books

Dead Ends is a fun, macabre medical history for kids

books, children's books, culture, medical history, medicine, Science / 9u50fv / October 18, 2025

flukes, flops, and failures

Ars chats with co-authors Lindsey Fitzharris and Adrian Teal about their delightful new children’s book.

In 1890, a German scientist named Robert Koch thought he’d invented a cure for tuberculosis, a substance derived from the infecting bacterium itself that he dubbed Tuberculin. His substance didn’t actually cure anyone, but it was eventually widely used as a diagnostic skin test. Koch’s successful failure is just one of the many colorful cases featured in Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failures that Sparked Medical Marvels, a new nonfiction illustrated children’s book by science historian Lindsey Fitzharris and her husband, cartoonist Adrian Teal.

A noted science communicator with a fondness for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art, in 2017—a great, if occasionally grisly, read. She followed up with 2022’s The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, about a WWI surgeon named Harold Gillies who rebuilt the faces of injured soldiers.

And in 2020, she hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death Of…, exploring famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Fitzharris performed virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses, and conducted real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning fresh insights. For his part, Teal is a well-known caricaturist and illustrator, best known for his work on the British TV series Spitting Image. His work has also appeared in The Guardian and the Sunday Telegraph, among other outlets.

The couple decided to collaborate on children’s books as a way to combine their respective skills. Granted, “[The market for] children’s nonfiction is very difficult,” Fitzharris told Ars. “It doesn’t sell that well in general. It’s very difficult to get publishers on board with it. It’s such a shame because I really feel that there’s a hunger for it, especially when I see the kids picking up these books and loving it. There’s also just a need for it with the decline in literacy rates. We need to get people more engaged with these topics in ways that go beyond a 30-second clip on TikTok.”

Their first foray into the market was 2023’s Plague-Busters! Medicine’s Battles with History’s Deadliest Diseases, exploring “the ickiest illnesses that have infected humans and affected civilizations through the ages”—as well as the medical breakthroughs that came about to combat those diseases. Dead Ends is something of a sequel, focusing this time on historical diagnoses, experiments, and treatments that were useless at best, frequently harmful, yet eventually led to unexpected medical breakthroughs.

Failure is an option

The book opens with the story of Robert Liston, a 19th-century Scottish surgeon known as “the fastest knife in the West End,” because he could amputate a leg in less than three minutes. That kind of speed was desirable in a period before the discovery of anesthetic, but sometimes Liston’s rapid-fire approach to surgery backfired. One story (possibly apocryphal) holds that Liston accidentally cut off the finger of his assistant in the operating theater as he was switching blades, then accidentally cut the coat of a spectator, who died of fright. The patient and assistant also died, so that operation is now often jokingly described as the only one with a 300 percent mortality rate, per Fitzharris.

Liston is the ideal poster child for the book’s theme of celebrating the role of failure in scientific progress. “I’ve always felt that failure is something we don’t talk about enough in the history of science and medicine,” said Fitzharris. “For everything that’s succeeded there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of things that’s failed. I think it’s a great concept for children. If you think that you’ve made mistakes, look at these great minds from the past. They’ve made some real whoppers. You are in good company. And failure is essential to succeeding, especially in science and medicine.”

“During the COVID pandemic, a lot of people were uncomfortable with the fact that some of the advice would change, but to me that was a comfort because that’s what you want to see scientists and doctors doing,” she continued. “They’re learning more about the virus, they’re changing their advice. They’re adapting. I think that this book is a good reminder of what the scientific process involves.”

The details of Liston’s most infamous case might be horrifying, but as Teal observes, “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” One of the reasons so many of his patients died was because this was before the broad acceptance of germ theory and Joseph Lister’s pioneering work on antiseptic surgery. Swashbuckling surgeons like Liston prided themselves on operating in coats stiffened with blood—the sign of a busy and hence successful surgeon. Frederick Treves once observed that in the operating room, “cleanliness was out of place. It was considered to be finicking and affected. An executioner might as well manicure his nails before chopping off a head.”

“There’s always a lot of initial resistance to new ideas, even in science and medicine,” said Teal. “A lot of what we talk about is paradigm shifts and the difficulty of achieving [such a shift] when people are entrenched in their thinking. Galen was a hugely influential Roman doctor and got a lot of stuff right, but also got a lot of stuff wrong. People were clinging onto that stuff for centuries. You have misunderstanding compounded by misunderstanding, century after century, until somebody finally comes along and says, ‘Hang on a minute, this is all wrong.’”

You know… for kids

Writing for children proved to be a very different experience for Fitzharris after two adult-skewed science history books. “I initially thought children’s writing would be easy,” she confessed. “But it’s challenging to take these high-level concepts and complex stories about past medical movements and distill them for children in an entertaining and fun way.” She credits Teal—a self-described “man-child”—for taking her drafts and making them more child-friendly.

Teal’s clever, slightly macabre illustrations also helped keep the book accessible to its target audience, appealing to children’s more ghoulish side. “There’s a lot of gruesome stuff in this book,” Teal said. “Obviously it’s for kids, so you don’t want to go over the top, but equally, you don’t want to shy away from those details. I always say kids love it because kids are horrible, in the best possible way. I think adults sometimes worry too much about kids’ sensibilities. You can be a lot more gruesome than you think you can.”

The pair did omit some darker subject matter, such as the history of frontal lobotomies, notably the work of a neuroscientist named Walter Freeman, who operated an actual “lobotomobile.” For the authors, it was all about striking the right balance. “How much do you give to the kids to keep them engaged and interested, but not for it to be scary?” said Fitzharris. “We don’t want to turn people off from science and medicine. We want to celebrate the greatness of what we’ve achieved scientifically and medically. But we also don’t want to cover up the bad bits because that is part of the process, and it needs to be acknowledged.”

Sometimes Teal felt it just wasn’t necessary to illustrate certain gruesome details in the text—such as their discussion of the infamous case of Phineas Gage. Gage was a railroad construction foreman. In 1848, he was overseeing a rock blasting team when an explosion drove a three-foot tamping iron through his skull. “There’s a horrible moment when [Gage] leans forward and part of his brain drops out,” said Teal. “I’m not going to draw that, and I don’t need to, because it’s explicit in the text. If we’ve done a good enough job of writing something, that will put a mental picture in someone’s head.”

Miraculously, Gage survived, although there were extreme changes in his behavior and personality, and his injuries eventually caused epileptic seizures, one of which killed Gage in 1860. Gage became the index case for personality changes due to frontal lobe damage, and 50 years after his death, the case inspired neurologist David Ferrier to create brain maps based on his research into whether certain areas of the brain controlled specific cognitive functions.

