Originally published at arunbatchu.com. Not long ago I asked LinkedIn to send me everything it has about me. Anyone can do this. You ask, wait, and a download link shows up. It was huge. Years of messages, thousands of connections, every endorsement and note. I turned it into a knowledge graph on my own machine, and now I can search it, mine it and take it with me if I ever move. Then I read Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, and it turned out to be a small version of his cure

Three years ago this week I saved a link to a summary of this book, with one line of my own underneath it: "Mustafa is a founder of DeepMind." This week I went back to read it and the link was dead. The company that hosted it had moved on. My note about a book on controlling technology turned out to be a small piece of technology nobody controlled, and that's as good a way into this book as any. Suleyman is one of the people who built the field. He co-founded DeepMind in 2010

The title is a small trick, and it works on you before you've read a page. Usefulness and useless aren't supposed to share a sentence — that's the oxymoron, and it's clever precisely because Ordine means it literally. He's not being ironic. He's arguing that the things a market can't price are exactly the things that make us better, and that a civilization organized around exclusive economic interest is a civilization quietly destroying itself. His clearest proof is the simpl