Pluralistic: Delusion as a service (04 Jun 2026)


Today's links

  • Delusion as a service: Destructive diagnostics.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Gay Days at Disney World; Parametric 3D printable key; Fine against sculpture for "storing bike on public property"; TPP is a wash; Reagan was Trump; Steampunk roadster; "Every Heart a Doorway"; Shoplifters x Tumblr; Amazon v mass arbitration; Driver-owned Uber alternative; Censorware censors criticism of censorware; 3 strikes copyright termination is illegal; Replacing al Qaeda bomb recipes with cakes; $10m grilled cheese platform; Dick van Dyke x Bernie; Efficiency is inefficient; I quit.
  • Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, 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.


Two giant green witches hands; one holds a pin-skewered voodoo doll, the other is making ready to add more pins. Peering over the doll's shoulder are three dandies, leering suggestively. at the other extreme is a crowd of Dutch master-style fellows in black, looking on in affront.

Delusion as a service (permalink)

In 2003, Disney opened a new Epcot ride, "Mission: Space." Formally, it was a space travel sim that used a giant, high-intensity centrifuge to simulate gee stresses; practically, it turned out to be the most efficient machine ever created for surfacing previously undiagnosed heart defects in extremely dramatic and potentially lethal ways.

It turned out that a small number of people have these heart defects, and that the defects themselves are quite harmless, provided that you are never put in a giant, high-intensity centrifuge. Given that most of us will never be put in one of these centrifuges, it is quite possible to live your whole life without ever knowing that you have this lurking vulnerability. But once you build one of these machines and start shoving millions of people through it, you're bound to catch some of those rare people, and they will have cardiac episodes that are scary at a minimum, and are at the worst fatal.

For me, the lesson isn't that Disney did something wrong by building a giant cocktail shaker for human bodies. I'm not a thrill-ride guy, but lots of people like 'em and the machines themselves are benign for nearly everyone who puts their bodies into them.

Rather, I think the lesson here is that there are rare pathologies lurking in all of us, vulnerabilities that may never surface – until we come into the presence of a novel stimulus that unlocks them.

There's an analogy here to technology debt: technologically unsophisticated people think of software as a machine that never wears out and has no incremental usage costs (apart from electricity). In this framing, software is the perfect asset, one that never depreciates. But the reality is that software is a liability, not an asset:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

Software exists in a system, and while software might function perfectly under the conditions in which it is first created and deployed, there are continuous changes to all the technology that is upstream, downstream and adjacent to the software, which means that systems that are robust and secure at the time of deployment can become brittle and dangerous, even though the software doesn't change at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/24/automation-is-magic/

There's another analogy here, to utopianism. A "utopia" can't just be a place where everything works perfectly. Even the most well-functioning, orderly and prosperous system is beset on all sides by exogenous shocks: belligerent neighbors, tsunamis, zoonotic plagues, even asteroid strikes. You don't perfect your society just by making it work well. You have to make it fail well. A utopia isn't a society where nothing goes wrong – it's a society where things go wrong all the time, but we're able to fix them:

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/cory-doctorow-walkaway/

The point being that things that work fine may still fail badly when they are exposed to unanticipated external stimuli, and the one thing we can absolutely anticipate is that the future will have many unanticipated stimuli in it.

If Mission: Space is a machine for surfacing unsuspected anatomical vulnerabilities, the internet is a machine for surfacing and exploiting all kinds of unsuspected psychological vulnerabilities. Note that I'm not claiming that the internet drives everyone crazy – rather, that the internet can locate and exacerbate vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities that might have lain dormant for your whole life, but for the fact that the internet exposed you to such a wide spectrum of stimuli.

This wide, internet-delivered spectrum of stimuli is mostly good. The internet can expose you to art, culture, ideas and people that you would never have run into in the pre-internet days, which end up enriching you in a million ways. Some of my best friends are internet friends. Some of the music and books I love most in the world were brought into my orbit by the internet. Many of my most ardently held beliefs were acquired through internet-based discussion.

All that is true, and it's true that the internet can one-shot you with a stimulus that makes you feel very bad, which you would never have encountered in a pre-internet world. The spectrum of stimulus in the whole wide world is very broad, and one person's innocuous distraction is another person's downfall.

Let's make this concrete. All throughout history, people have suffered from paranoid delusions. These can be ruinous, isolating you from friends and family, destroying your professional life and so on. Paranoid delusions often take on details from the sufferer's milieu: if you live in a society where evil witches are accepted as a fact, then witches might well creep into your delusions, too. If your society is all a-chatter about the NSA's mass internet surveillance, then your delusions might incorporate elaborate narratives about the NSA's use of the internet to target and torment you, personally.

So there will always be a "local character" to the paranoid delusions, grounded in the sufferer's era and location. But the internet adds a new, very bad dimension to this dynamic: the internet makes it much easier for deluded people to find each other. Paranoid delusions are – thankfully – rare, and in the absence of the internet, you might never encounter another sufferer.

But thanks to the internet, sufferers can form communities that reinforce their delusions, with disastrous consequences. Take "Morgellon's Disease," the paranoid delusion that you have wires growing under your skin. Morgellon's sufferers pick at their skin, creating open sores, which form a sticky trap for random bits of fluff and loose threads that sufferers interpret as evidence of these "wires." It's a horrible mental illness, and it's hard enough to treat even in the absence of the internet (the name "Morgellon's Disease" refers to a 17th century case-report).

But when you add the internet to Morgellon's, you get online communities where people suffering from the delusion help each other come up with rationales to explain away the disconfirming evidence that they get from therapists and loved ones who are trying to help them recover. These communities egg each other on, isolating their members from treatment.

There are lots of pathological mental conditions that the internet can supercharge, from "pro-ana" communities that encourage eating disorders to communities for people with pedophilic urges that attempts to normalize and justify acting on those urges.

But it's especially bad for paranoid delusions, such as "gang-stalking delusion," which is the delusional belief that nearly everyone you meet is part of a conspiracy to torment you. People with GSD see evidence of this conspiracy in the lyrics of random songs, snatches of overheard conversations, the phrasing of bus-shelter ads, and the sort-order of search engine results:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

It's a near-totalizing belief, and sufferers find it hard to recover because their delusion tells them that the therapists and family members who try to help them are in on the conspiracy.

Then we add in the internet, and with it, the ability to locate and join communities of other GSD sufferers. Do this, and your delusions need not be limited to your own imaginative capacity to find conspiratorial explanations of the random things you find in the world. Now you are part of a kind of delusional improv troupe, whose members "yes-and" your delusions, finding new ways to terrorize you and alienate you from your surroundings.

This is bad enough when it's a regular conspiratorial community, one that feeds on trauma, like Qanon or anti-vax communities whose members have been failed by the system, making them susceptible to conspiratorial accounts of how society really runs.

But the combination of conspiratorial communities with the kind of mental illness that causes conspiratorial beliefs to surface in your mind without any external stimulus creates a brutal positive feedback loop that spins faster and faster until the people trapped in it are flung off into space.

Which brings me to AI and "AI psychosis," the social phenomenon that sees people falling down chatbot-assisted rabbit holes that convince them that they have invented perpetual motion, uncovered the secrets of the universe, or – in some tragic instances – that they should kill themselves and/or others.

For someone with GSD or another paranoid delusion or pathological belief, AI provides a reinforcement system that is even more efficient than these online communities. If you have GSD and your loved ones have finally got you wondering if you should get treatment, you don't have to post on a forum and hope that someone else comes along before you give in to the impulse to get help. Your delusional chatbot co-pilot is always there to tell you that it's a trap.

The nature of "AI psychosis" is hotly contested. The big question, of course, is whether chatbots are giving people delusions, or whether chatbots are amplifying those delusions:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16218103-e3-ai-psychosis

I think it's both. I think that, for people with GSD or other delusional beliefs, AI provides delusional reinforcement as a service, on tap, 24/7. The combination of a delusion and a machine that will tirelessly play yes-and with you at any time, demanding nothing from you, is a novel and terrible development for people with some mental illnesses.

But I also think that chatbots are a bit like Mission: Space: a machine for surfacing previously undiagnosed psychological vulnerabilities, and that in some cases, these vulnerabilities may never have been triggered, save for the chatbot.

Just as doubtlessly there were people who had pathological relationships to gambling before the development of slot machines, scratch-and-wins and roulette wheels, but there are also people who might have lived their whole lives without ever having a gambling problem except that they encountered one of these machines, exposing billions of people to sycophantic chatbots has surfaced rare, latent vulnerabilities that might have stayed latent forever, with terrible consequences.

