Pluralistic: Don't Be Evil (11 Apr 2026)

Cory Doctorow wrote this morning about a short-lived business venture of his from the late 1990s that, during a brainstorming session, invented SEO slop years before either of those two terms became widely known. That train of thought didn’t go anywhere — they weren’t sociopaths — but it made him realize an important life fact: The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn’t their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks.

1 The knowledge class and its enemies Writing for The Nation, Elizabeth Spiers reaches for Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to frame something that should have been nagging at the edges of tech criticism for quite some time. Hofstadter's great insight was that anti-intellectualism in America has historically come