“Sometimes it takes a beat before we get there,” said Fitzharris. “Science builds upon ideas, and it can take time. In the age of looking for instantaneous solutions, I think it’s important to remember that research needs to allow itself to do what it needs to do. It shouldn’t just be guided by an end goal. Some of the best discoveries that were made had no end goal in mind. And if you read Dead Ends, you’re going to be very happy that you live in 2025. Medically speaking, this is the best time. That’s really what Dead Ends is about. It’s a celebration of how far we’ve come.”

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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Yes, everything online sucks now—but it doesn’t have to

books, Cory Doctorow, culture, enshittification, Features, online culture, Tech / Mike M. / October 17, 2025

from good to bad to nothing

Ars chats with Cory Doctorow about his new book Enshittification.

We all feel it: Our once-happy digital spaces have become increasingly less user-friendly and more toxic, cluttered with extras nobody asked for and hardly anybody wants. There’s even a word for it: “enshittification,” named 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. The term was coined by tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow, a longtime advocate of digital rights. Doctorow has spun his analysis of what’s been ailing the tech industry into an eminently readable new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.

As Doctorow tells it, he was on vacation in Puerto Rico, staying in a remote cabin nestled in a cloud forest with microwave Internet service—i.e., very bad Internet service, since microwave signals struggle to penetrate through clouds. It was a 90-minute drive to town, but when they tried to consult TripAdvisor for good local places to have dinner one night, they couldn’t get the site to load. “All you would get is the little TripAdvisor logo as an SVG filling your whole tab and nothing else,” Doctorow told Ars. “So I tweeted, ‘Has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most enshittified website I’ve ever used.’”

Initially, he just got a few “haha, that’s a funny word” responses. “It was when I married that to this technical critique, at a moment when things were quite visibly bad to a much larger group of people, that made it take off,” Doctorow said. “I didn’t deliberately set out to do it. I bought a million lottery tickets and one of them won the lottery. It only took two decades.”

Yes, people sometimes express regret to him that the term includes a swear word. To which he responds, “You’re welcome to come up with another word. I’ve tried. ‘Platform decay’ just isn’t as good.” (“Encrapification” and “enpoopification” also lack a certain je ne sais quoi.)

In fact, it’s the sweariness that people love about the word. While that also means his book title inevitably gets bleeped on broadcast radio, “The hosts, in my experience, love getting their engineers to creatively bleep it,” said Doctorow. “They find it funny. It’s good radio, it stands out when every fifth word is ‘enbeepification.’”

People generally use “enshittification” colloquially to mean “the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms over time.” Doctorow’s definition is more specific, encompassing “why an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds,” and how this process spreads to other online services, such that everything is getting worse all at once.

For Doctorow, enshittification is a disease with symptoms, a mechanism, and an epidemiology. It has infected everything from Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google, to Airbnb, dating apps, iPhones, and everything in between. “For me, the fact that there were a lot of platforms that were going through this at the same time is one of the most interesting and important factors in the critique,” he said. “It makes this a structural issue and not a series of individual issues.”

It starts with the creation of a new two-sided online product of high quality, initially offered at a loss to attract users—say, Facebook, to pick an obvious example. Once the users are hooked on the product, the vendor moves to the second stage: degrading the product in some way for the benefit of their business customers. This might include selling advertisements, scraping and/or selling user data, or tweaking algorithms to prioritize content the vendor wishes users to see rather than what those users actually want.

This locks in the business customers, who, in turn, invest heavily in that product, such as media companies that started Facebook pages to promote their published content. Once business customers are locked in, the vendor can degrade those services too—i.e., by de-emphasizing news and links away from Facebook—to maximize profits to shareholders. Voila! The product is now enshittified.

The four horsemen of the shitocalypse

Doctorow identifies four key factors that have played a role in ushering in an era that he has dubbed the “Enshittocene.” The first is competition (markets), in which companies are motivated to make good products at affordable prices, with good working conditions, because otherwise customers and workers will go to their competitors. The second is government regulation, such as antitrust laws that serve to keep corporate consolidation in check, or levying fines for dishonest practices, which makes it unprofitable to cheat.

The third is interoperability: the inherent flexibility of digital tools, which can play a useful adversarial role. “The fact that enshittification can always be reversed with a dis-enshittifiting counter-technology always acted as a brake on the worst impulses of tech companies,” Doctorow writes. Finally, there is labor power; in the case of the tech industry, highly skilled workers were scarce and thus had considerable leverage over employers.

All four factors, when functioning correctly, should serve as constraints to enshittification. However, “One by one each enshittification restraint was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittification impulse unchecked,” Doctorow writes. Any “cure” will require reversing those well-established trends.

But isn’t all this just the nature of capitalism? Doctorow thinks it’s not, arguing that the aforementioned weakening of traditional constraints has resulted in the usual profit-seeking behavior producing very different, enshittified outcomes. “Adam Smith has this famous passage in Wealth of Nations about how it’s not due to the generosity of the baker that we get our bread but to his own self-regard,” said Doctorow. “It’s the fear that you’ll get your bread somewhere else that makes him keep prices low and keep quality high. It’s the fear of his employees leaving that makes him pay them a fair wage. It is the constraints that causes firms to behave better. You don’t have to believe that everything should be a capitalist or a for-profit enterprise to acknowledge that that’s true.”

Our wide-ranging conversation below has been edited for length to highlight the main points of discussion.

Ars Technica: I was intrigued by your choice of framing device, discussing enshittification as a form of contagion.

Cory Doctorow: I’m on a constant search for different framing devices for these complex arguments. I have talked about enshittification in lots of different ways. That frame was one that resonated with people. I’ve been a blogger for a quarter of a century, and instead of keeping notes to myself, I make notes in public, and I write up what I think is important about something that has entered my mind, for better or for worse. The downside is that you’re constantly getting feedback that can be a little overwhelming. The upside is that you’re constantly getting feedback, and if you pay attention, it tells you where to go next, what to double down on.

Another way of organizing this is the Galaxy Brain meme, where the tiny brain is “Oh, this is because consumers shopped wrong.” The medium brain is “This is because VCs are greedy.” The larger brain is “This is because tech bosses are assholes.” But the biggest brain of all is “This is because policymakers created the policy environment where greed can ruin our lives.” There’s probably never going to be just one way to talk about this stuff that lands with everyone. So I like using a variety of approaches. I suck at being on message. I’m not going to do Enshittification for the Soul and Mornings with Enshittifying Maury. I am restless, and my Myers-Briggs type is ADHD, and I want to have a lot of different ways of talking about this stuff.

