Well, that was quite the little weekend, wasn’t it?

I was steaming fucking mad before the weekend. I’m just radioactively disgusted now.

With America? With gun violence? With “the tone of political rhetoric”? With the media? With Republicans? With Democrats? With 2024 holistically?

I mean, yes, but no more than usual. Because literally nothing has actually fucking changed since Saturday night.

No, I’m disgusted with us. My own alleged side. Everyone from ostensibly lefty commentators to that famously “liberal” media to regular everyday Jo and Joanna Six-Facts who aren’t particularly involved beyond being normal enough to remain not-fascists.

Goddammit, Us, what are we doing? What are we doing to ourselves? Why are we like this?

All I saw and heard Saturday night was total abject certainty that the election was over now and Trump had already won. No point in even trying anymore, right, fellow lefties? Just accept it, babe. It’s hopeless. It’s basically already happened so might as well buy a red fucking hat. Look how handsome and powerful he looks totally genuinely jumping up in ecstasy and screaming at his followers to fight for him. Daddy is SUCH a Big Daddy! Just give up, it’s only your rights, no big whoop.

And all that weeping and moaning and rending of garments was from US. The right was absolutely delighted. All the ghouls came out to smile their crocodile grins at us and gloat. They couldn’t even keep up the pretense of a vaguely normal solemn-shock-and-dignified-perserverance reaction between Tweets. The millisecond it happened the right was giggling with joy, high-fiving each other, laying out their best Gilead Commander cosplay, and counting every unhatched domesticated bird they could conjure up in their beetle-infested imaginations. Hardly any of their “thought leaders” seemed half as concerned for Trump or horrified at the shooting as positively turgid about taking this out on Democrats for the rest of time and using it every way they could to stomp half this country’s face into the mud. The night their candidate was shot, the Republican Party was just out there saying “we are going to use this to hurt everyone” AND WE JUST INSTANTLY GAVE UP AND SAID YES YOU’RE RIGHT IT IS INEVITABLE.

And this after weeks of the most appalling display from the media, who fully ignored or actively buried every horrifying Trump story, pretended Project 2025 didn’t exist, and said precisely nothing whatsoever about Trump’s own trashslime debate performance in their rush to drool and pant heavily (while trying to look like they weren’t disturbingly excited) over the absolutely fishfuck insane idea of ditching an incumbent candidate four months before an election because the President had half a bad debate. Every single person with even the most vaguely magical connection to politics just out there submitting their old West Wing spec scripts to social media like one of them was gonna get picked up by the big bosses at Reality Studios with, apparently, a fucking sea nymph’s idea of how the system actually works.

At the slightest excuse, we just vigorously chuck ourselves off a Victorian cliff clutching our pearls in despair and sighing to the wind that nothing could be done instead of, I don’t fucking know, not behaving like a caricature of wishy-washy weak liberals who can’t even back their own guy for five seconds in the face of an oncoming freight train of globally catastrophic dystopia.

Sometimes I hate us so much. We are so willing to believe the worst and beat each other down and so unwilling to put any of that energy into…well…anything else.

And yeah, okay, I had my moment of oh fuck who cursed us, too. But past the first twenty minutes, at no point did I think this was nearly as sure a thing as the media, who fucking bolted to release their barely-concealed ceiling-net of red balloons and confetti and rev up the celebration party bus, insisted.

First of all, if the last eight years have taught us anything, it should have taught us that Trump is Asimov’s fucking Mule and it is impossible to predict what happens next in any given circumstance involving his gaseous horrormouthed presence. The idea that what has held true historically is somehow fixing to start holding true for Trump is a pretty weird conclusion to belly-flop into. Four months is forever in terms of news cycles. Every story from four months ago is gone from the headlines now, even Gaza. If this happened in October, maybe. But we’re busy packing our bags for an all-expenses paid trip to failure in July?

Second, assassination attempts make people sympathetic when the target was sympathetic before, or behaves in a way that inspires sympathy afterward. Screeching GO FUCK YOURSELVES WE’VE ALREADY WON AND WE CANNOT WAIT TO CRUSH YOU ALL approximately thirty seconds after the shutter snapped on that thrice-damned photo I’m already sick to death of seeing plastered everywhere doesn’t exactly red rover new and/or remotely normal voters to the side.

It’s a real humdinger of a conundrum to bank on sympathy and shock from the voting population when you’ve taken such care to frame sympathy/empathy as weak bullshit, and snapped angrily at the nation to get over it and stop giving even the most hesitant of shits about victims after every single shooting for decades on end. Not to mention joyfully engaged in so much unprecedented, comic-book evil chaotic clown-car-of-goblins-with-the-rickets nonsense that the concept of being shocked by current events just seems like a fun nostalgia I Heart the 90s trip.

