Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.

As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:

https://www.normaltech.ai/

As a destructive economic pathology, AI is extraordinary. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money – over $1.4T, most of that in the past year – on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI can't do the jobs it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town.

In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed. What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp:

https://gizmodo.com/trump-on-data-centers-you-cant-fight-it-you-have-to-go-with-it-2000790014

This is just one of the many negative effects of AI that can be traced to the scale of the bubble. Were it not for the imperative to turn more than a trillion dollars of losses into a profit, we would not have the aggressive, site-destroying scraping epidemic. Nor would we see AI crammed into every part of every product and service we use. And of course, in the absence of the investment bubble, businesses wouldn't be firing productive workers and replacing them with defective chatbots.

The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference. AI's investor story is an incoherent tangle of predictions about AI's future, ranging from the outlandish ("Once we spend enough money, AI will become God and solve all our problems, including our profitability crisis") to the dystopian ("The majority of jobs in the economy will be done by our chatbots, and the employers who previously employed those workers will split the wage savings with us").

None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over trillions to finance this bubble?

I have previously written about one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real. How could they? Achieving billionairehood requires that you inflict pain on vast numbers of people. If you truly believed that those people were as real as you are, you'd never be able to look yourself in the mirror. Whether it's Leona Helmsley's claim that "only the little people pay taxes," or Elon Musk's habit of calling people who disagree with him "NPCs," the whole ideological project of billionaireism is shot through with a kind of solipsism:

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

This is true even in one-on-one encounters: for the Epstein Class, the children raped on his island weren't fully real – certainly not as real as their own children. It's even more true for the people that billionaires experience as statistical artifacts, such as Jeff Bezos's vast army of drivers and warehouse workers, with their sky-high on-the-job injury rates and the everyday indignity of their piss-bottles. It gets worse for social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg, for whom AI's principal appeal is the prospect of ending socializing on social media, swapping your mulish friends for pliable chatbots who will organize their interactions with you to maximize your platform usage and thus the number of ads you see:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/19/billionaire-solipsism/#sirius-cybernetics

I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that other people will believe in AI.

This is a well-established investment principle. As Keynes wrote, the point of investing isn't necessarily to pick the most beautiful contestant to win the beauty contest – it's to pick the contestant that the other judges will hand the crown to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most – you get rich by identifying the businesses that other investors will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares after the price spike, but before anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than you."

Blue-banded Pitta (Erythropitta arquata), family Pittidae, order Passeriformes, endemic to Borneo

Danse Macabre & Danse Mystique

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”

Right now there's an expectation from most owners that it's your job to do whatever you can to get those precious dollars. And that's largely accepted because yeah obviously the business needs money to survive, and you need to keep your job for the same reason. But in a world where that's not true (or to a smaller degree where the boss cares more about the employees than profit maximization) these kinds of consequences could be the standard method of attitude correction.

This is awesome on so many levels.

(aka, please do not click play if you cannot handle very graphic body horror and blood.)

What you call procrastination might just be your body saying: "I'm overwhelmed and everything feels too much"

What you call anxiety might just be your body saying: "I've been in danger before, and I don't know if it's over yet"

What you call neediness might just be your body saying: "I didn't get what I needed, and I'm still longing"

What you call overreacting might just be your body saying: "This feels like danger to me because it once was"

What you call emotional instability might just be your body saying: "I was never taught that feeling emotions could be safe"

What you call resistance might just be your body saying: "I don't feel safe enough to do what you want me to"

What you call laziness might just be your body saying: "I'm frozen because I had to work hard for too long"*

What you call numbness might just be your body saying: "I had to shut down to keep you safe"

What you call avoidance might just be your body saying: "Im not ready to face this yet. I need slower exposure to it"

(the.trauma.educator on ig)

take these tags, on somebody else's post (condolences pip)

the thing is. this is what i would call an inside thought. nobody would have known you didn't get it if you didn't tell them that. if you recognised that it was important but didn't have the headspace to process it, you can reblog without commentary for others, or to come back to later. or you can save it somewhere and wait until you DO have the capacity to read it over a few more times, ponder it, consider what it might mean, figure out how to understand it, and THEN reblog it

but no. rushing to reblog while it is still opaque. rushing to admit to ignorance rather than spend the time to achieve understanding. perhaps hoping that somebody will break it down for you more simply, though to my mind it was quite simply phrased in the first place. never stopping to take the time first

comprehension is not always instant! sometimes it takes a bit of time for something to percolate after you read it; sometimes you need to read it a few times; sometimes you realise you don't have the context for it and either go and get the context or accept that it's not for you right now