Ars Technica: One site that hasn’t (yet) succumbed is Wikipedia. What has protected Wikipedia thus far?

Cory Doctorow: Wikipedia is an amazing example of what we at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) call the public interest Internet. Internet Archive is another one. Most of these public interest Internet services start off as one person’s labor of love, and that person ends up being what we affectionately call the benevolent dictator for life. Very few of these projects have seen the benevolent dictator for life say, “Actually, this is too important for one person to run. I cannot be the keeper of the soul of this project. I am prone to self-deception and folly just like every other person. This needs to belong to its community.” Wikipedia is one of them. The founder, my friend Jimmy Wales, woke up one day and said, “No individual should run Wikipedia. It should be a communal effort.”

There’s a much more durable and thick constraint on the decisions of anyone at Wikipedia to do something bad. For example, Jimmy had this idea that you could use AI in Wikipedia to help people make entries and navigate Wikipedia’s policies, which are daunting. The community evaluated his arguments and decided—not in a reactionary way, but in a really thoughtful way—that this was wrong. Jimmy didn’t get his way. It didn’t rule out something in the future, but that’s not happening now. That’s pretty cool.

Wikipedia is not just governed by a board; it’s also structured as a nonprofit. That doesn’t mean that there’s no way it could go bad. But it’s a source of friction against enshittification. Wikipedia has its entire corpus irrevocably licensed as the most open it can be without actually being in the public domain. Even if someone were to capture Wikipedia, there’s limits on what they could do to it.

There’s also a labor constraint in Wikipedia in that there’s very little that the leadership can do without bringing along a critical mass of a large and diffuse body of volunteers. That cuts against the volunteers working in unison—they’re not represented by a union; it’s hard for them to push back with one voice. But because they’re so diffuse and because there’s no paychecks involved, it’s really hard for management to do bad things. So if there are two people vying for the job of running the Wikimedia Foundation and one of them has got nefarious plans and the other doesn’t, the nefarious plan person, if they’re smart, is going to give it up—because if they try to squeeze Wikipedia, the harder they squeeze, the more it will slip through their grasp.

So these are structural defenses against enshittification of Wikipedia. I don’t know that it was in the mechanism design—I think they just got lucky—but it is a template for how to run such a project. It does raise this question: How do you build the community? But if you have a community of volunteers around a project, it’s a model of how to turn that project over to that community.

Ars Technica: Your case studies naturally include the decay of social media, notably Facebook and the social media site formerly known as Twitter. How might newer social media platforms resist the spiral into “platform decay”?

Cory Doctorow: What you want is a foundation in which people on social media face few switching costs. If the social media is interoperable, if it’s federatable, then it’s much harder for management to make decisions that are antithetical to the interests of users. If they do, users can escape. And it sets up an internal dynamic within the firm, where the people who have good ideas don’t get shouted down by the people who have bad but more profitable ideas, because it makes those bad ideas unprofitable. It creates both short and long-term risks to the bottom line.

There has to be a structure that stops their investors from pressurizing them into doing bad things, that stops them from rationalizing their way into complying. I think there’s this pathology where you start a company, you convince 150 of your friends to risk their kids’ college fund and their mortgage working for you. You make millions of users really happy, and your investors come along and say, “You have to destroy the life of 5 percent of your users with some change.” And you’re like, “Well, I guess the right thing to do here is to sacrifice those 5 percent, keep the other 95 percent happy, and live to fight another day, because I’m a good guy. If I quit over this, they’ll just put a bad guy in who’ll wreck things. I keep those 150 people working. Not only that, I’m kind of a martyr because everyone thinks I’m a dick for doing this. No one understands that I have taken the tough decision.”

I think that’s a common pattern among people who, in fact, are quite ethical but are also capable of rationalizing their way into bad things. I am very capable of rationalizing my way into bad things. This is not an indictment of someone’s character. But it’s why, before you go on a diet, you throw away the Oreos. It’s why you bind yourself to what behavioral economists call “Ulysses pacts“: You tie yourself to the mast before you go into the sea of sirens, not because you’re weak but because you’re strong enough now to know that you’ll be weak in the future.

I have what I would call the epistemic humility to say that I don’t know what makes a good social media network, but I do know what makes it so that when they go bad, you’re not stuck there. You and I might want totally different things out of our social media experience, but I think that you should 100 percent have the right to go somewhere else without losing anything. The easier it is for you to go without losing something, the better it is for all of us.

My dream is a social media universe where knowing what network someone is using is just a weird curiosity. It’d be like knowing which cell phone carrier your friend is using when you give them a call. It should just not matter. There might be regional or technical reasons to use one network or another, but it shouldn’t matter to anyone other than the user what network they’re using. A social media platform where it’s always easier for users to leave is much more future-proof and much more effective than trying to design characteristics of good social media.

Ars Technica: How might this work in practice?

Cory Doctorow: I think you just need a protocol. This is [Mike] Maznik’s point: protocols, not products. We don’t need a universal app to make email work. We don’t need a universal app to make the web work. I always think about this in the context of administrable regulation. Making a rule that says your social media network must be good for people to use and must not harm their mental health is impossible. The fact intensivity of determining whether a platform satisfies that rule makes it a non-starter.

Whereas if you were to say, “OK, you have to support an existing federation protocol, like AT Protocol and Mastodon ActivityPub,” both have ways to port identity from one place to another and have messages auto-forward. This is also in RSS. There’s a permanent redirect directive. You do that, you’re in compliance with the regulation.

Or you have to do something that satisfies the functional requirements of the spec. So it’s not “did you make someone sad in a way that was reckless?” That is a very hard question to adjudicate. Did you satisfy these functional requirements? It’s not easy to answer that, but it’s not impossible. If you want to have our users be able to move to your platform, then you just have to support the spec that we’ve come up with, which satisfies these functional requirements.

We don’t have to have just one protocol. We can have multiple ones. Not everything has to connect to everything else, but everyone who wants to connect should be able to connect to everyone else who wants to connect. That’s end-to-end. End-to-end is not “you are required to listen to everything someone wants to tell you.” It’s that willing parties should be connected when they want to be.

Ars Technica: What about security and privacy protocols like GPG and PGP?

Cory Doctorow: There’s this argument that the reason GPG is so hard to use is that it’s intrinsic; you need a closed system to make it work. But also, until pretty recently, GPG was supported by one part-time guy in Germany who got 30,000 euros a year in donations to work on it, and he was supporting 20 million users. He was primarily interested in making sure the system was secure rather than making it usable. If you were to put Big Tech quantities of money behind improving ease of use for GPG, maybe you decide it’s a dead end because it is a 30-year-old attempt to stick a security layer on top of SMTP. Maybe there’s better ways of doing it. But I doubt that we have reached the apex of GPG usability with one part-time volunteer.

I just think there’s plenty of room there. If you have a pretty good project that is run by a large firm and has had billions of dollars put into it, the most advanced technologists and UI experts working on it, and you’ve got another project that has never been funded and has only had one volunteer on it—I would assume that dedicating resources to that second one would produce pretty substantial dividends, whereas the first one is only going to produce these minor tweaks. How much more usable does iOS get with every iteration?

I don’t know if PGP is the right place to start to make privacy, but I do think that if we can create independence of the security layer from the transport layer, which is what PGP is trying to do, then it wouldn’t matter so much that there is end-to-end encryption in Mastodon DMs or in Bluesky DMs. And again, it doesn’t matter whose sim is in your phone, so it just shouldn’t matter which platform you’re using so long as it’s secure and reliably delivered end-to-end.

Ars Technica: These days, I’m almost contractually required to ask about AI. There’s no escaping it. But it’s certainly part of the ongoing enshittification.

Cory Doctorow: I agree. Again, the companies are too big to care. They know you’re locked in, and the things that make enshittification possible—like remote software updating, ongoing analytics of use of devices—they allow for the most annoying AI dysfunction. I call it the fat-finger economy, where you have someone who works in a company on a product team, and their KPI, and therefore their bonus and compensation, is tied to getting you to use AI a certain number of times. So they just look at the analytics for the app and they ask, “What button gets pushed the most often? Let’s move that button somewhere else and make an AI summoning button.”

They’re just gaming a metric. It’s causing significant across-the-board regressions in the quality of the product, and I don’t think it’s justified by people who then discover a new use for the AI. That’s a paternalistic justification. The user doesn’t know what they want until you show it to them: “Oh, if I trick you into using it and you keep using it, then I have actually done you a favor.” I don’t think that’s happening. I don’t think people are like, “Oh, rather than press reply to a message and then type a message, I can instead have this interaction with an AI about how to send someone a message about takeout for dinner tonight.” I think people are like, “That was terrible. I regret having tapped it.”

The speech-to-text is unusable now. I flatter myself that my spoken and written communication is not statistically average. The things that make it me and that make it worth having, as opposed to just a series of multiple-choice answers, is all the ways in which it diverges from statistical averages. Back when the model was stupider, when it gave up sooner if it didn’t recognize what word it might be and just transcribed what it thought you’d said rather than trying to substitute a more probable word, it was more accurate. Now, what I’m getting are statistically average words that are meaningless.

That elision of nuance and detail is characteristic of what makes AI products bad. There is a bunch of stuff that AI is good at that I’m excited about, and I think a lot of it is going to survive the bubble popping. But I fear that we’re not planning for that. I fear what we’re doing is taking workers whose jobs are meaningful, replacing them with AIs that can’t do their jobs, and then those AIs are going to go away and we’ll have nothing. That’s my concern.

Ars Technica: You prescribe a “cure” for enshittification, but in such a polarized political environment, do we even have the collective will to implement the necessary policies?

Cory Doctorow: The good news is also the bad news, which is that this doesn’t just affect tech. Take labor power. There are a lot of tech workers who are looking at the way their bosses treat the workers they’re not afraid of—Amazon warehouse workers and drivers, Chinese assembly line manufacturers for iPhones—and realizing, “Oh, wait, when my boss stops being afraid of me, this is how he’s going to treat me.” Mark Zuckerberg stopped going to those all-hands town hall meetings with the engineering staff. He’s not pretending that you are his peers anymore. He doesn’t need to; he’s got a critical mass of unemployed workers he can tap into. I think a lot of Googlers figured this out after the 12,000-person layoffs. Tech workers are realizing they missed an opportunity, that they’re going to have to play catch-up, and that the only way to get there is by solidarity with other kinds of workers.

The same goes for competition. There’s a bunch of people who care about media, who are watching Warner about to swallow Paramount and who are saying, “Oh, this is bad. We need antitrust enforcement here.” When we had a functional antitrust system for the last four years, we saw a bunch of telecoms mergers stopped because once you start enforcing antitrust, it’s like eating Pringles. You just can’t stop. You embolden a lot of people to start thinking about market structure as a source of either good or bad policy. The real thing that happened with [former FCC chair] Lina Kahn doing all that merger scrutiny was that people just stopped planning mergers.

There are a lot of people who benefit from this. It’s not just tech workers or tech users; it’s not just media users. Hospital consolidation, pharmaceutical consolidation, has a lot of people who are very concerned about it. Mark Cuban is freaking out about pharmacy benefit manager consolidation and vertical integration with HMOs, as he should be. I don’t think that we’re just asking the anti-enshittification world to carry this weight.

Same with the other factors. The best progress we’ve seen on interoperability has been through right-to-repair. It hasn’t been through people who care about social media interoperability. One of the first really good state-level right-to-repair bills was the one that [Governor] Jared Polis signed in Colorado for powered wheelchairs. Those people have a story that is much more salient to normies. “

What do you mean you spent six months in bed because there’s only two powered wheelchair manufacturers and your chair broke and you weren’t allowed to get it fixed by a third party?” And they’ve slashed their repair department, so it takes six months for someone to show up and fix your chair. So you had bed sores and pneumonia because you couldn’t get your chair fixed. This is bullshit.

So the coalitions are quite large. The thing that all of those forces share—interoperability, labor power, regulation, and competition—is that they’re all downstream of corporate consolidation and wealth inequality. Figuring out how to bring all of those different voices together, that’s how we resolve this. In many ways, the enshittification analysis and remedy are a human factors and security approach to designing an enshittification-resistant Internet. It’s about understanding this as a red team, blue team exercise. How do we challenge the status quo that we have now, and how do we defend the status quo that we want?

Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops. That is the first law of finance, Stein’s law. We are reaching multiple breaking points, and the question is whether we reach things like breaking points for the climate and for our political system before we reach breaking points for the forces that would rescue those from permanent destruction.

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New Amelia Earhart bio delves into her unconventional marriage

Amelia Earhart, american history, aviation, aviation history, books, culture / 9u50fv / September 17, 2025

more than a marriage of convenience

Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro chats with Ars about her latest book, The Aviator and the Showman.

Amelia Earhart. Credit: Public domain

Famed aviator Amelia Earhart has captured our imaginations for nearly a century, particularly her disappearance in 1937 during an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Earhart was a complicated woman, highly skilled as a pilot yet with a tendency toward carelessness. And her marriage to a flamboyant publisher with a flair for marketing may have encouraged that carelessness and contributed to her untimely demise, according to a fascinating new book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon.

Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a longtime Earhart fan. A documentary filmmaker and journalist, she first read about Earhart in a short biography distributed by Scholastic Books. “I got a little obsessed with her when I was younger,” Shapiro told Ars. The fascination faded as she got older and launched her own career. But she rediscovered her passion for Earhart while writing her 2018 book, The Stowaway, about a young man who stowed away on Admiral Richard Byrd‘s first voyage to Antarctica. The marketing mastermind behind the boy’s journey and his subsequent (ghost-written) memoir was publisher George Palmer Putnam, Earhart’s eventual husband.

The fact that Earhart started out as Putnam’s mistress contradicted Shapiro’s early squeaky-clean image of Earhart and drove her to delve deeper into the life of this extraordinary woman. “I was less interested in how she died than how she lived,” said Shapiro. “Was she a good pilot? Was she a good, kind person? Was this a real marriage? The mystery of Amelia Earhart is not how she died, but how she lived.”

There have been numerous Earhart biographies, but Shapiro accessed some relatively new source material, most notably a good 200 hours of tapes that had become available via the Smithsonian’s Amelia Earhart Project, including interviews with Earhart’s sister, Muriel. “I took an extra six months on my book just so that I could listen to all of them,” said Shapiro. She also scoured archival material at the University of New Hampshire concerning Putnam’s close associate, Hilton Railey; at Purdue University; and at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, along with numerous in-person interviews—including several with authors of prior Earhart biographies.

Shapiro’s breezy account of Earhart’s early life includes a few new details, particularly about the aviator’s relationship with an early benefactor (Shapiro calls him Earhart’s “sugar daddy”) in California: a 63-year-old billboard magnate named Thomas Humphrey Bennett Varney. Varney wanted to marry her, but she ended up accepting the proposal of a young chemical engineer from Boston, Samuel Chapman. “Amelia could have had a very different life,” said Shapiro. “She could have gone to Marblehead, Massachusetts, where [Chapman] had a house, and become part of the yacht set and she still would have had an interesting life. But I don’t think that was the life Amelia Earhart wanted, even if that meant she had a shorter life.”

Shapiro doesn’t neglect Putnam’s story, describing him as the “PT Barnum of publishing.” The family publishing company, G.P. Putnam and Sons, was founded in 1838 by his grandfather, and by the late 1920s, the ambitious young George was among several possible successors jockeying for position to replace his uncle, George Haven Putnam. He had his own ambitions, determined to bring what he viewed as a stodgy company fully into the 20th century.

Putnam published Charles Lindbergh‘s blockbuster memoir, We, in 1927 and followed that early success with a series of rather lurid adventure memoirs chronicling the exploits of “boy explorers.” The boys didn’t always survive their adventures, with one perishing from a snake bite and another drowning in a Bolivian flood. But the books were commercial successes, so Putnam kept cranking them out.

After Lindbergh’s historic crossing, Putnam was eager to tap into the public’s thirst for aviation stories. It wouldn’t be especially newsworthy to have another man make the same flight. But a woman? Putnam liked that idea, and a wealthy benefactor, steel heiress Amy Phipps Guest, provided financial support for the feat—really more of a publicity stunt, since Putnam’s plan, as always, was to publish a scintillating memoir of the journey. During the Jazz Age, newspapers routinely paid for exclusive rights to these kinds of stories in exchange for glowing coverage, per Shapiro. In this case, The New York Times did not initially want to sponsor a woman for a trans-Atlantic flight, but Putnam’s connections won them over.

Love at first sight

Earhart, then a social worker living in Boston, interviewed to be part of the three-person crew making that historic 1928 trans-Atlantic flight, and Putnam quickly spotted her potential to be his new adventure heroine. Railey later recalled that, at least for Putnam—whose marriage to Crayola heiress Dorothy Binney was floundering—it was love at first sight.

At the time, Earhart was still engaged to Chapman, and George was still married to Binney, but nonetheless, he “relentlessly pursued” Earhart. Earhart ended her engagement to Chapman in November 1928. “There’s a tape in the Smithsonian archives that talks about his wife coming in and catching them in sexual relations,” said Shapiro. “But [Binney] was having an affair, too, with a young man named George Weymouth [her son’s tutor]. This is the Jazz Age, anything goes. Amelia wanted to be able to achieve her dreams. Who are we to say a woman can’t marry a man who can give her a path to being wealthy?”

The successful 1928 flight earned Earhart the moniker “Lady Lindy.” Putnam showered his mistress with fur coats, sporty cars, and other luxurious trappings—although as her manager, he still kept 10 percent of her earnings. That life of luxury fell apart in October 1929 with the onset of the Great Depression, and Putnam found himself scrambling financially after being pushed out of the family publishing company.

Earhart and Putnam in 1931. Public domain

After his rather messy divorce from Binney, Putnam married Earhart in 1931. Earhart held decidedly unconventional views on marriage for that era: They held separate bank accounts, and she kept her maiden name, viewing the marriage as a “partnership” with “dual control,” and insisting in a letter to Putnam on their wedding day that she would not require fidelity. “I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinement of even an attractive cage,” she wrote.

Since money was tight, Putnam encouraged Earhart to go on the lecture circuit. Earhart would execute a stunt flight, write a book about it, and then go on a lecture tour. “This is an actual marriage,” said Shapiro. “It might have started out more romantically, but at a certain point, they needed each other in a partnership to survive. We don’t have fairy tale connections. Sometimes we have a hot romance that turns into a partnership and then cycles back into intense closeness and mental separation. I think that was the case with Amelia and George.”

Then came Earhart’s fateful final fight. The night before her scheduled departure, a nervous Earhart wanted to wait, but Putnam already had plans in the works for yet another flight, financed through sponsorship deals. And he wanted to get the resulting book about the current pending flight out in time for Christmas. He convinced her to take off as planned. Her navigator, Fred Noonan, was good at his job, but he was a heavy drinker, so he came cheap. That decision was one of several that would prove costly.