They keep telling us to stop caring about other people. You can’t do that so hard for so long and then kick back and expect the caring to flow in the way it would for a normal candidate who never let a pandemic rip through states on purpose because not enough people there voted for him, actively killing many of our family members for their own benefit—and profit. Who shrugged and told everyone to suck shit if they actually cared when children were mown down by assault rifle fire—and insisted that that reaction was the Correct American Way to Do and Think Things.

Y’all said we were stupid asshole-babies for caring about shootings approximately 900,000 times this year. Just because you love him so much you think he’s the special exception to every single rule doesn’t mean anyone outside your play group does, and those are the voters everyone needs, so don’t be surprised if they…you know…

Plus, four months is plenty of time for some follower of the new President Pennywise in his blood-red tie to make an attempt on Biden, and for the right to show no sympathy whatsoever while laughing their asses off as they have anytime any lukewarm Democrat—or you know, children in a schoolroom—has suffered in any way.

The most callous comments I saw in the immediate aftermath were variations on “too bad the shooter missed.” And sure, that’s unkind. Not as unkind as literally anything that’s escaped a Republican’s midden-mouth concerning anyone not a Republican in the last… *checks notes* ever, but unkind.

It’s also very wrong. The first thing I said to my nieces was thank god he’s not dead. Thank god it’s only his ear. Because that’s the nightmare scenario. That’s the martyring. Then, if the violence isn’t completely unhinged, Nikki Haley (probably but who knows, it seems unlikely they’d go with something they disdain as much normal protocol to elevate a woman of color) ascends and very likely does win against Biden as Trump becomes deified and people do that ugly little trick where they pretend someone was good just because they died. And really and truly, we are lucky beyond belief that bullet only grazed his ear. If he’s still wearing that bandage in four months he’ll look like a ridiculous crybaby—the one thing the right 100% is but can’t stand to be seen as. If he’d been hit in a place with a longer recovery time that kept him in the hospital not being a jackass 24/7 so people could worry about him, or put his arm in a sling or his leg in a brace, if it had been an injury you could see, then yeah, that sympathy might kick in, because he’d seem in need of protection.

But, thirdly, he’s not a martyr. Because he’s still here. And he’s fine. Overclocked dickassery fully charged up and raring to be a total fucking psychopath at the RNC. So nothing has changed whatsoever. Looking “strong” might feel good to him and to them in the moment, but takes away a big part of the motive force of sympathy—to protect someone vulnerable. Trump isn’t vulnerable. He couldn’t even pretend to look hurt. He was THRILLED. He jumped right up with an active shooter on site to get his photo op, a very normal response from a normal human person. And he’s tossed the tried-and-true response to this sort of thing into a volcano because he doesn’t have any idea what human people with human feelings are like, so it never occurs to him to appeal to that. Come on, none of us had to read that Trump didn’t call the widow of his own supporter who actually died, or the injured (but Biden did). Did anyone, even the most devout and worshipful cultist, ever think he would? Why would he start now?

I had to go looking on purpose to even find out the name of the professional first responder who died. (It’s Corey Comperatore, by the way.) That is such a massive PR blunder I can hardly believe the party that couldn’t stop braying SAY HER NAME when Laken Riley was killed could possibly make it. That guy’s name and face should be everywhere. His wife should be speaking at the RNC right now. That guy is the martyr. That’s the one who lost something for their wretched “cause,” the person we can all sympathize with at least a little because he’s fucking dead. They should be howling SAY HIS NAME and Trump should be praying with the family and bringing them to his house, paying off their debt or mortgage or setting up a fund for his kids or something. But our Tangerine Trujillo, and his folk, are physiologically incapable of doing that, even if it benefits them. Because that would take a tiny part of the terrible light of collective attention away from the guy who thinks he’s Captain America now, and make someone else the face of it all.

They’re so hard for their revenge they can’t even play the PR right. No press conference, golfing immediately, no talk with the widow, no pretending to abhor violence. They can’t play the victim because they can’t stand to be seen as vulnerable even if it would help them. They simply have to smirk behind their hands so their base knows they’re super amazing and strong and cool and awesome and alpha.

Then there’s the fact that I have a hard time believing anyone who wasn’t voting for Trump is thinking oh no the guy who keeps saying he's gonna start blasting as soon as he's in office got minimally grazed by a bullet and is totally okay and golfing right now. Better change my vote and embrace fascism! Now, I bet it’s all rather more shocking when media is so laser-focused on the dream they had one time about reporting on a contested convention and absolutely burning Joe Biden at the stake that they just barely bother telling anyone the bloviating bully said he's considering murdering a new group of people today. But nobody, no matter how uninvolved in politics, just has no idea that Trump likes hurting people. That’s sort of his whole brand.

