Today's links

• Zuckermuskian solopsism: They just don't think other people are real.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Heinlein bio; Amazon bans Amazon-critical podcasts; How to Argue With a Racist; Disenshittify or Die; Food arrangement copyrights, Stingrays on steroids.
• 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.

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Zuckermuskian solopsism (permalink)

When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (think of the ghosts in Pac-Man) and perhaps utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc

Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard. When you nudge the "buy" button a few pixels over and see how sales rise or fall, you're interacting with people as a mass. The dashboard tells you how "sales" respond to a change in the UI, but not how people are affected by that change.

The dashboard can't tell you whether the change meant that some people couldn't locate a buy-button and thus didn't get something they needed, nor can it tell you whether some people bought something they later regretted.

Analytics allow you to relate to people the way a Simcity player does, by making a zoning change and observing the population-scale outcomes: put a road through a residential block and watch the traffic numbers improve while the happiness of the sims in that block declines.

But there's another way in which people like Musk are inclined to view others as NPCs: the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit lots of people. You have to be willing to cheat your investors by lying about "full-self driving," you have to be willing to maim your workers, you have to be willing to rain space debris down on people near your launchpad. If you think of those people as truly real – as being just as capable as you are of experiencing stress, sorrow, fear and anxiety – you couldn't possible set these crimes in motion. You have to view these people as NPCs, devoid of the rich interiority that you marinate in.

William Gibson described this mindset beautifully in Idoru, in a scene where a TV executive describes his audience:

Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

(Not for nothing, Musk frequently pumps millions of dollars into elections in the hopes of influencing all those NPCs into voting for his favored candidates, irrespective of whether those candidates will make those voters better off:)

https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/musks-plan-to-pull-back-from-politics-follows-flop-in-wisconsin-court-election/

On Twitter, Musk banned an account that reported on the movements of his private jet (that is, an account that republished public information), because he said that it made him feel unsafe. Musk also changed how Twitter's block button worked to make it easier for gang-stalkers, griefers, harassers, and trolls to attack their victims, who are disproportionately marginalized: women, queers, people of color:

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-block-x-blue-sky-rcna176130

Musk's fears are vivid and real to him, but the fears of millions of Twitter users are just scripted NPC behaviors. In some important sense, those people don't actually exist for Musk.In some important sense, those people don't actually exist for Musk. Or, as Musk put it on Rogan:

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-5321299/how-empathy-came-to-be-seen-as-a-weakness-in-conservative-circles

Not for nothing: this is also how being in a K-hole feels. Under ketamine sedation, it's easy to feel like the whole world, your whole life to that moment, was a dream or a hallucination. The whole universe is just a figment of your imagination, and you are its god and creator. In a K-hole, other people aren't real.

Now, as it happens, there's a long moral tradition that condemns people who treat others as unreal, as means to an end, rather than as ends unto themselves. For Kant, this is so odious that he said it violated the "categorical imperative":

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/persons-means/

Or, as Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax put it:

Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.

https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html

But when you are seeing like a billionaire, that's how people appear to you: as things. It's the mindset that leads to you offering your subordinate a thoroughbred horse in exchange for fucking you:

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flight-attendant-who-accused-elon-musk-of-sexual-misconduct-2022-5

Seeing like a billionaire is when you view people as aggregated masses without any real interiority or will. Hence "high agency," the term that people who aspire to extreme wealth and power use to describe themselves. If the elite are high agency, then it follows that the masses are low agency. They have few desires or real feelings:

https://www.highagency.com/

It's not just Musk who views people this way. Mark Zuckerberg has been treating people as things for his entire life, ever since he started Facebook in his dorm-room so that he could nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads. In Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams' whistleblower memoir of her time as a top FB exec, we get a picture of Zuck as someone who just doesn't think that other people are real enough to matter:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

It's no wonder that Zuck thinks that chatbots can replace our friends:

https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/mark-zuckerberg-ai-friends-hinge-ceo/

At some foundational level, he thinks we are all chatbots, automata driven by manipulable inputs that drive deterministic outcomes. This is a guy who claims to have invented a mind-control ray using warmed-over Skinnerian behavior mod techniques:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

Sam Altman, another person who sees like a billionaire, and wants to replace our friends with chatbots, claims that humanity is nothing more than a "stochastic parrot" – a statistical autocompleting program that does not truly understand or think:

https://x.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728?lang=en

Billionaires have to be solopsists, or at least, selective solopsists, who don't really believe in the humanity of the people who create their wealth and whom they weild their power over. This has always been clear, but the idea that we can replace our social connections with chatbots erases any doubt.