Shapiro describes this flight as being “plagued with mechanical issues from the start, underprepared and over-hyped, a feat of marketing more than a feat of engineering.” And she does not absolve Earhart from blame. “She refused to learn Morse code,” said Shapiro. “She refused to hear that trying to land on Howland Island was almost a suicide mission. It’s almost certain that she ran out of gas. Amelia was a very good person, a decent flyer, and beyond brave. She brought up women and championed feminism when other technically more gifted women pilots were going for solo records and had no time for their peers. She aided the aviation industry during the Great Depression as a likable ambassador of the air.”

However, Shapiro believes that Earhart’s marriage to Putnam amplified her incautious impulses, with tragic consequences on her final flight. “Is it George’s fault, or is it Amelia’s fault? I don’t think that’s fair to say,” she said. In many ways, the two complemented each other. Like Putnam, Earhart had great ambition, and her marriage to Putnam enabled her to achieve her goals.

The flip side is that they also brought out each other’s less positive attributes. “They were both aware of the risks involved in what they were doing,” Shapiro said. “But I also tried to show that there was a pattern of both of them taking extraordinary risks without really worrying about critical details. Yes, there is tremendous bravery in [undertaking] all these flights, but bravery is not always enough when charisma trumps caution—and when the showman insists the show must go on.”

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I threw away Audible’s app, and now I self-host my audiobooks

audible, Audiobooks, books, digital rights management, DRM, self-hosted, Tech / Kelly Newman / March 16, 2025

Stream your DRM-free audiobooks to devices yourselves, without the cloud’s chains.

We’re an audiobook family at House Hutchinson, and at any given moment my wife or I are probably listening to one while puttering around. We’ve collected a bit over 300 of the things—mostly titles from web sources (including Amazon’s Audible) and from older physical “books on tape” (most of which are actually on CDs). I don’t mind doing the extra legwork of getting everything into files and then dragging-n-dropping those files into the Books app on my Mac, but my wife prefers to simply use Audible’s app to play things directly—it’s (sometimes) quick, it’s (generally) easy, and it (occasionally) works.

But a while back, the Audible app stopped working for her. Tapping the app’s “Library” button would just show a spinning loading icon, forever. All the usual troubleshooting (logging in and out in various ways, removing and reinstalling the app, other familiar rituals) yielded no results; some searching around on Google and DuckDuckGo led me to nothing except a lot of other people having the same problem and a whole lot of silence from Audible and Amazon.

So, having put in the effort to do things the “right” way and having that way fail, I changed tacks and fixed the problem, permanently, with Audiobookshelf.

Screenshot of Lee's library — Audiobookshelf! Behold, the unholy melding together of my wife’s and my audiobooks. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Audiobookshelf

Audiobookshelf is a self-hosted audiobook and podcast server, and after two weeks of use, so far it works vastly better than trying to stream within Audible’s app. My wife can now actually listen to audiobooks instead of staring at a spinning loading icon forever.

To get Audiobookshelf running, you need something to run it on—a spare desktop or other computer you’re not using should fit the bill, as Audiobookshelf’s requirements are relatively meager. You can either install it via a Docker image, or on bare metal on Windows or several different Linux distros. (The Linux distro installations include a repository for handling updates via your system’s update method, so you won’t have to be manually installing releases willy-nilly.)

Since I already have a Proxmox instance up and running on my LAN, I chose to install Audiobookshelf inside an Ubuntu 24.04 LXC container using the “bare metal” method. It’s not particularly resource-intensive, using about 150MB of RAM at idle; as noted above, if you don’t have a server handy, running Audiobookshelf via Docker on your desktop or laptop shouldn’t be much of a burden on your memory or CPU. (It does suck up a fair amount of processing power when it’s bulk-importing or matching books in your library, but these aren’t things you’ll be doing terribly often.)

Screenshot of htop — Audiobookshelf process resource utilization in htop. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Getting it going

Once you’ve got Audiobookshelf installed via your preferred method, your next stop is creating and then populating your library. You can do this directly in the application’s web interface, if desired:

Screenshot of Audiobookshelf upload page — You can populate your library via Audiobookshelf’s upload page, if desired. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

I chose to do it the old-fashioned way and copy files into the library location myself, which also works.

There are a number of ways to make sure Audiobookshelf properly ingests and categorizes your books; first, it is aware of and respects metadata tags if your books have them. If your files lack tags, the Audiobookshelf docs provide several other methods of organization using file and directory structure. Between tags and being able to just name things per the guide, I had no problem uploading all 300-ish of my books into Audiobookshelf, with no misses or mismatches.

Of course, this all presupposes that you’ve got some DRM-free audiobooks. There are plenty of sources where you can get books free of charge—like Librivox, for example. If you’re using pay sites like Audible, you’ll want to actually log in to your library via a web browser and download each audiobook locally; this will give you a pile of files in .AAX format or something similar—which leads to a significant caveat.

The DRM elephant in the room

While books that come on audio CDs don’t have DRM embedded in them, files downloaded from Audible or other for-pay sources often do. Audiobookshelf won’t play books with DRM, which means you need a method of stripping that DRM out.

Unfortunately, here’s where we run into a problem: removing DRM from your audiobooks is not universally legal. “In the US, the law against ‘circumventing’ effective DRM has no personal-use exemption. In Europe, it varies by country,” explained the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Competition and IP Litigation Director Mitch Stoltz when Ars reached out for advice. “That’s as silly as it sounds—stripping DRM from one’s own copy of an audiobook in order to listen to it privately through different software doesn’t threaten the author or publisher, except that it makes it harder for them to charge you twice for the same audiobook. It’s another example of how anti-circumvention laws interfere with consumers’ rights of ownership over the things they buy.”

And that means you’re kind of on your own for this step. Should you live in a jurisdiction where DRM removal from audiobooks for personal use is legal—which includes some but not all European countries—then sites like this one can assist in the process; for the rest of us, the only advice I can give is to simply proceed in a legal manner and use DRM-free audiobooks to start with.

Playing things

Once you’ve got Audiobookshelf set up and your DRM-free books stuffed into it, the last piece of the puzzle is an app to actually listen to books with. There is an official Audiobookshelf app, and if you’re an Android user you can grab it right here. The iOS app is perpetually stuck in beta and requires Test Flight, but there are third-party alternatives.

Personally, I’ve been using Plappa, and I’ve found it to be not just perfectly acceptable, but also more responsive and less prone to crashing than Apple’s own Books app (not to mention there’s no annoying in-app audiobook store page always trying to get in my face!).

Administrating things

Audiobookshelf itself has plenty of tunable options for the home system administrator who just can’t leave well enough alone; I’ve found most of the defaults are exactly what I want, but there’s tons of stuff to tweak if you want to do the tweaking.

