Lukt het om in 2026 een vredesakkoord te bereiken tussen Oekraïne en Rusland? Michel Kerres en Eva Peek bespreken waar de onderhandelingen staan en wat er op het spel staat voor…

U schreef ons over het winterse weer, Trump in de ballenbak en de Zwitserse regering.

In de tentoonstelling ‘Monuments’ in Los Angeles gaan kunstenaars en curatoren direct de strijd aan met de nieuwe politiek van Trump. Het laat zien dat monumenten nooit neutraal zijn, maar altijd onderdeel van een politieke strijd.

Het einde van de voorraad ‘de-icing vloeistof’ op Schiphol is in zicht. Dat meldt vliegtuigmaatschappij KLM op de website.

Als het niet over politiek of de poppetjes gaat is het in principe best gezellig bij Denk. Zul je net zien dat Denk een politieke partij is waar het tot overmaat van ramp juist vaak over de poppetjes gaat. Vette pech dus voor het bij Denk opgestapte burgerraadslid te Rotterdam Safa Sodirijo. Zij kreeg met de ongezelligste kant van Denk te maken toen ze vol goede zin iets tegen racisme en discriminatie dacht te gaan doen. In het AD zegt zij namelijk: "Je afkomst doet er binnen Denk juist enorm toe. Het wordt gewoon niet geaccepteerd dat je van een andere afkomst bent dan Turks of Marokkaans, is mijn ervaring." Terwijl het zelfs tussen die twee groepen al niet per se lekker liep bij Denk. Heel bijzonder hoe dit soort problematiek toch vaak speelt bij partijen die juist zeggen te strijden tégen racisme en discriminatie. Zagen we ook al bij Bij1 (afsplitsing van Denk), waar de achterban de succesvolle lijsttrekker Tofik Dibi niet zwart genoeg vond. 

De lijsttrekker van Denk Rotterdam, Faouzi Achbar, bekend van internet, wil niet reageren op de aantijgingen van Sodirijo. Die laatste vraagt zich inmiddels af waartoe Denk op de wereld is: "Ik vraag me ook steeds meer af waar Denk nu echt voor dient. Willen we het leven van mensen in de stad beter maken, of vooral het leven van een paar mensen binnen Denk?" Een goede vraag die de oplossing voor het gerommel binnen deze verbindende partij echter niet dichterbij brengt. Wij vestigen al onze hoop dan maar op de 15-jarige(!) Denker Mohamed, die het tij vanuit Almere zal moeten keren. Als zijn afkomst nu maar meezit.

De twee mannen die maandag werden aangehouden voor de dood van een 60-jarige man in Schiedam zijn geen verdachten meer. Dat heeft de politie bekendgemaakt. Wat er precies is gebeurd aan het eind van de ochtend bij station Nieuwland, is nog steeds onduidelijk.

Samsung and SK hynix readying another gouge as server silicon squeeze leaves PCs and phones out in the cold

Memory prices are set to spike again as chipmakers prioritize AI server production over consumer devices, with analysts warning of a high double-digit jump in Q1 2026 alone as demand outpaces supply.…

Phishers posing as Booking.com use panic-inducing blue screens to bypass security controls

Russia-linked hackers are sneaking malware into European hotels and other hospitality outfits by tricking staff into installing it themselves through fake Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crashes.…

YUNGBLUD

Arctic Monkeys

SCHIPHOL (ANP) - Het aantal geschrapte vluchten op Schiphol is opgelopen tot zeshonderd, meldt de luchthaven in een update. Eerder op de dag meldde Schiphol al dat vierhonderd vluchten niet konden doorgaan als gevolg van het winterse weer en de sneeuwval. Schiphol adviseert reizigers de actuele vluchtinformatie in de gaten te houden voordat ze naar het vliegveld gaan.

NUUK (ANP/RTR) - De premier van Groenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, is dankbaar voor de steun van Europese leiders omtrent de soevereiniteit van Groenland. De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump herhaalde afgelopen weekend dat de Verenigde Staten het gebied "nodig hebben voor de nationale veiligheid". Nielsen noemt de Europese steun "belangrijk in een tijd waarin internationale principes worden uitgedaagd".

Hij stelt dat de VS een respectvolle dialoog met Groenland moeten aangaan, via de "juiste diplomatieke en politieke kanalen".

Europese leiders kwamen dinsdag met een verklaring over Groenland. Daarin wordt onder andere benadrukt dat het Koninkrijk Denemarken, inclusief Groenland, onderdeel van de NAVO is.

