The immense economic and ecological risks being taken by the artificial intelligence industry have grown so impossibly large that no one — including the AI companies — has the means to gauge them. This historic boom, like so much else in AI, is run purely on vibes. 

In every direction, AI companies are straining to expand beyond their capacities in three key areas: industrial supply chains, grid electricity capacity and global capital markets. High-tech companies occupy a world of structures, protocols and mutual interests that requires guaranteed supplies of rarefied parts and materials to be delivered with precision. If energy and mineral supplies cannot be guaranteed, if capital is no longer liquid and if long-term commitments cannot be met, then that world rapidly unravels. 

The tech billionaires talk excitedly about “existential risk,” but it is abundantly clear that none of them has any conception of systemic risk — the profound dangers that arise when vast complex systems impact one another in unforeseen and uncontrollable ways. But this ignorance cannot continue much longer. Even as AI CEOs continue projecting otherworldly confidence in near-term “10x” growth, the cracks in their world-bending visions are beginning to show. The term “bubble” does not do justice to the gravity of the situation; a failure of AI will be less like a burst than a systemic collapse.

The U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran has only accelerated these entropic dynamics. The world now faces the possibility of an energy crisis, a supply chain disruption and a massive economic contraction, each with profound impacts on an AI industrial complex dependent on fossil fuels from the Persian Gulf. 

“The vase is broken, the damage is done,” said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, from his organization’s Paris headquarters in late April. “It will be very difficult to put the pieces back together.”

The immediate impact of the Iran war is not simply in fossil energy, but also on a huge range of fossil fuel byproducts on which AI and many other industries depend. The global economy is still very much a fossil fuel economy, and AI is locking us even further into it.

Consider helium. A byproduct of natural gas, the element is irreplaceable for cleaning and treating silicon wafers. “Without it, you can’t make the product whatsoever,” said Aqib Zakaria, an analyst at ChinaTalk, a think tank. “It has a disproportionate importance relative to its economic value.”

Thirty percent of the world’s helium supply was produced at Qatar’s Ras Laffan Refinery. That has now stopped, and after an Iranian drone attack it will take years to fully repair. While stockpiles of helium were high, the supply chains are complex and run with no contingency. 

Helium is only one threatened input. The entire AI supply chain is a hyper-fragile system of critical choke points now struggling with “an ongoing fragmentation of global supply chains,” said S. Yash Kalash, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Further up the supply chain, Indonesia, one of the world’s largest mineral exporters, is cutting back mining of copper, nickel and silver, all essential for AI microchips and infrastructure. (AI data centers require an estimated 30,000 tons of copper for every gigawatt of power.) The cutbacks are due to shortages of sulfur, which is used in many mining processes, as well as oil and gas. “When one component is no longer available, all of a sudden the whole supply chain goes down, and you have a type of collapse,” said Craig Tindale, a former infrastructure executive at Oracle who closely monitors the tech supply chain. 

These systemic dependencies reveal a key point: While AI superficially appears like another digital platform industry — providing services and products like ChatGPT and Claude — it is really more like a heavy industry. Every new AI user requires more computing power — what AI companies call “compute” — that in turn requires more energy and resources. Between 2010 and 2022, despite the extraordinary growth of big tech platforms, data center energy demand remained virtually static as those companies switched to more efficient “hyperscale” data centers. That all changed following the launch of ChatGPT; since 2022, energy demand of data centers has more than doubled. The International Energy Agency expects energy demand to more than double again by 2030 in its “base case” forecast. With AI, there are no economies of scale.

The paradox of a heavy industry attempting to grow at the speed of a social media startup has created an intractable tension that is pulling the hastily assembled AI industry apart at the seams.

Recently, Google’s head of AI infrastructure, Amin Vahdat, was asked which shortage was causing the most serious bottleneck of the company’s data center expansion plans. Was it a lack of labor, AI graphics processing units or power?

“All three of those are major, major issues for us,” responded Vahdat. “I’m not relaxed about any of them. I couldn’t pick one.”