Notably, Audiobookshelf supports multiple libraries if you want more organizational options. It has accounts you can set up for different listeners, logging options, notification options, RSS support, and a whole mess of other things I honestly haven’t even looked at yet. The good news for me is that you don’t have to look at any of that stuff if you don’t want to—Audiobookshelf is set up to be workable right out of the box.

But what if I’m not home?

Sharper readers might already have spotted a major problem with self-hosting audiobooks on one’s LAN: How do you listen when you’re not on the LAN?

This is probably worth another article, but the way I’m tackling this particular problem is with a local instance of Wireguard and a VPN profile on my mobile devices. When I’m out and about or in the car or whatever, I can tap the “VPN” shortcut on my iOS home screen, and boom—Plappa is now able to see Audiobookshelf, and streaming works just as well as it does at home.

One potential concern for doing this is cellular data usage, but this fear seems minor. The biggest audiobook I’ve got is a cool multicast recording of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which weighs in at about 2.4GB—so, the most data I’m going to transfer even for my biggest audiobook is 2.4GB max, and that’d only be if I listened to all hillion-jillion hours of Dune at the same time. And depending on the app you’re using for playback, you’ll likely also have the option to download the books to your device and listen to them locally, without streaming. (This is true for Plappa, at least.)

Self-hosting happiness achieved

I glossed over a lot of the setup steps to keep this a relatively short piece, but even so, getting Audiobookshelf going is a relatively simple self-hosting task, as self-hosting tasks go.

We also haven’t talked about Audiobookshelf’s other major feature: podcast hosting. I’m not a big podcast kind of guy (I tend to prefer audiobooks if I have time to listen to something), but Audiobookshelf is also (purportedly) great for hosting a giant pile of podcasts. If those are your jam, then that’s another point for Audiobookshelf.

I can’t vouch for the podcasting bits, but I can say that it’s gratifying to have solved a problem—especially one that was driving my wife crazy, and any day I can solve a problem for her via nerdery and server-wrangling is a good day. At least as of right now, the Audible app on her phone remains nonfunctional for reasons that are beyond me, but with luck—and a bit of ongoing care and maintenance for the server in the closet where this stuff all lives now—neither of us will ever have to deal with that app again.

Lee is the Senior Technology Editor, and oversees story development for the gadget, culture, IT, and video sections of Ars Technica. A long-time member of the Ars OpenForum with an extensive background in enterprise storage and security, he lives in Houston.

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How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons

12 days of Christmas, books, cognitive bias, cognitive science, human cognition, psychology, Science, science of cons / Mike M. / January 5, 2024

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are the authors of <em> Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.</em>” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/fool1-800×531.jpg”></img><figcaption>
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There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: A conversation with psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris on the key habits of thinking and reasoning that may serve us well most of the time, but can make us vulnerable to being fooled.

It’s one of the most famous experiments in psychology. Back in 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment on inattentional blindness. They asked test subjects to watch a short video in which six people—half in white T-shirts, half in black ones—passed basketballs around. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the midst of the players and thumped their chest at the camera before strolling off-screen. What surprised the researchers was that fully half the test subjects were so busy counting the number of basketball passes that they never saw the gorilla.

The experiment became a viral sensation—helped by the amusing paper title, “Gorillas in Our Midst“—and snagged Simons and Chabris the 2004 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize. It also became the basis of their bestselling 2010 book, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Thirteen years later, the two psychologists are back with their latest book, published last July, called Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It. Simons and Chabris have penned an entertaining examination of key habits of thinking that usually serve us well but also make us vulnerable to cons and scams. They also offer some practical tools based on cognitive science to help us spot deceptions before being taken in.

“People love reading about cons, yet they keep happening,” Simons told Ars. “Why do they keep happening? What is it those cons are tapping into? Why do we not learn from reading about Theranos? We realized there was a set of cognitive principles that seemed to apply across all of the domains, from cheating in sports and chess to cheating in finance and biotech. That became our organizing theme.”

Ars spoke with Simons and Chabris to learn more.

Ars Technica: I was surprised to learn that people still fall for basic scams like the Nigerian Prince scam. It reminds me of Fox Mulder’s poster on The X-Files: “I want to believe.“

Daniel Simons: The Nigerian Prince scam is an interesting one because it’s been around forever. Its original form was in letters. Most people don’t get fooled by that one. The vast majority of people look at it and say, this thing is written in terrible grammar. It’s a mess. And why would anybody believe that they’re the one to recover this vast fortune? So there are some people who fall for it, but it’s a tiny percentage of people. I think it’s still illustrative because that one is obviously too good to be true for most people, but there’s some small subset of people for whom it’s just good enough. It’s just appealing enough to say, “Oh yeah, maybe I could become rich.”

There was a profile in the New Yorker of a clinical psychologist who fell for it. There are people who, for whatever reason, are either desperate or have the idea that they deserve to inherit a lot of money. But there are a lot of scams that are much less obvious than that one, selecting for the people who are most naive about it. I think the key insight there is that we tend to assume that only gullible people fall for this stuff. That is fundamentally wrong. We all fall for this stuff if it’s framed in the right way.

Christopher Chabris: I don’t think they’re necessarily people who always want to believe. I think it really depends on the situation. Some people might want to believe that they can strike it rich in crypto, but they would never fall for a Nigerian email or, for that matter, they might not fall for a traditional Ponzi scheme because they don’t believe in fiat money or the stock market. Going back to the Invisible Gorilla, one thing we noticed was a lot of people would ask us, “What’s the difference between the people who noticed the gorilla and the people who didn’t notice the gorilla?” The answer is, well, some of them happened to notice it and some of them didn’t. It’s not an IQ or personality test. So in the case of the Nigerian email, there might’ve been something going on in that guy’s life at that moment when he got that email that maybe led him to initially accept the premise as true, even though he knew it seemed kind of weird. Then, he got committed to the idea once he started interacting with these people.

So one of our principles is commitment: the idea that if you accept something as true and you don’t question it anymore, then all kinds of bad decisions and bad outcomes can flow from that. So, if you somehow actually get convinced that these guys in Nigeria are real, that can explain the bad decisions you make after that. I think there’s a lot of unpredictableness about it. We all need to understand how these things work. We might think it sounds crazy and we would never fall for it, but we might if it was a different scam at a different time.

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“Metaversed”: A Book Review and Author Interview

books, featured, interview, metaverse, Review, Reviews / Shannon Garcia / May 3, 2023

Metaversed: See Beyond the Hype is the new book by Samantha G. Wolfe and Luis Bravo Martins introducing the metaverse stripped of its over-inflated, pie-in-the-sky expectation cloud built up by marketers. The book presents a practical and balanced approach to using the metaverse as it exists today and preparing for how it might exist tomorrow.

