type=user&func=display&sid=36144 #10yrsago Miami police union smears woman who posted video of cop beating handcuffed suspect in police cruiserhttps://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/police-union-smears-woman-who-posted-video-of-police-beating-on-facebook-7823262 #10yrago Pre-crime: DHS admits that it puts people on the no-fly list based on “predictive assessment” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/10/us-no-fly-list-predictive-assessments #5yrsago AI, 1A and Citizens United https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/15/wish-youd-share/#clearview-1a #1yrago Apple vs the "free market" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig 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 with Rohit Chopra, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (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 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) The Utopias Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124 Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io 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. (1053 words yesterday, 32026 words total). 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

Welcome to machine learning for software engineers.

Today's links Goodhart's Law (of AI): When a metric becomes a target, AI can hit it every time. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bill Ayers graphic novel; Foxconn in India; Uber loses $4B; Warren Buffet, monopolist. 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. Goodhart's Law (of AI) (permalink) One way to think about AI's unwelcome intrusion into our lives can be summed up with Goodhardt's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law Goodhart's Law is a harsh mistress. It's incredibly exciting to discover a new way of measuring aspects of a complex system in a way that lets you understand (and thus control) it. In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page realized that all the links created by everyone who'd ever made a webpage represented a kind of latent map of the value and authority of every website. We could infer that pages that had more links pointing to them were considered more noteworthy than pages that had fewer inbound links. Moreover, we could treat those heavily linked-to pages as authoritative and infer that when they linked to another page, it, too, was likely to be important. This insight, called "PageRank," was behind Google's stunning entry into the search market, which was easily one of the most exciting technological developments of the decade, as the entire web just snapped into place as a useful system for retrieving information that had been created by a vast, uncoordinated army of web-writers, hosted in a distributed system without any central controls. Then came the revenge of Goodhart's Law. Before Google became the dominant mechanism for locating webpages, the only reason for anyone to link to a given page or site was because there was something there they thought you should see. Google aggregated all those "I think you should see this" signals and turned them into a map of the web's relevance and authority. But making a link to a webpage is easy. Once there was another reason to make a link between two web-pages – to garner traffic, which could be converted into money and/or influence – then bad actors made a lot of spurious links between websites. They created linkfarms, they spammed blog comments, they hacked websites for the sole purpose of adding a bunch of human-invisible, Google-scraper-readable links to pages. The metric ("how many links are there to this page?") became a target ("make links to this page") and ceased to be a useful metric. Goodhart's Law is still a plague on Google search quality. "Reputation abuse" is a webcrime committed by venerable sites like Forbes, Fortune and Better Homes and Gardens, who abuse the authority imparted by tons of inbound links accumulated over decades by creating spammy, fake product-review sites stuffed with affiliate links, that Google ranks more highly than real, rigorous review sites because of all that accumulated googlejuice: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse Goodhart's Law is 50 years old, but policymakers are woefully ignorant of it and continue to operate as though it doesn't apply to them. This is especially pronounced when policymakers are determined to Do Something about a public service that has been starved of funding kicked around as a political football to the point where it has degraded and started to outrage the public. When this happens, policymakers are apt to blame public servants – rather than themselves – for this degradation, and then set out to Bring Accountability to those public employees. The NHS did this with ambulance response times, which are very bad, and that fact is, in turn, very bad. The reason ambulance response times suck isn't hard to winkle out: there's not enough money being spent on ambulances, drivers, and medics. But that's not a politically popular conclusion, especially in the UK, which has been under brutal and worsening austerity since the Blair years (don't