culture – Page 4

With deadline looming, 4 of 9 universities reject Trump’s “compact” to remake higher ed

culture, education, higher ed, Trump / Kelly Newman / October 18, 2025

Earlier this month, the Trump administration made nine elite universities an offer they couldn’t refuse: bring in more conservatives while shutting down “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” give up control of admissions and hiring decisions, agree to “biological” definitions of sex and gender, don’t raise tuition for five years, clamp down on student protests, and stay institutionally “neutral” on current events. Do this and you won’t be cut off from “federal benefits,” which could include research funding, student loans, federal contracts, and even student and faculty immigration visas. Instead, you may gain “substantial and meaningful federal grants.”

But the universities are refusing. With the initial deadline of October 20 approaching, four of the nine universities—the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, University of Southern California, and MIT—that received the federal “compact” have announced that they will not sign it.

In addition, the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 colleges and universities, today issued a statement calling for the compact to be completely withdrawn.

The compact would “impose unprecedented litmus tests on colleges and universities as a condition for receiving ill-defined ‘federal benefits’ related to funding and grants,” the statement says, and goes on to add that “it offers nothing less than government control of a university’s basic and necessary freedoms—the freedoms to decide who we teach, what we teach, and who teaches… The compact is just the kind of excessive federal overreach and regulation, to the detriment of state and local input and control, that this administration says it is against.”

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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 Starfleet Academy trailer debuts at NYCC

culture, Entertainment, New York Comic Con, paramount plus, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, streaming television, Trailers / Shannon Garcia / October 13, 2025

Rosta’s Caleb is front and center in the new trailer. We see him as a child with his mother (Tatiana Maslany), who is torn away from him by armed guards as Nus Braka cackles, “You hold on to how much you hate me right now, kid. It’ll keep you warm at night.” Cut to Captain Ake finding the now-grown Caleb and recruiting him to the Academy with a promise to help him find Nus Braka—presumably to exact some kind of revenge. We get to see instructors put the new cadets through their paces as they strive to be worthy of the Starfleet uniform. Love might be in the air for Caleb. And Captain Ake seems to have her own twisted history with Nus Braka.

As Ars senior editor Sam Axon pointed out in 2023, there have been Kobayashi Maru references throughout the franchise, as well as substantial plotlines about the academy in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, among others. There were also Starfleet Academy video games in the 1990s for various platforms.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on January 15, 2026, on Paramount+.

First look at Strange New Worlds S4

Let’s be honest. The third season of Strange New Worlds has been pretty uneven. But a course correction could be in the offing, judging by a four-and-a-half minute clip from the upcoming fourth season that was unveiled at NYCC. It’s an extended sequence in which Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and his crew respond to a distress signal from another ship, only to encounter a massive space storm that knocks out almost all their systems. They decide to take a shuttle to a nearby planet to gather some much-needed iridium to power their warp drive. (Is anyone else hearing echoes of Galaxy Quest and the hunt for a replacement beryllium sphere?)

Still, the tone does seem more of a return to form for the series. (For what it’s worth, producer Akiva Goldsman has attributed the S3 issues in part to production delays as a result of strikes and staffing changes.) The fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is slated for release sometime next year. The series has already been renewed for a truncated fifth and final season of six episodes.

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Why doesn’t Cards Against Humanity print its game in the US? It’s complicated.

board gaming, cards against humanity, culture, manufacturing, tariffs / Shannon Garcia / October 11, 2025

Or take Meredith Placko, the CEO of Steve Jackson Games, which produces games like Munchkin. “Some people ask, ‘Why not manufacture in the US?’ I wish we could,” she wrote. “But the infrastructure to support full-scale board game production—specialty dice making, die-cutting, custom plastic and wood components—doesn’t meaningfully exist here yet. I’ve gotten quotes. I’ve talked to factories. Even when the willingness is there, the equipment, labor, and timelines simply aren’t.”

But surely, you say, a box of cards should be possible. And it is. But CAH tells me that the downsides of US manufacturing for its game are still significant.