Perhaps most alarming is the industry’s staggering power needs. The energy shock of the Iran war has yet to hit the U.S. data center build-out, but the industry’s incredible energy demands are already breaking U.S. power grids.

Energy analyst Grid Strategies recently estimated that data centers will require 90 gigawatts of new power in the U.S. alone by 2030, or about 25% of all U.S. electricity demand today. But only 24 gigawatts of new electricity capacity is being added to the U.S. grid over that time. In effect, AI companies are building their own power, nearly all of it using planet-warming natural gas. There are now long bottlenecks on gas turbines and electrical transformers. As a result, many data centers are now using converted jet engines, which are twice as polluting as purpose-built turbines.

Despite being gas powered, data centers also require massive, grid-scale batteries to even their power load, causing delays in their rollout to other parts of the grid. In this way, AI has slammed recent progress made on decarbonizing electricity grids into reverse.

In 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mused about a not-too-distant future where “intelligence was too cheap to meter.” This vision required building AI models at an unfathomable scale, with no regard to the cost, energy or resources used. It was assumed that if usage rapidly grew, like other digital platforms, it would all pay off eventually.

But the costs of using AI continue to soar, despite AI companies spending $720 billion in 2026 alone. As a result, the AI data center build-out has slowed to a crawl. The research group Data Center Watch reports 48 data center projects were blocked in 2025. Another research group, Sightline Climate, estimates that of 16 gigawatts of data centers planned for 2026, only 5 gigawatts are actually under construction. Much of this gap is likely due to power bottlenecks.

As a result of the slowdown, AI companies don’t have enough capacity to serve their AI models that depend on prodigious amounts of compute and energy. And this is now an economic problem for the industry that is edging toward existential. 

While AI companies never cease to boast about futures of exponential growth, underneath the bravado is a terrifying problem: Their losses are going up faster than revenues. Much faster. Open AI is hemorrhaging more money than any company in history. Early last year it forecast a “burn rate” of $35 billion until 2030. Since then, it’s adjusted that forecast twice, and now the burn rate is up to $228 billion. OpenAI will lose $85 billion in 2029 alone — the biggest ever corporate loss in a year — before (it predicts) miraculously turning a profit of $45 billion in 2030.

Despite raising billions in funding rounds, the financial doom loop appears intractable. OpenAI recently missed its revenue targets, while its chief financial officer was reported as saying that it might “not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough.”

All AI companies are facing the same problem, but have so far not adjusted to this reality. Indeed, it’s hard to see how they can. Having sucked in hundreds of billions of dollars from financial markets on the premise of scale, they can hardly pivot now.

This represents another departure from previous digital platform eras, when big tech companies used to accumulate vast mountains of cash. In AI’s financial bubble, the sector has become by far the largest issuer of debt on global finance markets. The amounts are in the trillions. The Financial Times recently forecast that $9 trillion will be spent on AI infrastructure by 2030. Adjusted for inflation, this would pay for over 270 Manhattan Projects. Over $1.2 trillion in corporate bonds has been issued to AI-related companies in the past two years alone. U.S. banks, meanwhile, are anxiously trying to offload their exposure to the massive debt. As one banker confided to the Financial Times, “The sizes we’re talking about [are] out of scale to anything we’ve thought about, ever.” 

The swirling mass of interconnected multibillion-dollar deals, often called AI’s “circular economy,” links all AI companies together in one inextricably entangled speculative frenzy. The upshot is that AI companies, despite their courtroom battles, their feuds and their hand-holding tiffs, are all entirely codependent; if one goes down, they all go down.

And if they go down, so much of global finance is now so deeply invested in these companies that the shock waves of the failure will be seismic.

The conflict in the Gulf has compounded the AI industry’s problems in more ways than one. The enormously wealthy sovereign wealth funds of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have been huge investors in OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, and plans were in the works for huge AI data centers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where (fossil) energy is abundant and public resistance is nonexistent.

