I'm still working on all the things. While you wait for them, read Fat Monster, it's the best and it's won 3 awards. amzn.to/4acKWcJ
#Bodyhorror, #MLMs, #fatpeople, #shoggoths, #fungusmonsters

Please read Fat Monster because #shoggoths are awesome. Also it placed 2nd in the Critter Readers Poll. amzn.to/4qZQNrm

Human-shaped things are human. "If not people, why people-shaped?" #horrorwriterschat #mimics #shapechangers #shoggoths

To be fair, human brains start out as #shoggoths, I'm pretty sure, and they are literally overtrained by trauma and bullying by the time they get into adulthood.

I am Bert, as always, writing all sorts of #horror. #JurassicPark and #thething (1982) are both very inspiring to me, I fill my stories with genetically engineered #dinosaurs and #shoggoths. #horrorwriterschat

Oooh The Threshold! I'm a #bookwitch & #swampwitch from the edge of a #frogpond in #Connecticut, currently writing #non-fiction (writing craft), #Victorian #historicalhorror with #DeepOnes & #shoggoths, & plotting a #Cthulhupunk series. #horrorwriterschat

Shoggoths amongst us What Lovecraft's monsters _actually_ tell us about Large Language Models

“ #H.P.Lovecraft’s horror novel, #AtTheMountainsofMadness, describes how #shoggoths were created millions of years ago, as the formless slaves of the alien #OldOnes … and the meme’s implied political lesson is that #LLMs too may be untrustworthy servants …” www.programmablemutter.com/p/shoggoths-...

From draft 2 of Neon Cryptkeeper. Just wrote this bit the other day.

#wipsnips #weirdfiction #urbanfantasy #booksky #writesky

Also, keep reading AWOO, my first novel! writesinister.substack.com

#werewolves #aliens #shoggoths #ohmy #cosmichorror #funny #queer #ttrpg #nerds #geeks #dorks

From draft 2 of Neon Cryptkeeper.

#wipsnips #weirdfiction #urbanfantasy #booksky #writesky #d&d #ttrpg

Also, keep reading AWOO, my first novel! writesinister.substack.com

#werewolves #aliens #shoggoths #ohmy #cosmichorror #funny #queer #ttrpg #nerds #geeks #dorks

From draft 2 of Neon Cryptkeeper.

#wipsnips #weirdfiction #urbanfantasy #booksky #writesky #d&d #ttrpg

Also, keep reading AWOO, my first novel! writesinister.substack.com

#werewolves #aliens #shoggoths #ohmy #cosmichorror #funny #queer #ttrpg #nerds #geeks #dorks

From draft 2 of Neon Cryptkeeper.

#wipsnips #weirdfiction #urbanfantasy #booksky #writesky #kinginyellow #carcosa

Also, keep reading AWOO, my first novel! writesinister.substack.com

#werewolves #aliens #shoggoths #ohmy #cosmichorror #funny #queer #ttrpg #nerds #geeks #dorks

From draft 2 of Neon Cryptkeeper.

#wipsnips #weirdfiction #urbanfantasy #booksky #writesky #waitwhat #whatishappening #whoa

Also, keep reading AWOO, my first novel! writesinister.substack.com

#werewolves #aliens #shoggoths #ohmy #cosmichorror #funny #queer #ttrpg #nerds #geeks #dorks

From draft 2 of Neon Cryptkeeper.

#wipsnips #weirdfiction #urbanfantasy #booksky #writesky #waitwhat #whatishappening #whoa

Also, keep reading AWOO, my first novel! writesinister.substack.com

#werewolves #aliens #shoggoths #ohmy #cosmichorror #funny #queer #ttrpg #nerds #geeks #dorks

PLEASE BUY MY BOOK. Fat Monster has #fatpeople #shoggoths #mushrooms #MLMs #fungus #bodyhorror #pyramids amzn.to/4462HrF I SUCK AT MARKETING but my book doesn't suck it's awesome. #horrorwriterschat @nightmarepress.bsky.social

I'm Miss Bert and I write all kinds of #horror and on Monday my novel FAT MONSTER from @nightmarepress.bsky.social was released! amzn.to/4462HrF #Multilevelmarketing #fatpeople #fungus #mushrooms #bodyhorror #shoggoths #horrorwriterschat

Fat Monster Fat Monster [Piedmont, Gevera Bert] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Fat Monster

It's out! amzn.to/4jckTo2
#bookrelease #horror #fungus #shoggoths #fatpeople #mlm #bodyhorror

MONDAY! #newrelease #bodyhorror #fatpeople #mlmhorror #shoggoths #mushrooms #Preorder the Kindle right now or get the paperback in 2 days. amzn.to/3RmE5TU

I'm gonna keep posting until you ALL tell me you have bought an advance copy. FAT MONSTER, OUT 4/21. #Mushroom #shoggoths. #Fatpeople. The greatest #pyramidscheme ever. #Bodyhorror. A #mustread. amzn.to/3XQYpQV by @nightmarepress.bsky.social

Hello bat-peeps. I'm Miss Bert. I have a book coming out on MONDAY! I'm currently plotting a #paranormal #cyberpunk series, training to be a developmental editor, & I'm on the committee for #stokercon2025 @nightmarepress.bsky.social #horrorwriterschat #Mushroom #shoggoths. #Fatpeople. #pyramidscheme

Fat Monster Amazon.com: Fat Monster eBook : Piedmont, Gevera Bert: Books

I'm gonna keep posting until you ALL tell me you have bought an advance copy. FAT MONSTER, OUT 4/21. #Mushroom #shoggoths. #Fatpeople. The greatest #pyramidscheme ever. #Bodyhorror. A #must-read. amzn.to/3XQYpQV @nightmarepress.bsky.social

The worst? That's subjective. I'm going to say Fat Monster, which comes out on 4/21. Space #shoggoths eating fat people in horrible painful ways. And multi level marketing, ugh. #horrorwriterschat

Pluralistic: Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined (01 Apr 2025) Today's links Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined: Same goes for trusting an AI with your trade secrets. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined (permalink) There's a debate to be had about whether AI chatbots make good psychotherapists. This is not an area of my expertise, so I'm not going to weigh in on that debate. But nevertheless, I think that if you use an AI therapist, you need your head examined: https://www.salon.com/2025/03/30/some-argue-ai-therapy-can-break-down-mental-health-stigma–others-warn-it-could-make-it-worse/ I'm not an expert on psychotherapy, but I am an expert on privacy and corporate misconduct, and holy shit is the idea of a chatbot psychotherapist running on some Big Tech cloud a terrible idea. Because while I'm no expert on therapy, I have benefited from therapy, and I know this for certain: therapy requires confidentiality. Shrinks are incredibly careful about privacy. For example: when my brother was getting married, my therapist was invited to the wedding. His daughter and my brother's fiancee were close friends, and my brother's fiancee had grown up staying over at their house and wanted her friend and her friend's parents at the wedding. My therapist sat me down and said, "Now listen, I take confidentiality very seriously. If you want me to, I will pretend not to know you at the wedding. No one needs to know that you're seeing me or – any therapist." I told him I didn't mind people knowing I'd seen him, but just that little fastidious gesture confirmed the trust I'd put in Alan. It meant that I could openly and freely discuss things I'd never told anyone before, and that I never told anyone ever again. Having those genuinely open conversations transformed my life, for the better. Now consider the chatbot therapist: what are its privacy safeguards? Well, the companies may make some promises about what they will and won't do with the transcripts of your AI sessions, but they are lying. Of course they're lying! AI companies lie about what their technology can do (of course). They lie about what their technologies will do. They lie about money. But most of all, they lie about data. There is no subject on which AI companies have been more consistently, flagrantly, grotesquely dishonest than training data. When it comes to getting more data, AI companies will lie, cheat and steal in ways that would seem hacky if you wrote them into fiction, like they were pulp-novel dope fiends: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/ When an AI company tells you it won't use your intimate secrets as training data, they are lying. Of course they're lying! This isn't just any data, it's data that isn't replicated elsewhere on the internet. It's rare – it's unique. It's a competitive advantage. AI companies will 100%, without exception, totally use your private therapy data as training data. What's more: they will leak your therapy sessions. They will leak them because they can't figure out how to prevent models from vomiting up their training data verbatim: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/chatgpt-memorization-lawsuit/677099/ But they'll also leak because tech companies leak like hell. They are crawling with insider threats. If the AI company sticks around long enough, it'll leak your secrets. And if it goes bankrupt? That's even worse! When tech companies go bust, the first thing their creditors do is sell off their warehouses full of private data. The more private and compromising that data is, the harder they'll try to sell it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/how-delete-your-23andme-data Now, maybe you're thinking, "OK, but that's a small price to pay if we can finally get therapy for everyone." After all, the country – the world – is in the midst of a terrible mental health crisis and there's a dire shortage of therapists. Now, let's stipulate for the moment to the idea that chatbots are substitutes for human therapists – that, at the very least, they're better than nothing. I don't think that's true, but let's say it is. Even so, this is a bad tradeoff. Here, try this thought-experiment: someone figures out a great business-model to pay for therapy for poor people. "We turned therapy into a livestreamed reality TV show. If you're too poor to afford a therapist, you can go to one of our partially trained livestreamer therapists, who will broadcast all of your secrets to anyone who watches. There's a permanent archive of these sessions, and the worst people in the world comb through it 24/7 looking for embarrassing stuff to repost and go viral with. What, you don't like that? Oh, I see: you just don't think poor people deserve mental health. I guess the perfect really is the enemy of the good." This gambit is called "predatory inclusion." Think of Spike Lee shilling cryptocurrency scams as a way to "build Black wealth" or Mary Kay promising to "empower women" by embroiling them in a bank-account-draining, multi-level marketing cult. Having your personal, intimate secrets sold, leaked, published or otherwise exploited is worse for your mental health than not getting therapy in the first place, in the same way that having your money stolen by a Bitcoin grifter or Mary Kay is worse than not being able to access investment opportunities in the first place. But it's not just people struggling with their mental health who shouldn't be sharing sensitive data with chatbots – it's everyone. All those business applications that AI companies are pushing, the kind where you entrust an AI with your firm's most commercially sensitive data? Are you crazy? These companies will not only leak that data, they'll sell it to your competition. Hell, Microsoft already does this with Office365 analytics: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware These companies lie all the time about everything, but the thing they lie most about is how they handle sensitive data. It's wild that anyone has to be reminded of this. Letting AI companies handle your sensitive data is like turning arsonists loose in your library with a can of gasoline, a book of matches, and a pinky-promise that this time, they won't set anything on fire. (Image: Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Tariffs, Abundance and Why America Can't Build https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-tariffs-abundance Global Working Conditions Matter for American Workers https://prospect.org/labor/2025-03-30-global-working-conditions-matter-american-workers-su-tai-ilab/ "An off switch? She'll get years for that." https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/03/an-off-switch-shell-get-years-for-that-2/ Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Noteworthy Modern Occurances: the Digital Economy Bill https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/disconnection-notices-served/ #15yrsago Digital Economy Bill: the last hours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOyg1GUY18U #5yrsago Turn on wifi sharing https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#digital-divide #5yrsago Coronavirus travel posters https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#jennifer-baer #5yrsago How you are subsidizing the otherwise unprofitable Fox News https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#unfoxmycablebox #5yrsago Ted Chiang on pandemics as idiot plots https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#disaster-capitalism #5yrsago Bird's "Black Mirror" mass layoffs https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#2-mins #5yrsago UK public health official endorses official reagents for covid tests https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#unauthorized-reagents #5yrsago A promising, plausible plan for "privacy-preserving" surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#pepp-pt #5yrsago Private equity titan squats on empty hospital https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#joel-kills #1yrago Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch Upcoming appearances (permalink) Upcoming appearances (permalink) Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2 https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853 Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3 https://www.techshow.com/ Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4 https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4 https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8 Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast) https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU 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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "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 "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) 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 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud) A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025 Latest podcast: Why I don't like AI art https://craphound.com/news/2025/03/30/why-i-dont-like-ai-art/ 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 ISSN: 3066-764X

Pluralistic: Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined (01 Apr 2025) Today's links Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined: Same goes for trusting an AI with your trade secrets. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined (permalink) There's a debate to be had about whether AI chatbots make good psychotherapists. This is not an area of my expertise, so I'm not going to weigh in on that debate. But nevertheless, I think that if you use an AI therapist, you need your head examined: https://www.salon.com/2025/03/30/some-argue-ai-therapy-can-break-down-mental-health-stigma–others-warn-it-could-make-it-worse/ I'm not an expert on psychotherapy, but I am an expert on privacy and corporate misconduct, and holy shit is the idea of a chatbot psychotherapist running on some Big Tech cloud a terrible idea. Because while I'm no expert on therapy, I have benefited from therapy, and I know this for certain: therapy requires confidentiality. Shrinks are incredibly careful about privacy. For example: when my brother was getting married, my therapist was invited to the wedding. His daughter and my brother's fiancee were close friends, and my brother's fiancee had grown up staying over at their house and wanted her friend and her friend's parents at the wedding. My therapist sat me down and said, "Now listen, I take confidentiality very seriously. If you want me to, I will pretend not to know you at the wedding. No one needs to know that you're seeing me or – any therapist." I told him I didn't mind people knowing I'd seen him, but just that little fastidious gesture confirmed the trust I'd put in Alan. It meant that I could openly and freely discuss things I'd never told anyone before, and that I never told anyone ever again. Having those genuinely open conversations transformed my life, for the better. Now consider the chatbot therapist: what are its privacy safeguards? Well, the companies may make some promises about what they will and won't do with the transcripts of your AI sessions, but they are lying. Of course they're lying! AI companies lie about what their technology can do (of course). They lie about what their technologies will do. They lie about money. But most of all, they lie about data. There is no subject on which AI companies have been more consistently, flagrantly, grotesquely dishonest than training data. When it comes to getting more data, AI companies will lie, cheat and steal in ways that would seem hacky if you wrote them into fiction, like they were pulp-novel dope fiends: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/ When an AI company tells you it won't use your intimate secrets as training data, they are lying. Of course they're lying! This isn't just any data, it's data that isn't replicated elsewhere on the internet. It's rare – it's unique. It's a competitive advantage. AI companies will 100%, without exception, totally use your private therapy data as training data. What's more: they will leak your therapy sessions. They will leak them because they can't figure out how to prevent models from vomiting up their training data verbatim: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/chatgpt-memorization-lawsuit/677099/ But they'll also leak because tech companies leak like hell. They are crawling with insider threats. If the AI company sticks around long enough, it'll leak your secrets. And if it goes bankrupt? That's even worse! When tech companies go bust, the first thing their creditors do is sell off their warehouses full of private data. The more private and compromising that data is, the harder they'll try to sell it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/how-delete-your-23andme-data Now, maybe you're thinking, "OK, but that's a small price to pay if we can finally get therapy for everyone." After all, the country – the world – is in the midst of a terrible mental health crisis and there's a dire shortage of therapists. Now, let's stipulate for the moment to the idea that chatbots are substitutes for human therapists – that, at the very least, they're better than nothing. I don't think that's true, but let's say it is. Even so, this is a bad tradeoff. Here, try this thought-experiment: someone figures out a great business-model for to pay for therapy for poor people. "We turned therapy into a livestreamed reality TV show. If you're too poor to afford a therapist, you can go to one of our partially trained livestreamer therapists, who will broadcast all of your secrets to anyone who watches. There's a permanent archive of these sessions, and the worst people in the world comb through it 24/7 looking for embarrassing stuff to repost and go viral with. What, you don't like that? Oh, I see: you just don't think poor people deserve mental health. I guess the perfect really is the enemy of the good." This gambit is called "predatory inclusion." Think of Spike Lee shilling cryptocurrency scams as a way to "build Black wealth" or Mary Kay promising to "empower women" by embroiling them in a bank-account-draining, multi-level marketing cult. Having your personal, intimate secrets sold, leaked, published or otherwise exploited is worse for your mental health than not getting therapy in the first place, in the same way that having your money stolen by a Bitcoin grifter or Mary Kay is worse than not being able to access investment opportunities in the first place. But it's not just people struggling with their mental health who shouldn't be sharing sensitive data with chatbots – it's everyone. All those business applications that AI companies are pushing, the kind where you entrust an AI with your firm's most commercially sensitive data? Are you crazy? These companies will not only leak that data, they'll sell it to your competition. Hell, Microsoft already does this with Office365 analytics: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware These companies lie all the time about everything, but the thing they lie most about is how they handle sensitive data. It's wild that anyone has to be reminded of this. Letting AI companies handle your sensitive data is like turning arsonists loose in your library with a can of gasoline, a book of matches, and a pinky-promise that this time, they won't set anything on fire. (Image: Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Tariffs, Abundance and Why America Can't Build https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-tariffs-abundance Global Working Conditions Matter for American Workers https://prospect.org/labor/2025-03-30-global-working-conditions-matter-american-workers-su-tai-ilab/ "An off switch? She'll get years for that." https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/03/an-off-switch-shell-get-years-for-that-2/ Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Noteworthy Modern Occurances: the Digital Economy Bill https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/disconnection-notices-served/ #15yrsago Digital Economy Bill: the last hours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOyg1GUY18U #5yrsago Turn on wifi sharing https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#digital-divide #5yrsago Coronavirus travel posters https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#jennifer-baer #5yrsago How you are subsidizing the otherwise unprofitable Fox News https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#unfoxmycablebox #5yrsago Ted Chiang on pandemics as idiot plots https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#disaster-capitalism #5yrsago Bird's "Black Mirror" mass layoffs https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#2-mins #5yrsago UK public health official endorses official reagents for covid tests https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#unauthorized-reagents #5yrsago A promising, plausible plan for "privacy-preserving" surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#pepp-pt #5yrsago Private equity titan squats on empty hospital https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#joel-kills #1yrago Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch Upcoming appearances (permalink) Upcoming appearances (permalink) Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2 https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853 Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3 https://www.techshow.com/ Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4 https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4 https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8 Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast) https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU 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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "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 "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) 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 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud) A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025 Latest podcast: Why I don't like AI art https://craphound.com/news/2025/03/30/why-i-dont-like-ai-art/ 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 ISSN: 3066-764X

Pluralistic: Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined (01 Apr 2025) Today's links Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined: Same goes for trusting an AI with your trade secrets. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined (permalink) There's a debate to be had about whether AI chatbots make good psychotherapists. This is not an area of my expertise, so I'm not going to weigh in on that debate. But nevertheless, I think that if you use an AI therapist, you need your head examined: https://www.salon.com/2025/03/30/some-argue-ai-therapy-can-break-down-mental-health-stigma–others-warn-it-could-make-it-worse/ I'm not an expert on psychotherapy, but I am an expert on privacy and corporate misconduct, and holy shit is the idea of a chatbot psychotherapist running on some Big Tech cloud a terrible idea. Because while I'm no expert on therapy, I have benefited from therapy, and I know this for certain: therapy requires confidentiality. Shrinks are incredibly careful about privacy. For example: when my brother was getting married, my therapist was invited to the wedding. His daughter and my brother's fiancee were close friends, and my brother's fiancee had grown up staying over at their house and wanted her friend and her friend's parents at the wedding. My therapist sat me down and said, "Now listen, I take confidentiality very seriously. If you want me to, I will pretend not to know you at the wedding. No one needs to know that you're seeing me or – any therapist." I told him I didn't mind people knowing I'd seen him, but just that little fastidious gesture confirmed the trust I'd put in Alan. It meant that I could openly and freely discuss things I'd never told anyone before, and that I never told anyone ever again. Having those genuinely open conversations transformed my life, for the better. Now consider the chatbot therapist: what are its privacy safeguards? Well, the companies may make some promises about what they will and won't do with the transcripts of your AI sessions, but they are lying. Of course they're lying! AI companies lie about what their technology can do (of course). They lie about what their technologies will do. They lie about money. But most of all, they lie about data. There is no subject on which AI companies have been more consistently, flagrantly, grotesquely dishonest than training data. When it comes to getting more data, AI companies will lie, cheat and steal in ways that would seem hacky if you wrote them into fiction, like they were pulp-novel dope fiends: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/ When an AI company tells you it won't use your intimate secrets as training data, they are lying. Of course they're lying! This isn't just any data, it's data that isn't replicated elsewhere on the internet. It's rare – it's unique. It's a competitive advantage. AI companies will 100%, without exception, totally use your private therapy data as training data. What's more: they will leak your therapy sessions. They will leak them because they can't figure out how to prevent models from vomiting up their training data verbatim: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/chatgpt-memorization-lawsuit/677099/ But they'll also leak because tech companies leak like hell. They are crawling with insider threats. If the AI company sticks around long enough, it'll leak your secrets. And if it goes bankrupt? That's even worse! When tech companies go bust, the first thing their creditors do is sell off their warehouses full of private data. The more private and compromising that data is, the harder they'll try to sell it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/how-delete-your-23andme-data Now, maybe you're thinking, "OK, but that's a small price to pay if we can finally get therapy for everyone." After all, the country – the world – is in the midst of a terrible mental health crisis and there's a dire shortage of therapists. Now, let's stipulate for the moment to the idea that chatbots are substitutes for human therapists – that, at the very least, they're better than nothing. I don't think that's true, but let's say it is. Even so, this is a bad tradeoff. Here, try this thought-experiment: someone figures out a great business-model for to pay for therapy for poor people. "We turned therapy into a livestreamed reality TV show. If you're too poor to afford a therapist, you can go to one of our partially trained livestreamer therapists, who will broadcast all of your secrets to anyone who watches. There's a permanent archive of these sessions, and the worst people in the world comb through it 24/7 looking for embarrassing stuff to repost and go viral with. What, you don't like that? Oh, I see: you just don't think poor people deserve mental health. I guess the perfect really is the enemy of the good." This gambit is called "predatory inclusion." Think of Spike Lee shilling cryptocurrency scams as a way to "build Black wealth" or Mary Kay promising to "empower women" by embroiling them in a bank-account-draining, multi-level marketing cult. Having your personal, intimate secrets sold, leaked, published or otherwise exploited is worse for your mental health than not getting therapy in the first place, in the same way that having your money stolen by a Bitcoin grifter or Mary Kay is worse than not being able to access investment opportunities in the first place. But it's not just people struggling with their mental health who shouldn't be sharing sensitive data with chatbots – it's everyone. All those business applications that AI companies are pushing, the kind where you entrust an AI with your firm's most commercially sensitive data? Are you crazy? These companies will not only leak that data, they'll sell it to your competition. Hell, Microsoft already does this with Office365 analytics: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware These companies lie all the time about everything, but the thing they lie most about is how they handle sensitive data. It's wild that anyone has to be reminded of this. Letting AI companies handle your sensitive data is like turning arsonists loose in your library with a can of gasoline, a book of matches, and a pinky-promise that this time, they won't set anything on fire. (Image: Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Tariffs, Abundance and Why America Can't Build https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-tariffs-abundance Global Working Conditions Matter for American Workers https://prospect.org/labor/2025-03-30-global-working-conditions-matter-american-workers-su-tai-ilab/ "An off switch? She'll get years for that." https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/03/an-off-switch-shell-get-years-for-that-2/ Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Noteworthy Modern Occurances: the Digital Economy Bill https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/disconnection-notices-served/ #15yrsago Digital Economy Bill: the last hours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOyg1GUY18U #5yrsago Turn on wifi sharing https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#digital-divide #5yrsago Coronavirus travel posters https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#jennifer-baer #5yrsago How you are subsidizing the otherwise unprofitable Fox News https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#unfoxmycablebox #5yrsago Ted Chiang on pandemics as idiot plots https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#disaster-capitalism #5yrsago Bird's "Black Mirror" mass layoffs https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#2-mins #5yrsago UK public health official endorses official reagents for covid tests https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#unauthorized-reagents #5yrsago A promising, plausible plan for "privacy-preserving" surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#pepp-pt #5yrsago Private equity titan squats on empty hospital https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#joel-kills #1yrago Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch Upcoming appearances (permalink) Upcoming appearances (permalink) Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2 https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853 Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3 https://www.techshow.com/ Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4 https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4 https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Recent appearances (permalink) Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8 Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast) https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU 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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "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 "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) 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 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud) A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025 Latest podcast: Why I don't like AI art https://craphound.com/news/2025/03/30/why-i-dont-like-ai-art/ 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 ISSN: 3066-764X