Billionaires just don't think we're real.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Alternative https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-alternative

• Is Price Fixing Protected by the First Amendment? https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08/is-price-fixing-protected-by-the-first-amendment.html

• FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025 — the longlist https://www.ft.com/content/b64257f1-2949-42e9-85a1-a115bdfc7d11

• Google is killing the open web https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/google-killing-open-web/

• How the Government Built the American Dream House https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-the-government-built-the-american-dream-house

• Antitrust Liability Obligates Structural Change https://www.thesling.org/antitrust-liability-obligates-structural-change/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago PC disguised as a set of encyclopedia volumes https://www.mini-itx.com/projects/encyclomedia/

#20yrago Nobel economist on harm lurking in copyright monopolies https://web.archive.org/web/20060217023906/http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_16-8-2005_pg5_12

#15yrsago Heinlein biography: LEARNING CURVE – the secret history of science fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/16/heinlein-memoir-learning-curve-the-secret-history-of-science-fiction/

#10yrago LAPD & Chicago bought “Stingrays on steroids” with asset-forfeiture & DHS money https://revealnews.org/article/chicago-and-los-angeles-have-used-dirt-box-surveillance-for-a-decade/

#10yrsago NSA kremlinology: spooks outsourced lawbreaking to AT&T https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/was-nsa-trying-outsource-responsibilty-its-fourth-amendment-violations

#10yrsago German chefs can claim copyright over the arrangement of food on plates https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/17/germany-says-taking-photos-food-infringes-chefs-copyright/

#10yrsago Massive Star Wars lands coming to Disneyland and Walt Disney World https://web.archive.org/web/20150815230427/http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2015/08/star-wars-themed-lands-coming-to-walt-disney-world-and-disneyland-resorts/

#10yrsago America’s “worst voting machines” dropped in Virgina (at last) https://www.wired.com/2015/08/virginia-finally-drops-americas-worst-voting-machines/

#5yrsago No one wants an H1B visa https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/17/aura-of-benevolence/#crickets

#5yrsago Amazon bans podcasts that criticize Amazon #https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#nondisparagement

#5yrsago Combat Wheelchairs https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#combat-wheelchairs

#5yrsago How to Argue With a Racist https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

#5yrsago Self-driving cars are bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#car-wreck

#1yrago MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

#1yrago "Disenshittify or Die" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

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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
  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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Divesting from Amazon’s Audible and the Fight for Digital Rights (Libro.fm)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9349e8d0-a87f-013a-d8af-0acc26574db2/00e6cbcf-7f27-4589-a11e-93e4ab59c04b

• 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

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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

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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

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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. (1000 words yesterday, 35029 words total).

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Marius Borg Høiby zou vier vrouwen in hun slaap hebben aangerand en dat hebben gefilmd. De laatste aanranding zou eind vorig jaar hebben plaatsgevonden, terwijl hij eerder dat jaar al door de politie werd gearresteerd.

De Haarlemse zanger Yorick van Norden zag een foto van Paul McCartneys platenkast en wist met een vergrootglas alle titels te achterhalen. Hij schreef een boek over de platen en wat ze voor de Beatle betekenden.

ZANDVOORT (ANP) - Henk Poort zingt dit jaar het volkslied voorafgaand aan de Grote Prijs van Nederland. Ook Yves Berendse, Outsiders en Gerard Joling treden eind deze maand op tijdens het Formule 1-weekend in Zandvoort.

De 69-jarige Poort wordt bij de vertolking van het Wilhelmus bijgestaan door een orkest van twintig violisten. Samen brengen zij volgens de organisatie een kwartier voor de start "een klassieke, indringende uitvoering" van het volkslied ten gehore. Poort treedt in de voetsporen van Duncan Laurence, André Rieu, Floor Jansen en Davina Michelle, die het volkslied eerder vertolkten.

Na de uitvoering van het Wilhelmus opent Joling de Pre-Race Show. Outsiders neemt het daarna van hem over en voorziet de nummers van Joling van "een energieke beat". De dj blijft draaien tot de lichten op de grid uitgaan en de race begint. Aan het eind van de show verzorgt de in Zandvoort geboren en getogen zanger Yves Berendse de vlaggenactie, waarmee het publiek de tribunes rood, wit en blauw laat kleuren.

