By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)
@doctorow.pluralistic.net
I post long threads. Writer (sf novels, etc); blogger (pluralistic.net); activist (eff.org). Latest book: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" Buy my books (DRM-free!) at craphound.com/shop.
The Nevada Motel of Colorado Springs, Colorado was abandoned in 2016. Today, it remains boarded up and fenced off, likely waiting for demolition. deadmotelsusa.com/post/8241219...
Exactly my experience yesterday with Google Fiber. It lied about remotely resetting my router... the fiber had been cut... and repeatedly lied about the service team. The fiber was repaired, probably just because of automatic detection of the cut.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 4d agoBusinesses *suck* at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots *also* suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere. 30/
Oh heck yeah. I've recently had an issue with an Agoda booking. The only customer support available was a chatbot who repeatedly insisted in providing a solution that had _nothing_ to do with our issue. Took a while to escalate to an actual human.
To paraphrase an old adage, when the cat doesn't care the mice will run amok. The cat (Google) lets all the mice (fraudsters) do whatever they want so long as the cat gets its cut Google is a scammer's paradise @doctorow.pluralistic.net pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/a...
Pluralistic: Google is a scammer’s paradise (05 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net
Oh yes they do make huge sums from scam ads. So does Meta (more so than Google) do the same shit knowingly. There's money in letting these scams proliferate, and if anything, these companies love their money.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoI don't know why Google doesn't do this. Maybe they make huge sums from these scam ads and they don't want to forego the revenue. Or maybe they just don't care. Whichever it is, there's real consequences for this negligence by the internet's absentee landlord. 35/
@doctorow.pluralistic.net on what responsible AI deployment would look like: "An automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways."
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our t...
thenerve.news
they really made maps say gulf of mexico and all they got was this
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoGoogle - a thrice-convicted monopolist - is the gateway to the internet, with more than a 90% search market share that it attained by buying out all its competitors and bribing Apple more than $20b/year not to start a rival search engine: www.democracynow.org/2024/8/6/goo... 3/
Scammers took advantage of this for a while - and likely still do - by creating credential-harvesting lookalikes of popular sites (banks, social media, crypto exchanges, etc) then paying to advertise them on Google. Boom, their honeypot now looks like the top search result.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoTo make this even worse, Google's spent years making it more difficult to distinguish ads from "organic" search results, changing the font and size of the "ad" warning to make it harder to spot, and making the font and color of the ad itself closer to the color of the search results below it. 28/
Reposting one of the most egregious examples from a great thread on scams in Google ads and the enshitifcation of the internet.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoWhen Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves: www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne... 20/
The Truth, I scream, this is the Truth of Our Age, I shout into the void, after this wasted afternoon dealing with an AI "assistant" that assisted with nothing, answered nothing, led nowhere, may its circuits burn in everlasting fire.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 4d agoBusinesses *suck* at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots *also* suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere. 30/
Reminder: ChatGPT first came online in November 2022. We’re attributing “inevitable” societal changes to a technology that has yet to see its first midterm election.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 4d agoNeoclassical econ assumes rationality. The corollary of, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus, people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing everything," well then, *AI must be changing everything*. 1/
Google is bad. On purpose.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoWhen Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves: www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne... 20/
604 words on “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. (1940 words total) #dailywords
In just a few days of following, I've come to look forward to @doctorow.pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow's tech essays. Solid work.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoForget "Don't be evil"; Google's true motto is a form of vulgar spidermanism: "With great power comes no responsibility." The internet's *de facto* boss is an absentee landlord. 1/
A contrasting take to the “moral imperative” argument is @doctorow.pluralistic.net's. Really interesting read.
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our t...
thenerve.news
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 7h agoYou will be surprised to learn that I do not believe there is a “moral imperative“ to teach educators about AI.
I pay $10 a month for Kagi, & it is worth every bit of it. Google's front has devolved into a digital amalgam of old yellow pages, Sears catalogs, and coin-operated trinket machines, while the back end scans our family photos, reads our emails and deletes our work at will.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoIf Kagi (with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google - a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of *thousands* of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation - could also do so. 14/
For anyone with a small business who uses advertisements, this also means that your business is going to pay for clicks from people who are not active customers who do not know that they are clicking on an advertisement. Nothing like paying somebody $5 or $10 to read your website blog...
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoTo make this even worse, Google's spent years making it more difficult to distinguish ads from "organic" search results, changing the font and size of the "ad" warning to make it harder to spot, and making the font and color of the ad itself closer to the color of the search results below it. 28/
will def be reusing “Main Character Syndrome “
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoVisa - another bloated monopolist with terminal Main Character Syndrome - can see that it has merchants who generate zillions of appeals and charge-backs because they run scam businesses like these. 56/
A client of mine just spent a big chunk of our shift together yesterday dealing with this
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoThis is a pure ripoff. If Google had served the correct result at the top of the page - if it had used its own database of confirmed merchants and their associate websites to validate its ads - then people booking hotels would have saved 35% to 85% on their rooms. 50/
Also if you accidentally book transport through one if these deceptive shell brokers, you are unable to get weather cancelation info and rescheduling opportunities you would have received from the service provider. Ask me how I know.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoCard companies allow merchants to set terms of service that refuse refunds under almost any circumstances, and, more often than not, the card issuers side with the merchants over their own customers when they call to cancel a charge from one of these scammers. 53/
Another brilliant thread by @doctorow.pluralistic.net on Google's enshittification.
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 8h agoIf 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: pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/a... 2/
poor Kiin ... we order from them all the time (always from their website)
Don’t forget that Google has repeatedly gone to court to fight for the right to do this, by vigorously contesting any suggestion that it has an obligation not to sell a trademarked AdWord to anyone other than the mark owner.
Great essay. You concentrate on search, but it's also true in their stores. Google Books has scam books with the same name as real books designed where the purported authors generate them with LLMs. Again, trivial for them to address but they don't.
Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Google is a scammer's paradise; and more! Archived at: pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/a... #Pluralistic 1/
Forget "Don't be evil"; Google's true motto is a form of vulgar spidermanism: "With great power comes no responsibility." The internet's *de facto* boss is an absentee landlord. 1/