“We actually tried diversifying our suppliers by working with a US factory several years ago, but they were twice as expensive, three times slower, and much lower quality—something like 20 percent of games were unsellable due to production errors,” said a spokesperson for the company.

And although it is possible to print card games in the US, CAH makes other products too and would prefer to work with a single manufacturer who can handle all of it. Newer CAH games like Head Trip use “wooden tokens and a round folding board,” while another title called Tales “has a bound book and 20 tiny matchboxes of prompts.”

In the end, though, it’s not just about dollars and sense. It’s also about relationships and trust. CAH has “used the same factory in China since 2010, and they’ve grown alongside us from a small business to a huge operation,” I was told. “They do great work, we like them, and we feel a moral obligation to stand by them through Trump’s insanity.”

(If you want to produce Cards Against Humanity in the US, however, you can always download the free files for the game [PDF] and print it yourself. Be warned that it is quite vulgar!)

Board and card games are not one of the major pillars of the US economy, of course, but looking into how complicated it can be to get a game made does illuminate complex issues around globalization and manufacturing that are too often turned into simple soundbites.

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Marvel gets meta with Wonder Man teaser

culture, Disney Plus, marvel studios, MCU Phase Six, New York Comic Con, nycc, streaming television, Trailers, Wonder Man / Mike M. / October 11, 2025

Marvel Studios has dropped the first teaser for Wonder Man, an eight-episode miniseries slated for a January release, ahead of its panel at New York Comic Con this weekend.

Part of the MCU’s Phase Six, the miniseries was created by Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of Five Rings) and Andrew Guest (Hawkeye), with Guest serving as showrunner. It has been in development since 2022.

The comic book version of the character is the son of a rich industrialist who inherits the family munitions factory but is being crushed by the competition: Stark Industries. Baron Zemo (Falcon and the Winter Soldier) then recruits him to infiltrate and betray the Avengers, giving him super powers (“ionic energy”) via a special serum. He eventually becomes a superhero and Avengers ally, helping them take on Doctor Doom, among other exploits. Since we know Doctor Doom is the Big Bad of the upcoming two new Avengers movies, a Wonder Man miniseries makes sense.

In the new miniseries, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as Simon Williams, aka Wonder Man, an actor and stunt person with actual superpowers who decides to audition for the lead role in a superhero TV series—a reboot of an earlier Wonder Man incarnation. Demetrius Grosse plays Simon’s brother, Eric, aka Grim Reaper; Ed Harris plays Simon’s agent, Neal Saroyan; and Arian Moayed plays P. Clearly, an agent with the Department of Damage Control. Lauren Glazier, Josh Gad, Byron Bowers, Bechir Sylvain, and Manny McCord will also appear in as-yet-undisclosed roles

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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms teaser debuts at NYCC

culture, Entertainment, Game of Thrones franchise, George R.R. Martin, HBO, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, streaming television, Trailers / Shannon Garcia / October 10, 2025

A squire and his hedge knight: Dexter Sol Ansell plays “Egg” (l) and Peter Claffey plays Dunk (r). Credit: YouTube/HBO

This being a Game of Thrones series, there’s also an extensive supporting cast. Ross Anderson plays Ser Humfrey Hardyng; Edward Ashley plays Ser Steffon Fossoway; Henry Ashton as Egg’s older brother, Prince Daeron “The Drunken” Targaryen; Youssef Kerkour as a blacksmith named Steely Pate; Daniel Monks as Ser Manfred Dondarrion; Shaun Thomas as Raymun Fossoway; Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Plummer, a steward; Steve Wall as Lord Leo “Longthorn” Tyrell, Lord of Highgarden; and Danny Webb as Dunk’s mentor, Ser Arlan of Pennytree.

It’s a good rule of thumb in the Game of Thrones universe not to get too attached to any of the characters, and that probably holds true here, too. But Knight of the Seven Kingdoms also seems to be aiming for a different, lighter tone than its predecessors, judging by the teaser, which has its share of humor. Martin has said as much on his blog, although he added, “It’s still Westeros, so no one is truly safe.”