Groenland maakt deel uit van het Deense koninkrijk, maar is grotendeels autonoom. De premier van Denemarken, Mette Frederiksen, reageerde maandag op de nieuwe dreigementen van Trump. Zij verklaarde dat een Amerikaanse aanval op een NAVO-bondgenoot "het einde van alles" zou zijn.

DEN HAAG (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De wereldwijde groei in de verkoop van elektrische auto's vertraagt dit jaar naar verwachting. Dit komt doordat China subsidies afbouwt, Europa twijfelt over het uitfaseren van verbrandingsmotoren, en Amerikaanse fabrikanten en beleidsmakers hun plannen voor elektrische auto's bijstellen.

Onderzoeksbureau BloombergNEF verwacht dat er dit jaar 24,3 miljoen elektrische personenauto's verkocht worden, een stijging van slechts 12 procent ten opzichte van 2025. Dat is aanzienlijk zwakker dan de 23 procent groei van de verkoop vorig jaar.

In de VS wordt pas in 2027 of 2028 een herstel in de verkopen verwacht. "Hoewel de langetermijnvooruitzichten voor voertuigen op batterijen positief blijven, is er geen verhaal voor 2026 dat echt reden geeft tot veel optimisme", zegt een onderzoeker van Boston Consulting Group. Doordat de Trump-regering een deel van de belastingvoordelen voor consumenten stopzette en de brandstofnormen versoepelde, is de Amerikaanse markt voor elektrische auto's gekelderd.

De uitstraling van een woning of bedrijfspand wordt voor een groot deel bepaald door de gevel. Waar vroeger vooral hout en steen de standaard waren, kiezen tegenwoordig steeds meer mensen bewust voor kunststof gevelbekleding. Niet alleen vanwege de moderne uitstraling, maar vooral door de vele andere praktische voordelen.

Een tijdloze uitstraling

Kunststof gevelbekleding is verkrijgbaar in uiteenlopende structuren en profielen. Vooral de houtlook varianten zijn enorm in opkomst. Dankzij moderne productietechnieken is het verschil met echt hout nauwelijks nog te zien. Natuurlijke tinten zorgen voor een warme en authentieke uitstraling. Het grote voordeel? Je geniet van de uitstraling van hout, zonder de nadelen van schuren en schilderen.

Makkelijke en snelle montage

Een belangrijk pluspunt van kunststof gevelbekleding is de makkelijke montage. De panelen zijn licht van gewicht en vaak voorzien van slimme klik- of bevestigingssystemen. Hierdoor kan de gevelbekleding snel en strak worden geplaatst. Dit maakt kunststof gevelbekleding niet alleen aantrekkelijk voor nieuwbouw, maar ook voor renovatieprojecten. Een oude gevel kun je heel gemakkelijk opfrissen zonder ingrijpende werkzaamheden te hoeven uitvoeren.

Bestand tegen weer en wind

Het klimaat in Nederland wisselt sterk, met koude, natte winters en zomerdagen met felle zon. Gevelmateriaal moet daartegen bestand zijn en kunststof is daarvoor een slimme optie. Het materiaal neemt geen vocht en is ongevoelig voor schimmelvorming. En in tegenstelling tot hout trekt kunststof niet krom en scheurt het niet door temperatuurschommelingen. Hierdoor blijft de gevel jarenlang in topconditie.

Onderhoudsarme gevel

Wie kiest voor kunststof gevelbekleding, kiest voor gemak. Waar houten gevels regelmatig onderhoud nodig hebben, volstaat bij kunststof meestal een eenvoudige schoonmaakbeurt. Je hoeft dus nooit te schuren of te schilderen. Dit bespaart niet alleen tijd, maar ook kosten op de lange termijn. Zeker voor grotere oppervlakken of moeilijk bereikbare gevels is dit een groot voordeel.

Kleurvast materiaal

Een ander belangrijk voordeel is de kleurvastheid van kunststof. De kleur zit door en door in het materiaal en is bestand tegen uv-straling. Hierdoor verkleurt de gevel nauwelijks, zelfs niet na jarenlang blootstelling aan zonlicht. Dit betekent dat overschilderen volledig overbodig is, want je gevel behoudt zijn oorspronkelijke uitstraling.