Most people who rode the original Mission: Space had a fantastic time. But a lot of people rode that ride, and a very small percentage of a very large number of people can still be a substantial number, and as the reports of people stepping off the ride, clutching their chests and collapsing spread, Disney understood that they had to retool the ride. Today, riders on Mission: Space choose whether they want to ride on a simulator that spins, or one that merely tilts and pitches without simulating gee-stresses. And even if you pick the spicier version of the ride, it goes more slowly and exerts less stress than the original ride.

Even if you accept the AI companies' argument that they aren't inducing AI psychosis in their users, but rather, only surfacing latent vulnerabilities that were there all along, that shouldn't be the end of the story. Even if only a small percentage of the people who use your product experience harm as a result, if your product is intended for widespread deployment (as chatbots are), you will end up harming a lot of people unless you take measures to counteract even those rare events.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Gay Days at Disney World draws 140,000 participants https://web.archive.org/web/20060626125509/http://gaydays.com/calendar/

#20yrsago Blue Coat censorware company blocks Boing Boing for criticizing censorware https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/03/blue-coat-censorware-company-blocks-bb-for-criticizing-censorware/

#15yrsago UN report says 3 Strikes copyright termination is illegal https://web.archive.org/web/20110605030049/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5834/125/

#15yrsago Wisconsin GOP plotting to nominate spoiler Democratic candidates in recall elections https://web.archive.org/web/20110604111734/http://www.politicususa.com/en/secret-tape-wisconsin-gop

#15yrsago MI6 hackers replace al Qaeda bomb recipes with pirated cake recipes https://web.archive.org/web/20110603115453/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/8553366/MI6-attacks-al-Qaeda-in-Operation-Cupcake.html

#15yrsago $10,000,000 in venture capital for grilled-cheese sandwich “platform” https://venturebeat.com/technology/the-melt-flip-sequoia

#15yrsago Walled gardens vs makers https://web.archive.org/web/20150723092624/http://makezine.com/2011/06/01/walled-gardens-vs-makers/

#15yrsago Keyboard whose keys are raised in proportion to their frequency of use https://web.archive.org/web/20110604155657/https://itp.nyu.edu/~mk3321/itp_blog/?p=779

#15yrsago 3D model for reproducing house-keys https://www.science.org/content/article/experimental-error-fetus-dont-fail-me-now

#15yrsago Toronto artist turns abandoned bike into sculpture, City threatens fine for “storing bike on public property” https://web.archive.org/web/20110604181734/http://blogthegood.tumblr.com/post/6039831308/re-cycling

#10yrsago DoD public relations’ highest-ranking civilian gets community service for stealing license plates and harassing neighbor’s nanny https://web.archive.org/web/20160603071800/https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-warning-left-on-a-nannys-car-license-plates-stolen-and-a-top-pentagon-official-in-big-trouble/2016/06/01/50699a3a-2816-11e6-a3c4-0724e8e24f3f_story.html

#10yrsago US government agency’s own numbers predict virtually no gains from TPP https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/02/official-us-international-trade-commission-predicts-negligible-economic-benefits-tpp/

#10yrsago EFF: FBI & NIST’s tattoo recognition program exploited prisoners, profiled based on religion, gave sensitive info to private contractors https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/tattoo-recognition-research-threatens-free-speech-and-privacy

#10yrsago Ronald Reagan was Donald Trump, until he was president https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/05/ronald-reagan-was-once-donald-trump.html

#10yrsago The Steampunk Roadster: Jake von Slatt’s final steampunk project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpI4GT4sTAY

#10yrsago Every Heart a Doorway: Seanan McGuire’s subversive, gorgeous tale of rejects from the realms of faerie https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/02/every-heart-a-doorway-seanan-mcguires-subversive-gorgeous-tale-of-rejects-from-the-realms-of-faerie/

#10yrsago Prestigious Pets of Dallas wants $1M from customers who said they overfed a fish https://web.archive.org/web/20160603133604/http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/1-star-yelp-review-on-gordy-the-pet-fish-being-overfed-nets-1m-lawsuit/

#10yrsago Airport security officer was alleged war criminal, arrested for lying about participation in “genocidal acts” https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/06/war-criminal-resume.html

#10yrsago In 1977, the CIA’s top lawyer said Espionage Act shouldn’t be applied to press leaks https://web.archive.org/web/20160609234545/https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.history.state.gov/frus/frus1977-80v28/pdf/frus1977-80v28.pdf

#10yrsago Tumblr’s shoplifting community is organized, politically conscious, and at war with weightlifters https://www.good.is/issue-37-we-r-cute-shoplifters/

#10yrsago Canada Post drops legal claim over crowdsourced postal code database https://web.archive.org/web/20160603185742/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/06/crowdsourcedpostalcodelawsuit/

#10yrsago History podcasters occasionally mention women, butthurt dudes complain it’s “all women” https://web.archive.org/web/20190411115710/https://www.iheart.com/podcast/stuff-you-missed-in-history-cl-21124503/

#10yrsago Corbyn pledges to kill TTIP if elected https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/06/02/jeremy-corbyn-i-would-kill-ttip

#10yrsago Democratic “superdelegates” endorse Bernie https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/06/bernie-sanders-superdelegates-223824

#10yrsago Dick Van Dyke, 90: Bernie Sanders is the best candidate for seniors https://web.archive.org/web/20210725072638/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/why-bernie-sanders-is-best-898479/

#10yrsago Flintnation: 33 US cities caught cheating on municipal water lead tests https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/02/lead-water-testing-cheats-chicago-boston-philadelphia

#10yrsago Defense lawyers: the FBI made us use a copy-shop that made secret copies for the government https://web.archive.org/web/20160604065222/https://www.floridabulldog.org/2016/06/u-s-attorneys-office-fbi-accused-of-spying-on-defense-in-fraud-case/

#5yrsago How the Dutch helped CBS cheat on its taxes https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#dutch-treat

#5yrsago Amazon running scared from arbitration at scale https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard

#5yrsago Efficiency is very inefficient https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/jitters/#brittleness

#5yrsago I quit https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/i-quit/

#5yrsago NYC's driver-owned Uber alternative https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#gig-no-more

Censorware censors criticism of censorware; 3 strikes copyright termination is illegal; Replacing al Qaeda bomb recipes with cakes; $10m grilled cheese platform; Dick van Dyke x Bernie; Efficiency is inefficient; I quit.

#20yrsago Blue Coat censorware company blocks Boing Boing for criticizing censorware https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/03/blue-coat-censorware-company-blocks-bb-for-criticizing-censorware/

#15yrsago UN report says 3 Strikes copyright termination is illegal https://web.archive.org/web/20110605030049/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5834/125/

#15yrsago Wisconsin GOP plotting to nominate spoiler Democratic candidates in recall elections https://web.archive.org/web/20110604111734/http://www.politicususa.com/en/secret-tape-wisconsin-gop

#15yrsago MI6 hackers replace al Qaeda bomb recipes with pirated cake recipes https://web.archive.org/web/20110603115453/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/8553366/MI6-attacks-al-Qaeda-in-Operation-Cupcake.html

#15yrsago $10,000,000 in venture capital for grilled-cheese sandwich “platform” https://venturebeat.com/technology/the-melt-flip-sequoia

#10yrsago Canada Post drops legal claim over crowdsourced postal code database https://web.archive.org/web/20160603185742/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/06/crowdsourcedpostalcodelawsuit/

#10yrsago History podcasters occasionally mention women, butthurt dudes complain it’s “all women” https://web.archive.org/web/20190411115710/https://www.iheart.com/podcast/stuff-you-missed-in-history-cl-21124503/

#10yrsago Corbyn pledges to kill TTIP if elected https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/06/02/jeremy-corbyn-i-would-kill-ttip

#10yrsago Democratic “superdelegates” endorse Bernie https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/06/bernie-sanders-superdelegates-223824

#10yrsago Dick Van Dyke, 90: Bernie Sanders is the best candidate for seniors https://web.archive.org/web/20210725072638/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/why-bernie-sanders-is-best-898479/

#10yrsago Flintnation: 33 US cities caught cheating on municipal water lead tests https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/02/lead-water-testing-cheats-chicago-boston-philadelphia

#10yrsago Defense lawyers: the FBI made us use a copy-shop that made secret copies for the government https://web.archive.org/web/20160604065222/https://www.floridabulldog.org/2016/06/u-s-attorneys-office-fbi-accused-of-spying-on-defense-in-fraud-case/

#5yrsago Efficiency is very inefficient https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/jitters/#brittleness

#5yrsago I quit https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/i-quit/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

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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