But these countries — now with broken supply chains, severely damaged infrastructure and their image as tax-free havens of stability now in ruins — are facing their own existential challenges. Iranian drone attacks on three Amazon data centers in the region have put all AI projects on extended hold and may well hold back further investment. Research group Epoch AI recently rated Gulf states’ withholding of capital investment a “high risk” for the AI boom. “What this war has shown is that the United States can’t guarantee any security in the region, given how many attacks have landed on these countries,” said Kalash, the fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

The loss of Gulf states’ capital risk IPO plans by SpaceX, now merged with xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic. All these companies urgently need to go public, as it’s the only place they have left to raise the vast amounts of capital they need. SpaceX plans to go first in June. Its entire pitch to investors hinges on launching its data centers in space for xAI. OpenAI plans to follow soon after, but its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has warned that “company isn’t yet ready to meet the rigorous reporting standards required of a public company.” Hardly reassuring for a company worth $875 billion.

Any one of these IPOs — each expected to be worth between $50 billion and $100 billion — would be by far the largest in history. Many analysts question if the financial markets can swallow three AI elephants in one year. And if one of these company’s IPO fails, it will have a cascading impact through the tech sector. Considering the wider economy’s exposure to tech — whose seven biggest firms account for 30% of the stock market — this is unlikely to be shrugged off like the dot-com bubble.

The Bank of England recently warned of the systemic risks deeply embedded in the AI bubble. “Valuations for U.S. technology companies focused on AI remained particularly stretched,” it stated in the Financial Policy Committee meeting record from March. “AI-related repricing could transmit widely throughout the financial system and impact the real economy.”

The modern world has instilled in us all the expectation of inexorable progress. In 2026, AI is the ultimate — and perhaps only — remaining symbol of this idea. Despite the widespread fear that AI provokes, the fear of stopping it, of stopping progress, is for many of us an even more frightening prospect. Maybe this is what drives the AI boom ever onward, however much chaos it creates.

But as AI drags us toward energy, economic and geopolitical tumult, Silicon Valley’s platitudes of AI-enabled progress seem all the more detached from reality. The narrative of progress appears to be crumbling like the supply chain for a high bandwidth memory chip. When our narrative of progress stutters and fails, a narrative of collapse swiftly fills the void left behind.

In this narrative, AI can be seen as a pan-global collapse machine. All likely scenarios of AI’s future contain at least some dimension of collapse. The AI bubble will either collapse in on itself, causing systemic chaos across the global economy, or AI will reach some kind of terrifying inflection point, where it presents an array of ecological and social “existential threats.” But even its “success” could take the form of a collapse: Ninety-nine percent of the human economy becomes a permanent underclass, eking out survival in a ravaged world, while AI and its overlords spiral merrily onward.

Whether you are for AI or against it, it’s collapsing all the way down.

The post $9 Trillion Collapse Machine appeared first on Truthdig.

Today’s links

• Hold on for dear life: Not your keys, not your wallet, entirely your problem.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Who owns “Web 2.0”; EFF saves bloggers’ sources; Non-porn porn; Redaction fails; Canadian Tories say markets, not government, will help flood victims; Forced gold-farming; Walkaway cover; Oracle eats shit in Java API case; Captain America was a Nazi spy; Who Broke the Internet? (Pt IV).
• Upcoming appearances: London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh.
• 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.

Hold on for dear life (permalink)

From the earliest days of technopolitics, the role of technology in resisting authoritarianism was unclear. On the one hand, there’s the indisputable fact that modern cryptography, properly implemented, can deliver a degree of privacy that is proof against all technological attacks.

That is to say, if you pull out your distraction rectangle, fire up the camera, and tap the shutter button, in the ensuing eyeblink instant the image you’ve captured will be scrambled so thoroughly that it could never be unscrambled without the secret key unlocked by your passphrase or biometrics. Even if every hydrogen atom in the universe were converted into a computer, and even if all those computers spent all the time between now and the end of the universe trying to guess what the key was, we would run out of universe and time long before we ran out of possible keys.