Verschillende toepassingen en profielen

Kunststof gevelbekleding is beschikbaar in diverse uitvoeringen. Elke uitvoering heeft een eigen uitstraling en toepassing. Met kunststof rabatdelen, met overlappende opbouw, zorg je voor een klassieke, robuuste uitstraling. Je schuift deze rabatdelen heel eenvoudig over elkaar. Je kunt ook kiezen voor kunststof schroten. Welke soort je ook kiest: er is veel variatie mogelijk. Door deze variatie is kunststof gevelbekleding niet alleen geschikt voor woningen, maar bijvoorbeeld ook voor garages en bedrijfspanden.

Jarenlang plezier van je aanschaf

Het mag duidelijk zijn: de populariteit van kunststof gevelbekleding is geen toeval. Of je nu kiest voor kunststof schroten of rabatdelen: het materiaal combineert uitstraling met praktisch gebruiksgemak. De montage is simpel en het materiaal is onderhoudsarm, maar wel weerbestendig. Ook vanwege de lange levensduur is het een slimme keuze. Of je nu gaat voor een moderne houtlook of een klassieke afwerking met rabatdelen: kunststof gevelbekleding biedt een toekomstbestendige oplossing waar je jarenlang plezier van hebt.

sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Volkswagen is making a drastic change to its interiors, or at least the interiors of its electric vehicles. The automaker recently unveiled a new cockpit generation with the refreshed ID. Polo -- the diminutive electric hatchback that the brand sells in Europe -- that now comes with physical buttons. [...] The steering wheel gets new clusters of buttons for cruise control and interacting with music playback, while switches for the temperature and fan speed now live in a row along the dashboard.

The move back to buttons doesn't come out of nowhere. Volkswagen already started the shift with the new versions of the Golf and Tiguan models in the United States. Unfortunately, some climate controls, such as those for the rear defrost and the heated seats, are still accessed through the touchscreen. Thankfully, they look to retain their dedicated spot at the bottom of the display. Volkswagen hasn't announced which models will receive the new cockpit design. The redesigned interior also may be limited to the brand's electric vehicles, which would limit it to the upcoming refresh for the ID.4 SUV (and potentially the ID.Buzz), as the only VW EV models currently sold in America. "Unfortunately, the glued-on-dash tablet look is still there," adds sinij.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The draft statement comes ahead of a meeting of the so-called Coalition of the Willing allies of Ukraine in Paris.

Today's links

• Code is a liability (not an asset): AI psychosis, tech boss edition.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Coldplay CD DRM; Star Wars Wars; Digital manorialism vs neofeudalism; Transvaginal foetal sonic bombardment: woo-tunes for your hoo-hah.
• 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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Code is a liability (not an asset) (permalink)

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

Code is a liability. Code's capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn't even wear down.

This is the thesis of Paul Mason's 2015 book Postcapitalism, a book that has aged remarkably poorly (though not, perhaps, as poorly as Mason's own political credibility): code is not an infinitely reproducible machine that requires no labor inputs to operate. Rather, it is a brittle machine that requires increasingly heroic measures to keep it in good working order, and which eventually does "wear out" (in the sense of needing a top-to-bottom refactoring).

To understand why code is a liability, you have to understand the difference between "writing code" and "software engineering."

"Writing code" is an incredibly useful, fun, and engrossing pastime. It involves breaking down complex tasks into discrete steps that are so precisely described that a computer can reliably perform them, and optimising that performance by finding clever ways of minimizing the demands the code puts on the computer's resources, such as RAM and processor cycles.

Meanwhile, "software engineering" is a discipline that subsumes "writing code," but with a focus on the long-term operations of the system the code is part of. Software engineering concerns itself with the upstream processes that generate the data the system receives. It concerns itself with the downstream processes that the system emits processed information to. It concerns itself with the adjacent systems that are receiving data from the same upstream processes and/or emitting data to the same downstream processes the system is emitting to.

"Writing code" is about making code that runs well. "Software engineering" is about making code that fails well. It's about making code that is legible – whose functions can be understood by third parties who might be asked to maintain it, or might be asked to adapt the processes downstream, upstream or adjacent to the system to keep the system from breaking. It's about making code that can be adapted, for example, when the underlying computer architecture it runs on is retired and has to be replaced, either with a new kind of computer, or with an emulated version of the old computer:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/hpux_end_of_life/

Because that's the thing: any nontrivial code has to interact with the outside world, and the outside world isn't static, it's dynamic. The outside world busts through the assumptions made by software authors all the time and every time it does, the software needs to be fixed. Remember Y2K? That was a day when perfectly functional code, running on perfectly functional hardware, would stop functioning – not because the code changed, but because time marched on.

We're 12 years away from the Y2038 problem, when 32-bit flavors of Unix will all cease to work, because they, too, will have run out of computable seconds. These computers haven't changed, their software hasn't changed, but the world – by dint of ticking over, a second at a time, for 68 years – will wear through their seams, and they will rupture:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/23/the_unix_epochalypse_might_be/

The existence of "the world" is an inescapable factor that wears out software and requires it to be rebuilt, often at enormous expense. The longer code is in operation, the more likely it is that it will encounter "the world." Take the code that devices use to report on their physical location. Originally, this was used for things like billing – determining which carrier or provider's network you were using and whether you were roaming. Then, our mobile devices used this code to help determine your location in order to give you turn-by-turn directions in navigation apps. Then, this code was repurposed again to help us find our lost devices. This, in turn, became a way to locate stolen devices, a use-case that sharply diverges from finding lost devices in important ways – for example, when locating a lost device, you don't have to contend with the possibility that a malicious actor has disabled the "find my lost device" facility.

These additional use cases – upstream, downstream and adjacent – exposed bugs in the original code that never surfaced in the earlier applications. For example, all location services must have some kind of default behavior in the (very common) event that they're not really sure where they are. Maybe they have a general fix – for example, they know which cellular mast they're connected to, or they know where they were the last time they got an accurate location fix – or maybe they're totally lost.

It turns out that in many cases, location apps drew a circle around all the places they could be and then set their location to the middle of that circle. That's fine if the circle is only a few feet in diameter, or if the app quickly replaces this approximation with a more precise location. But what if the location is miles and miles across, and the location fix never improves? What if the location for any IP address without a defined location is given as the center of the continental USA and any app that doesn't know where it is reports that it is in a house in Kansas, sending dozens of furious (occasionally armed) strangers to that house, insisting that the owners are in possession of their stolen phones and tablets?

https://theweek.com/articles/624040/how-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-kansas-farm-into-digital-hell

You don't just have to fix this bug once – you have to fix it over and over again.

In Georgia:

https://www.jezebel.com/why-lost-phones-keep-pointing-at-this-atlanta-couples-h-1793854491

In Texas:

https://abc7chicago.com/post/find-my-iphone-apple-error-strangers-at-texas-familys-home-scott-schuster/13096627/

And in my town of Burbank, where Google's location-sharing service once told us that our then-11-year-old daughter (whose phone we couldn't reach) was 12 miles away, on a freeway ramp in an unincorporated area of LA county (she was at a nearby park, but out of range, and the app estimated her location as the center of the region it had last fixed her in) (it was a rough couple hours).

The underlying code – the code that uses some once-harmless default to fudge unknown locations – needs to be updated constantly, because the upstream, downstream and adjacent processes connected to it are changing constantly. The longer that code sits there, the more superannuated its original behaviors become, and the more baroque, crufty and obfuscated the patches layered atop of it become.

Code is not an asset – it's a liability. The longer a computer system has been running, the more tech debt it represents. The more important the system is, the harder it is to bring down and completely redo. Instead, new layers of code are slathered atop of it, and wherever the layers of code meet, there are fissures in which these systems behave in ways that don't exactly match up. Worse still: when two companies are merged, their seamed, fissured IT systems are smashed together, so that now there are adjacent sources of tech debt, as well as upstream and downstream cracks:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

That's why giant companies are so susceptible to ransomware attacks – they're full of incompatible systems that have been coaxed into a facsimile of compatibility with various forms of digital silly putty, string and baling wire. They are not watertight and they cannot be made watertight. Even if they're not taken down by hackers, they sometimes just fall over and can't be stood back up again – like when Southwest Airlines' computers crashed for all of Christmas week 2022, stranding millions of travelers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/16/for-petes-sake/#unfair-and-deceptive

Airlines are especially bad, because they computerized early, and can't ever shut down the old computers to replace them with new ones. This is why their apps are such dogshit – and why it's so awful that they've fired their customer service personnel and require fliers to use the apps for everything, even though the apps do. not. work. These apps won't ever work.

The reason that British Airways' app displays "An unknown error has occurred" 40-80% of the time isn't (just) that they fired all their IT staff and outsourced to low bidders overseas. It's that, sure – but also that BA's first computers ran on electromechanical valves, and everything since has to be backwards-compatible with a system that one of Alan Turing's proteges gnawed out of a whole log with his very own front teeth. Code is a liability, not an asset (BA's new app is years behind schedule).