And all this was before it came out that the shooter was one of Trump’s own beautiful beloved darlings, a disaffected white 20-something gun-stroking manchild whose reasons have no reason because reason is not part of the Republican platform at any level. And my god, are they disappointed. They were so excited for it to be one of us. Oh, fingers crossed it’s a trans person! Maybe even a black trans person! A party can dream, right? But no, the guy who got people to just ignore reality wholesale, embrace profound madness and eschatological violence, who encouraged their hate and their growing distance from anything resembling normal behavior, who openly and in public hopes for a Civil War on his own behalf every day…got a minor injury from a lone wolf functionally indistinguishable Kyle Rittenhouse, who they call a hero.

I don’t think that’s a narrative that’s going to move a lot of swing votes, if such magical things actually exist.

Look, Doom Patrol. The election is four months away. Four months before COVID we were all Christmas shopping crammed in together merrily breathing each others’ snot and literally never washing our hands like that was just totally fine. Because it was.

Four months is far more than enough time for the right to completely pile-driver themselves into the mat, eat their own teeth on this topic, and alienate everyone who hasn’t lovingly worn the “Q” off the Q buttons on their keyboards yet.

They’re already doing it. They literally can’t help themselves. They were immediately crowing victory, they’re crowing now, sneering and smirking and laughing at everyone who isn’t in their club of Demographics Who Are Semi-Safe Until We Run Out of Others to Brutalize. Trump announced J.D. Vance, a white authoritarian fuckbeard with the world’s most kickable face, who does nothing to bring in undecided voters, but really must believe you gotta stick it out in violent marriages because he’s prancing down the aisle toward the same one the GOP can’t quit. The RNC is in full scream-sweating fangs-out fall-in-line-maggots swing and no one seems to be upset or shaken, they’re all celebrating like it’s Mardi Gras on Cocaine Planet—so why should anyone feel bad for them? They look super-stoked! No one likes Now I’m REALLY Gonna Get Ya as a campaign slogan. It’s incredibly off-putting, and they couldn’t WAIT to rub everyone’s noses in the reeking shit they’ll make of our future.

But the thing is, we, who are busy not shooting people over here on the center-to-left, seemingly can’t even hold it together for 48 hours to give these mule-headed Pleasure Island cast-offs a chance to fuck it up for themselves, as they have every single easy lay-up political opportunity that’s ever landed in their laps, because their pure need to be toxic hate-barfing sadistic regular plain old shitty-uncle assholes right now always, well, trumps their plans to be toxic hate-barfing sadistic uncontested rulers of all mankind. They get ahead of themselves. They blow their wad too early. They post their plans online and storm the capitol before they have the numbers and assume they’ve got it in the bag when the bag hasn’t even been opened yet.

What is wrong with us? Are we just nihilistic and semi-suicidal as a culture now? Is that even possible? Fuck it, McDonalds’s is too expensive so why not let it all burn this is a sensible thought that I should have and share enthusiastically. Wishing for everyone and everything I know and love to suffer endlessly because reform and compromise take too long for not enough of what I specially know is perfectly correct isn’t something I should seek therapy about at all.

We don’t even seem to be able to try solidarity or optimism or even…criticism of anyone but each other. The bile the left holds for conservatives is a cup of sweet tea next to what we have for other members of our own coalition.

We’re in this masochistic abusive relationship with the right where they’ve groomed us and ground us down and told us we were worthless so thoroughly we flinch whenever they take a breath and just fall utterly apart when they get mad. The media, who hasn’t been on our side since mostly always, says our guy is too old? Yes, masters, he is too old, all is lost. Social media says our guy is somehow personally and solely responsible for the oldest continuous conflict in human history despite doing more than any President ever has to reign it in? Yes, masters, revolting nickname accepted, all is lost. Republicans stand by their man no matter how many times he rambles on about sharks or airports during the American Revolution, but Biden stutters like he always has, and we join right in with the media telling him to fuck off in to the sun despite there being no one whatsoever anyone can agree on to take his place and everyone knowing full and goddamned well that this clown-tantrum country will not vote for a woman of color, not even over a fascist who promises to eat our faces on Inauguration Day, even if they won’t admit it out loud.

Is some of this bots and astroturfing? Oh, far more of it than we’ll know until it’s too late, I’d bet. But a lot of it is just traumatized fucking people using social media as therapy to purge their anxiety and terror without realizing all that outpouring of individual despair creates a collective zeitgeist of surrender and hopeless misery—which motivates no one to vote or organize or believe in anything but an inevitably dark future.

