Pluralistic: Canny Valley (04 Sep 2025)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Canny Valley (04 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links


A mockup of Canny Valley, set into an oil painting of a pastoral scene.

Canny Valley (permalink)

I've spent every evening this week painstakingly unpacking, numbering and signing 500 copies of my very first art-book, a strange and sturdy little volume called Canny Valley.

The cover of the Canny Valley paperback, on a worn Persian rug in my office.

Canny Valley collects 80 of the best collages I've made for my Pluralistic newsletter, where I publish 5-6 essays every week, usually headed by a strange, humorous and/or grotesque image made up of public domain sources and Creative Commons works.

The copyright page and dedication of the Canny Valley paperback, on a worn Persian rug in my office.

These images are made from open access sources, and they are themselves open access, licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike, which means you can take them, remix them, even sell them, all without my permission.

I never thought I'd become a visual artist, but as I've grappled with the daily challenge of figuring out how to illustrate my furious editorials about contemporary techno-politics, especially "enshittification," I've discovered a deep satisfaction from my deep dives into historical archives of illustration, and, of course, the remixing that comes afterward.

Over the years, many readers have asked whether I would ever collect these in a book. Then I ran into Creative Commons CEO Anna Tumadóttir and we brainstormed ideas for donor gifts in honor of Creative Commons' 25th anniversary. My first novel was the first book ever released under a CC license, and while CC has gone on to bigger and better things (without CC there'd be no Wikipedia!), I never forget that my own artistic career and CC's trajectory are co-terminal:

https://craphound.com/down/download/

Talking with Anna, I hit on the idea of making a beautiful little book of my favorite illustrations from Pluralistic. Anna thought CC could use about 400 of these, and all the printers I talked to offered me a pretty great quantity break at 500, so I decided I'd do it, and offer the excess 100 copies as premiums in my next Kickstarter, for the enshittification book:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/

An unflattering collage depicting Elon Musk as a baby in a bathtub, from the interior of the Canny Valley paperback, on a worn Persian rug in my office.

That Kickstarter is going really well – about to break $100,000! – and as I type these words, there are only five copies of Canny Valley up for grabs. I'm pretty sure they'll be gone long before the campaign closes in ten days. Of course, the fact that you can't get a physical copy of the book doesn't mean that you can't get access to all its media. Here's the full set of all 238 collages, in high-rez, for your plundering pleasure:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

Bruce Sterling's introduction for the Canny Valley paperback, on a worn Persian rug in my office.

But there is one part of this book that's not online: my pal and mentor Bruce Sterling, a cyberpunk legend turned electronic art impressario turned assemblage sculptor, wrote me a brilliant foreword for Canny Valley. Bruce gave me the go-ahead to license this CC BY 4.0 as well, and so I'm reproducing it below.

Having spent several days now handling hundreds of these books, I have to say, I am indecently pleased with how they turned out, which is all down to other people. My friend John Berry, a legendary book designer and typographer, laid it out:

https://johndberry.com/

And the folks at LA's best comics shop, Secret Headquarters, hooked me up with an incredible printer, the 100+ year old Pasadena institution Typecraft:

https://www.typecraft.com/live2/who-we-are.html

A gigantic, complex Indigo digital offset printer.

Typecraft ran this on a gorgeous Indigo printer on 100lb Mohawk paper that just drank the ink. The PVA glue in the binding will last a century, and the matte coat cover doesn't pick up smudges or fingerprints. It's a stunning little artifact.

Merriam-Webster ‪@merriam-webster.com‬ enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits.

This has been so much fun (and such a success) that I imagine I'll do future volumes in the years to come. In the meantime, enjoy Bruce's intro, and join me in basking in the fact that "enshittification" has made Webster's:

https://bsky.app/profile/merriam-webster.com/post/3lxxhhxo4nc2e

INTRODUCTION

by Bruce Sterling

In 1970 a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori discovered a new problem in aesthetics. He called this "bukimi no tani genshō."

The Japanese robots he built were functional, so the "bukimi no tani" situation was not an engineering problem. It was a deep and basic problem in the human perception of humanlike androids.

A flayed human face with huge, staring eyes, held open with cruel calipers. The calipers' handles bear the 'As Seen On TV' logos. In the center of each pupil is an Amazon Prime logo. Behind this figure is a static-distorted title card for a K-Tel record of the month club ad.

Humble assembly robots, with their claws and swivels, those looked okay to most people. Dolls, puppets and mannequins, those also looked okay.

Living people had always aesthetically looked okay to people. Especially, the pretty ones.

However, between these two realms that the late Dr Mori was gamely attempting to weld together — the world of living mankind and of the pseudo-man-like machine– there was an artistic crevasse. Anything in this "Uncanny Valley" looked, and felt, severely not-okay. These overdressed robots looked and felt so eerie that their creator's skills became actively disgusting. The robots got prettier, but only up to a steep verge. Then they slid down the precipice and became zombie doppelgangers.

The ruins of the Temple of Jupiter, taken in the late 18th century, overlooking a stretch Lebanon. It has been emblazoned with the 1970s-era logo for the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before it stands a figure taken from an early 1900s illustrated bible, depicting a Hebrew priest making an offering to the golden calf at the foot of Mt Sinai. The priest's head has been replaced with the head of Milton Friedman. The calf has been adorned with a golden top-hat and a radiating halo of white light.

That's also the issue with the aptly-titled "Canny Valley" art collection here. People already know how to react aesthetically to traditional graphic images. Diagrams are okay. Hand-drawn sketches and cartoons are also okay. Brush-made paintings are mostly fine. Photographs, those can get kind of dodgy.

Digital collages that slice up and weld highly disparate elements like diagrams, cartoons, sketches and also photos and paintings, those trend toward the uncanny.

The pixel-juggling means of digital image-manipulation are not art-traditional pencils or brushes. They do not involve the human hand, or maybe not even the human eye, or the human will. They're not fixed on paper or canvas; they're a Frankenstein mash-up landscape of tiny colored screen-dots where images can become so fried that they look and feel "cursed." They're conceptually gooey congelations, stuck in the valley mire of that which is and must be neither this-nor-that.

A scythe-wielding, crook-backed Father Time bends low to stare into the face of a cherubic Baby New Year. Father Time wears a backwards baseball-cap with the Tiktok logo. Baby New Year is waving goodbye and holding a satchel decorated with the 'code waterfall' from the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. The background is a stormy sky, with a forked lightning striking between the two figures.

A modern digital artist has billions of jpegs in files, folders, clouds and buckets. He's never gonna run out of weightless grist from that mill.

Why would Cory Doctorow — novelist, journalist, activist, opinion columnist and so on — want to lift his typing fingers from his lettered keyboard, so as to create graphics with cut-and-paste and "lasso tools"?

An early 20th century editorial cartoon depicting the Standard Oil Company an a world-spanning octopus clutching the organs of state - White House, Capitol dome, etc - in its tentacles. It has been altered: to its left, curled within its tentacles, stands an early 20th century cartoon depicting Uncle Sam as a policeman with a billyclub, with a DOJ Antitrust Division crest on his chest. On its right, one of its tentacles clutches an early Google 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button. Its head has been colored in with bands in the colors of the Google logo, surmounted by the Chrome logo. Its eyes have been replaced with the eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Nestled in one of its armpits is the Android robot. Cryteria (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg/CC BY 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

I think there are two basic reasons for this.

The important motivation is his own need to express himself by some method other than words.

I'm reminded here of the example of H. G. Wells, another science fiction writer turned internationally famous political pundit. HG Wells was quite a tireless and ambitious writer — so much so that he almost matched the torrential output of Cory Doctorow.

An old woodcut of a disembodied man's hand operating a Ouija board planchette. It has been modified to add an extra finger and thumb. It has been tinted green. It has been placed on a 'code waterfall' backdrop as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

But HG Wells nevertheless felt a compelling need to hand-draw cartoons. He called them "picshuas." These hundreds of "picshuas" were rarely made public. They were usually sketched in the margins of his hand-written letters. Commonly the picshuas were aimed at his second wife, the woman he had renamed "Jane." These picshuas were caricatures, or maybe rapid pen-and-ink conceptual outlines, of passing conflicts, events and situations in the life of Wells. They seemed to carry tender messages to Jane that the writer was unable or unwilling to speak aloud to her. Wells being Wells, there were always issues in his private life that might well pose a challenge to bluntly state aloud: "Oh by the way, darling, I've built a second house in the South of France where I spend my summers with a comely KGB asset, the Baroness Budberg." Even a famously glib and charming writer might feel the need to finesse that.

