*Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs*

Another H Armstrong Roberts remix: originally, this was a grinning delivery man jugging several parcels. I reskinned him and his van with Amazon delivery livery, and matted in the horse-head to create a "reverse centaur" (another theme I return to often).

21/

I used one of Alistair Milne's tips to get that horse's head right: rather than trying to trace all the stray hairs on the mane, I traced them with a fine brush tool on a separate layer, then erased the strays from the original and merged down to get a nice, transparency-enabled hair effect.

pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/tra…

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*The mad king's digital killswitch*

The Uncle Sam image is Keppler's (who else?). In the original (which is about tariffs! everything old *is* new!), Sam's legs have becoome magnets that are drawing in people and goods from all over the world. The Earth-from-space image is a NASA pic. Love that all works of federal authorship are born in the public domain!

pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/pos…

23/

*Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall!*

Clippy makes a *perfect* element for posts about chatbots. It's hard to think that Microsoft shipped a product with such a *terrible* visual design, but at the same time, I gotta give 'em credit, it's so awful that it's still instantly recognizable, 25 years later.

pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/fre…

24/

*A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage*

Another remix of Keppler's excellent Teddy Roosevelt/trustbuster giant image, this time with Ben Franklin's glorious C-note phiz. God, I love using images from money!

pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/syn…

25/

*Apple's unlawful evil*

Alistair Milne helped me work up a super hi-rez version of Trump's hair from his official (public domain) 2024 presidential portrait. Lots of tracing those fine hairs, and boy does it pay off. Apple's "Think Different" wordmark (available as a vector on Wikimedia Commons) is a gift to the company's critics. The fact that the NYPD actually routinely show up for protests dressed like this makes my job too easy.

pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rog…

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*Blue Bonds*

Another C-note remix. One of the things I love about remixing US currency is that every *part* of it is so immediately identifiable, meaning that just about *any* crop works. The California bear comes from a public domain vector on Wikimedia Commons. I worked hard to get the intaglio effect to transfer to the bear, but only with middling success.

27/

Thankfully, I was able to work at massive resolution (like, 4,000 px wide) and reduce the image, which hides a lot of my mistakes.

pluralistic.net/2025/10/04/fis…

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*The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh*

Another money scan, this time a hyperinflationary Zimbabwean dollar (I also looked at some Serbian hyperinflationary notes, but the Zimbabwean one was available at a higher rez). Not thrilled about the engraving texture on the HAL 9000, but the Sam Altman intaglio kills. I spent a lot of time tweaking that using G'mic, a good (but uneven) plugin suite for the GIMP.

pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/eco…

29/

*Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine*

This one made this year's faves list purely because I was so happy with how the Doordash backpack came out. The belligerent worker is part of a Keppler diptych showing a union worker and a boss facing off against one another with a cowering consumer caught in the crossfire. I'm not thrilled about this false equivalence, but I'll happily gank the figures, which are great.

pluralistic.net/2025/09/25/rob…

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I spent a lot of time tweaking the poop emoji on those solar panels, eventually painstakingly erasing the frames from the overlay image. It was worth it.

pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our…

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*AI psychosis and the warped mirror*

One of those high-concept images that came out *perfect*. Replacing Narcissus's face (and reflection) with HAL 9000 made for a striking image that only took minutes to turn out.

pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/aut…

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*Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox*

pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vul…

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*Radical juries*

Another high-concept image that just *worked*. It took me more time to find a good public domain oil painting of a jury than it did to transform each juror into Karl Marx. I love how this looks.

pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jur…

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*LLMs are slot-machines*

It's surprisingly hard to find a decent public domain photo of a slot machine in use. I eventually started to wonder if Vegas had a no-cameras policy in the early years. Eventually, the Library of Commerce came through with a scanned neg that was high enough rez that I could push the elements I wanted to have stand out from an otherwise muddy, washed-out image.

pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jac…

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*Zuckermuskian solipsism*

The laborers come from an LoC collection of portraits of children who worked in coal mines in the 1910s. They're pretty harrowing stuff. I spent a long plane ride cropping each individual out of several of these images.

pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/see…

36/

*Good ideas are popular*

The original crowd scene (a presidential inauguration, if memory serves) was super high-rez, which made it very easy to convincingly matte in the monkeys and the Congressional dome. I played with tinting this one, but pure greyscale looked a *lot* better.

pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the…

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*By all means, tread on those people*

Another great high concept. The wordiness of Wilhoit's Law makes this intrinsically funny. There's a public domain vector-art Gadsen flag on Wikimedia Commons. I found a Reddit forum where font nerds had sleuthed out the typeface for the words on the original.

pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sol…

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*AI's pogo-stick grift*

The pogo stick kid is another H Armstrong Roberts gank. I spent ages trying to get the bounce effect to look right, and then Alistair Milne fixed it for me in like 10 seconds. The smoke comes from an oil painting of the eruption of Vesuvius from the Met. It's become my go-to "hellscape" background.

pluralistic.net/2025/08/02/inv…

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*The worst possible antitrust outcome*

The smoke from Vesuvius makes another appearance. I filled the Android droid with tormented figures from Bosch's "Garden of Early Delights," which is an amazing painting that is available as a more than 15,000 pixel wide (!) scan on Wikimedia Commons.

pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unp…

40/

*Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes*

Boy, I love this one. The steamship image is from the Met. The carny barker is a still of WC Fields, whose body language is *impeccable*. It took a long-ass time to get a MAGA hat in the correct position, but I eventually found a photo of an early 20th C baseball player and then tinted his hat and matted in the MAGA embroidery.

pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all…

41/

*Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed*

These guys on the sofa come from Thomas Hawke, who has recovered and scanned nearly 30,000 "found photos" - collections from estates, yard-sales, etc:

flickr.com/search/?sort=date-t…

The *Shining*-esque lobby came from the Library of Congress, where it is surprisingly easy to find images of buildings with scary carpets.

pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/pri…

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*Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives*

Another great high-concept that turned out great. I think that matting the Heritage Foundation chiselwork into the background really pulls it together, and I'm really happy with the glow-up I did for the knives.

pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-…

43/

*Are the means of computation even seizable?*

I spent *so long* cutting out this old printing press, but *boy* has it stood me in good stead. I think there's like *five* copies of that image layered on top of each other here. The figure is an inside joke for all my Luddite trufan pals outthere, a remix of a classic handbill depicting General Ned Ludd.

pluralistic.net/2025/05/14/pre…

44/

*Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again)*

I was worried that this wouldn't work unless you were familiar with the iconic portrait photo of Rasputin, but that guy was such a creepy-ass-looking freak, and Zuck's metaverse avatar is *so* awful, that it works on its own merits, too.

pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah…

45/

*Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you*

The original image was so grainy, but it was also *fantastic* and I spent hours rehabbing it. It's a posed, comedic photo of two Australian miners in the bush cheating at cards, rooking a third man. The Uncle Sam is (obviously) from Keppler.

pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/che…

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*Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case*

This one got more, "Wow is that ever *creepy*" comments than any of the other ones. I was going for Chatty Cathy, but that Zuck metaverse avatar is so weird and bad that it acts like visual MSG in any image, amplifying its creepiness to incredible heights.

pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/cha…

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*Machina economicus*

The image is from an early illustrated French edition of HG Wells's *War of the Worlds*. I love how this worked out, and a family of my fans in Ireland commissioned a paint-by-numbers of it and painted it in and mailed it to me. It's *incredible*. If I re-use this, I will probably swap out the emoji for the graphic from the book's cover.

pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/tim…

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*How the world's leading breach expert got phished*