ARPost received a copy of Metaversed and had the opportunity to interview the authors on how it came together and what they hope it will achieve.

Preparing for the Metaverse

Metaversed begins with an important and common question in the industry: how do we prepare for the metaverse when we can’t agree on what it is?

“Taking the internet and bringing another dimension to it and setting it free in the phygital world […] it’s almost impossible to fully understand the extent of this shift.”

– Chapter One: Predictions

Early on, the authors present a working definition of the metaverse. This isn’t for the authors to throw their definition into the war of words already taking place around the metaverse, but rather so that everyone reading Metaversed has a common starting point.

“To the authors, the metaverse is the next stage of the internet and results from the evolution of a wide variety of emerging exponential technologies maturing simultaneously, converging and enabling a new interconnected relationship between physical and digital.”

– Chapter One: Predictions

Metaversed isn’t just about technology, but how technology impacts us as a society and as individuals – and about the societal trends that are helping to usher in the metaverse. These include movements towards remote work and education, decentralization, social media, and the creator economy.

“The challenges we’re about to face will need a multidisciplinary effort. Business professionals from all areas, teachers, lawyers, scientists, historians, and sociologists, everyone can contribute with their experience and knowledge so we can start preparing for this tremendous shift.”

– Chapter One: Predictions

A Book Written for Anybody

Metaversed is written for a reader in any profession to encompass the entire metaverse. Chapter two presents all of the technologies playing into the development of the metaverse. That includes immersive technologies like the spatial web, XR hardware, and digital twins. It also includes Web3 and blockchain, cloud computing, and AI and ML.

“I feel like we went through a hype cycle of ‘the metaverse’ as a term and now we’re kind of past that. People are looking beyond that and asking, ‘What is this, really?’” said Wolfe. “I’m hoping that as people get past all of that hype they can ask ‘What does this mean to me, and what does this mean to my business?’”

Metaversed See Beyond the Hype book Readers of ARPost might be principally interested in immersive technologies. Understanding the role that these technologies will play in larger shifts in the coming years requires an understanding of other technologies even though they may feel removed.

“The main topic is to bring in people that are not in on all of the metaverse discussion,” said Martins. “We need to have those people. We need to have a version of the metaverse that isn’t just created by technologists like us.”

The book also discusses governments and standards organizations furthering the metaverse through protecting users and ensuring interoperability respectively. A lot of the value of the metaverse will be created by users – much as with the current web, but more equitable.

“A true creator economy has been set in motion where communities are not only spawning creators but overall helping them to remain independent and relevant.[…] With several new platforms available in the gaming industry and in the so-called Web3 businesses, new avenues for distributing digital products and content are being envisioned and built.”

– Chapter Four: New Rules

Life and Work in the Metaverse

The largest single chapter in the book, “Metaversed Markets” is an exhaustive exploration of how different industries are using the extant iteration of the metaverse and how they may adapt to its development. While the bulk of Metaversed discussed opportunities in the metaverse and how to realize them, four chapters are dedicated exclusively to challenges in the metaverse.

“When living in a hybrid reality of digital and physical objects, spaces, and people that we seemingly use and own, will it all be real? The memories of our time immersed in those worlds won’t tell us otherwise. […] We can pick up our lessons learned of the risks involved and plan ahead for a better, positive metaverse. But, to do that, we need to first identify key challenges.”

– Chapter Nine: Understanding Reality

These challenges have some to do with technologies that haven’t yet been realized or optimized, but mainly pertain to the human experience of adapting to and living in the metaverse.

“The whole purpose is exactly that – to try to shed light on not just the potential of the metaverse […] but more than that to try to pass on the challenges of the metaverse,” said Martins. “Presenting the challenges is not negative – it’s facing those challenges […] At the end of the day, what we want is to contribute to a more ethical metaverse.”

Metaversed expresses hope that governments and organizations like the XR Safety Initiative will help to mitigate some risks. It also recognizes that a lot of responsibility will be put on users themselves.

“Even if it’s uncomfortable, we need to discuss how emerging tech can be monitored and regulated. We don’t have to cross our fingers and hope that big tech companies figure it out themselves (again).”

– Chapter Ten: Privacy and Safety in the Metaverse

“Unanswered Questions”

“Because we’re faced with so many unanswered questions and unsolved technical challenges, there should be no shame in saying ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘We don’t know’ when asked about the future […] for better or worse, we’re in this together.”

– Chapter Twelve: The New Humanity

The thing that struck me the most about Metaversed was its honesty. The authors are confident in their predictions but never present those predictions as already being facts. Overall, it feels like a conversation rather than a keynote or a sales pitch.

“At the end of the day, tech runs so quickly and changes so completely unexpectedly […] it’s sort of an exercise,” said Martins. “Hopefully what we can offer is more of the logic of thought.”

How “Metaversed” Came to Be

Wolfe and Martins have a long history, despite having yet to meet in person. The two began talking after Martins read “Marketing New Realities,” which Wolfe co-wrote with Cathy Hackl in 2017. Then, Martins was a guest speaker at Wolfe’s courses at New York University’s Steinhardt School. Martins was invited to write a book and knew who to talk to for a coauthor.

“It started with this opportunity that came about from the publisher. Around that time there was this huge push regarding the metaverse and I was thinking about doing something on the flipside, focusing entirely on the challenges,” said Martins. “I decided that that approach wouldn’t be the best possible way to explain to people who don’t know much or aren’t as involved.”

Wolfe’s coming on board provided the balance that Martins was looking for. It also expanded the vast network of experts that contributed their insights to Metaversed.

“He wanted to write this book about what can go wrong but I tend to be quite positive,” said Wolfe. “I also tend to look at how all of this applies to businesses.”

Despite being based in different countries and working on the book largely asynchronously, the two decided to write Metaversed with one voice, rather than passing chapters back and forth. While the book doesn’t feel divided (at least, not to people who don’t know the authors very closely) both of them have chapters that they feel they put more into.

“In the end, I think we were all very involved in doing the writing and – of course – the research,” said Martins. “There were chapters which were being run by one of us or by the other one, and some – particularly the chapters in the beginning – were very consensual.”

A Digestible Book, if Not in One Sitting

Metaversed: See Beyond the Hype is currently available on Amazon. The book, weighing in at over 300 pages, may or may not be a lot to read from cover to cover depending on where you are on your metaverse journey. However, the book was also designed to be incredibly navigable, making it easy to read or reread as you see fit.

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