We have to stop this. We have to stop giving up in advance. We have to stop accepting the blame for conservative’s sins and responsibility for their extremism. The problem is not that we call the right fascists the problem is the right is full of fascists.

The problem isn’t that Joe Biden is old, it’s that the media doesn’t want Biden and is providing cover for a monster to sink regular boring old democracy that isn’t fun to heroically report on. And pretending, like everyone else, that things will just go on as normal if Trump wins and they’re just kidding about all the horrors they’re looking into the camera with a smile and announcing “We are very much not kidding and are tickled pink about doing this as soon as possible.”

I don’t really care if you hate Joe Biden or think he’s old and Trump (who is 78) looked cool in a photo he clearly had an actor’s instinct to pose for. It’s not a joke, and it’s not impossible for it to happen here. If America falls to fascism fleeing the country will not help. Fascism must have prey to survive and grow. This nation has the greatest military in the history of the world and is embedded in every aspect of the global economy. Do the math. Everyone will lose everything. White rural resentful men, too. If you think your precious 401K survives Project 2025, you need to read it again.

All hope is NOT lost.

What we choose to do and say now will determine the future in November. I am begging you all to pull it together and stop backbiting and self-sabotaging, stop using social media as a hallucinogen, stop demanding the impossible and dismissing the possible from our own side while celebrating the tiniest decency the other side occasionally fakes. I don’t care if Biden isn’t left enough or perfect enough or young enough or magical superhero unicorn enough. Another Trump term is the end of progressive policy in this country. Another Biden term isn’t. So suck it the fuck up, don’t give them the narrative they’re insisting we MUST follow (because we must always follow) and vote for Biden’s team and Biden’s SCOTUS if you can’t get behind what Biden himself has accomplished because the media hates him like fire so we don’t all lose our rights before they get around to killing us. And if the rhetoric of Republican party can get one of their goodest boys to come within a head-turn of murdering their own adored leader, that is not hyperbole.

If they beat us and the darkest timeline comes to pass, it better not fucking be because we refused to fight back.

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CORY EFRAM DOCTOROW was born July 17, 1971 in Toronto, Canada. He attended alternative schools and worked at SF specialty store Bakka Books, but dropped out of high school at 17 and briefly moved to Mexico to write. He dropped out of four universities in two years and worked as a CD-ROM programmer, website designer, volunteer in Central America, CIO for a film company and an ad agency, founder of ...Read More

This week on my podcast, I read The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you, a column from one of last week’s editions of my Pluralistic newsletter; it describes a monopoly pattern whereby companies execute a series of mergers to dominate a sector, leaving their IT systems brittle and tangled – and vital to the nation.

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he’s just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won’t be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they’ll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn’t even a teardown, it’s just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn’t start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It’s not a toxic asset, because it’s not an asset. It’s just toxic.

Equifax isn’t just a company: it’s infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black

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Dear subscribers,

For personal and paid work reasons, I have to temporarily suspend the newsletter until mid-July. I have plenty of ideas to write about, but I would really, REALLY appreciate requests from YOU to write about some specific subject. This is my request, nothing more: please do spend 4/5 minutes to browse:

• the archives of this newsletter

• my “human-digital studies” page

• my original blog, where I have already shared more than one million words about AI, robotics, digital rights and innovation in general

and then let me know, preferably via email at mfioretti@nexaima.net, what you would like me to write about in the next issues. That’s it, really. Oh, and of course invite everybody you know who may be interested in the issues I cover here to do the same!

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HEY THIS IS A SUPER FUN TIME TO BE A PARENT, AM I RIGHT OR AM I RIGHT?

Spoiler: It’s fuckin’ not.

And since Senate Republicans smugly shot down protecting the right to birth control right after we all had the honor of listening to Kicky Kicky Ball Boy, the Very Specialest Boy Ever to Grace Us with His Luminous and Wise Eminence, mouth off about what a waste of time it is for a woman to be anything but an adoring, silent wife and mother, silently raising as many babies as he wants, making bread silently from silent scratch, never asking for anything (more silence, girl! Where’s your head?) but his bimonthly (not guaranteed) glance her way and occasional remembering of her name (plus up to 75% of the children’s names!) as she watches him, silently, like a nervous border collie awaiting the next command and/or punishment, I THOUGHT WE COULD HAVE A LITTLE TALK ABOUT THAT.