What’s more, this extremely robust form of scrambling and descrambling can be combined with other techniques to block tampering with the encrypted data, and to allow parties to reliably identify who scrambled the data and also to restrict who may unscramble it. These remarkable technological facts have inspired many excited debates about what they mean for our politics, most notably among a group of people who called themselves “cypherpunks”:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151102012232/https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/

One cypherpunk faction believed that modern cryptography could enable a kind of technological secession: by allowing ordinary people to communicate, transact and collaborate without the possibility of state interception or control, crypto could make states themselves obsolete.

But another faction pointed out that no amount of mathematics could help you if an agent of the state – or a criminal the state failed to protect you from – tortured you until you revealed the secret passphrase needed to unlock your secrets. This was (ironically) called “rubber hose cryptanalysis” (as in “Tell me your passphrase or I’ll hit you with this rubber hose again”). Later, this became known as a “wrench attack” after a famous XKCD comic about $1m worth of security technology being defeated by hitting someone with a $5 wrench until they divulged the password:

https://xkcd.com/538/

Once you stipulate to the problem of wrench attacks and rubber-hose cryptanalysis, it becomes apparent that your cryptography is only as good as your physical defenses. What’s more, the most effective physical defenses we have come from a strong rule of law, because even the thickest safe door benefits from the threat of prison for anyone who breaks into the safe, and the most effective tool for preventing a cop from hitting you with a rubber hose is the existence of a judge who can send that cop to prison for abusing your civil rights.

But what do you do if you already live under tyranny? The rule of law is a great defense, but cryptography alone can’t bring about the rule of law. What is the role of technology in this foundational struggle?

My technopolitics faction – the faction associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I’ve worked for a quarter-century – has an answer: the role of encryption is to provide a measure of privacy and security that is best used to organize political struggles to demand the rule of law and respect for human rights. Encryption isn’t proof against rubber hoses, but it is effective against many other forms of state repression, and it can provide a technical edge for those engaged in a political struggle.

Another faction – the faction most associated with bitcoin and subsequent cryptocurrency projects – rejects the role of the state altogether, and seeks to replace states (and state-regulated institutions like courts and banks) with mathematics. Rather than asking courts to interpret contracts, we can put our trust in self-executing “smart contracts,” and rather than asking banks to safeguard our financial integrity, we can use cryptographic software to ensure that money only moves when the person it belongs to tells it to.

This has many problems. Smart contracts are slow, expensive, and unreliable. The number of people who understand contracts is small, the number of people who understand the software that embodies smart contracts is likewise small, and the Venn intersection of the two is more of a sphincter. What’s more, there is irreducible ambiguity in all but the simplest of contracts, which means that even a “self-executing” contract ends up relying on a human adjudicator (an “oracle”) who can be bribed or intimidated into cheating:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/14/externalities/#dshr

And when it comes to transactions, crypto proves to be unwieldy, expensive and complex, so that nearly all crypto users end up directing an intermediary (like Coinbase) to hold and move their cryptographic assets for them. The upshot is that cryptocurrency mostly replaces banks – imperfect, but heavily regulated and insured – with unregulated tech platforms with murky ownership and often defective security procedures, who may or may not be insured (or even locatable) in the event of a collapse or a breach. Consequently, cryptocurrency has become a scam magnet of unprecedented and unstoppable power, and hardly a day goes by without people being ripped off in the most ghastly ways imaginable:

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

For bitcoin maxis and other anti-state cypherpunks, this is just a skill issue. Anyone who doesn’t understand how to manage their own keys and turns to a platform to hold and move their crypto is getting what they deserve. As the maxim goes, “Not your keys, not your wallet,” which is cypherpunkspeak for “caveat emptor.”

That’s where the wrench attacks come in. Because if you are in possession of keys that can be used to irreversibly and instantaneously steal large sums of money and move it to jurisdictions where the perpetrators are beyond any legal or physical recourse (e.g. North Korea), then there is a massive incentive for your adversaries to kidnap you and hit you with a wrench or a rubber hose.

