U schreef ons over het Marokkaanse elftal, erfbelasting, afstandsmoeders, de pindakaasvloer en de NAVO-top.

Jante Wortels eetstoornis kwam voort uit een gebrek aan controle in haar leven. „Ik had een project nodig waarbij ik zelf kon bepalen of het lukt of niet.” Dat werd eten.

NRC-columnist Floor Rusman kreeg in september te horen dat ze eierstokkanker had. Deze zomer schrijft ze wekelijks over wat er in haar hoofd gebeurde toen haar lichaam een bedreiging werd.

Nadat er in het weekend ongeregeldheden waren na de wedstrijd van Marokko tegen Canada, werd er bij programma’s als ‘Vandaag Inside’ in apocalyptische woorden vooruitgeblikt op de wedstrijd van donderdagavond. Blijft Amsterdam overeind?

De autoriteiten in Spanje houden er rekening mee dat veel slachtoffers van de dodelijke natuurbrand in de Zuid-Spaanse provincie Almería uit het buitenland komen.

Deze zomer luncht NRC mee bij organisaties en bedrijven in het buitenland. Deze week: India. „Mijn eten moet een human touch hebben. Ik vind het fijn dat het door iemand gemaakt wordt die ik vertrouw en die weet wat ik lekker vind.”

The latest Linux Mint blog says that its Wayland support is about ready for primetime – but X11 isn’t going away. Linux Mint lead developer Clement Lefebvre has published the Linux Mint blog for June 2026, announcing that as of the next version of the Cinnamon desktop, it will officially drop “experimental” status for Wayland: this will be a fully supported way to use the Cinnamon desktop environment. You will have to be patient, though – the post says: “The improvements and features mentioned in this blog post are planned for the next version of Linux Mint, which is scheduled for Christmas this year.” The current release of Mint is version 22.3, which we looked at in January this year, and, as we said then, it shipped with Cinnamon version 6.6.4. The version of the desktop in development in the project’s Github repo is currently 6.7.4. So this suggests that Linux Mint 24 will arrive at the end of 2026, and that it will come with Cinnamon 6.8. Mint fans will have to be patient, but the Mint blog for March did reveal that the project was slowing down its release cycle. The post discusses some of the issues the team is encountering with Wayland, such as around controlling the size and positioning of new windows, updating icons with progress bars, and so on. Earlier in the year, the Mint blog for February went into some depth on the problem creating screensaver support in a Wayland environment. If you track such things, this is not shocking. For instance, this is something that XScreensaver creator Jamie Zawinski castigated Wayland for this at very amusing length, back in 2023. Similarly, the May Mint blog discussed performance issues in detail with hard numbers, and showed the effects of different settings on dialog boxes and screenshot-grabbing tools. For us, though, what these insights into the development process illustrate is the Mint team’s determination to bring Cinnamon to Wayland without losing any of its rich functionality – however serious the challenges this presents. And despite the effort going into Wayland, X11 is not going away. The blog says: “In the next version of Cinnamon, both X11 and Wayland will be fully supported.” Perhaps it’s paranoia, but it seems to us that there’s some subtext here, which we interpret as the next version will still support X11 – but after that, all bets are off. We hope we’re wrong on that front. ®

A staff member sent the personal details of around 150 women who were in contact with a Scottish NHS Trust’s maternity services to their own personal email account, the Trust has revealed. NHS Forth Valley, the health board that oversees NHS services in the region between Edinburgh and Glasgow, said it is investigating the matter and has contacted the women affected. “An internal investigation is underway after a member of staff transferred a spreadsheet containing an extract of data from our maternity system to their personal email address,” a spokesperson said. "While the majority of information in the spreadsheet is unidentifiable, it contained some lines of data relating to a number of women who had accessed local maternity services. "There is no evidence that the information has been shared any wider at this stage, and the member of staff has also advised that they have now deleted the data.” NHS Forth Valley has contacted to data subjects directly and informed a number of other relevant organizations, including the UK Information Commissioner. A new mum who was one of the circa 150 women affected by the data mishap, told the Fakirk Herald, which first reported the story, that she was experiencing anxiety that her details were out in the public domain. The woman reportedly was told by NHS Forth Valley that the information was transferred for analytical purposes and concerned a fully qualified, non-clinical staff member, and not a junior. She was also informed that the data in the spreadsheet included full names, dates of birth, NHS numbers, pregnancy treatment information, and the patients’ total number of children. NHS Forth Valley said it had made Police Scotland and the Information Commissioner’s Office aware of what happened. The UK’s health service, for all its merits, has a far from sparkling record when it comes to email-based data breaches. Between bungled Freedom of Information responses to the BCC function proving too difficult for staff members, the NHS and wider UK public sector have been the subject of their fair share of blunders in recent years. Two separate Trusts – Chelsea and Westminster and NHS Highland – failed to protect HIV patients’ data when bulk-sending responses via the CC field instead of the BCC field in recent years. Between 2020 and 2021, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust was also found exposing extraneous data in spreadsheets sent as part of FoI responses. And perhaps our favorite NHS clanger of all, the service’s Digital division, no less, exposed hundreds of email addresses via a failed BCC attempt when sending four separate emails to attendees of a cybersecurity event. ®