Most of our culture is still clinging by its claws to the bedrock assumption that every household has a stay-at-home parent to deal with sick days, snow days, half days, Covid outbreaks, doctor’s appointments, playdates, extracurriculars from straight out of the womb, regular 9-5 business hours meaning no one has time for basic offline life logistics, least of all the people working those shifts, the crushing expectation of constant child-enrichment and engagement and no unsupervised time but don’t forget to serious limit and oversee any screen time, every single thing costing 2-3 times as much as it did three years ago when everyone also needed two incomes to make a go of it because go fuck yourself, that’s why (especially you, Joe Biden! Ha ha it’s not your fault but everyone’s gonna blame you anyway!), including child care of any type, school hours that don’t cover work hours, spring break, winter break, mid-winter break, and the looming eldritch creature called summer break (and don’t start, because I love my kid, but it’s three months with nothing but camps that cost more than cars, waiting lists, nannies and babysitters that cost more than trucks, and zero jobs, not even teachers, that take three months off every year. I used to think parents who looked forward to fall so school would start were the ones who never wanted to be parents, but I get it now, it’s brutal).

And on and on. Yet most households do not have a stay at home parent. What they have is (usually, not always) one parent who is working full-time and also constantly struggling to cover the enormous amount of labor and time that goes into raising children and maintaining a household—even if that one parent is married to someone who is working full-time as well. It’s mind-breaking shit, and there rarely seems like any way out or through.

Especially when suddenly, the news and social media and a bunch of rich white assholes who enjoy life as a perpetual child, pampered, cared for, shielded from harsh truths, and indulged in their loud but totally naive and bizarre opinions by a small army, only some of whom are paid, are screaming at us that we all need to have a bunch more kids on the chop-chop, and seem totally baffled as to why that hasn’t made the continent tilt with all women bolting toward maternity wards.

Almost every parent I know has an all-access unlimited strugglebus pass to this journey. It crosses just about every demographic boundary—I assume the very wealthy can pay their way through it, but what the fuck would I know about them. And I hear so often, from so many people, online, offline, in group chats, everywhere, that it didn’t used to be this way, that it shouldn’t be this way, that we need “a village” again, that if only we had a village like our parents and grandparents did, life wouldn’t be this way.

Now, I’m not gonna sit here tutting from my high, high throne of…also being totally unable to balance all this, thus failing both work and motherhood daily, and say they’re all wrong. It didn’t used to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. It is completely unsustainable for it to stay this way, particularly if the billionaire toddlers of the world magically expect more children out of us groveling morlocks down here in the dripping hell-vaults of real life, not less.

But I think most village-less people raising children in the developed world right now are seriously misunderstanding what “the village” is/was and the price it demands, misremembering or misinterpreting our own childhood memories, or both. Or maybe just optimistically longing for a fucking break and imagining a system that never existed, at least not in a way that would actually solve the problem.

First of all, and this is no kind of original thought springing from my own unique and precious brain like unto Athena (who you just KNOW was a major behavioral problem in her preschool class. Just ask Pallas), but it must be said anyway: “the village” was literally always women’s unpaid labor.

OH NO BUCKLE UP I’M GONNA TALK ABOUT GENDER! BUCKLE UP AND PLEASE KEEP YOUR HANDS AND FEET INSIDE THE VEHICLE AT ALL TIMES.

The thing is, I don’t say the village was always women as a criticism or even necessarily a complaint. It’s simply a fact. You can apply morality to it or not, but the fact won’t change just because it’s uncomfortable. Until extraordinarily recently, the “traditional” division of labor used to leave almost all the assistance dreamed of by my generation as labor to be performed, freely, cheerfully, promptly, unceasingly, and preferably invisibly, by women.

But don’t worry! As St. Mitch used to say, it still does, but it used to, too!

Whether we’re talking about grandparents and aunties and older siblings (and yes, the occasional male relative as well. Often one, who for one reason or another they weren’t allowed to discuss openly, didn’t feel at home with the traditional male side of the family) helping out with the next generation or an actual village in which unrelated people band together to share the load for everyone, it still ends up, most of the time, being a gilded metaphor for a vast network of women providing physical, mental, and emotional labor without acknowledgement or payment.

Many of us remember weekends and even whole summers at our grandparents in our own childhoods. We remember lots of help for our parents and daycare being somewhat unusual for us. Those childhoods, for Millennials on up, were both not that long ago and eons ago in terms of social evolution. For reference, women got the right to use the financial system without a male babysitter five years before I was born.

So I think, I hope, that deep down most of us recall that “grandparents” usually meant Grandma and not Grandpa, at least until the male children were old enough to fish or golf or play pool or nail things to other things or witness a sport or whatever activities Grandpa was going to be doing anyway.