Code is a liability. The servers for the Bloomberg terminals that turned Michael Bloomberg into a billionaire run on RISC chips, meaning that the company is locked into using a dwindling number of specialist hardware and data-center vendors, paying specialized programmers, and building brittle chains of code to connect these RISC systems to their less exotic equivalents in the world. Code isn't an asset.

AI can write code, but AI can't do software engineering. Software engineering is all about thinking through context – what will come before this system? What will come after it? What will sit alongside of it? How will the world change? Software engineering requires a very wide "context window," the thing that AI does not, and cannot have. AI has a very narrow and shallow context window, and linear expansions to AI's context window requires geometric expansions in the amount of computational resources the AI consumes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda

Writing code that works, without consideration of how it will fail, is a recipe for catastrophe. It is a way to create tech debt at scale. It is shoveling asbestos into the walls of our technological society.

Bosses do not know that code is a liability, not an asset. That's why they won't shut the fuck up about the chatbots that shit out 10,000 times more code than any human programmer. They think they've found a machine that produces assets at 10,000 times the rate of a human programmer. They haven't. They've found a machine that produces liability at 10,000 times the rate of any human programmer.

Maintainability isn't just a matter of hard-won experience teaching you where the pitfalls are. It also requires the cultivation of "Fingerspitzengefühl" – the "fingertip feeling" that lets you make reasonable guesses about where never before seen pitfalls might emerge. It's a form of process knowledge. It is ineluctable. It is not latent in even the largest corpus of code that you could use as training data:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

Boy do tech bosses not get this. Take Microsoft. Their big bet right now is on "agentic AI." They think that if they install spyware on your computer that captures every keystroke, every communication, every screen you see and sends it to Microsoft's cloud and give a menagerie of chatbots access to it, that you'll be able to tell your computer, "Book me a train to Cardiff and find that hotel Cory mentioned last year and book me a room there" and it will do it.

This is an incredibly unworkable idea. No chatbot is remotely capable of doing all these things, something that Microsoft freely stipulates. Rather than doing this with one chatbot, Microsoft proposes to break this down among dozens of chatbots, each of which Microsoft hopes to bring up to 95% reliability.

That's an utterly implausible chatbot standard in and of itself, but consider this: probabilities are multiplicative. A system containing two processes that operate at 95% reliability has a net reliability of 90.25% (0.95 * 0.95). Break a task down among a couple dozen 95% accurate bots and the chance that this task will be accomplished correctly rounds to zero.

Worse, Microsoft is on record as saying that they will grant the Trump administration secret access to all the data in its cloud:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

So – as Signal's Meredith Whittaker and Udbhav Tiwari put it in their incredible 39C3 talk last week in Hamburg – Microsoft is about to abolish the very idea of privacy for any data on personal and corporate computers, in order to ship AI agents that cannot ever work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

Meanwhile, a Microsoft exec got into trouble last December when he posted to Linkedin announcing his intention to have AI rewrite all of Microsoft's code. Refactoring Microsoft's codebase makes lots of sense. Microsoft – like British Airways and other legacy firms – has lots of very old code that represents unsustainable tech debt. But using AI to rewrite that code is a way to start with tech debt that will only accumulate as time goes by:

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/24/microsoft-denies-rewriting-windows-11-using-ai-after-an-employees-one-engineer-one-month-one-million-code-post-on-linkedin-causes-outrage/

Now, some of you reading this have heard software engineers extolling the incredible value of using a chatbot to write code for them. Some of you are software engineers who have found chatbots incredibly useful in writing code for you. This is a common AI paradox: why do some people who use AI find it really helpful, while others loathe it? Is it that the people who don't like AI are "bad at AI?" Is it that the AI fans are lazy and don't care about the quality of their work?

There's doubtless some of both going on, but even if you teach everyone to be an AI expert, and cull everyone who doesn't take pride in their work out of the sample, the paradox will still remain. The true solution to the AI paradox lies in automation theory, and the concept of "centaurs" and "reverse centaurs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

In automation theory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. A "reverse centaur" is someone who has been conscripted into assisting a machine. If you're a software engineer who uses AI to write routine code that you have the time and experience to validate, deploying your Fingerspitzengefühl and process knowledge to ensure that it's fit for purpose, it's easy to see why you might find using AI (when you choose to, in ways you choose to, at a pace you choose to go at) to be useful.

