#25yrsago Remixable vocal tracks from the next Public Enemy release https://web.archive.org/web/20010813195140/http://www.slamjamz.com/slamnews.php?article=7

#20yrsago Wikipedia creates RSS for its posts https://web.archive.org/web/20060718103013/http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/07/wikipedia_entir.html

#10yrsago Help Doctors Without Borders fill in the geodata blanks for vulnerable communities https://missingmaps.org/blog/2016/07/14/mapswipe/

#10yrsago Sign a book of congratulations for America’s new Librarian of Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20160718023555/https://action.everylibrary.org/congratulate_carla_hayden_today

#10yrsago Hungary’s Cold War cartoons were weird and awesome https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/14/the-fascinating-world-of-cold-war-era-hungarian-cartoons/

#10yrsago The ACLU has a roadmap for defeating President Donald Trump’s signature initiatives https://web.archive.org/web/20160715131734/https://action.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pages/trumpmemos.pdf

#10yrsago America’s infrastructure debt is so bad that towns are unpaving roads they can’t afford to fix https://web.archive.org/web/20160713170836/https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-roads-cant-afford-fix/

#10yrsago It’s official: the Olympics result in the worst budget overruns of any megaproject https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2804554

#10yrsago Vivendi lobbyist appointed to run copyright for UN agency https://web.archive.org/web/20160717052135/http://keionline.org/node/2614

#10yrsago The long, racist history of Brexiteer Boris Johnson, the new UK Foreign Secretary https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-36792746

#5yrsago Facebook employees stalk users https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/14/who-watches-the-zuckmen/#pecksniffs

#5yrsago Semantic drift versus ethical drift https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian

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

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/13/go-meta-meta/#meta-meta-meta

“I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell” -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I’d had three times as much to spend.

As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn’t understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is shit”) applies to a bookstore’s wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.

Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám’s question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they’ve found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám’s question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?

This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they’re planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE’s broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: “General AI is around the corner and it’s going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!”

Which all raises the question: if you’ve truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your “AI lab,” why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?”

Of course, they might answer, “We need your money now so we can make god later.” That’s why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor’s job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just open your own hospital? If you’ve got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant’s job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service? If you’ve got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school?

If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn’t you want as much cash as possible? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022?

I think the only reason this question doesn’t come up more frequently is that we’re stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the “go meta” economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don’t drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don’t own a medallion, start a “rideshare” company. Don’t start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don’t invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom. Take the world of online grifters, who don’t just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they also peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other “wealth influencers’” insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets:

https://www.404media.co/how-i-bought-a-private-jet-by-selling-10-subscriptions-to-404-media/

The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on other scam services (November Kelly calls this “The world’s most expensive ‘inspect element’”):

https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/faux-high-level-163443872

It’s an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that’s not true — there’s even more money to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alaskan_Gold_Mining_Supplies_(1897)_(ADVERT_277).jpeg

Today’s economy is dominated by pick-and-shovel wholesalers. America is a gerontocracy drowning in MBAs, while there’s no one to do eldercare:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-recruiters-can-t-find-workers-and-new-grads-can-t-find-jobs-it-s-not-ai/ar-AA27K57y

So it’s not surprising that we don’t ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they’re immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?

#25yrsago Pro-lumber industry spoof of The Lorax https://web.archive.org/web/20010721042828/http://www.forestcouncil.org/news/articles/truax1.htm

#20yrsago Anti-DRM picture-book https://web.archive.org/web/20060721095740/https://dustrunners.blogspot.com/2006/07/pig-and-box.html

#10yrsago The US has spent $122B training foreign cops and soldiers in 150+ countries, but isn’t sure who https://web.archive.org/web/20160713145824/https://theintercept.com/2016/07/13/training/

#10yrsago German free school teaches without grades, timetables or lesson plans https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/no-grades-no-timetable-berlin-school-turns-teaching-upside-down

#10yrsago For the first time, a federal judge has thrown out police surveillance evidence from a “Stingray” device https://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/federal-judge-throws-out-evidence-gathered-with-stingray-cell-phone-tracker/

#10yrsago Day on a Device: art made by screenshotting a multitasker’s screen with each context-switch https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/13/12170526/multitasking-phone-laptop-pierre-buttin-art

#10yrsago Remarkably Normal: the true stories of abortion in America https://web.archive.org/web/20160810092901/http://jezebel.com/the-vagina-monologues-but-for-abortion-1783289270/amp

#10yrsago Theresa May performs the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv7Jd94bnOI

#10yrsago UK Labour’s dirty trick excludes 130,000 members from leadership vote https://web.archive.org/web/20160712225142/http://www.itv.com/news/2016-07-12/corbyn-opponents-try-to-fix-vote/

#10yrsago Security researchers: the W3C’s DRM needs to be thoroughly audited https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/call-security-community-w3cs-drm-must-be-investigated

TODAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.