Since Dunk is a humble hedge knight, there are lots of scenes with him trudging through mud and rain, and jousting will apparently feature much more prominently. “I always love Medieval tournaments in other pictures,” Martin said during a NYCC panel. “We had several tournaments in Game of Thrones, they were in the background, but not the center. I wanted to do something set during a tournament. I sent (the TV writers) a challenge: Let’s do the best jousting sequences that were ever done on film. My favorite was 1952’s Ivanhoe.”

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms debuts on HBO on January 18, 2026.

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Trump admin defiles even the “out of office” email auto-reply

culture, out of office message, Trump, website / Kelly Newman / October 3, 2025

Well—not “Democrats,” exactly, but “Democrat Senators.” The use of the noun “Democrat” as an adjective (e.g., “the Democrat Party”) is a long-standing and deliberate right-wing refusal to call the opposition by its name. (If you visit the Democrats’ website, the very first words below the site header are “We are the Democratic Party”; the party is run by the “Democratic National Committee.”) Petty? Sure! But that’s a feature, not a bug.

Similar out-of-office suggestions have been made to employees at the Small Business Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services. Such messages appear to be violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits partisan speech from most executive branch employees while they are on duty, since these people represent and work for all Americans.

The Office of Special Counsel, which is supposed to prosecute violations of the Hatch Act, notes in a training flyer that most executive branch workers “may not engage in political activity—i.e., activity directed at the success or failure of a political party.”

Employees may also not “use any e-mail account or social media to distribute, send, or forward content that advocates for or against a partisan political party.”

When asked about its suggested out-of-office message blaming Democrats, the Department of Health and Human Services told CNN that yes, it had suggested this—but added that this was okay because the partisan message was accurate.

“Employees were instructed to use out-of-office messages that reflect the truth: Democrats have shut the government down,” the agency said.

Truly, as even a sitting Supreme Court justice has noted, the “rule of law” has now become “Calvinball.”

Websites, too

Department websites have also gotten in on the partisan action. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s site now loads with a large floating box atop the page, which reads, “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government.” When you close the box, you see atop the main page itself an eye-searingly red banner that says… the same thing. Thanks, I think we got it!

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Trailer for del Toro’s Frankenstein is pure macabre mythology

culture, film trailers, frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro, netflix, Trailers / Beth Washington / October 1, 2025

Per the official synopsis:

Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro adapts Mary Shelley’s classic tale of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.

In addition to Isaac, the cast includes Jacob Elordi as the Creature; Mia Goth as Elizabeth Lavenza, who is engaged to Victor’s young brother William, played by William Kammerer; Lars Mikkelsen as Captain Anderson; Christoph Waltz as Heinrich Harlander, uncle to Elizabeth and wealthy financer of Victor’s experiments; Charles Dance as Victor’s father Leopold; Lauren Collins as Victor’s late mother Claire; David Bradley as the blind man; Sofia Galasso as the little girl; Ralph Ineson as Professor Krempe; and Burn Gorman as Fritz.

The trailer looks every bit as mythically epic and visually lavish as del Toro said he wanted for his version. “I remember pieces, the Creature says in a voiceover as footage plays out. “Memories of different men. Then I saw it. Your name. Victor Frankenstein. My creator. I demand a single grace from you. If you are not to award me love, then I will indulge in rage.”

We see lavish balls, Victor’s Gothic laboratory, a ship trapped in Arctic ice, and lots and lots of consuming fire—everything one could want in a Frankenstein movie from a master of macabre mythologies.

Frankenstein hits theaters on October 17, 2025. It will start streaming on Netflix on November 7.

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The AI slop drops right from the top, as Trump posts vulgar deepfake of opponents

AI, culture, deepfake, Trump / Kelly Newman / October 1, 2025

AI poses an obvious danger to the millennia-long human fight to find the truth. Large language model “hallucinations,” vocal deepfakes, and now increased use of video deepfakes have all had a blurring effect on facts, letting bad actors around the globe brush off even recorded events as mere “fake news.”