Today's links

• "Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy: When we were robots in Egypt…
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Awkward questions for the entertainment industry; ISP v record label death penalty; Coming out on Splash Mountain; Negative Swiss bond yields; Are We Having Fun Yet?
• Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• 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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"Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy (permalink)

While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people

AI dangles the possibility of a world without ego-shattering confrontations between bosses who tell themselves they're in charge, and the workers who know how to do things and insist on telling bosses that their ideas are dangerous, illegal and/or unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

A world without people might be lonely, but it sure would be convenient. How maddening it must be to invest billions in Amazon warehouse automation, only to have to slow down or (gasp!) stop the machines so that the workers who serve as "humans in the loop" can stop to pee! Isn't there some way we can make that their problem, not ours?

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

With AI, the fact that you need to pee – or get paid – does become your problem, rather than your boss's. After the majority of your colleagues have been fired ("because AI will do their jobs"), you become painfully aware that there are plenty of people who need your job, who will happily step in to take it if you complain too much about your bladder or your paycheck.

Even better is when the "human in the loop" can be outsourced to a company overseas, which allows bosses to simply set-and-forget a set of requirements for how the human part of the AI's labor is to be done without ever having to meet or even think about those workers' conditions. This is the illusion of full automation, in which the AI does the job "like magic."

The "magic"? A human being stuck in AI Omelas, tormented by an algorithm that sets an inhuman pace, demands inhuman perfection, and metes out pitiless punishments for any misstep – or perceived misstep – without appeal or explanation. So often, "AI" stands for "Absent Indians": low-waged call-center workers pretending to be robots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

There are many differences between jobs performed by machines and jobs performed by people, of course. But the biggest difference between a machine and a person is moral consideration. A person deserves and demands moral consideration: for their wellbeing, their feelings, even their bladders. A machine gets none of this: you can curse at it, kick it, snap out orders without a "please" or "thank you."

There's only one kind of person you get to treat like this: a slave.

Slavery is labor without even the pretense of moral consideration.

AI, then, isn't just the fantasy of a world without people – it's the fantasy of a world without people…except for slaves. It's the fantasy of a world where the skilled workers who tell you your ideas are stupid are replaced with pliable chatbots who tell you they're brilliant, and then uncomplainingly do the job to your specifications.

It's a world where the cab driver who has all kinds of shit going on in their life – health problems, family problems, (especially) money problems – is replaced by a "robo-taxi" that is being overseen and (often) driven by a remote worker you can't talk to or see, whose problems you therefore never need consider.

The "AI safety" world is a key piece of the AI hype machine, pulling focus away from the idea that AI has shitty economics, produces substandard goods, and fails to do the jobs it takes from human workers, and shifting that focus to the idea that AI is so powerful that it constitutes an existential risk to the human race. The idea that teaching too many words to the word-guessing program risks creating a "superintelligence" that awakens and converts all into paperclips is absurd, a silly idea akin to the notion that if we breed horses to run ever faster, one of our mares will foal a locomotive. Nevertheless, the elevation of "AI takeoff" from a thought-experiment to an "existential risk" is a powerful marketing tool, because any technology that is indistinguishable from god is also going to be extremely valuable (at least, up to the moment that it turns us all into paperclips):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Once the superintelligence thought-experiment is upgraded to an X-risk, lots of other thought experiments are sucked along in its wake. That's where "rights for robots" comes in, the idea that we should spend time thinking about whether chatbots should have human rights.

The best argument for this is that every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world, we end up treating each other better. Movements to extend moral consideration to animals raised uncomfortable questions about the treatment of humans: slaves, workers, poor people, women, children. The Rights for Nature movement, which seeks to extend legal and moral personhood to watersheds and forests, has been key to winning legal and moral victories to protect the environment, and thus the animals and people who depend on it.

But while extending rights to natural things produces positive spillovers for human thriving and rights, the opposite happened when we extended personhood to artificial constructs. Corporate personhood has been a catastrophe for human thriving, conjuring into existence a new race of immortal, pluripotent colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations" that use us as disposable, inconvenient gut flora even as they consume our environment, our political system, and our lives:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge

There's every reason to think that extending personhood to AI will produce the same outcome as "rights for corporations," which is the opposite of the outcome of "Rights for Nature." Rights for nature come at the expense of corporations. Rights for corporations come at the expense of nature. Humans are part of nature, so we benefit from the former, and suffer under the latter:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration

But here's the kicker: as soon as you start arguing about whether chatbots have rights, you elevate them to personhood, which means that all those chatbots your boss just bought are people. And because they're the kind of people who don't warrant moral consideration (let alone a please or thank you), they are slaves (hence "rights for robots").

