Cory Doctorow

A Hearst freelancer got a byline on a 64-page summer reading guide full of hallucinated books — work that used to take three interns and a fact-checking desk. Cory Doctorow's name for that setup: a "reverse centaur," where the machine drives and the human absorbs the blame.

On Hacker News, John Nagle, who read Doctorow's full book on the idea, said it undersells how cheaply AI now lets corporations run the kind of surveillance only a government once could afford.

After her memoir, a Meta-paid arbitrator ordered Wynn-Williams to stop promoting it at $50,000 per criticism — over $11 million, more than she and her husband have earned in their lives. So at a UK festival she sat on stage for an hour and said nothing.

Cory Doctorow frames it as a Streisand-effect self-own. The thread's skeptics aren't defending Meta so much as noting his essay never once mentions Meta's side — that she signed an NDA, took severance, and that he overstates the China claim.

Cory Doctorow's argument is mechanical, not moral: to verify a user is a child you must identify every user, so age verification is mass surveillance wearing a hall pass. He maps the escalation — checks push kids to VPNs, then governments move to ban VPNs.

The thread tried to engineer its way out with zero-knowledge attestations and device-level parent mode. But a commenter who says he built such systems for the US cut it short: when they say it's for the kids, it was never their idea.

Miguel Grinberg borrowed Cory Doctorow's 'reverse centaur' — a human reduced to serving a machine — to describe what open source maintenance has become: spending your days reviewing code an LLM wrote and nobody understands.

His fix is friction: open an issue first, in your own voice, no LLM-generated novel with bullet points and emojis. A Netflix engineer in the thread noted that ticket queues aren't reverse centaurs at all — a person is on the other end.