The danger is perhaps most acute in the political realm, where deepfake audio and video can make any politician say or appear to do anything. In such a climate, our most senior elected officials have a special duty to model truth-seeking behavior and responsible AI use.

But what’s the fun in that, when you can just blow up negotiations over a budget impasse by posting a deepfake video of your political opponents calling themselves “a bunch of woke pieces of shit” while mariachi music plays in the background? Oh—and did I mention the fake mustache? Or the CGI sombrero?

On Monday night, the president of the United States, a man with access to the greatest intelligence-gathering operation in the world, posted to his Truth Social account a 35-second AI-generated video filled with crude insults, racial overtones, and bizarre conspiracy theories. The video targeted two Democratic leaders who had recently been meeting with Trump over a possible agreement to fund the government; I would have thought this kind of video was a pretty poor way to get people to agree with you, but, apparently, AI-generated insults are the real “art of the deal.”

In the clip, a deepfake version of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) utters a surreal monologue as his colleague Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) looks on… in a sombrero.

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Fortnite disables Peacemaker emote that might resemble a swastika

culture, epic games, gaming, Peacemaker / Shannon Garcia / September 29, 2025

If you watch this for a full hour, leave a comment to receive absolutely no prize.

Epic Games has disabled a Fortnite emote based on the HBO show Peacemaker after the latest episode cast the dancing animation in a potentially different light.

The remainder of this post contains spoilers for Season 2 of Peacemaker.

The “Peaceful Hips” emote, which was first introduced to the game on September 15, mirrors the dance motions that John Cena’s character Christopher Smith makes during the opening credits sequence for the show’s second season. In the dance and the emote (which can be applied to any character in-game), the dancer briefly flails their arms at opposing right angles before shaking their hips seductively.

Some are seeing the dance in a different light after the sixth episode of the show’s second season, “Ignorance is Chris,” which revealed that the alternate universe featured throughout the season has been controlled by swastika-brandishing Nazis. With that knowledge front of mind, the arm movements in the dance emote could be seen as a winking reference to the arms of a swastika.

“[In] season 2 there’s a lot more of the story of the season in the intro, [in] the first season there wasn’t as much of a reference to the story,” choreographer Charissa Barton said in a video interview posted by Warner Bros. last month.

The opening dance sequence to Season 2 of Peacemaker.

The arm motions mean what?

Fans have been picking up on hints of the show’s eventual Nazi-related reveal (including from that opening dance) as the second season has aired over recent weeks. But the confirmation of the link in Sunday’s episode had Epic quickly re-evaluating the emote by Sunday night.

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Why LA Comic Con thought making an AI-powered Stan Lee hologram was a good idea

AI, culture, LA comic con, marvel comic, Stan Lee / 9u50fv / September 27, 2025

Trust us, it’ll be marvel-ous

“I suppose if we do it and thousands of fans… don’t like it, we’ll stop doing it.”

Excelsior, true beliers! Credit: Proto Hologram

Late last week, The Hollywood Reporter ran a story about an “AI Stan Lee hologram” that would be appearing at the LA Comic Con this weekend. Nearly seven years after the famous Marvel Comics creator’s death at the age of 95, fans will be able to pay $15 to $20 this weekend to chat with a life-sized, AI-powered avatar of Lee in an enclosed booth at the show.

The instant response from many fans and media outlets to the idea was not kind, to say the least. A writer for TheGamer called the very idea “demonic” and said we need to “kill it with fire before it’s too late.” The AV Club urged its readers not to pay to see “the anguished digital ghost of a beloved comic book creator, repurposed as a trap for chumps!” Reactions on a popular Reddit thread ranged from calling it “incredibly disrespectful” and “in bad taste” to “ghoulish” and “so fucked up,” with very little that was more receptive to the concept.

But Chris DeMoulin, the CEO of the parent company behind LA Comic Con, urged critics to come see the AI-powered hologram for themselves before rushing to judgment. “We’re not afraid of people seeing it and we’re not afraid of criticism,” he told Ars. “I’m just a fan of informed criticism, and I think most of what’s been out there so far has not really been informed.”