A Soviet propaganda poster depicting two workers holding flags in front of a locomotive. The flags have been replaced with US flags. The locomotive's face has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The maxim below has been replaced with the lettering from a Walmart 'everyday low prices' sign. The background has been replaced with a posterized grocery aisle. Cryteria (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg/CC BY 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls.

Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon.

A demonic figure cropped from the 'Hell' section of Hieronymus Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights.' She is on all fours, looking over her shoulder. Her entire rectum has been removed, revealing smaller, industrious demonic figures at work inside her guts. Her open rectum has been limned in radioactive acid-green light. Atop her flat hat is an open box of radium suppositories, lid open to reveal (entirely inadequate) health warnings. The background is a dark, abstract damask wallpaper pattern.

So instead, he diligently clips, cuts, pastes, lassos, collages and pastiches. He might, plausibly, hire a professional artist to design his editorial cartoons for him. However, then Cory would have to verbally explain all his political analysis to this innocent graphics guy. Then Cory would also have to double-check the results of the artist and fix the inevitable newbie errors and grave misunderstandings. That effort would be three times the labor for a dogged crusader who is already working like sixty.

It's more practical for him to mash-up images that resemble editorial cartoons.

He can't draw. Also, although he definitely has a pronounced sense of aesthetics, it's not a aesthetic most people would consider tasteful. Cory Doctorow, from his very youth, has always had a "craphound" aesthetic. As an aesthete, Cory is the kind of guy who would collect rain-drenched punk-band flyers that had fallen off telephone poles and store them inside a 1950s cardboard kid-cereal box. I am not scolding him for this. He's always been like that.

A magnified image of the inside of an automated backup tape library, with gleaming racks of silver tape drives receding into the distance. In the foreground is a pile of dirt being shoveled by three figures in prisoner's stripes. Two of the figures' heads have been replaced with cliche hacker-in-hoodie heads, from which shine yellow, inverted Amazon 'smile' logos, such that the smile is a frown. The remaining figure's head has been replaced with a horse's head. Behind the figure is an impatiently poised man in a sharp business suit, glaring at his watch. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Cryteria (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg/CC BY 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

As Wells used to say about his unique "picshuas," they seemed like eccentric scribblings, but over the years, when massed-up as an oeuvre, they formed a comic burlesque of an actual life. Similarly, one isolated Doctorow collage can seem rather what-the-hell. It's trying to be "canny." If you get it, you get it. If you don't get the first one, then you can page through all of these, and at the end you will probably get it. En masse, it forms the comic burlesque of a digital left-wing cyberspatial world-of-hell. A monster-teeming Silicon Uncanny Valley of extensively raked muck.

<img src="https://craphound.com/images/ai-freud.jpg" alt="Sigmund Freud's study with his famous couch. Behind the couch stands an altered version of the classic Freud portrait in which he is smoking a cigar. Freud's clothes and cigar have all been tinted in bright neon colors. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' His legs have been replaced with a tangle of tentacles. Cryteria (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg/CC BY 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en | Ser Amantio di Nicolao (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Study_with_the_couch,_Freud_Museum_London,_18M0143.jpg"/CC BY-SA 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed">

There are a lot of web-comix people who like to make comic fun of the Internet, and to mock "the Industry." However, there's no other social and analytical record quite like this one. It has something of the dark affect of the hundred-year-old satirical Dada collages of Georg Schultz or Hannah Hoch. Those Dada collages look dank and horrible because they're "Dada" and pulling a stunt. These images look dank and horrible because they're analytical, revelatory and make sense.

