Pluralistic: Kickstarting "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI" (14 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Kickstarting "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI": How to be a better AI critic.

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Kickstarting "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" (permalink)

My next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, will be out in about a month – and (once again) Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform refuses to carry it, and so (once again) I'm pre-selling the audio, ebook and print edition in a Kickstarter campaign that proves that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai

Reverse Centaur is a book about the realpolitik and the political economy of AI, written by a tech critic (me!) who is sick to the back teeth of hearing about AI. Central to the book's thesis:

The AI bubble is exceptionally bad and dangerous:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/07/dump-the-pumpers/#alpo-eaters-anonymous

The AI bubble is part of a lineage of pump-and-dump swindles created by monopolists who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow even after they've saturated their markets:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

In service to that stock swindle, AI companies have cooked up all kinds of ways to "juke the stats" to paint a false picture of AI adoption:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

AI is a normal technology, and in the absence of the bubble, we'd call this collection of technically interesting, sometimes useful tools "plug-ins":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

A chatbot can't do your job, but an AI salesman can absolutely convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

Despite the fact that the AI can't do your job, there are many ways that AI can be used to erode your wages and working conditions:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/06/empiricism-washing/#veena-dubal

The workers who say that their jobs are worse and the things they produce are much worse as a result of AI are correct; but the workers who say their work is much better thanks to AI are also correct. This only seems like a riddle until you understand that the most important fact about any technology (including AI) isn't what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

When a boss fires a worker and gives their jobs to an AI, it usually means that they don't care if that job is done well, which is why customer service jobs are being handed over to AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

Bosses also love firing coders and replacing them with AI – first, because bosses are really angry about the decades when tech workers were in short supply and bosses had to pretend to like them, and second, because if you're selling AI as a way to replace workers, what better way to convince a potential customer than to fire the workers your own company depends upon? (All that said, the coders who are excited about their new AI coding tools have a point – when a worker is in charge of their work and thus when and how they use a tool, we should defer to their own experience):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype

Artists are also a favorite target of AI bosses, which is weird, because the wages of creative workers add up to a total that rounds to zero when compared with the unimaginably large sums AI companies will have to take in if they are to pay back the trillions they've spent to date (let alone the trillions more they're proposing to spend in the near term). All of this raises a foundational question: can AI "art" ever be good? (Spoiler: probably not):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted

Media companies say they have the answer to the AI art question: they'll create (or assert) a copyright that lets them control AI training. This is an incredibly transparent ruse: media companies are artists' class enemies, and if we...