
Today's links
- Textured: The surprises are what matter.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: RIP Mr Dressup; Oligarch sucker-punch; ICC v CEOs.
- Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
- 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.

I'm going to come right out and say it: statistical extrapolation is fine. One of the most useful ways to understand the present and anticipate the future is to measure the things that happened in the past, find the correlations among them, and extrapolate likely future outcomes from those correlations.
There is nothing wrong with this method. It is a productive and reliable way to uncover the causal relationships between natural phenomena, and to find ways to influence the world. If you discover that A reliably causes B, you can do A whenever you want B to happen.
However, the fact that this method works for some things does not mean that it works for all things. Naive, "theory-free" statistical extrapolation (the method that LLMs rely on) has hard limits. LLMs are very good at finding areas of statistical regularity and producing new material that matches this statistical picture: you can use an LLM to produce strings of words that are statistically indistinguishable from sentences and strings of pixels that are statistically indistinguishable from images.
The single most exciting and interesting thing about LLMs is how well this works. Call an LLM "a word-guessing program" and AI boosters will accuse you of reductionism. But the LLM is just guessing words, and the remarkable and amazing thing about this fact is the sheer plausibility of the sentences this method produces.
Before the rise of LLMs, nearly everyone overestimated the statistical irregularity of routine sentences. Our intuition insists that the world is textured, but it turns out that there's far more smoothness in the distribution of natural phenomena, including the actions that we take of our own free will. The same goes for image generation, music generation, and other output from "generative AI" programs.
When I call an LLM a word-guessing program, that's not a dismissal. It's an acknowledgment of the degree to which the tactic of guessing words has exceeded all expectations in the production of sensible-seeming, conversational-seeming sentences and paragraphs. It's all right to be surprised by how similar the output from a conscious being and a word-guessing program can be. It's surprising!
Since the 1950s, researchers have applied the "AI" label to an incoherent grab-bag of technologies that share one characteristic: each one is designed to perform tasks that are considered to be the province of conscious minds. Each one of these "AI" technologies has failed in important ways, but the one way in which every single one of them has succeeded is in refining our own understanding of which things are truly and solely the product of conscious intervention.
The thing we're calling "AI" this year has also succeeded in this way. We've learned that the sentences and other communiques produced by conscious minds have more statistical regularity than previously understood. Again, it's okay to be excited after learning this fact about yourself and your species and its endeavors.
But there are hard limits to the usefulness of these methods, and the fact that AI bosses and boosters can't or won't acknowledge this has led to the current cul-de-sac in which we're spending trillions and emitting gigatons of carbon to produce diminishing returns, even as we fire an army of workers and replace them with defective chatbots that can't do their jobs.
That's because the statistical regularity of the natural world and our activities in it are the backdrop against which the statistical surprises occur, and it's those surprises that make all the difference.
Some weeks ago, I recorded a podcast with a host who was a giant AI booster who claimed that since he could predict what his wife was going to say, and the LLM-powered predictive typing on her phone could predict what she was going to say, that her phone understood her the way he did. This is an obviously repellent idea and you have to feel for this guy's poor wife.
And also: the fact that you can use a statistical lookup table to predict what words someone is going to say doesn't mean you understand them, a fact that you will learn the minute that person says something surprising, like "I want a divorce."
If your "understanding" of your partner is entirely grounded in a statistical record of their utterances and deeds, such that when they do A, you anticipate that B will come next, you will have no ability to cope with a surprise like "I want a divorce." To handle an "I want a divorce" event, you need to actually have a theory about your partner, about how they feel and why, and the factors that might cause that to change.
Surprises are everything. A surprise is the seam of gold in the wall of quartz; it's the friend who confesses they've fallen in love with you; it's the moment when you and the party and the GM all come up with an amazing way to kill the dragon and then roll a natural 20. Surprise is the difference between Pi and 3.11111111111111111111111111111… Dylan going electric is a surprise. A surprise is Miles Davis choosing not to play a note in a phrase. A surprise is Picasso's cubism and Kahlo's mustache.
It's a mistake to interpret the statistical regularity of your life with your spouse as meaning that they're indistinguishable from the output of an LLM. The LLM's statistical picture is always incomplete: it sands off, rounds down or truncates the final couple decimal places, and those smoothings make all the difference, the way the pinch of salt makes all the difference to the chocolate.
Lots of things seem smooth to the naked eye: glass, stainless steel, ice, polished wood. Put those "smooth" materials under a high-magnification microscope and you discover a whole world of tiny irregularities, a texture to reality. Most of the time, you can treat these things as "smooth," but that roughness matters: it's the fracture line the glass cracks on, the place where the ice starts to melt, the grain where the wood starts to warp. The danger of forgetting that your "smooth" thing only seems smooth is that you'll only know how to make it work, and will be totally at sea when it fails.
You can scan the night sky with a radio telescope night after night and only find things that fit with our existing theories of the universe. But you keep scanning, because somewhere out there is a surprise that will open up a deep mystery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
With LLMs, we have invented a machine that uncovers the statistical regularities in our seemingly irregular world, and we have learned that the roughness is rarer than our intuition led us to believe. This machine will also produce statistically regular, smooth output that has the seeming of understanding and consciousness. But – by definition – it can't contain any of our future surprises, because it's just trained on the things we already know, and if we knew about something, it wouldn't be a surprise anymore.
(Image: Zhaoxing Wang, Kunpeng Wang & Yan Xu, CC BY 4.0, modified)
Hey look at this (permalink)


Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago RIP Mr Dressup https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/mr-dressup-ernie-coombs-dies-after-stroke-1.294923
#20yrsago Diebold voting machines opened with hotel minibar key https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/09/18/hotel-minibar-keys-open-diebold-voting-machines/
#15yrsago Russian oligarch sucker-punches rival billionaire on talk show https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/sep/18/alexander-lebedev-russian-tv-punchup
#15yrsago HOWTO track down a con-artist https://web.archive.org/web/20110923143613/http://www.popehat.com/2011/09/10/anatomy-of-a-scam-investigation-chapter-one/
#10yrsago International Criminal Court in the Hague will now try CEOs https://web.archive.org/web/20160919000813/http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/CEOs-Can-Now-Be-Prosecuted-Like-War-Criminals-at-the-Hague-20160916-0013.html
#10yrsago Italy on the verge of the stupidest censorship law in European history https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/transcription.pdf
Upcoming appearances (permalink)

- Berkeley: Celebrating 25 Years at the Digital Frontier (Samuelson Clinic), Sep 24
https://www.law.berkeley.edu/experiential/clinics/samuelson-law-technology-public-policy-clinic/samuelson-25th-anniversary-celebration/
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Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28
https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/
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Boston: The Post-American Internet: Possibilities for a new internet created by an American Hermit Kingdom (MIT Media Lab), Sep 30
https://www.media.mit.edu/events/the-post-american-internet-possibilities-for-a-new-internet-created-by-an-american-hermit-kingdom/
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Boston: Rethinking Our Relationship with AI, Sep 30 (Emtech)
https://event.technologyreview.com/emtech-future-2026/detailed-agenda
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Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs
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South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
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Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=
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Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/
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Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow
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Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01
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Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
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Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
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Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
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Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/
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Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/
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Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
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Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
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"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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"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/
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"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).
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"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"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).
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"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).
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"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.
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"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

- "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 539 (16530 total).
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"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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