And yes, yes, I know your Grandpa was super woke and wonderful and worked 200 hours a week while doing everything domestic to perfection while Grandma rested in luxury or ran about town on account of being the best man who ever lived and he tenderly nursed all the grandbabies at his own breast.

But generally speaking, for most of us, Grandpa was often still working outside the home. Particularly before people started having babies much later in life. When I was born, my grandfather was 53, and he’d been a somewhat late father himself, at least for his era. My grandmother was only 48. When my son was born, my father was 62 and my mother 64. As the younger grandchildren come, they’ve hit or are approaching 70. They’re not even comparable stages of life. At 53, in the 80s, a man could be expected to be at the height of his career. And while women often worked outside the home in every era, no matter how hard certain influencers dream otherwise, they were so discouraged or, depending on how far back our little wayback machine wants to take us, barred from fields with silly things like career trajectories and big rewards and high incomes, that the person who could make time for kinkeeping was the one who always had.

So much, much more often than not, it was Grandma that we remember taking us in so our parents could take a breath. She raised the OG children, after all. Her ability and interest in constantly nurturing others was expected, and a lot of society’s structures relied on not examining that expectation too closely. FUN FACT, STILL DO!

Much like “holiday magic” was also always women’s unpaid labor, because apart from (sometimes) getting the tree and (sometimes) assembling toys, the cooking and decorating and cleaning and gift-buying, gift-wrapping, card-sending, organizing, hostessing, inter-familial conflict-resolving, child-wrangling, and planning were and very, very often still are, the responsibility of AFAB family members.

Likewise, in the multigenerational households so many of us are able to fantasize about as a better system because so few of us in our working years now have ever experienced one, it’s the daughters-in law, the aunties, the mothers, the daughters, and especially the oldest, the female cousins, the sisters and sisters-in-laws—and the female members of friends’, neighbors, colleagues’ households—who do most of the work of helping and supporting and organizing and maintaining social bonds.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this point without a whole lot of joking or yelling because it’s most often AFAB folk I hear longing for relief and community and just a little fucking help—and the sheer intensity of that longing creates a TRAGIC misunderstanding of what actually happens in a village.

This “traditional” village we all think we want does not give Mama a break. It is built, stone by stone, on a deep and pervasive assumption that she doesn’t need or want one.

When people imagine this village, they imagine someone being there to lovingly and respectfully take on some of their burdens now and then, which would give them space to live and rest and breathe and think for ONE GODDAMNED SECOND. Maybe even do something for themselves for a change! And then they can return rejuvenated and sane and go back to every day life just worrying about themselves and their immediate concerns.

But that’s not how a village works at all. You only get help because you gave it and will continue to give it. And the more help you get the more you owe. Yep, Granny is there to help with the new baby. And Mama will be on deck for her grandchildren, too. Just like she was for her siblings or her cousins or her neighbors’ children or whatever random fucking baby waddled by. There is no break, not just during childrearing years, but ever. It’s a system that requires a constant cycle of favors, and anyone who doesn’t pay in isn’t going to get much out because the village will hate them like fire and boy howdy if you think social media cancel culture is bad allow me to introduce you to kitchen table gossip because HOLD ONTO YOUR FUCKING HAT. Oh, you don’t have a hat? Maybe you shouldn’t have read that book instead of taking care of the hatmaker’s sick twins twenty years ago, hm? Or, you know, frowned when that hardworking haberdasher said you were pretty just because you were nine. Now you don’t get a hat, and neither do your grandchildren, because the village has INFINITE GIGS OF RANDOM ACCESS GRUDGE MEMORY.

Now get back to folding dumplings. The kitchen table comment section has disabled replies.

So welcome to the village! Your exhaustion isn’t just the twenty-odd years of your own child’s life anymore; you only get help with your own waddler if you’ve helped with everyone else’s from just about the minute you could , and will continue helping with everyone else’s for the rest of your life UNTIL YOU DIE OF A MASSIVE STROKE WHILE MENDING A BLANKET WITH A BABY IN YOUR LAP. (And yes, you guessed it—that is truly and actually how my great-grandmother died. Because after raising six kids and an almost mathematically infinite number of grandchildren and great grandchildren and a few neighborhood kids who had no one else while running a chicken farm for forty years, she was still minding the newest baby up until the millisecond her body gave out.)

And don’t think men were or are just totally outside this system, because they most certainly are not, even in the most “traditional” structures. They might not (mostly, generally) have had to manage the favor-economy themselves or worry too much about holidays or take on the majority of domestic tasks, and certainly in many cultures men had more time to themselves and the privilege to enjoy it, but in any given village, the men were still fixing shit and helping Bob build a shed and networking for money or advancement or both, or coaching or running for office or being part of the Lions’ Club or whatever Grand Order of the Water Buffalo society was available in their era and location.