worry, eventually they'll do enough austerity and things will really turn around, because, as the old saying goes, "Good policymaking consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome)." Instead of blaming inadequate funding for poor ambulance response times, politicians blamed "inefficiency," driven by a poor motivation. So they established a metric: ambulances must arrive within a certain number of minutes (and they set a consequence: massive cuts to any ambulance service that didn't meet the metric). Now, "an ambulance where it's needed within a set amount of time" may sound like a straightforward metric, and it was – retrospectively. As in, we could tell that the ambulance service was in trouble because ambulances were taking half an hour or more to arrive. But prospectively, after that metric became a target, it immediately ceased to be a good metric. That's because ambulance services, faced with the impossible task of improving response times without spending money, started to dispatch ambulance motorbikes that couldn't carry 95% of the stuff needed to respond to a medical emergency, and had no way to get patients back to hospitals. These motorbikes were able to meet the response-time targets…without improving the survival rates of people who summoned ambulances: https://timharford.com/2014/07/underperforming-on-performance/ AI turns out to be a great way to explore all the perverse dimensions of Goodhart's Law. For years, machine learning specialists have struggled with the problem of "reward hacking," in which an AI figures out how to meet some target in a way that blows up the metric it was derived from: https://research.google/blog/bringing-precision-to-the-ai-safety-discussion/ My favorite example of this is the AI-powered Roomba that was programmed to find an efficient path that minimized collisions with furniture, as measured by a forward-facing sensor that sent a signal whenever the Roomba bumped into anything. The Roomba started driving backwards, smashing into all kinds of furniture, but measuring zero collisions, because there was no collision-sensor on its back: https://x.com/smingleigh/status/1060325665671692288 Charlie Stross has observed that corporations are a kind of "slow AI," that engage in endless reward-hacking to accomplish their goals, increasing their profits by finding nominally legal ways to poison the air, cheat their customers and maim their workers: https://memex.craphound.com/2017/12/29/charlie-strosss-ccc-talk-the-future-of-psychotic-ais-can-be-read-in-todays-sociopathic-corporations/ Public services under conditions of austerity are another kind of slow AI. When policymakers demand that a metric be satisfied without delivering any of the budget or resources needed to satisfy it, the public employees downstream of that impossible demand will start reward-hacking and the metric will become a target, and then cease to be a useful metric. Which brings me, at last, to AI in educational contexts. In 2008, George W Bush stepped up the long-running war on education with the No Child Left Behind Act. The right hates public education, for many reasons. Obviously, there's the fact that uneducated people are easier to mislead, which is helpful if you want to get a bunch of turkeys to vote for Christmas ("I love the uneducated" -DJ Trump). Then there's the fact that, since 1954's Brown v Board of Ed, Black and brown kids were legally guaranteed the right to be educated alongside white kids, which makes a large swathe of the right absolutely nuts. Then there was the 1962 Supreme Court decisions that banned prayer in school, leading to bans on teaching Christian doctrine, including nonsense like Young Earth Creationism. Finally, there's the fact that teachers a) belong to unions; and, b) believe in their jobs and fight for the kids they teach. No Child Left Behind was a vicious salvo in the war on teachers, positing the problem with education as a failure of teachers, driven by a combination of poor training and indifference to their students. Under No Child Left Behind, students were subjected to multiple rounds of standardized tests, and teachers with low-performing students had their budgets taken away (after first being offered modest assistance in improving those scores). Some of NCLB's standardized tests represented reasonable metrics: we really do want kids to be able to read and do math and reason and string together coherent thoughts at various points in their schooling. But when these metrics became targets, boy did they stop being useful as metrics. It's impossible to overstate how fucking perverse NCLB was. I once met an elementary school teacher from an incredibly poor school district in Kansas. Many of her students were resettled refugees who didn't speak English; they spoke a language that no one in the school system could speak, and which had no system of writing. They arrived in her classroom unable to speak English and unable to read or write in any language, and no one could speak their language. Obviously, these students performed badly on standardized tests delivered in English (it didn't help that they had to take the tests just months after arriving