“It’s unfortunate that a few people have really negative things to say about it, sight unseen, just the level of it being a concept,” DeMoulin continued. “It’s not perfect. I’m not sure something like this can ever be perfect. But I think what you strive to do is feed enough information into it and test it enough so that the experience it creates for the fans is one that feels genuine.”

“It’s going to have to be really good or we’re all going to say no”

This isn’t the first time LA Comic Con has featured an interactive hologram (which for the Stan Lee experience means a life-sized volumetric screen-in-a-box that can show different views from different angles). Starting in 2019, the convention used similar technology to feature Boffo the Bear, a 7-foot-tall animated blue ursid who served as the MC for a live talent show featuring famous voice acting talent. But Boffo was powered by a real-time motion-captured improv performance from actor Mark DeCarlo rather than automated artificial intelligence.

A live mo-capped version of Boffo the Bear hosts a panel with voice actors at LA Comic Con.

In the years since Boffo’s introduction at the con, DeMoulin said he’s kept up with the team behind that hologram and “saw the leaps and bounds that they were making in improving the technology, improving the interactivity.” Now, he said, it’s possible to create an AI-powered version that ingests “all of the actual comments that people made during their life” to craft an interactive hologram that “is not literally quoting the person, but everything it was saying was based on things that person actually said.”

DeMoulin said he called Bob Sabouni, who manages the Stan Lee Legacy brand, to pitch the AI Stan Lee avatar as “kind of an entry point into people asking questions about the Marvel universe, the stories, the characters he created.” Sabouni agreed to the idea, DeMoulin said, but added that “it’s gonna have to be really good or we’re all going to say no.”

With that somewhat conditional approval, DeMoulin reached out to Proto Hologram, the company that had developed the Boffo the Bear experience years earlier. Proto, in turn, reached out to Hyperreal, a company that describes itself as “powering ownership, control, performance, and monetization of identity across digital ecosystems” to help develop the AI model that would power the Lee avatar.

A promotional video from Proto Holograms shows off the kind of volumetric box that the AI-powered Stan Lee avatar will appear in.

Hyperreal CEO and Chief Architect Remington Scott tells Ars that the company “leverages a customized ecosystem of cutting-edge AI technologies” to create “bespoke” and “custom-crafted” AI versions of celebrities. To do that for Stan Lee, DeMoulin said they trained a model on decades of content he had left behind, from tapes of dozens of convention panels he had appeared on to written and spoken content gathered by the managers of the Stan Lee Universe brand.

Scott said Hyperreal “can’t share specific technical details” of the models or training techniques they use to power these recreations. But Scott added that this training project is “particularly meaningful, [because] Stan Lee had actually begun digitizing himself while he was alive, with the vision of creating a digital double so his fans could interact with him on a larger scale.”

After incurring costs of “tens of thousands into six figures” of dollars, DeMoulin said he was finally able to test the Lee hologram about a month ago. That first version still needed some tweaks to get the look and feel of Lee’s delivery just right, though.

“Stan had a considered way of speaking… he would pause, he had certain catch phrases that when he used them he would say them in a certain way,” DeMoulin said. “So it took a while to get to the hologram to be able to say all that in a way that [Sabouni] and I and others that work with Stan felt like, ‘Yeah, that’s actually starting to sound more like him.’”

“The only words that are gonna be in Stan’s mouth are Stan’s words”

Anyone who is familiar with LLMs and their tendency to confabulate might be worried about the potential for an AI Lee avatar to go off-script or make things up in front of a live audience. And while DeMoulin said he was concerned about that going in, those concerns have faded as he and others who worked with Lee in his lifetime have spent hours throwing “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of questions at the hologram “to sort of see where the sensitivities on it are.”

“The only words that are gonna be in Stan’s mouth are Stan’s words,” DeMoulin said. “Just because I haven’t personally seen [the model hallucinate] doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, but that hasn’t been my experience.”