Een veelgebruikt landbouwgif veroorzaakt blijvende schade in kinderhersenen. Dat schrijven Amerikaanse onderzoekers vandaag in het vakblad JAMA Neurology. Het gaat om chlorpyrifos (CPF), een insecticide dat in de landbouw nog steeds veel wordt gebruikt in de VS en elders in de wereld. De Europese Unie heeft het chemische goedje in 2020 verboden.

Wetenschappers van Columbia University en University of Southern California (USC) onderzochten 270 kinderen en tieners in New York. Zij hadden bij de geboorte allemaal aantoonbare hoeveelheden van het middel in hun navelstrengbloed. Tussen hun zesde en veertiende levensjaar kregen ze hersenscans en motorische testen.

Hoe meer blootstelling, hoe meer schade

De uitkomst was duidelijk: hoe hoger de blootstelling, hoe groter de afwijkingen in de hersenstructuur en stofwisseling. Ook scoorden de kinderen slechter op fijne motoriek, zoals handbewegingen en reactiesnelheid.

"Landarbeiders, zwangere vrouwen en ongeboren kinderen worden tot op de dag van vandaag in gevaar gebracht op een niveau dat vergelijkbaar is met die in dit onderzoek. Het probleem is wijdverbreid”, waarschuwt hoogleraar Virginia Rauh van Columbia. “Het is van vitaal belang dat we de blootstellingsniveaus blijven monitoren, vooral bij zwangere vrouwen in landbouwgemeenschappen.”

Wijdverspreide effecten

Ook hoofdonderzoeker Bradley Peterson van USC is bezorgd: “De verstoringen in hersenweefsel en stofwisseling die we zagen bij prenatale blootstelling aan dit ene pesticide waren door het hele brein verspreid. Er is een grote kans dat andere organofosfaatpesticiden vergelijkbare effecten veroorzaken.”

Oproep tot strengere regels

Volgens de onderzoekers is het cruciaal om zwangere vrouwen en jonge kinderen te beschermen tegen deze middelen, juist omdat de hersenontwikkeling in die fases het kwetsbaarst is. Ondanks eerdere verboden kan blootstelling nog steeds plaatsvinden via landbouwproducten of de lucht in agrarische gebieden.

Hun conclusie is ontnuchterend: het gif verdwijnt niet na de oogst, maar laat blijvende sporen achter in de hersenen van de volgende generatie.

Bron: Eurekalert JAMA Neurology

ROTTERDAM (ANP) - Een meisje is slachtoffer geworden van een zedenmisdrijf in het Zuiderpark in Rotterdam, meldt de politie. Ze was vorige week dinsdag in de middag met haar moeder in het park. Nadat ze een paar minuten uit het zicht was verdwenen, zei ze tegen haar moeder dat een man in de bosjes aan haar had gezeten.

De leeftijd van het slachtoffer wil de politie om privacyredenen niet delen. Wel zegt de politie dat het meisje "een mouwloos donkerblauw jurkje met witte eenhoorntjes en witte sandaaltjes" droeg. Het meisje werd belaagd "in een rietkraag" aan de Zuiderparkpromenade-West.

Onder leiding van het Openbaar Ministerie is een onderzoeksteam bezig uit te zoeken wat er precies is gebeurd. Er zijn sporen en beelden veiliggesteld. Een duidelijk signalement van de dader ontbreekt. Daarom roept de politie getuigen op zich te melden. Het was die middag druk in het park vanwege het mooie weer, aldus de politie.

Hahaha. Muziek is mooi, maar je moet er wel wat te eten bij hebben! Ideetje voor #LL2026... voedseldroppings, speciale drones die hamburgers brengen, en een frietkanon in Elburg!

In dit artikel houden we je op de hoogte van het belangrijkste en meest opvallende 112-nieuws van maandag 18 augustus.

De politie zoekt getuigen van de aanranding van een minderjarig meisje in het Zuiderpark in Rotterdam-Charlois op donderdagmiddag 12 augustus. Het meisje was rond 16:30 uur even uit het zicht van haar moeder verdwenen in een rietkraag aan de Zuiderparkpromenade-West toen het misging. Ze vertelde haar moeder dat een man in de bosjes aan haar had gezeten.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: