Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Justin Key's "The Hospital at the End Of the World"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/04/slice-bees/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Michael Swanwick's "The Universe Box"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/23/the-last-days-of-old-night/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Stock swindles; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/02/corprophagia/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Disenshittification Nation; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Carney isn't a hero (and that's OK); and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/
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Billy Smith
boosted
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Trump and the unmighty dollar; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Trump and the unmighty dollar; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating ungovernability as a habit; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/22/optimized-for-unoptimization/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Google's AI pricing plan; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: AI is how bosses wage war on "professions"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/20/i-would-prefer-not-to/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Social media without socializing; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/19/billionaire-solipsism/
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@Npars01 Yeah I agree, what do you think is the solution forward if AI is here to stay and it becomes ubiquitous
What do you think should be that small unit of practice one can repeat daily to get better at even with AI use, that will always hold value and amplify our expertise rather than decrease it
AI is like a crutch you get addicted to using, long after the broken leg is healed
Something that weakens, never strengthens
AI is built on stolen intellectual property, it can never be better than its origins. It can't create original work, only copy other's work
As #pluralistic describes it, it's spicy autocomplete
Overreliance on such tools means people forget how to spell on their own. They make obvious grammatical errors because they're not really doing the writing
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/17/erin-go-go-go/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Catch this! and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/16/interrupt-driven/
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Cory Doctorow
boosted
I want to talk about something that has been brought to the fore of my mind by something that Cory Doctorow has recently published ; happiness, optimism and hope. In particular optimism because it made me step back and consider his proposition in order to reassess my own understanding of a word I’ve often used in the past to describe one of the characteristics of my persona.
‘Optimism […] is a toxin to be avoided. Optimism is a subgenre of fatalism, the belief that things will get better no matter what we do. It’s just the obverse of pessimism. Both are ways of denying human agency. To be an optimist is to be a passenger of history, along for the ride, with no hope of changing course.’
It is the words ‘human agency’ which first spiked my interest of course. And all of a sudden an answer to a one question that has been on my mind for some time was delivered to me. The world is turning to shit because it has to in order to deliver a better world. In a world where I despair for want of a politically active electorate willing – because we all can – to sort the hay from the chaff on a routine basis and inured to propaganda, all I see around me are angry people, too busy to make ends meet (a relative as well as a subjective reconciliation of financial and social dues and rights) all the while gobbling up whatever mis/dis-information is force-fed onto them; nothing is going to change without some major upheavals. People are not going to wake up from the nightmare until they are scared out of their wits. Shocked awake and gasping for breath, heart thumping in the chest and all senses primed for fight or flight responses. Only then will people sit up and take note of what is happening. In other words, human agency being what it is, if a better world is to be built, the old one must writhe in pain and lash out in frustration as it burns itself out of existence. That is the explanation for what I see around the world today. It is both a sad and painful sight and a harbinger of better things to be, therein lies hope.
‘Hope […] That’s the stuff. Hope is the belief that if we change the world for the better, even by just a little, that we will ascend a new gradient towards a better future, and as we rise up to that curve, new terrain will be revealed to us that we couldn’t see from our lower vantage-point. It’s not necessary -- nor even possible – to see a course from here to the world you want to live in. You can get there is a stepwise fashion, one beneficial change at a time.’
Tying up loose ends… Upon reflection, it is not true that I am an optimist, or ever was one. What I can say now with some confidence is that I am full of hope, have always been. Thank you
@pluralistic
I want to talk about something that has been brought to the fore of my mind by something that Cory Doctorow has recently published ; happiness, optimism and hope. In particular optimism because it made me step back and consider his proposition in order to reassess my own understanding of a word I’ve often used in the past to describe one of the characteristics of my persona.
‘Optimism […] is a toxin to be avoided. Optimism is a subgenre of fatalism, the belief that things will get better no matter what we do. It’s just the obverse of pessimism. Both are ways of denying human agency. To be an optimist is to be a passenger of history, along for the ride, with no hope of changing course.’
It is the words ‘human agency’ which first spiked my interest of course. And all of a sudden an answer to a one question that has been on my mind for some time was delivered to me. The world is turning to shit because it has to in order to deliver a better world. In a world where I despair for want of a politically active electorate willing – because we all can – to sort the hay from the chaff on a routine basis and inured to propaganda, all I see around me are angry people, too busy to make ends meet (a relative as well as a subjective reconciliation of financial and social dues and rights) all the while gobbling up whatever mis/dis-information is force-fed onto them; nothing is going to change without some major upheavals. People are not going to wake up from the nightmare until they are scared out of their wits. Shocked awake and gasping for breath, heart thumping in the chest and all senses primed for fight or flight responses. Only then will people sit up and take note of what is happening. In other words, human agency being what it is, if a better world is to be built, the old one must writhe in pain and lash out in frustration as it burns itself out of existence. That is the explanation for what I see around the world today. It is both a sad and painful sight and a harbinger of better things to be, therein lies hope.
‘Hope […] That’s the stuff. Hope is the belief that if we change the world for the better, even by just a little, that we will ascend a new gradient towards a better future, and as we rise up to that curve, new terrain will be revealed to us that we couldn’t see from our lower vantage-point. It’s not necessary -- nor even possible – to see a course from here to the world you want to live in. You can get there is a stepwise fashion, one beneficial change at a time.’
Tying up loose ends… Upon reflection, it is not true that I am an optimist, or ever was one. What I can say now with some confidence is that I am full of hope, have always been. Thank you
@pluralistic
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: How the Light Gets In; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/15/how-the-light-gets-in/
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Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: It's not normal; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/
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Em :official_verified:
boosted
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Sorry, eh; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/not-sorry/
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