But the majority of what my generation is crying out for help with isn’t building sheds. It’s the work traditionally done by women that women no longer have the time to do alone. A generation of AFAB people who were raised to forge a full life for themselves just like men…and no one really ever mentioned that the male version of that life tacitly included a spouse who would take care of everything at home. Someone also forgot to spend literally any time whatsoever talking to AMAB folk about other modes of life and work and love and connection they might explore in this brave new world we really, really, hoped would be a bit less shitty than the frightened old one.

And it’s never just the childminding, then or now. It’s remembering who’s sick and who’s dying and who’s bereaved and who’s destitute making an appropriate pain-casserole (or other culturally-relevant misery-carbohydrate) for all of them. It’s petsitting and tutoring and skill-sharing and fixing every item necessary for life and advocating for local issues and raising money for them. It’s knowing every birthday, anniversary, holiday, christening, retirement (for Grandpa only), graduation, birth, death, and never forgetting to acknowledge them the way each villager individually prefers it so no one gets insulted and withholds hats. It’s remembering that when you were broke, Helen gave you half her chickens’ eggs for months so now that Helen is about to lose her house you gotta do something for her or the whole fabric of society is meaningless and also the next time you’re drowning the village will watch from shore and whisper Helen to your slowly-sinking carcass. It’s giving a vast galaxy of rides to a vast galaxy of people: to and from hospitals, airports, relatives, funerals, games, events, schools, voting booths, churches, banks, the corner shop. It’s opening your home and wallet, often indefinitely, not just to your blood family should any of them get injured or ill or lose a job or flee from abuse or be accused of a crime or do that super gross inconvenient thing where humans grow old and need radical care and some needed it from birth, but to anyone in that network of lifelong trades, favors, labor, and support who has been there for you at any point in your life, and then, honestly, probably a few people who didn’t because they did help your spouse or your spouse’s friend or your spouse’s friend’s child. Or maybe everyone knows that person is just one of the few in every generation everywhere who was born a full-on chaos goblin who can’t handle life on any level and now it’s your turn.

Because it’s always someone’s turn.

Now, do we do a lot of those things even in our highly-individualistic society? And are AFAB partners, GENERALLY SPEAKING, still the ones expected to handle all that kinkeeping and emotional labor but also a full-time job that pays well enough to live in this silly-ass world? Yes. Of course. And of course men are taking part in this sphere more than ever, but statistics concerning second shifts and domestic labor are still insanely lopsided.

But as life gets more and more complicated, we just let more and more of those old responsibilities slide, or focus them on biological family alone, or simply refuse to spend our precious free moments grinding for everyone else on the promise of our going around coming around at some point. Or just never have kids at all. But in a village, there’s no such thing as childfree. You’re not exempt—you were signed up for this system of social debt management at birth and someone took care of your shrieking colicky mucus-ful baby butt, didn’t they? If you don’t have kids of your own, you have so much more time to help with Helen’s, right?

Fuckin’ Helen.

I just don’t think working adults these days want to do all that—because it doesn’t mean any real reduction in workload. Most of the time freed up by a village’s support ends up being spent in supporting the village, because everyone pretty much needs some kind of help all the time. And the mental load of remembering and modeling the needs of that huge network of people (even a small family has a large web of connections) sit on the brain stem with the approximate weight of the fucking sun.

And it actually increases the workload in terms of years spent in the clownshow plate-spinning depthless hellpit of child-herding. We like the idea that until we have kids, our time is our own. We like the idea that once the kids are moved out, our time will be our own again. As a culture, we like those ideas A LOT. Even older generations do—Boomer grandparents statistically spend much less time with their grandchildren than their parents did. We want a village to help us—and HOLY SCREAMING FUCKBLOCKS SO DO I—but I see very few people pining to spend their entire lives helping the village. Because you can just…do that, you know? Anyone can. You can start doing favors for your neighbors and I can almost guarantee they will start looking for ways to pay that back or forward.

And we’re all just so tired by the end of the day.

But once you get that cycle going, another problem arises. Another one that is CRAZY EASY to forget if you’ve never actually lived in a multi-generational household or a tight-knit small town. And it’s this.

Every single one of the people who help you in any way, from your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s son’s former roommate all the way down to Helen with her shitty blackmail eggs, now gets a say in how you run your life.

