Long considered a luxury for chardonnay-sipping environmentalists, solar energy now has the potential to become the energy choice of beer-drinking workers concerned about the cost of living.

It is no longer a theoretical possibility that polluters could be held responsible in court — it is a real and rising legal tide.

Today's links AI's pogo-stick grift: The hard part is operating in an unpredictable, adversarial, unstructured world. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Galaksija, TSA shock-wand, Reverse-centaur apocalypse. 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. AI's pogo-stick grift (permalink) Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, we don't get fooled again." Automation can be transformative, relieving us of danger and drudgery by getting a machine to pick up some of the heavy work. Ideally automation seamlessly swaps a human for a machine at some stage in a process (ideally, the boring, dangerous and/or difficult phase). Like, whipping egg-whites for a meringue is hard on your wrist. But swap your whisk for a hand blender, and suddenly that tiresom process becomes fast and easy. If the blender is cordless, you can use it anywhere in your kitchen, including wherever you would have stood over a bowl with a whisk. A mixer, by contrast, requires more labor on your part: you have to decant the contents of your mixing bowl into the mixer, run its motor, and then scrape the whipped whites back into your bowl for the next phase. It's worse automation. But the worst automation would be a mixer that requires a special electrical outlet, a different fridge, and a special egg-carton. You would have to redesign your whole kitchen to use that thing. Sure, it might produce perfect meringues, and sure, if you had a meringue factory it might be a great solution. But for everyday use, it's a solution that creates more problems than it solves. AI pitchmen promise that seamless swapping of a human tethered to some choresome drudgery for software. That's the whole point of self-driving cars: each of us can swap a standard car for one with an autopilot and use the same roads, with the same road-users, to get to all the same places. We don't have to tear up all the roads and lay tracks, or fill the roadside environment with sensors and beacons to help the "self-driving" cars navigate the system. A self-driving car can share the road with human-piloted vehicles, even when those other vehicles are driven by humans who don't see why they should allow a robot to merge into their lane or have the right of way, even if the human is turning left into oncoming robo-traffic. Self-driving cars are not very good at this stuff, as it turns out. When that became apparent, self-driving car hucksters announced that it was only reasonable for their products to require something of the rest of us. As Andrew Ng put it: “I think many AV teams could handle a pogo stick user in pedestrian crosswalk,” Ng told me. “Having said that, bouncing on a pogo stick in the middle of a highway would be really dangerous.” “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.” https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-winter-full-autonomy-waymo-tesla-uber This is an incredible act of shameless bait-and-switchery. In just a few short sentences, Ng's cars go from being the kind of automation that is purely the concern of the person who uses it – the owner of a self-driving car – to the kind of automation that everyone in the world has to adjust to, lest we become part of the "pogo stick problem." Making a car that can navigate a well-behaved, non-adversarial world is relatively straightforward. But demanding that the entire world behave itself? Well, that's the hard problem of 100,000 years of civilization and ethics. A product that only works in an ideal world isn't a viable product. Self-driving car boosters didn't invent this wheeze, either. The entire concept of "pedestrian" (and later, "jaywalker") was invented by the auto industry to shift blame for the death and destruction the wealthy owners of their products inflicted on everyday people to the victims: https://marker.medium.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-afd48f994c05 The latest peddlers of pogo-stick demands are the agentic AI people. They have raised (hundreds of) billions of dollars by promising that they will make AIs that can autopilot your browser to accomplish tedious, time-consuming tasks, visiting the same websites you would visit, locating and processing the information needed to perform the task you've set for it. This will supposedly make all kinds of human workers obsolete (which is where the hundreds of billions of dollars come in – the whole AI investor pitch is "We are developing technology that will let bosses fire their workers"). But agentic AI sucks. Asking a chatbot to take a screenshot of a website, then make guesses about which parts of it are links and what those links do, choose one link to fire a click at, and then start again is a recipe for incredible dysfunction. That's even before we get into "hallucinations" (this is AI jargon for "errors"). A more mature agentic AI apologetics admits that while no one knows how to make an AI that can navigate the whole internet, we can make specialist agents that can perform one kind of task, then hand off the output from that task to the next agent, and the next. This also sucks: you're created a whole menagerie of AIs, each of which is prone to its own failure modes, and then combining them, multiplying all those error potentials together, sending erroneous findings careening through a cascade of downstream AIs. This is broken-telephone-as-a-service. Give