If you do not enjoy contemporary electronic politics, and instead you have somehow obtained an art degree, I might still be able to help you with my learned and well-meaning intro here. I can recommend a swell art-critical book titled "Memesthetics" by Valentina Tanni. I happen to know Dr. Tanni personally, and her book is the cat's pyjamas when it comes to semi-digital, semi-collage, appropriated, Situationiste-detournement, net.art "meme aesthetics." I promise that I could robotically mimic her, and write uncannily like her, if I somehow had to do that. I could even firmly link the graphic works of Cory Doctorow to the digital avant-garde and/or digital folk-art traditions that Valentina Tanni is eruditely and humanely discussing. Like with a lot of robots, the hard part would be getting me to stop.

A painting of Ulysses tied to the mast, beset by flying sirens. The sirens' wings have been replaced with the Bluesky butterfly wing logo. On the deck of Ulysses' trireme is a giant poop emoji.

Cory works with care on his political meme-cartoons — because he is using them to further his own personal analysis, and to personally convince himself. They're not merely sharp and partisan memes, there to rouse one distinct viewer-emotion and make one single point. They're like digital jigsaw-puzzle landscape-sketches — unstable, semi-stolen and digital, because the realm he portrays is itself also unstable, semi-stolen and digital. The cartoons are dirty and messy because the situations he tackles are so dirty and messy. That's the grain of his lampoon material, like the damaged amps in a punk song. A punk song that was licensed by some billionaire and then used to spy on hapless fans with surveillance-capitalism.

A photo of an orange Telemation acoustic coupler next to an avocado-green German 611 dial phone, whose receiver is socketed to the coupler in what Neal Stephenson memorably described as 'a kind of informational soixante-neuf.' The image has been modified to put a colorized version of Woody Guthrie's iconic 'THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS' hand-lettered label on the side of the coupler. Felix Winkelnkemper (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acoustic_Coupler.jpg/CC BY-SA 4.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.

Since that's how it goes, that's also what you're in for. You have been warned, and these collages will warn you a whole lot more.

If you want to aesthetically experience some elegant, time-tested collage art that was created by a major world artist, then you should gaze in wonder at the Max Ernst masterpiece, "Une semaine de bonté" ("A Week of Kindness"). This indefinable "collage novel" aka "artist's book" was created in the troubled time of 1934. It's very uncanny rather than "canny, "and it's also capital-A great Art. As an art critic, I could balloon this essay to dreadful robotic proportions while I explain to you in detail why this weirdo mess is a lasting monument to the expressive power of collage. However, Cory Doctorow is not doing Max Ernst's dreamy, oneiric, enchanting Surrealist art. He would never do that and it wouldn't make any sense if he did.

A heavily armed and armored figure with the head of a foolishly grinning 19th century newsie. He stands in the atrium of a pink, vintage mall.

Cory did this instead. It is art, though. It is what it is, and there's nothing else like it. It's artistic expression as Cory Doctorow has a sincere need to perform that, and in twenty years it will be even more rare and interesting. It's journalism ahead of its time (a little) and with a passage of time, it will become testimonial.

Bruce Sterling — Ibiza MMXXV

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Singapore’s cool-ass hard-drive video-players https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/03/singapores-cool-ass-hard-drive-video-players/

#20yrsago Being Poor — meditation by John Scalzi https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

#20yrsago MSFT CEO: I will “fucking kill” Google — then he threw a chair https://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/09/ballmer_throws_a_chair_at_fing_google

#20yrsago Massachusetts to MSFT: switch to open formats or you’re fired https://web.archive.org/web/20051001011728/http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/09/02/state_may_drop_office_software/

#20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Singapore wrapup https://web.archive.org/web/20051217133502/https://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1211240

#20yrsago Apple //e mainboards networked and boxed: the Applecrate https://web.archive.org/web/20050407173742/http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/CratePaper.html

#15yrsago Jewelry made from laminated, polished cross-sections of bookshttps://littlefly.co.uk/

#15yrsago Boneless, clubfooted French Connection model invades Melbournehttps://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/4953586953/

#5yrsago Corporate spooks track you "to your door" https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#hyas

#5yrsago Hedge fund managers trouser 64% https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#2-and-20

#5yrsago Rest in Power, David Graeber https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rip-david-graeber

#5yrsago Coronavirus is over (if we want it) https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#test-test-test

#5yrsago Snowden vindicated https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#criming-spooks

#5yrsago Algorithmic grading https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#computer-says-no

#5yrsago Big Car says Right to Repair will MURDER YOU https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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