I'm (Miss) Bert. I write whatever kind of horror I damn well feel like. I have a #historicalmash-up with #DeepOnes & #Shoggoths, a #non-fiction #howtowrite, an #anthology (Deep Ones again) & I'm taking a course to be a #CertifiedBookCoach. I'm also on the #stokercon2025 committee. #horrorwriterschat

#shoggoths sleeping #photofunnies #waterscape #lovecraft #speculativerealism #scifi #scifireads #ireadscifi

I'm (Miss) Bert and I write/edit weird and paranormal horror often with #velociraptors or lizards.
My WIP in <6 words is " #Shoggoths on the high seas."
(No #dinosaurs, alas, but I do manage to squeeze in some #mammoths.) #horrorwriterschat

Murder One: A Mickey Crow Paranormal Omnibus (Mickey Crow and the Contrary Crowcast) Murder One: A Mickey Crow Paranormal Omnibus (Mickey Crow and the Contrary Crowcast) [Piedmont, Gevera Bert] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Murder One: A Mickey Crow Paranormal Omnibus (Mickey Crow and the Contrary Crowcast)

Don't forget that MURDER ONE exists and contains a bonus #mickeycrow short story! amzn.to/4gRxvyU #mermaids #sharks #shoggoths #ghosts #killerrobots #paranormal #horror

I'm Bert. I mostly write weird, paranormal, horror fiction, often with misbehaving #velociraptors, #shoggoths, or #DeepOnes.

I have been writing since third grade when my teacher said "Since you like reading #NancyDrew mysteries so much why don't you try writing one?"

#horrorwriterschat