The actual epistemic crisis
Pluralistic: The actual epistemic crisis (20 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
发布时间: November 30, 2020
原文链接: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/20/epistemic-void/
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/20/epistemic-void/
Today's links
- The actual epistemic crisis: AI's assault on reality is an opportunistic infection.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: Disney goths; Running a con room party; Equation Group's fuggly sourcecode; "Bubble"; "The Weight."
- Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
- 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.
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The actual epistemic crisis (permalink)
AI is alarming for many reasons: it's a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster.
We've had photoshopped images, voice impersonators and visual effects for years, of course, but with deepfakes, we've democratized access to reality-bending images, sounds and videos that appear real but are _not_. It's harder than ever to know what's true. Politicians and celebrities and activists show up in our feeds, declaring their fealty to this cause or product, or their fury at some turn in the world's events. Battlefields mound high with bodies and influencers marvel at impossible, sumptuous meals. It all _seems_ plausible, and some of it is real, but not all of it, and because we know some of it is fake, we can't be sure if any of it isn't.
It's a very putinesque way of living. Vladislav Surkov was Vladimir Putin's media strategist, and he had a deadly effective tactic: he announced that he was covertly funding _some_ of the groups that publicly opposed Putin, but did not disclose which of those opposition groups were fake. That meant that _any_ of the groups could be fake, which meant that any discussion of the opposition was liable to devolve into an argument about its authenticity. Anything could be a lie, so nothing was necessarily true. Putin's method isn't to get you to believe a lie – it's to keep you from believing that _anything_ is true.
That's life under AI – a world of uncertainty, an epistemological void full of plausible phantasms, some of which are actually real. A world where it's impossible to know what's true, and where anything might be fake.
But here's the thing: AI's assault on our ability to know isn't a new battle – rather, it's the latest barrage in a war that's been waged for years, as corporations grew larger and more powerful, capturing their regulators, who let them lie to us and abuse us with impunity.
This complicated, technical world – the world that produced AI – is full of complicated, technical questions, and none of us can answer these questions for ourselves. You're not stupid, but even a generational genius could not acquire the expertise to answer the long list of life-or-death questions we face every day.
Are the food hygiene standards followed by your grocer or lunchtime spot adequate, or will your dinner make you shit yourself to death? Are the building codes that specify the alloys in the steel joists that hold up the roof over your head sufficient, or are you about to be crushed to death? Is the software in your anti-lock brakes any good, or will you die in a fireball on the way to work?
From food additives to pedagogy, psychotherapeutic techniques to retirement savings, it would take a hundred lifetimes for you to acquire the 200 PhDs needed to answer these questions for yourself.
Thankfully, we don't have to answer those questions for ourselves. Instead, we defer to expert agencies: governmental regulators that assess truth claims by soliciting input from all comers, publicly deliberating about the evidence they've gathered, and then making a rule in public. These regulators are meant to be experts, nonpartisan and neutral, operating with the highest degree of probity, recusing themselves in the event of even a whiff of conflict.
It has to be that way. You may not be able to assess claims about the safety of vaccines – or opioids – but you can see for yourself whether the FDA is full of ex-pharma execs. You can see for yourself whether pharma company lobbyists all used to work for the FDA. You don't need to be a virologist or a cell biologist to tell whether the system that's supposed to sort truth from lies is fit for purpose.
It is _not_ fit for purpose. When arguments broke out over covid vaccines, many vaccine advocates characterized their opponents as foolish people engaged in foolish conspiratorialism. They argued that the corporations that produced the vaccines and the regulators who oversee them were intrinsically trustworthy, and on that basis, we should all get vaccinated.
Now, I happen to be a big believer in vaccination. I've had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and get five bars of 5G in a coal-mine. But I didn't get vaccinated because I trust pharma companies or their regulators. A string of scandals – most notably the Sacklers' Oxycontin murder-spree – has proven that pharma will kill you for a nickel and that the FDA will let them get away with it:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know
From tobacco safety to food safety to the climate emergency, it's obvious that the system of expert agencies that we rely on was terminally compromised by corporate power and regulatory capture:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
This is the epistemological void we were already adrift in _before_ AI came along: a world of unresolvable, urgent, terrifyingly high-stakes questions.
When you get a call from "your bank" and accede to the demand that you hand over all kinds of personal information before they will disclose the call's purpose, you're not being naive or foolish – you're doing the thing that our banks have conditioned us to do for years by engaging in _exactly this behavior_ (my bank did this to me _this week_!). Why are banks allowed to get away with engaging in this kind of outrageous conduct? Because – as we've repeatedly discovered through crisis after crisis – banks are too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care.
Why is it so believable that a loved one might call you in a panic because they've been arrested or injured and need an immediate cash payment before they can get bail or doctor's treatment? Because our criminal justice system and our health care system are _already_ plagued by this kind of inhumane, high-handed, extortionate behavior.
Why do you fall for a deepfake of celeb shilling for supplements or a shitcoin? Maybe it's because celebs _actually_ shill for supplements and shitcoins, and face no consequences for helping rope us all into scams:
https://gizmodo.com/matt-damon-crypto-com-crypto-bitcoin-1850282413
Not just celebs – also our newspapers:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/18/technology/cryptocurrency-crypto-guide.html
We laugh when other people fall for newspaper articles making absurd claims – but after living through a time in which our most respected journalistic outlets credulously helped a dishonest government lie the world into a war that's still smoldering more than a generation later, who can be sure when to trust the papers?
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html
One of the reasons it is so hard to agree on covid's death-toll is that so many of the people who died of covid were already compromised by chronic illnesses or "pre-existing conditions" from cancer to heart disease. Those people _did_ die of covid – _and_ they died of cancer or heart disease or some other comorbidity. Covid was an opportunistic infection that inflicted disproportionate harms on people who were already suffering.
The epistemic void created by AI is another opportunistic infection. Our ability to know things has been in decline for generations, as monopolies shredded our truth-assessment systems, rendering us all incapable of knowing the truth in a world where believing lies could bankrupt you or kill you dead.
_If_ you could trust your government's expert agencies and _if_ they had reliable systems for making their findings known; _if_ your bank was banned from engaging in conduct indistinguishable from phishing; _if_ the health-care and criminal justice systems _never_ forced the people they ensnared to call their relatives and beg for money, then deepfakes would have a much harder time penetrating our cognitive immune systems.
It's not so much that AI is a powerful way of lying – rather, we have been made progressively more vulnerable to lies for decades, leaving us at an epistemic death's door, and AI has arrived to deliver the coup de grace.
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Hey look at this (permalink)
- The $1 Trillion Black Box https://www.propublica.org/article/military-defense-spending-budget-series
- The Right Word is Wrongness https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/the-right-word-is-wrongness/
- Yes Obviously the Senate Should Be Abolished https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/yes-obviously-the-senate-should-be
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Object permanence (permalink)
20yrsago Goth day at Disneyland photos https://flickr.com/photos/doctorow/tags/batsday/
20yrsago HOWTO run a successful sf convention room party https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/how\_to\_throw\_a\_1/
20yrsago Yahoo: Go ahead and remix our brand https://web.archive.org/web/20061111175912/http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000348.html
10yrsago The Equation Group’s sourcecode is totally fugly https://web.archive.org/web/20160818012451/https://www.cs.uic.edu/~s/musings/equation-group/
5yrsago Bubble https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/21/podcasting-as-a-visual-medium/#huntr
1yrago Melissa Mendes's "The Weight" https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/21/weighty/#edie-is-a-badass
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Upcoming appearances (permalink)
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/
- Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification
- Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html
- London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2)
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
- Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
- London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
- South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
- Victoria: Munro's Books (Oct 20)
- Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
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Recent appearances (permalink)
https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory
- Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with
- Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves
- Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
- Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
- Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
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Latest books (permalink)
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
- "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
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
- "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
- "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
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Upcoming books (permalink)
- "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, April 20, 2027
- "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
- "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
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Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 533 (8263 total). - "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
- A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Source: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/20/epistemic-void/
Captured: 2026-08-21 (AAIF daily-intake-evening)