That’s precisely what’s going on. People with substantial cryptocurrency holdings face grave personal danger, and the physical attacks on their person grow bolder, more violent, and more sadistic by the day:

https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks/blob/master/README.md

As crypto critic David Rosenthal writes, this problem is even worse than it seems at first blush:

https://blog.dshr.org/2026/05/wrench-attacks.html

For one thing, cryptocurrencies depend on “public ledgers” that indelibly, publicly record every transaction in the network. Cryptocurrency is nothing without these ledgers, and they have to be immutable and public to work. This is very bad news for anyone who relies on anonymity as their defense against physical attacks.

That’s because “reidentification attacks” (where an anonymous person in a dataset is positively identified) get easier to perform over time. You might be represented in a database of hospital prescribing activities by a random number, and that number might be hard to associate with your real identity…at first. But with every subsequent release of data – whether in the form of an anonymized data-set or a breach – it gets easier to cross-reference the facts associated with your record with other facts from other records, such that a detailed, identifying picture of you emerges one fact at a time.

For example, if the taxi company you use suffers a breach that reveals journeys associated with every doctor’s appointment at the hospital, now an attacker can pick out the home or work address of the single person who visited the hospital just before you received your prescription. The longer an “anonymized” data-set sits around in public view, the easier it gets to de-anonymize it:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3

Combine the fact that permanent ledgers make it progressively easier to identify people whom you can torture into revealing their crypto keys with the irreversible, instantaneous nature of crypto transfers and you get some very juicy targets indeed. “Not your keys, not your wallet” means it’s “not anyone else’s problem” when you get robbed. You can’t ask the bank to interdict or reverse the transaction.

Rosenthal provides a litany of the escalating security measures crypto holders are turning to as this problem goes progressively more dangerous and terrifying. There’s the guy who splits his keys up in four physical vaults at four separate locations, whose management is instructed to make him wait a minimum of seven days when he asks to retrieve them. Despite all this, he keeps his identity secret:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/crypto-conferences-up-security-after-attacks-scams

Rosenthal quotes Nicholas Weaver, who asks what kind of “internet of money” bitcoin can be if it can’t be safely stored on a computer connected to the actual internet:

https://doi.org/10.1145/3208095

But an equally valid question is, what kind of escape from tyranny is it that requires you to hide your identity at all times lest you be snatched off the street and brutally tortured? What kind of “liberty” requires you to spend $860,000 armoring your two top execs’ personal vehicles to protect them from gunfire and light artillery?

https://www.ft.com/content/71d7486d-89b5-48ac-8f94-857578c0a03b

It costs $6.2m/year to protect Coinbase’s CEO – “more than the combined amount that JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Nvidia Corp. spent on their respective CEOs”:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-18/crypto-high-rollers-go-big-on-bodyguards-to-deter-kidnappers

Crypto true believers exhort one another to “HODL” (hold on for dear life). Selling your crypto during downturns is considered a moral failing. But now, crypto holders – especially those who manage their own keys – are literally holding on for dear life, as they are hunted by crime syndicates and state actors alike.

It’s a good reminder of how badly crypto has failed on its own terms, delivering its biggest users into an existence of fear and physical peril that rivals the plight of even the most hunted dissidents in the most repressive societies. Worse: as cryptocurrency lobbyists have fused crypto with the world’s largest and most corrupt governments (especially the Trump regime), crypto now has all the exposure to state coercion that made banks so unsuitable, but without the (inconstant, insufficient) protections offered by traditional banking.