I don't understand how composition works, but I know when I've lucked into a good composition. This is a good composition! I made this on the sofa of Doc and Joyce Searles in Bloomington, Indiana while I was in town for my *Picks and Shovels* book tour.

pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/tro…

49/

*Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined*

I worked those tentacles for *so long*, trying to get Freud/Cthulhu/HAL's lower half just right. In the end, it all paid off.

pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doc…

50/

*You can't save an institution by betraying its mission*

The "fireman" is an image from the Department of Defense of a soldier demoing a flamethrower (I hacked in the firefighter's uniform). I spent a lot of time trying to get a smoky look for the foreground here, but I don't think it succeeded.

pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/sel…

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*Trump loves Big Tech*

The two guys in the jars (John Bull and a random general I've rebadged to represent the EU) come from an epic Keppler two-page spread personifying the nations of the world as foolish military men. While many of the figures are sadly and predictably racist (you don't want to see "China"), these guys were eminently salvageable, and I *love* their expressions and body-language.

pluralistic.net/2025/03/24/wha…

52/

*The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers*

The background is a photo of the interior of a tape-robot that I snapped in the data-centre at the Human Genome Project when I was out on assignment for *Nature* magazine. It remains one of the most striking images I've ever captured. It was way too hard to find a horse's head from that angle for the "reverse centaur."

53/

If there are any equestrian photographers out there, please consider snapping a couple and putting them up on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.

pluralistic.net/2025/03/13/ele…

54/

*Gandersauce*

I'm not thrilled with how the face worked out on this one, but people *love* it. If I'm giving a speech and I notice the audience elbowing one another and pointing at the slides and giggling, I know this one has just rotated onto the screen.

pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/tur…

55/

*Premature Internet Activists*

I spent a *lot* of time cleaning up and keystoning Woody Guthrie's original sticker, which can be found at very high resolutions online. Look for this element to find its way into many future collages.

pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/dig…

56/

*It's not a crime if we do it with an app*

The two figures come from Keppler; the potato field is from the Library of Congress. Putting HAL eyes on the potatoes was fiddly work, but worth it. Something about Keppler's body language and those potato heads really *sings*.

pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/pot…

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*The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing*

I don't often get a chance to use Chinese communist propaganda posters, but I love working with them. All public domain, available at high rez, and always to the point. It was a lot of work matting those US flags onto the partially furled Chinese flags, but it worked out great.

pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/soc…

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*Occupy the Democratic National Committee*

I love this sad donkey, from an old political cartoon. Given the state of the Democratic Party, I get a lot of chances to use him, and more's the pity.

pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smo…

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*Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits*

This one's actually from 2024, but I did it after last year's roundup, and I like it well enough to include it in this year's. I think the smoke came out pretty good!

pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fir…

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I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification!

Catch me next in #Seattle (TOMORROW!), #Madison, CT and #Hamburg!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

pluralistic.net/tour

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Images:

TechCrunch
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…

Ajay Suresh
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Steve Jurvetson (modified)
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CC BY 2.0
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Cryteria (modified)
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UK Parliament/Maria Unger (modified)
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CC BY 3.0
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Bastique (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…

Frank Schwichtenberg (modified)
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CC BY 4.0
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Columbia University

Alma Mater, Columbia University, Columbia University Visitors Center, Library, Low Memorial Library

^Flickr

Japanexperterna.se (modified)
flickr.com/photos/japanexperte…

CC BY-SA 2.0:
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

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Ser Amantio di Nicolao (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…

CC BY-SA 3.0
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Armin Kübelbeck (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…

Zde (modified)
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Felix Winkelnkemper (modified)
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CC BY-SA 4.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

See no evil speak no evil hear no evil

Statue of the three wise monkeys in a Japanese garden on Innoshima Island. Known in Japanese as "mizaru iwazaru kikazaru" (見ざる言わざる聞かざる) If you use this image, please attribute it with a link reading "Japanexperterna" to www.japanexperterna.

^Flickr