The AI sales pitch relies on convincing bosses that we've invented a new kind of slave – a worker who neither deserves nor demands rights or consideration. "Rights for robots" affirms that sales pitch. "Rights for robots" implies that robots are slaves. Wittingly or unwittingly, the transformation of "rights for robots" from a thought experiment to a campaign is a massive convincer for any AI salesman who's hunting for would-be slavers to sell chatbots to.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Apple held accountable under the DMA – A victory for developers and computer users! https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260708-01.en.html

• Over Leveraged https://www.todayintabs.com/p/over-leveraged

• FCC to end Biden-era rule that forces ISPs to list all their fees https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/fcc-to-end-biden-era-rule-that-forces-isps-to-list-all-their-fees/

• Connected and Captured https://democracyatwork.substack.com/p/connected-and-captured

• Locus Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume 1 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2040521099/locus-anthology-2025

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Advice for science fiction/fantasy cover artists https://igallo.blogspot.com/2006/07/in-response-to-old-question-what-do-i.html

#20yrsago Embarrassing questions for the entertainment industry https://web.archive.org/web/20060719200608/https://www.eff.org/IP/faq/

#20yrsago UK ISP to British recording industry: get lost https://craphound.com/tiscalibpiresponse.txt

#20yrsago Felten’s paper on the complexities of Network Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20060719095720/https://itpolicy.princeton.edu/pub/neutrality.pdf

#15yrsago 3D printed hair-clips inspired by Bruce Sterling’s “Kiosk” https://myriadwhimsies.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/jovanicas-hair-toys-3d-printed-hair-clips/

#10yrsago Teen comes out to her family on Disneyland’s Splash Mountain https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/this-teen-came-out-to-her-family-in-the-most-awesomely-funny#.rlDowJe6

#10yrsago On the bewildering regional names for corner stores https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-do-you-call-the-corner-store

#10yrsago Amazon is full of Chinese counterfeits and they’re driving out legit goods https://web.archive.org/web/20160708152442/http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08/amazons-chinese-counterfeit-problem-is-getting-worse.html

#10yrsago Negative Swiss 50-year bond yields just shattered the global insecurity barometer https://web.archive.org/web/20160708134915/http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/07/investors_are_paying_to_lend_switzerland_money_for_50_years_at_a_time.html

#10yrsago How can the media regain its credibility in reporting on race in America? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/09/dallas-shooting-racism-and-the-us-media-micah-johnson

#10yrsago Flawed police drug-test kits, railroading prosecutors and racism: the police-stop-to-prison pipeline https://www.propublica.org/article/common-roadside-drug-test-routinely-produces-false-positives

#10yrsago China bans mentions of newly discovered species of beetle from social media https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/11/a-new-species-of-beetle-named-after-president-xi-is-blacklisted-on-chinese-social-media/

#10yrsago Pokemon Go privacy rules are terrible (just like all your other apps) https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-all-the-data-pokemon-go-is-collecting-from-your-phone

#5yrsago Are we having fun yet? https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/11/are-we-having-fun-yet/

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Idler Festival, Jul 11
  https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• 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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Recent appearances (permalink)

• You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah)
  https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6

• Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism)
  https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/

• Lawfare Daily
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g

• How to Think About AI (Organized Money)
  https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow

• Breaking Points
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE

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Latest books (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/

• "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

• "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)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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.

• 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.

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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"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

"I've loved the sickbay on Star Trek: The Next Generation since I was a teenager... Cortical stimulators that revive the unconscious, no matter how traumatising their injuries. Biobeds that enclose patients within sensor arrays, short metal tunnels that scan and analyse —all, I imagine, while keeping sick and hurt beings warm... Our delivery suite has a pseudo-dot-matrix printer, a team of blue scrubs, and the promise of a scalpel."

What the attack on Monticello cost was not the truth. The truth is in the ground, in the archive, in the oral histories collected beginning in 1993, in the names Stanton and Swann-Wright recovered, in the descendants' faces in the photographs taken on the West Lawn steps. Those things were put in the record by specific people doing specific work over three decades, and they remain; the work was done carefully enough that it survives the institution's retreat from it. What the attack cost was the institution's willingness to stand in front of that truth without flinching. That is a real cost.

Nu is elke e-mail met «Loket» in de naam van de afzender bij voorbaat spam.
«Landelijk energieopslag loket»
«Gemeentelijk isolatie loket»
«Het officiele subsidie loket»
en vele variaties met de woorden in andere volgorde.

if "loket" in sender:
spam

draag me weg stelletje prutsers.
(on a sidenote, de Odido-spam groeit hard, geen verassing daar, op dit moment is 1% van alle spam op mijn Odido e-mailadres)

#spam #email #waterhose

jspeter9191 has added a photo to the pool:

In the afternoon at my village(Tallawong), Sydney, Australia.
God bless you.

The original wreck released thousands of metric tons of heavy fuel, known as mazut, in what was described as the Black Sea region’s worst environmental disaster in decades.

Normaal doen!

Leuk stukje in Stripschrift van deze maand over Cozy Coloring:

Hier te bestellen: webshop.catullus.nl

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: