Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment

Having spent a long time in the consulting world and adjacent (national security particularly) spaces, I think the most pernicious thing about "jargon" is not that it serves as a social in-group bonding signal (which is part of the problem), but that it specifically conflates actions and outcomes in a way that bypasses critical thought. The use and misuse of natsec shibboleths like "lethality" is a good example; "we're going to maximize lethality," first implies that whatever we're doing (kicking out minority groups, spending more time on PT, committing war crimes) will "maximize lethality," implies that we have a working definition of whatever "lethality" is, and, critically, implies that "lethality" is necessary for the fulfillment of whatever our actual goals are. "Lethality" is an adjective, not a goal, but the second you start sprinkling your PPT with the military adjectives du jour (lethality, resilience, survivability, full-spectrum anything) then your audience is already nodding along. These are good things! Who doesn't want to be more lethal, more survivable, more full-spectrum? But a billion dollars later, you can see that none of this actually amounted to a strategy beyond "massive transfer of taxpayer dollars to the prime-of-the-day."

The corporate world is, of course, even more prone to this; it's where the military got it from, after all. Slice out every jargonized adjective or verb from a proposal deck and see how little is often left, and how little it really addresses the user concerns.

I absolutely love corporate jargon. Not in an earnest way, but maybe more in the way people love terrible movies.

For example, I’ll inject corpo-bullshit into regular conversations. When someone asks me to do something, instead of saying “no thanks”, I’ll say something like “this ideation aligns poorly with our 10,000 foot goals on a go-forward basis. Let’s revisit in a few cycles.”

It's utterly maddening to me how much annoying doublespeak permeates through corporate American culture.

Even when management does something that seems objectively awful, they always feel a need to try and spin it into something aggressively positive (e.g. treating layoffs as an "opportunity to reorganize"). You can't speak candidly about anything because anything remotely negative will come off as a "bad attitude" or "not a team player".

After a job interview I'm expected to send an email about how I "appreciate the opportunity regardless of the outcome". I suppose that's not completely untrue, but to some extent if I don't get the job it really is a waste of time for both parties. I've been told you're supposed to send a thank you letter even if you're declined, which feels like a punch in the gut. You've already rejected me and decided I'm not good enough to work at your magnificent company, but you still expect me to grovel and suck up to you.

I've told this story before, but at a previous job at a BigCo I made the statement "we all do this for the money" [1]. I end up getting told by my manager that that was inappropriate and indicative of an attitude problem. It was candid, but is it untrue? I don't think so; you might do it for other reasons in addition to the money, but if the job stopped paying you then you would stop showing up, and that's totally fine.

I am sure there are studies saying that being overly candid and honest leads to worse outcomes in corporations, and fine, maybe it's "necessary", but I don't have to like it. I wish I could live in the a utopia where people say what they actually mean. I wish I could live in a society were I'm not expected to pretend that this isn't fucking weird.

"Weird" is the right word for it. It's weird that corporations seem to like being lied to. It's weird that everyone just goes along with it. It's weird that not everyone seems to think it's weird.

[1] To be clear, I didn't bring this up out of nowhere; people were criticizing a potential job candidate trying to negotiate his salary higher, which I thought was a little unfair.

> Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil.Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil.

oh come on.

jargon is incredibly useful. here on HN we know that very well. clanker, agent, +1, LGTM, these are extremely convenient jargon we use daily. and here, he's complaining about 'space' not 'AI'. AI is itself jargon. There's nothing "artificial" about it (just non-organic), and nothing "intelligent" either.

'enshittification' is jargon.

> I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."

it's just descriptive (usefully so), not self-congratulatory.

and what's wrong with "thought leader"? it's a pejorative, not acclaim. even more so when the user takes themselves seriously.

he does go on to get to the point about "bullshit", and i would agree completely with the title, that there is a correlation. why lament and complain about it? i absolutely adored adobe flash -- ad blocking was oh so easy in those days. i would actually narrow the problem from "bullshit" to "doublespeak". i think that is where the real problem lies. bullshit is just bullshit, it's fine.

> Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad,"

I haven't actually seen much of this. What I have seen (and done myself) is applying the term to a situation where the incentives are (mis)aligned to make it so things stochastically get ever-worse for an effectively-captive audience. The term resonates because it captures the process dynamics we all feel, not merely thing being in a poor state.

While this differs from the original definition which involved three parties (users, customers, investors), the bulk of that difference is that the original usage simply had two separate enshittification dynamics (users->customers and customers->investors).

oh come on.

'enshittification' is jargon.

> I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."

it's just descriptive (usefully so), not self-congratulatory.

and what's wrong with "thought leader"? it's a pejorative, not acclaim. even more so when the user takes themselves seriously.

> Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad,"

I use it for spotting dummies.

"Lethality" is a noun.

> kicking out minority groups

Huh? “Lethality” is used as a euphemism for this?

I absolutely love corporate jargon. Not in an earnest way, but maybe more in the way people love terrible movies.

ah that reminds me of when small startup SUSE was acquired by Big Corporation Novell. German engineers saying "no" and "yes" and "the F word! in meetings!" met very polite Corporate Americans who had twenty supportive soundings ways of saying no.

"this is an interesting idea" -> no

"we need to discuss this further" -> no

"can you help me better understand?" -> no

the only yes was "I do it, by such and such date"

so the jargon created a culture clash which only accelerated the decline.

And thanks to the recent Kagi Translate HN post, we have a tool to generate these more easily:

https://translate.kagi.com/?to=corporate-jargon&from=en&text...

Excellent, I'm going to cascade that outcome to my team.

Yeah, it's just fun to find creative ways to say common things!

Thanks for the much needed laugh in these times.

It's utterly maddening to me how much annoying doublespeak permeates through corporate American culture.

"Weird" is the right word for it. It's weird that corporations seem to like being lied to. It's weird that everyone just goes along with it. It's weird that not everyone seems to think it's weird.

[1] To be clear, I didn't bring this up out of nowhere; people were criticizing a potential job candidate trying to negotiate his salary higher, which I thought was a little unfair.

> I am sure there are studies saying that being overly candid and honest leads to worse outcomes in corporations, and fine, maybe it's "necessary", but I don't have to like it. I wish I could live in the a utopia where people say what they actually mean. I wish I could live in a society were I'm not expected to pretend that this isn't fucking weird.

I've met a few genuinely atypical people who do wish this, and maybe that's you.

What's much more common, in my experience, is people who support the concept of "uncomfortable truths you shouldn't be too candid about" and don't realize that corporate speak serves as a lowest common denominator in that regard. To you and I "we all do this for the money" is a banal observation; to someone going through a midlife crisis, or someone in the middle of a fight with their spouse about how they missed their kid's big soccer game, it's a pretty sensitive topic.

I use it for spotting dummies.

"Lethality" is a noun.

"this is an interesting idea" -> no

"we need to discuss this further" -> no

"can you help me better understand?" -> no

the only yes was "I do it, by such and such date"

so the jargon created a culture clash which only accelerated the decline.

And thanks to the recent Kagi Translate HN post, we have a tool to generate these more easily:

https://translate.kagi.com/?to=corporate-jargon&from=en&text...

Excellent, I'm going to cascade that outcome to my team.

Yeah, it's just fun to find creative ways to say common things!

> kicking out minority groups

Huh? “Lethality” is used as a euphemism for this?

Justification, hypothetically, not euphemism

Thanks for the much needed laugh in these times.

Justification, hypothetically, not euphemism

I've actually applied and talked to a recruiter once, but never even got to a real interview. Finance is really hard to break into if you don't have a million degrees from an Ivy League, and probably not easy even then.

I've heard about it being a bit scary to say anything though, so I don't know if it would be a good fit.

The pay seems a bit low based on that article for that level of “performance expectation”

I've met a few genuinely atypical people who do wish this, and maybe that's you.

I really don't think it's the midlife crisis people we're protecting with this language. It's management. Corpspeak comes down to protecting their feelings from their uncomfortable truths. Management didn't tell off tombert for their remark because it might upset a worker struggling with work/life balance. They did it because it upsets management, who is invested in the idea that people come to work for higher reasons, because it makes them feel good and because they want it to be true because it means they can get away with paying less.

When companies describe putting a bunch of people out of work as "restructuring" or whatever, who is that for? It's not for the people who lose their jobs, they know what it means. It's not for the people who remain, and who just saw a bunch of coworkers get the boot, they know too. It's ultimately for the people who put out the statement, because it lets them distance themselves from the reality of what they're doing.

The people with the power are the ones who set the tone, and they're going to set a tone that makes them happy.

I don't disagree with anything you said, and I expressed a sentiment not too dissimilar about a week ago [1]. People like the idea of being direct but not actual directness.

When I was younger I was more accepting of regular corporate bullshit, but after a certain number of being lied to by startups you end up being kind of inoculated to it. Now I really wish they'd just be upfront instead of making me decode what they actually mean.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47373442

I've heard about it being a bit scary to say anything though, so I don't know if it would be a good fit.

The pay seems a bit low based on that article for that level of “performance expectation”

The people with the power are the ones who set the tone, and they're going to set a tone that makes them happy.

I don't disagree with anything you said, and I expressed a sentiment not too dissimilar about a week ago [1]. People like the idea of being direct but not actual directness.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47373442

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Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment (permalink)

I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance.

This is one of the things I love about being a native English speaker – this glorious mongrel language of ours is full of extremely weird words, like "cleave," which means its own opposite ("to join together" and "to cut apart"). English is full of these words that mean their own opposite, from "dust" to "oversight" to "weather":

https://www.mentalfloss.com/language/words/25-words-are-their-own-opposites

This is what you get when you let a language run wild, with meaning determined (and contested) by speakers. Not for nothing, my second language is Yiddish, another glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of a tongue with no authoritative oversight and innumerable dialects.

Semantic drift is a feature, not a bug. It's how we get new words, and new meanings for old words. I love semantic drift! I mean, I'd better, since, having coined "enshittification," I'm now destined to have a poop emoji on my headstone. Having coined a word – and having proposed a precise technical meaning for it – I am baffled by people who make it their business to scold others for using enshittification "incorrectly." "Enshittification" is less than five years old, and we know when and how it was invented. If you like it when I make up a word, you can't categorically object to other people making up new meanings for this word. I didn't need a word-coining license to come up with enshittification, and you don't need a semantic drift license to use it to mean something else.

I wrote a whole danged essay about this, but still, hardly a day goes by without someone trying to enlist me in their project to scold and shame strangers for using the word incorrectly:

The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

Colloquialization doesn't dilute language, it thickens it. Using a powerful word to describe something else can be glorious. It's allusion, metaphor, simile. It's poesie. It's fine. Bemoaning the "tsunami" of bad news doesn't cheapen the deaths of people who die in real tsunamis. Saying that the Trump administration "nuked" the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau doesn't desecrate the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Calling creeping authoritarianism a "cancer" doesn't denigrate the suffering of people who have actual cancer.

What's more, devoting your energies to "correcting" other people's allusive language makes you a boring, tedious person. Sure, you can have a conversation with a comrade about making inclusive word choices, but interrupting a substantive debate to have that discussion is unserious. The words people use matter (I care a lot about words!) but they matter less than the things people mean. Keep your eye on the prize (metaphorically) (for avoidance of doubt, there is no prize) (both the prize and the eye are metaphors).

(By all means, get angry at people who intentionally use slurs. None of this is to say that you should tolerate – or be subjected to – language that is intended to dehumanize you.)

It's time we admitted that it's no good replacing an offensive term with a phrase that no one understands. Calling it "child sexual abuse material" is a good idea, but no one actually calls it that. The customary phrase is actually "child sexual abuse material, which most people call 'child porn,' but which we should really call 'child sex abuse material.'" If your goal is to avoid saying "child porn" (a laudable goal!), this isn't achieving it.

None of this means that I am immune to being rubbed up the wrong way by other people's language choices. Having been mentored by the science fiction great Damon Knight, I have been infected by many of his linguistic peccadillos, which means that if you say "out loud" in my earshot, I will (mentally) "correct" it to "aloud" (yes, "out loud" is fine, but Damon had a thing about it and it got stuck in my brain).

I am especially perturbed by "business English," the language of the commercial class, their cheerleaders in the press, and (alas) many of their critics. Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil. Superlatives like "thought-leader" are so self-parodying I have to check every time someone utters one aloud (see?) to verify that they're not being sarcastic. Objects of derision should be referred to by their surnames, not their given names ("Musk" is vituperative, "Elon" is friendly – though, thanks to the glorious and thickening contradictions of language, calling someone by their surname can also be affectionate). I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."

I share the impulse to impose my linguistic preferences on the people around me. I just (mostly) suppress that impulse and try to focus on substance rather than style, at least when I'm trying to understand others and be understood by them. But yes, I do silently judge the people around me for their word choices – all the time.

That's why I immediately pounced on "The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes," an open access paper in the Feb 2026 edition of Personality and Individual Differences by Shane Littrell, a linguistics postdoc at Cornell:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400597536_The_Corporate_Bullshit_Receptivity_Scale_Development_validation_and_associations_with_workplace_outcomes

Littrell set out to evaluate "corporate bullshit," a linguistic category that is separate from mere "jargon." Jargon, Littrell writes, is a professional vocabulary that serves a useful purpose: "facilitat[ing] communication and social bonding, increas[ing] fluency, and help[ing] reinforce a shared identity among in-group members."

Bullshit, meanwhile, is "semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging." There's a whole field of bullshit studies, with investigations into such exciting topics as "pseudo-profound bullshit" (think: Deepak Chopra).

Littrell borrows from that field and others to investigate corporate bullshit, formulating a measurement index he calls the "Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale." In a series of three experiments, Littrell sets out to determine who is the most susceptible to corporate bullshit, and what the correlates of that receptivity are.

Littrell concludes that corporate bullshitters themselves are pretty good at identifying bullshit (they have a high "Organizational Bullshit Perception Score"). In other words, bullshitters know that they're bullshitting. When a corporate leader declares that:

This synergistic look at our thought leadership will ensure that we are decontenting and avoiding reputational deficits with our key takeaways as effectively as we can in order to sunset our resonating focus.

they know it's nonsense.

This reminded me of the idea that cult leaders tell obvious lies to their followers as a way of forcing them to demonstrate their subservience. When Trump demands that his followers wear clown shoes:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-is-obsessed-with-these-145-shoes-and-won-t-let-anyone-leave-without-a-pair/ar-AA1XOEBm

Or that they pretend that "mutilization" is a word:

https://www.wonkette.com/p/is-trumps-save-america-fck-america

He's engaging in a dominance play that forces his feuding princelings and their lickspittles to humiliate themselves and reaffirm his supremacy.

There are plenty of rank-and-file workers inside corporations who have high OBPSes and know when they're being bullshitted, but Littrell also identifies a large cohort of low-OBPS workers who are absolutely taken in by corporate bullshit.

Here we get to a fascinating dichotomy. Both the low-OBPS and high-OBPS workers can be described as being "open minded," but "open" has a very different meaning for each group. Workers who are good at spotting bullshit score high on open-mindedness metrics like "willingness to engage" and "willingness to reflect," both characteristic of the "fluid intelligence" that makes workers good at solving problems and doing a good job.

Meanwhile, workers who are taken in by bullshit are "open minded" in the sense that they are bad at analytical reasoning and thus easily convinced. These people test poorly on metrics like "logical reasoning" and "decision-making," and score high on "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities." They are apt to make blunders that "expose organizations to financial, reputational, or legal risks."

But they're also exactly the workers who score high on "job satisfaction," "trust in one's supervisor," and "degree to which they are inspired by corporate mission statements." These people are so open minded that their brains start to leak out of their ears. Or, as Carly Page put it in The Register: "jargon sticks around not just because executives enjoy using it, but because many people respond to it as if it were genuine insight":

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/15/corporate_jargon_research/

This creates a feedback loop where bosses get rewarded for using empty and maddening phrases, and their workforce gets progressively more skewed towards people who are bad at spotting bullshit and at exercising their judgment on the job. It's quite a neat – and ugly – explanation of why bullshit proliferates within organizations, and how organizations come to be completely overrun with bullshit.

This is a fascinating research paper, and while I've focused on its conclusions, I really suggest going and reading about the methodology, especially the tables of "corporate bullshit" phrases they generated for their experiments (Tables 1, 2 and 3). This is some eldritch horror bullshit:

By solving the pain point of customers with our conversations, we will ideate a renewed level of end-state vision and growth-mindset in the market between us and others who are architecting to download on a similar balanced scorecard.

What's more, these are all based on real examples of corporate bullshit from leaders at large corporations, with a few words rotated to synonyms drawn from the business-press.

I'm a writer. I really do care about language. Sure, I get frustrated with scolds who rail against semantic drift or engage in petty, pedantic corrections, but not because words don't matter. They matter, a lot. But language isn't math (which is why double negatives are intensifiers, not negators). It can obscure (as with bullshit) or it can enlighten (as with poesie) or it can enable precision (as with jargon). Arguments about language matter, but what matters about them isn't subjective aesthetics, nor is it a peevish obsession with "correctness." What matters is the way that language operates on the world (and vice versa).

Hey look at this (permalink)

The public will pay https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-102/
Enshittified UX https://www.awwwards.com/sites/enshittified-ux
The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
Immutable https://www.pbs.org/video/immutable-lw8ctv/
Why Are We Still Doing This? https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-are-we-still-doing-this/

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#10yrsago Redaction fail: U.S. government admits it went after Lavabit looking for Snowden https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/

#10yrsago McAfee shovelware emits tracking beacons https://web.archive.org/web/20160909030152/https://duo.com/blog/bring-your-own-dilemma-oem-laptops-and-windows-10-security

#10yrsago Cops in small MA town warn about roving rap-battle challengers https://www.kron4.com/news/cops-warn-residents-of-men-challenging-others-to-rap-battles/

#10yrsago Rather than banning “lobbying” by academics, UK government should encourage it https://web.archive.org/web/20160310100844/https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/ban-academics-talking-to-ministers-we-should-train-them-to-do-it

#10yrsago Russia’s military uses gigantic wooden comedy props for punishment https://semperannoying.tumblr.com/post/122390977886/semperannoying-russian-army-punishments-1

#10yrsago Study: people who believe in innate intelligence overestimate their own https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/think-intelligence-is-fixed-youre-more-likely-to-overestimate-your-own/

#5yrsago SNAPDRAGON https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/17/there-once-was-a-union-maid/#coming-out

#5yrsago How unions de-risk work https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/17/there-once-was-a-union-maid/#solidarity-forever

#5yrsago Meet the new music boss, same as the old music boss https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#excessive-buyer-power

#5yrsago The People's Parity Project https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp

#5yrsago SMS security is flaming garbage https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#override-service-registry

#1yrago David Enrich's "Murder the Truth" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.

Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/
Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/
Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885
Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410
London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691
Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)

Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech
Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU
Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074
The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/
Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)

"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

A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming 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/)
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"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, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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 (1002 words today, 52553 total)

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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