#20yrsago Alanya to Alanya: feminist science fiction adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/12/alanya-to-alanya-feminist-science-fiction-adventure/

#20yrsago Soviet jokes https://web.archive.org/web/20060708144926/http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7412

#10yrsago Empirical proof that Terms of Service are “the biggest lie on the Internet” https://web.archive.org/web/20160712233511/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/nobody-reads-tos-agreements-even-ones-that-demand-first-born-as-payment/

#10yrsago Fox’s employee contracts may mean Gretchen Carlson will never get her day in court https://web.archive.org/web/20160712123858/https://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/11/3797060/dirty-trick-fox-news-using-undercut-gretchen-carlsons-sexual-harassment-suit/

#10yrsago To see the future, visit the most remote areas of the GBAO https://medium.com/studio-d/6-1-glimpses-of-the-future-e3fdb510dcc1#.iwyo4x141

#10yrsago Benjamin Frisch’s “Fun Family”: good old American narcissism https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/12/benjamin-frischs-fun-family-good-old-american-narcissism/

#5yrsago The Sacklers will get to keep billions https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions

TOMORROW (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.

Here’s an irony: the “gig economy” is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app.

The reason this is ironic is that the “gig economy” is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won’t share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture.

Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public’s understanding of the gig companies’ business is fragmentary and thin.

But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber’s business operations.

In a new American Prospect longread called “The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility,” Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering “flexibility” that lets workers “choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around”:

https://prospect.org/2026/07/09/dangerous-myth-of-flexibility-uber-lyft-gig-economy/

This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company’s efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California’s Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state’s landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign’s corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor.

On its face, West’s statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls “flexibility” is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.

Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn’t schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there’s a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they’ll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok.

In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the “tipped minimum wage.” Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to “top up” their workers’ pay if the tips from their shift don’t add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don’t wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 — the tipped minimum).

This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.

This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It’s the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly.

For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss’s strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company’s presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it’s a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.

But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that’s nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they’re doing workers a favor by offering them “flexibility.” Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available — at no charge — to Uber, it is the company’s actions, not the driver’s, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they’ll get paid.

Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too — when (if) they’re offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it’s more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through “algorithmic wage discrimination,” which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But workers can’t simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.

This is “flexibility,” but mostly it’s flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber’s informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.

Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same rides, based on the company’s surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server’s tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2025/Uber-Expands-AI-Data-Platform-to-Power-Next-Gen-Enterprise-and-AI-Lab-Needs/default.aspx

(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber’s investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)

Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I’d add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).

As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they’d still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they’d have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement — rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.

Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you’re willing to pay for any given ride. You’re already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.

Weil has been in many forums — including that Massachusetts courtroom — where Uber touted its “flexibility” as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs — but “the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections.”

Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers’ backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN’s International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, “Decent Work in the Platform Economy”:

https://onlabor.org/a-win-for-platform-workers-ilo-convention-no-193/

The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump’s labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government “will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide”:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3435961/america-must-lead-gig-economy/

But, as Weil says, this isn’t about innovation, flexibility or AI. It’s about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.

The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies’ businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don’t work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they’re getting shafted.

What’s a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:

https://vimeo.com/1203473793

This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a “counter-app” that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

The only problem is the “anticircumvention” laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America’s trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.

This is the hidden silver lining to Trump’s lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you’re told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don’t have to keep complying:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission “Tuyul” apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop — once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5729723

The platforms like to pitch themselves as “frictionless,” but the reality is that they don’t reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you’re a worker or a customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution

Tony West isn’t lying when he says Uber values flexibility — they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/11/your-risk/#my-reward

TOMORROW (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.

#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/

TOMORROW (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.

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.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post 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

THIS SATURDAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.

#25yrsago The Extent of Systematic Monitoring of Employee E-mail and Internet Use https://web.archive.org/web/20010711204804/http://www.privacyfoundation.org/workplace/technology/extent.asp

#20yrsago BPI: We should be able to cut off your Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/10/bpi-we-should-be-able-to-cut-off-your-internet/

#15yrsago Shirky: Cheap, free, chaotic news is better than all-the-same news businesses https://web.archive.org/web/20110711165517/http://shirky.com/weblog/2011/07/we-need-the-new-news-environment-to-be-chaotic/

#10yrsago New Zealanders raise millions to buy beach and donate it to the public https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-36759321

#10yrsago Jughead: Zdarsky’s reboot is funny, fannish, and freaky https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/10/jughead-zdarskys-reboot-is-funny-fannish-and-freaky/

#5yrsago Biden’s Right to Repair will include electronics, too https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/10/unnixing-the-fix/#r2r-plus-plus

THIS SATURDAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.