And that’s before we talk about the energy consumption problems, the scams enabled by crypto, and the rampant human trafficking that those scams necessitate:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-human-trafficking-victims-are-forced-to-run-pig-butchering-investment-scams

People in my technopolitical faction have a saying of our own: “‘Crypto’ means cryptography.” Cryptography plays a hugely important role in protecting people from crime and state repression. It is no substitute for the rule of law and democracy, but it remains a key tool for securing and defending both:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/the-best-defense-against-rubber-hose-cryptanalysis/

Cryptocurrency, on the other hand? That’s the worst of all worlds.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Un internet post americano, resistente a la mierdificación https://supernovainterna.substack.com/p/traducir-sin-ia-mi-interpretacion?r=3ok21u&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

• Best sketches from SNL season 51 https://a.wholelottanothing.org/best-sketches-from-snl-season-51/

• Revenge of The Business Idiot https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/

• Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/uber-lyft-drivers-massachusetts-form-first-us-ride-share-union-2026-05-26/

• Star Trek Title Card Generator https://trek.epicrandomness.com/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Can anyone own “Web 2.0?” https://memex.craphound.com/2006/05/26/can-anyone-own-web-2-0/

#20yrsago iRiver gives customers the choice of switching off DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060619150812/http://www.iriver.com/mtp/

#20yrsago EFF scores win against Apple: bloggers’ sources are protected https://web.archive.org/web/20060602020337/http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/index.blog?entry_id=1489151

#15yrsago Anonymous pre-paid credit-cards and money-laundering https://web.archive.org/web/20110529001021/https://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/05/23/technology-lt-fea-plastic-money-laundering_8481416.html

#15yrsago More incompetence revealed on the part of France’s “three-strikes” copyright enforcer https://web.archive.org/web/20120520073256/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/french-three-strikes-anti-piracy-software-riddled-with-flaws/

#15yrsago Montage: Non-pornographic scenes from pornographic movies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVBhVDXLpaI

#15yrsago Improper court record redaction: a study https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/05/25/studying-frequency-redaction-failures-pacer/

#15yrsago Texas anti-TSA-grope bill killed by threat to shut down all Texas airports https://www.texastribune.org/2011/05/24/fed-threat-shuts-down-tsa-groping-bill-in-texas/?r

#15yrsago Canadian Tories refuse to send soldiers to help flood victims because they’d compete with the private sector https://web.archive.org/web/20110527053822/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec/ottawa-initially-refuses-request-for-more-troops-to-aid-quebec-flood-victims/article2033562/

#15yrsago Gold-farming in a Chinese forced-labor camp https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam

#10yrsago Edward Snowden performs radical surgery on a phone to make it “go black” https://web.archive.org/web/20160527125043/https://www.wired.com/2016/05/snowden-vice-cell-phone-hack/

#10yrsago FBI is investigating copyright trolls Prenda Law for fraud https://web.archive.org/web/20160526005012/https://popehat.com/2016/05/25/fbi-actively-investigating-prenda-law-team-for-fraud/

#10yrsago How a pharma company made billions off mass murder by faking the science on Oxycontin https://web.archive.org/web/20160524112437/http://static.latimes.com/oxycontin-part1/

#10yrsago GOP officials won’t let the FEC stop bosses from forcing employees to give to PACs https://web.archive.org/web/20160526114245/https://prospect.org/blog/checks/fec-deadlocks-over-employer-political-coercion

#10yrsago Undetectable proof-of-concept chip poisoning uses analog circuits to escalate privilege https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2016/papers/0824a018.pdf

#10yrsago “Pickup artist” douche uses copyright to sue Youtube critics, fans raise $100K defense fund https://www.gofundme.com/f/h3h3defensefund

#10yrsago The best thing you will read about the revelation that Captain America was a Nazi spy https://web.archive.org/web/20160623131614/https://storify.com/rahaeli/captain-america

#10yrsago Revealed: the amazing cover for Walkaway, my first adult novel since 2009 https://reactormag.com/cover-reveal-walkaway-cory-doctorow//

#10yrsago Tor Project is working on a web-wide random number generator https://blog.torproject.org/mission-montreal-building-next-generation-onion-services/

#10yrsago Jury hands Oracle its ass, says Google doesn’t owe it a penny for Java https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/eff-applauds-jury-verdict-favor-fair-use-oracle-v-google