The living version of Stan Lee appeared at the Wizard World convention in 2018, shortly before his death. Credit: Getty Images

While a moderator at the convention will be on hand to repeat fan questions into a microphone (to avoid ambient crowd noise from the showfloor), DeMoulin said there won’t be any human filtering on what fans are allowed to ask the Lee avatar in the 15- to 20-minute group Q&A sessions. Instead, DeMoulin said the team has set up a system of “content governors” so that, for instance, “if you ask Stan what he thought of the last presidential election he’s gonna say ‘That’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’re here to talk about the Marvel universe.'”

For topics that are Marvel-related, though, the AI avatar won’t shy away from controversy, DeMoulin said. If you ask the avatar about Jack Kirby, for instance, DeMoulin said it will address the “honest disagreements about characters or storylines, which are gonna happen in any creative enterprise,” while also saying that “‘I have nothing but respect for him,’ which is I think largely what Stan would have said if he was asked that question.”

Hyperreal’s Scott said the company’s approach to training digital avatars on verified content “ensures responses stay true to Stan’s documented perspectives and values.” And DeMoulin said the model is perfectly willing to say when it doesn’t know the answer to an appropriate question. In early testing, for instance, the avatar couldn’t answer a question about the Merry Marvel Marching Society, DeMoulin said, because that wasn’t part of its training data. After a subsequent update, the new model provided a relevant answer to the same question, he said.

“We are not trying to bring Stan back from the dead”

Throughout our talk, DeMoulin repeatedly stressed that their AI hologram wasn’t intended to serve as a replacement for the living version of Lee. “We want to make sure that people understand that we are not trying to bring Stan back from the dead,” he said. “We’re not trying to say that this is Stan, and we’re not trying to put words in his mouth, and this avatar is not gonna start doing commercials to advertise other people’s products.”

DeMoulin said he sees the Lee avatar as a kind of futuristic guide to a library of Marvel information and trivia, presented with a fun and familiar face. “In the introduction, the avatar will say, ‘I’m here as a result of the latest developments in technology, which allow me to be a holographic representation of Stan to answer your questions about Marvel and trivia’ and this, that, and the other thing,” DeMoulin said

Still, DeMoulin said he understands why the idea of using even a stylized version of Lee’s likeness in this manner could rub some fans the wrong way. “When a new technology comes out, it just feels wrong to them, and I respect the fact that this feels wrong to people,” he said. “I totally agree that something like this–not just for Stan but for anyone, any celebrity alive or dead–could be put into this technology and used in a way that would be exploitative and unfortunate.”

Fans like these, seen at LA Comic Con 2022, will be the final arbiters of whether the AI-powered Stan Lee avatar is respectful or not. Credit: Getty Images

That’s why DeMoulin said he and the others behind the AI-powered Lee feel a responsibility “to make sure that if we were going to do this, we never got anywhere close to that.” Moreover, he said he’s “disappointed that people would be so negative about something they’ve not seen. … It’s not that I think that their point of view is invalid. What I think is invalid is having a wildly negative point of view about something that you haven’t actually seen.”

Scott said concerns about respect for the actual human celebrity are why they “partner exclusively with authorized estates and rights holders like Stan Lee Universe.” The “premium, authenticated digital identities” created by Hyperreal’s system are “not replacing artists” but “creating respectful digital extensions that honor their legacy,” Scott said.

Once fans actually see the AI-powered Lee avatar in person, DeMoulin said he’s confident they’ll see the team behind the convention is “trying to do it in a way that will actually be delightful and very much be consistent with Stan’s legacy… We clearly have to set our sights on doing this right, and doing it right means getting people that knew and loved the guy and worked with him during his career to give us input, and then putting it in front of enough fans to know if we’re doing it in a way that lives up to his standards.”

And if he’s wrong about the expected reception? “I suppose if we do it and thousands of fans interact with [it] and they don’t like it, we’ll stop doing it,” he said. “I saw firsthand the impact that Stan had in that [convention] environment, so I think we have a team of people together that love and respect that and are trying to do something which will continue that. And if it turns out, for some reason, this isn’t that, we won’t do it.”

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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