There’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan “political polarization” and call for a politics that abandons the “tribalism of left and right.”

Obviously there’s the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.

“Leftist extremism” is moving some zines around:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines

Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth’s richest man slaughtering the world’s poorest children for the lulz:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

“Horseshoe theory” (the idea that the far right and the far left actually bend around to meet each other) is bullshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement

The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as “tribalism” doesn’t know what “left” and “right” mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers — pronouns, MMA, brands of beer — for politics.

Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism’s most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you’ll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn’t the identities of the ruling class — it’s whether we have a ruling class at all.

I collect definitions of “right” and “left.” There’s Corey Robin’s definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists (rule by white people), Hindu nationalists (rule by high-caste Hindus), libertarians (rule by bosses), imperialists (rule by military aggressors), etc. It also explains the right’s obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster: “See, the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge!”

Another important definition is Wilhoit’s Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

This one hardly needs explanation in this era of “it’s not a crime if the president does it,” where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets:

https://www.status.news/p/infowars-the-onion-alex-jones-ben-collins

But when it comes to a “post-politics that is neither right nor left,” the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:

“Left” and “right” have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, “What is more important: human rights or property rights?” If they say “Property rights are a human right,” then they are on the right.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp

That’s it. That’s the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you’re on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library’s right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never “sold,” merely “licensed.”

If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies’ patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo

Human beings have the right to shelter. If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there’s an obvious solution. At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict, empty blights:

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/owners-homes-left-empty-more-28622796

Human beings have the right to food. If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your 100,000lbs of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off:

https://apnews.com/article/california-farmer-nectarines-lawsuit-patent-4f7bc8ab185e8b9cbdd6d6ad4f2aabd1

As Brust says, this fight is as old as the French Revolution. It’s literally the plot of Les Miz (“In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live”).

Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists: we can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill-gotten loot and when that loot should be divided up among its victims, and what to do about empty houses and homeless people. We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and co-operatives, about land reform. Very (very!) few leftists want to abolish property, but to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means, and never an end.

In systems thinking, we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in paradigms, from which all rules, laws and arrangements flow:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/#paradigmatic

“Left” and “right” represent two radically different paradigms. The right’s paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to “property rights are the only human right.” If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates. If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk. If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death-traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk (as economists would say, they have a “revealed preference” for being killed at work):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

Leftists view property rights as a tool, like laws, or regulations, or polls, or voting. Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all. But “voting” and “laws” aren’t good unto themselves. The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric:

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807

Good regulations and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you’ve passed is designed to solve a real problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it

Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization: to safeguard the human rights of its people. Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species.

If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering:

https://sos.mn.gov/media/3k4hu2if/minnesota-election-laws-statutes-and-rules.pdf

If you believe property rights are human rights, then you end up supporting unlimited dark money spending in elections:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf

If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to fuck off. If you believe property rights are human rights, then landlords can force their tenants to pay every dime the fossil fuel industry demands of them. “Property right as tool” allows you to defend a farmer’s right to install a wind-farm, and still, to block a data-center from installing a gas turbine on its own land.

“Post-political” movements are made up of people who don’t know what politics are. A “centrist” is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy (“property is a human right” means that it’s a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a lucky orifice). It’s the ideology that breeds oligarchy.

Politics aren’t a bunch of cultural signifiers or identity markers. Politics aren’t about who rules — it’s about whether we are ruled at all, or whether we are free.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-v-property-rights

Image:
Lewis Clarke (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bridport_,_Bridport_Suburbs_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6489460.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

THIS SATURDAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.

#25yrsago Why Microsoft was invited to OSCON https://web.archive.org/web/20010701102931/http://www.oreilly.com/news/osconint_0601.html

#20yrsago Technology for parents to spy on kids https://web.archive.org/web/20060711084212/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/09/BIGMOTHER.TMP

#20yrsago Dale Bailey’s “The Resurrection Man” https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/09/southern-gothic-science-fiction-collection/

#10yrsago A law prof responds to students who anonymously complained about #blacklivesmatter tee https://backspace.com/notes/2016/07/law-professors-response-to-black-lives-matter-shirt-complaint.php

#10yrsago UK government rejects Brexit do-over petition with 4.1m signatures https://web.archive.org/web/20160709101514/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-government-rejects-eu-referendum-petition-latest-a7128306.html