#10yrsago Arcade cabinet enthusiasts discover trove of 50+ games in ship, derelict for 30 years https://arcadeblogger.com/2016/05/06/arcade-raid-the-duke-of-lancaster-ship/

#5yrsago Monopolists are winning the repair wars https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

#1yrago Who Broke the Internet, Part IV https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
  https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow

• LA: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler’s), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: TBA, Jun 25

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Recent appearances (permalink)

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

• The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
  https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

Latest books (permalink)

• “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

• “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/

• “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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• “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

• “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today’s top sources:

Currently writing: “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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• “The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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This post is part of a symposium on international law under the second Trump administration. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** During his most recent campaign, President Trump promised to launch “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” In his first year back in office, that general ambition became a more specific aspiration: to remove 1 million migrants…

Source

On March 25, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. In his speech introducing the law at a press conference, Sanders explained the thinking behind the proposal, which would put a stop to the construction of new data centers until federal regulations are in place. “Today we are announcing legislation to impose a moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers until strong national safeguards are in place to ensure that AI is safe and effective,” he said. The bill lays out a regulatory framework that includes greater protections on privacy and civil rights, restrictions on AI exports, and assurances that economic gains will include American workers, not increase electricity prices and protect the environment.

Without question, these are important issues, and the AIDCM has received enthusiastic praise from the American left. Jacobin’s Nicholas Liu opined, “Only federal legislation stands a chance at leashing a monster of this size.” Jim Walsh of Food & Water Watch, the first national organization to demand a moratorium, said data centers must be halted “so that states and communities have the time needed to properly consider their own futures.” While the moratorium builds on nationwide activism to further open up a space to contest Big AI, it does not think big enough. Specifically, it attempts to address AI harms while at the same time accepting the corporatist, neocolonial framework of the AI economy and Big Tech in general. This can be seen in closer looks at the bill’s provisions, which are far too weak to stop the harm threatened by the rapid data center buildout.

Consider the AIDCM’s call for a federal review of products before they hit the market to ensure they respect “privacy and civil rights.” In theory, laws can be passed that tell Big Tech corporations and employers not to create or deploy AI that spies on workers and consumers, and to ensure their products do not discriminate. Yet as long as AI is owned and deployed by corporations, workers and citizens will always be threatened by “turnkey totalitarianism”: a situation where restrictions on totalitarian powers baked into these technologies can be turned back on should the government change its mind. If we lived in a world of equals who collectively owned and managed the technologies, it’s unlikely they would put themselves under surveillance or develop tools for discrimination. As Eric Hughest, author of “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” put it in 1993, “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age… We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy… We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any.”

Or consider the AIDCM’s call for the “economic gains” of AI to be shared with the American working class, in the form of policies to prevent job displacement and ensure the creation of union jobs at prevailing wages. Under this scenario, Big Tech corporations and their billionaire CEOs retain control of AI, while workers will be left to wage Sisyphean battles against them for better wages, job security and so on.

The AIDCM’s loudest silence is on the matter of digital colonialism. As I argued with comprehensive data in my book, “Digital Degrowth,” the U.S. has unipolar dominance of the global digital ecosystem. (China isn’t even close.) The U.S. has substantial market share or dominates social media, search engines, operating systems, streaming media, email, online advertising, cloud computing, semiconductors, investment in AI data centers and more. Chinese open weight models, advances in robotics, dominance of some tech minerals and a few products like TikTok are far from challenging American tech hegemony. As we will see below, this point is the central connection between AI and the environment.

On that issue, the AIDCM repeats the received wisdom that the direct footprint of AI data centers pose a critical threat to the environment, with reference to carbon emissions, water use, noise, thermal outputs and so on. Attention to AI’s impact on the planet is all to the good. But according to middle-of-the road forecasts by the International Energy Agency, data centers are set to consume just 3% of global energy by 2035 (as the AI boom tapers off) and emit 350 Megatonnes (Mt) of carbon (or 500 Mt on the high-end trajectory). Even with 70% of data center capacity used for AI by 2035 (the high-end estimate), we’re talking just under 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions from AI on the upper-bound projection. Water accounts for even less: agriculture accounts for 70% of freshwater withdrawals and 90%  freshwater consumption (compared to 0.1% consumed by data centers). Golf courses use about as much as many large (hyperscaler) data centers, and there are 16,000 in the U.S. (compared to 5,000 or so data centers with an estimated 600-700 hyperscalers).