it your credit card, ask it to order a bag of jucing oranges, and six months later someone's gonna back a 16 wheeler up to your front door with $40,000 worth of frozen OJ and a receipt for a futures contract you're on the hook for. The latest agentic AI pitch "solves" this problem by asserting that the whole internet will simply have to accommodate itself to AI agents. Every website will have to adopt robust, accurate semantics that describe its navigation and offerings, standardized across every domain of human activity. This would be great. The semantic web people have been trying to make it happen since 1999, with no success to speak of, for reasons I identified more than 20 years ago: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm The reason websites don't make their results easy to scrape and compare is that they want to cheat you. They want you to buy something more expensive and/or inferior than the best match for your desire. There is no way for an AI agent to know when a website is lying to it, and the websites that lie the most are incentivized to have the best, highest-grade automation hooks for an AI agent to connect to (just as spammers have the best, most pristine anti-spam incidia, from DKIM to SPF to DMARC records). And these cheaters aren't fringe players – they're the biggest companies out there. Amazon knows that Prime members don't shop around, so it presents them with higher prices than non-Prime users. Airlines use AI and surveillance data to estimate your desperation and price their tickets accordingly: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed What's more, these companies sue people who try to collect and analyze their prices: https://simpleflying.com/ryanair-wins-case-booking-screen-scraping-reselling-tickets/ The hard part of comparison-shopping for an airline isn't sorting a database of all the prices offered to all customers under all circumstances: it's compiling such a database. We don't need complex AI-based techniques to perform a simple sort – we need AI to solve the problem of knowing what prices every airline is charging at this instant to every flier for every itinerary. When agentic AI grifters insist that the entire internet has to adopt and faithfully use standard APIs so their bots can accurately analyze the internet's contents, they are re-inventing the pogo-stick problem. Yes, if you could get the entire world to arrange its affairs to your benefit, you could surely do some incredible things, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a rollerskate. Even if you could get everyone to adopt a standard set of APIs and use them well, this is a titanic engineering challenge, at least as big as anything the agentic AI people are promising to do. There's an unassailable response to the assertion that you could do amazing things as soon as everyone else upends their life to make things more convenient for you, the sacred principle of "wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which will be full first": https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/oqiic7/studying_the_origins_of_the_phrase_wish_in_one/ (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) A business model for hyperactive smoke alarms https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1945959030851035223.html Britain’s New Left-Wing Party May Be Devastating for Labour https://jacobin.com/2025/08/britain-new-left-wing-party/ Making America Epstein Again https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-01-making-america-epstein-again/ Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two-stories-jeffrey-epstein-prison-death/596029/ LIDER MIT PALESTINE https://lidermitpalestine.bandcamp.com/album/lider-mit-palestine-new-yiddish-songs-of-grief-fury-and-love Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Telco that blocked union site also blocked 766+ other sites https://web.archive.org/web/20050807000417/http://www.opennetinitiative.net/bulletins/010/ #20yrsago Chevron being sued in US for hiring Nigerian death squads https://web.archive.org/web/20050812002406/http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/12285441.htm #20yrsago Airport security wand delivers debilitating shocks https://web.archive.org/web/20051226123609/http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7777&feedId=online-news_rss20 #15yrsago Shades of Milk and Honey: Kowal’s debut novel is a drawing-room romance with magic and art https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/02/shades-of-milk-and-honey-kowals-debut-novel-is-a-drawing-room-romance-with-magic-and-art/ #5yrsago Galaksija https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/02/ventilator-202/#Galaksija #1yrago The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips Upcoming appearances (permalink) San Diego: ACM Collective Intelligence keynote, Aug 5 https://ci.acm.org/2025/speakers/cory-doctorow/ 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, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ 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 Recent appearances (permalink) ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress) https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409 If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw 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 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 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. (1032 words yesterday, 18440 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING 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. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "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