But if you're a software engineer who's been ordered to produce code at 10x, or 100x, or 10,000x your previous rate, and the only way to do that is via AI, and there is no human way that you could possibly review that code and ensure that it will not break on first contact with the world, you'll hate it (you'll hate it even more if you've been turned into the AI's accountability sink, personally on the hook for the AI's mistakes):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

There's another way in which software engineers find AI-generated code to be incredibly helpful: when that code is isolated. If you're doing a single project – say, converting one batch of files to another format, just once – you don't have to worry about downstream, upstream or adjacent processes. There aren't any. You're writing code to do something once, without interacting with any other systems. A lot of coding is this kind of utility project. It's tedious, thankless, and ripe for automation. Lots of personal projects fall into this bucket, and of course, by definition, a personal project is a centaur project. No one forces you to use AI in a personal project – it's always your choice how and when you make personal use of any tool.

But the fact that software engineers can sometimes make their work better with AI doesn't invalidate the fact that code is a liability, not an asset, and that AI code represents liability production at scale.

In the story of technological unemployment, there's the idea that new technology creates new jobs even as it makes old ones obsolete: for every blacksmith put out of work by the automobile, there's a job waiting as a mechanic. In the years since the AI bubble began inflating, we've heard lots of versions of this: AI would create jobs for "prompt engineers" – or even create jobs that we can't imagine, because they won't exist until AI has changed the world beyond recognition.

I wouldn't bank on getting work in a fanciful trade that literally can't be imagined because our consciousnesses haven't so altered by AI that they've acquired the capacity to conceptualize of these new modes of work.

But if you are looking for a job that AI will definitely create, by the millions, I have a suggestion: digital asbestos removal.

For if AI code – written at 10,000 times the speed of any human coder, designed to work well, but not to fail gracefully – is the digital asbestos we're filling our walls with, then our descendants will spend generations digging that asbestos out of the walls. There will be plenty of work fixing the things that we broke thanks to the most dangerous AI psychosis of all – the hallucinatory belief that "writing code" is the same thing as "software engineering." At the rate we're going, we'll have full employment for generations of asbestos removers.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• The State of Anti-Surveillance Design https://www.404media.co/the-state-of-anti-surveillance-design/

• Ancient Everyday Weirdness https://bruces.medium.com/ancient-everyday-weirdness-591955f40a2d

• Norman Podhoretz, 1930-2025 https://coreyrobin.com/2025/12/18/norman-podhoretz-1930-2025/

• A Cultural Disease: Enshittificationitis https://aboutsomething.substack.com/p/a-cultural-disease-enshittificationitis?triedRedirect=true

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Coldplay CD DRM — more information https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/05/coldplay-cd-drm-more-information/

#20yrsago Sony sued for spyware and rootkits in Canada https://web.archive.org/web/20060103051129/http://sonysuit.com/

#20yrsago What if pizzas came with licenses like the ones in DRM CDs? https://web.archive.org/web/20110108164548/http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060104161112858

#10yrsago Star Wars Wars: the first six movies, overlaid https://starwarswars.com/

#10yrsago Transvaginal foetal sonic bombardment: woo-tunes for your hoo-hah https://babypod.net/en/

#10yrsago Of Oz the Wizard: all the dialog in alphabetical order https://vimeo.com/150423718?fl=pl&fe=vl

#5yrsago Pavilions replacing union workers with "gig workers" https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/manorialism-feudalism-cycle/#prop22

#5yrsago South Carolina GOP moots modest improvements to "magistrate judges" https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/manorialism-feudalism-cycle/#karolina-klown-kar

#5yrsago Digital manorialism vs neofeudalism https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/manorialism-feudalism-cycle/#to-the-manor

#5yrsago My Fellow Americans https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/manorialism-feudalism-cycle/#my-fellow-americans

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

• Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/

• Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
  https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (39c3)
  https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet

• Enshittification with Plutopia
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

• "can't make Big Tech better; make them less powerful" (Get Subversive)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1EzM9_6eLE

• The Enshitification Life Cycle with David Dayen (Organized Money)
  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2412334/episodes/18399894

• Enshittificaition on The Last Show With David Cooper:
  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-last-show-with-david-c-31145360/episode/cory-doctorow-enshttification-december-16-2025-313385767

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Latest 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/

• "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 (thebezzle.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)

• "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, June 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. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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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.

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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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