This does not mean there are never harms at the local level (as in Memphis), or that people shouldn’t call for data center moratoriums. It’s that the thinking and action leaves out the real elephant in the room: that a just transition is incompatible with the interwoven ills of capitalism, American hegemony and the overuse of the planet’s finite resources.

Indeed, from a digital degrowth perspective that acknowledges the limits of global material resource use, Big Tech is central to the environment, but not because of data center footprints. It is central because the tech economy concentrates the planet’s finite wealth between and within countries and digitalizes the capitalist suicide machine. Data centers — whether built for AI or not — are neocolonial inequality machines.

Consider this: the U.S. is home to 4% of the world’s population, yet it has about a third of the wealth and almost half of the financial assets. If you believe in equality, as socialists do, then that should be 4% across the board. America also holds the largest environmental debts (carbon and ecological). Thanks to Big Tech, American billionaires, millionaires and even tech workers (earning a median of $300,000 per year) are benefiting from the corporate ownership of AI. Yet on a planet of 8 billion people, there is only $16,000 per head. There’s simply not that much to go around, and those salaries could never sustainably scale up without destroying the planet. Something has to give.

Big Tech digitalizes capitalism broadly, including some of the most destructive industries (industrial agriculture, oil exploration and production, fast fashion, consumerism, etc.). Along the way, it dumps electronic waste on the poor. Americans reportedly junk as much as 150 million phones per year, and much of its e-waste is illegally exported to poor countries. In Ghana, hundreds of thousands of tons of used electronics are dumped at waste sites annually, where workers are exposed to toxic chemicals. This received international attention when the press exposed e-waste dumping in Agbogbloshie where poor workers foraged through toxic e-waste to salvage minerals like gold. While the government eventually shut the scrapyard down, other sites for illegal waste have cropped up. The United States refuses to ratify the Basal Convention, which restricts the movement of hazardous waste across borders.

Big Tech also strengthens the U.S. empire by advancing military tech (including U.S. allies), and providing it control over information flows.

The Sanders-AOC proposal does not touch on any of this. Like the Green New Deal, it fails to recognize that the United States is a global minority that objectifies, extracts and exploits from the world’s people and nature more so than any other country.

To put this another way, the AIDCM and state-level moratoriums simply demand minor capitalist reforms that will at best erect speedbumps on the way to Big Tech’s buildout. If we want human rights, equality and sustainability, then we have no choice but to oppose digital capitalism and colonialism altogether. As we race full speed past 1.5C, we get closer to triggering catastrophic tipping points. There isn’t much time left.

Instead of calling for laws to make Big Tech slightly less tyrannical, we should call for its abolition. Instead of vague requests for Big Tech to share the wealth with Americans, we should call for AI that produces global equality. Instead of focusing on the direct footprints of data centers, we should be calling for digital degrowth.

If Sanders-AOC want to claim the moniker, “democratic socialist,” they should push for actual socialism, which is about worker and community ownership of the means of production, universal class abolition, human rights and social equality. Instead, Sanders-AOC propose a social democratic capitalism that gives minor concessions to ordinary Americans. Instituting a moratorium — a brief pause — on Big Tech’s neo-colonial land grab doesn’t work for workers, it doesn’t work for the Global South, and it doesn’t work for the environment.

A major transformation would resemble something like a global Digital Tech Deal as an organized plan to phase out Big Tech and socialize the digital economy. Like antitrust, a mildly reformist moratorium will give the false impression of change, while we accelerate full-speed towards an environmental catastrophe caused not by data center footprints, but by the larger reality of a world-capitalist system with the U.S. empire at its core.

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