in the classroom, because the clock started ticking on their first test when they entered the system, which could take half a year to place them in a class). Within a couple years, these schools had had most of their budgets taken away. When the standardized tests rolled around, this teacher would lead her students into the only room in the school with computers – the test taking room. For many of these students, this was the first time they had ever used a computer. She would tell them to do their best and leave the room for an hour, while a well-paid proctor (along with test-taking computers, the only thing NCLB guaranteed funding for) observed them as they tried to figure out how a mouse worked. They would all score zero on the test, and the school would be punished. NCLB was such a failure that it was eventually rescinded (in 2015), but by that time, a new system of standardization had rushed in to fill the gap, the Common Core. Common Core is a set of rigid standardized curriciula – with standardized assessment rubrics – that was, once again, driven by contempt for teachers. The argument for Common Core was that students were failing – not because of falling budgets or No Child Left Behind – but because the unions were "protecting bad teachers," who would then go on to fail students. By taking away discretion from teachers, we could impose "accountability" on them. The absolutely predictable outcome followed Goodhart's Law to a tee: teachers prioritized inculcating students with the skills to pass the standardized tests, and when those test-taking skills crowded out actual learning, learning fell by the wayside. This continues up to the most advanced part of public education, the Advanced Placement courses that students aspiring to college are strongly pressured to take. If Common Core is rigid, AP is brittle to the point of shattering. Anyone who's ever parented a kid through the US secondary school system knows how much time their kids spent learning to hit their marks on standardized assessments, to the exclusion of actual learning, and how soul-suckingly awful this is. Take that staple of the AP assessment rubric: the five-paragraph essay (5PE), bane of students, teachers and parents everywhere: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/kill-5-paragraph-essay Speaking as a sometime writing teacher and an internationally bestselling essayist, 5PEs are objectively very bad essays. Their only virtue is that they can be assessed in a totally standard way, so the grade any given 5PE is awarded by any grader is likely to be the same grade it receives when presented to any other grader. Grading an essay is an irreducibly subjective matter, and the only way to create an objective standard for essays is to make the essays unrecognizable as essays. And yet, the 5PE is the heart of assessment for many AP classes, from History to English to Social Studies and beyond. A kid who scores high on any humanities APs will have put endless hours into perfecting this perfectly abominable literary form, mastering a skill that they will never, ever be called upon to use (the top piece of college entrance advice is "don't write your personal essay as a 5PE" and college professors spend the first half of their 101 classes teaching students not to turn in 5PEs). The same goes for many other aspects of AP and Common Core assessment. If you do AP Lit, you'll be required to annotate the literature you read by making a set number of marginal observations on every page of the novels, poems and essays you read. Again, as a literary reviewer, novelist, and nonfiction writer who's written more than 30 books, I have to say, this is a batshit way to learn to analyze and criticize literature. Its sole virtue is that it reduces the qualitative matter of literary analysis to a qualitative target that students can hit and teachers can count. And that's where AI comes in. AI – the ultimate bullshit machine – can produce a better 5PE than any student can, because the point of the 5PE isn't to be intellectually curious or rigorous, it's to produce a standardized output that can be analyzed using a standardized rubric. I've been writing YA novels and doing school visits for long enough to cement my understanding that kids are actually pretty darned clever. They don't graduate from high school thinking that their mastery of the 5PE is in any way good or useful, or that they're learning about literature by making five marginal observations per page when they read a book. Given all this, why wouldn't you ask an AI to do your homework? That homework is already the revenge of Goodhart's Law, a target that has ruined its metric. Your homework performance says nothing useful about your mastery of the subject, so why not let the AI write it. Hell, if you're a smart, motivated kid, then letting the AI write your bullshit 5PEs might give you time to write something good. Teachers aren't to blame here. They have to teach to the test, or they will fail their students (literally, because they will have to assign a failing grade to them, and figuratively, because a student who gets a failing grade will face all kinds of punishments). Teachers' unions – who consistently fight against standardization and in favor of their members discretion to practice their educational skills based on kids' individual needs – are the best hope we have: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/29/jane-mcalevey/#trump-is-a-scab The right hates teachers and keeps on setting them up to fail. That hatred has no bottom. Take the Republican Texas State Rep Ryan Guillen, whose House Bill 462 will increase the state's school safety budget from $10/student to $100/student, with those additional funds earmarked to buy one armed drone per 200 students (these drones are supplied by a single company that has ties to Guillen): https://dronelife.com/2024/12/08/texas-lawmaker-proposes-drones-for-school-security-a-less-lethal-solution/ Imagine how much Texas schools could do with an extra $90/student/year – how much more usefully that money could be spent if it were turned over to teachers. But instead, Rep Guillen wants to put "AI in schools" in the form of drones equipped with pepper-spray, flash bangs, and "lances" that can be smashed into people at 100mph. The problem with AI in schools isn't that students are using AI to do their homework. It's that schools have been turned into reward-hacking AIs by a system that hates the idea of an educated populace almost as much as it hates the idea of unionized teachers who are empowered to teach our kids. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Lee Haywood, CC BY-SA 2.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Cybertruck Leads Tesla’s Used-Car Collapse https://gizmodo.com/cybertruck-leads-teslas-used-car-collapse-2000641133 Hackers Went Looking for a Backdoor in High-Security Safes—and Now Can Open Them in Seconds https://www.wired.com/story/securam-prologic-safe-lock-backdoor-exploits/ I clustered four Framework Mainboards to test huge LLMs https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-clustered-four-framework-mainboards-test-huge-llms The Framework Desktop is a beast https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-framework-desktop-is-a-beast-636fb4ff Leaving MAGA https://leavingmaga.org/they-left-maga/steve-vilchez/ Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Bill Ayers’s To Teach: The Journey, in Comics, a humanist look at education https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/10/bill-ayerss-to-teach-the-journey-in-comics-a-humanist-look-at-education/ #10yrsago Kansas officials stonewall mathematician investigating voting machine “sabotage” https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article27951310.html #10yrsago Chinese mega-manufacturers set up factories in India https://web.archive.org/web/20150811043714/https://www.itworld.com/article/2968375/android/foxconn-to-invest-5b-to-set-up-first-of-up-to-12-factories-in-india.html #10yrsago Oracle’s CSO demands an end to customers checking Oracle products for defects https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/oracle-security-chief-to-customers-stop-checking-our-code-for-vulnerabilities/ #10yrsago Girl Sex 101: “for EVERYone who wants to bone down with chicks, regardless of your gender/orientation.” https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/girlsex-101/ #10yrsago John Oliver on the brutal state of sex-ed in America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0jQz6jqQS0 #10yrsago Insurance monitoring dashboard devices used by Uber let hackers “cut your brakes” over wireless https://www.wired.com/2015/08/hackers-cut-corvettes-brakes-via-common-car-gadget/ #10yrsago US lobbying for TPP to lock up clinical trial data https://theconversation.com/how-the-battle-over-biologics-helped-stall-the-trans-pacific-partnership-45648 #10yrsago Larry Lessig considers running for the Democratic presidential nomination https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaqrQz71bMk #10yrsago Felicia Day’s “You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)” https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/11/felicia-days-youre-never-weird-on-the-internet-almost/ #10yrsago Overshare: Justin Hall’s biopic about the first social media/blogging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxD4mqFtySQ #5yrsago When you hear "intangibles"… https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#capitalists-hate-competition #5yrsago How they're killing the post office https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#sos-usps #5yrsago Terra Nullius https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#terra-nullius #5yrsago Uber lost $4b in H1/2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/10/folksy-monopolists/#bezzled #5yrsago Warren Buffet, monopolist https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/10/folksy-monopolists/#folksy-monopolists 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 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress) https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409 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. (1076 words yesterday, 27803 words total). 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 also a reaction to OpenAI's GPT-5 release