They get to have an opinion on every aspect of how you raise your kids, and also their opinions on the general quality of those kids’s deepest natures, which they will not be shy about sharing. They do not and will not conform to each and every parent’s hyper-specific guidelines for gentle parenting, baby-led weaning, screen-time limits, balanced whole-grains diet, avoiding allergens and pollutants, accepting the identities of those children even if they don’t understand them, or even not actually hitting children in the face for sneaking snacks. They’re going to do what they think is right, what’s easiest in the moment because they’re watching someone else’s kids tomorrow and that list of rules is even longer. And more likely than not, as soon as you can be trusted not to immediately chainsaw yourself in half the second an adult back is turned, they’re going to turf you out on your own with zero supervision apart from other kids who’ll ask if you want to see their dad’s super cool chainsaw before lunch.

This is, in fact, how a lot of abuse and adult-on-child bullying happened in the parts of we middle-aged folks’ childhoods we don’t get quite so nostalgic about. Yeah, sure, we were free-range. And a lot of us got hurt. A lot of us experienced things we never should have at ages that would be shocking now. And some of us just didn’t make it out of childhood. When I was 13, we moved to a small college town just after a bunch of high school kids on their own and fucking around like we all did, pushed a middler schooler they’d bullied relentlessly in front of a train. It was easier for parents and grandparents to let us run wild, but sometimes the wild was exactly what we found.

And sometimes being supervised was worse. If Gam-Gam believed sparing the rod doth spoil the child, you got that rod. If your neighbor didn’t believe in depression or ADHD or autism, you didn’t have any of those things the second you stepped foot in her house. If your aunt and uncle thought you were weak and soft, they made sure you knew it. And if your neighbor hated the kind of person you were, you still had to go over there when Mom had to work or pick up somebody from the hospital, and maybe, just maybe, it made you hide who you were for the rest of your life.

But wait! The village also gets a say in your job, your choice of spouse, your haircut, your hobbies, your pets, how many glasses of wine you have with dinner, every single choice you make in life. Depending on the type of village, they may or may not be able to compel you to choose differently, but they will 100% DEFINITELY opine at length about all of it like an HOA on planet-strength steroids.

We like the idea that we get to decide how to raise our children, whether to have them or not at all. We like the idea that we get to decide our own lives and associations with little to no input from anyone else. As a culture, we like those ideas A LOT. There’s no going no-contact with a toxic relative in a village, no deciding not to care for elderly parents just because they abused you, no surrounding yourself with only positive energy. Your village is your village. You can leave it, but people are people everywhere, and joining a new village is a VERY uphill climb.

I don’t think many of us would give up the individualism and self-actualization we prize so deeply in order to work from cradle to grave dog-paddling in the exact impossible-to-balance sea of troubles we can’t manage for a limited span and just for ourselves right now. Even rural American culture has become more insular and anti-social, less group-minded and more isolated. I don’t think that many of us would take free babysitting in exchange for a whole group of people getting STRAIGHT UP IN OUR BUSINESS about everything and losing all control over our children’s direct influences and formative experiences. I know I’m not letting Dipshit McRacist-Homophobe Esq who has a picture of Mrs. Trunchbull taped in her dream journal take care of my kid no matter how free she is—and she ABSOLUTELY feels the same way about letting a loud feminist queer lefty agnostic with rainbow hair and tattoos like me within five feet of her little soldiers for Christ.

We say we want a village, and we do—in the sense that we want to feel connected and less lonely as humans. That sense of community is certainly a huge gap that’s only being filled with worse and worse nightmares as the years go on. But we seem to want a village where everything else about how modern families prefer to live and pursue their own happiness stays the same, and that’s just never existed anywhere. There is no cultural framework where help flows toward working parents but not from them. Where we are beholden to no one but entitled to support. Where we only have to associate with people we choose to at our leisure. Where there’s always someone to pick up slack for us and manage whatever we find unmanageable.

That’s not a village, it’s a wife. Which is why conservatives, faced with the same difficulties, don’t call out for a village, they start changing laws so women can be controlled again. And that brings us right back around to the beginning. Yeah, it’s great to have someone to do all that and ask for nothing for themselves, but a whole lot of us (not all!) are trying SUPER HARD not to expect fully-realized sentient human beings to spend their whole precious finite lives that way anymore.

We may or may not actually want a village. I have a strong suspicion many of my peers in the mines of middle age right now would run screaming from the actual realities of one. We just want a little reprieve, a little help we don’t have to pay a mortgage for, and it feels impossible without returning to a way of life that necessarily curtails free will QUITE A BIT (citation: all of history forever).

We will have to find a new way. Fill in the social blanks that got forgotten along the way to modernity. We’ll have to build our own systems and hope they last (they don’t, ask any village where a teenager has ever drawn breath). We’ll have to do all the unromantic, tedious, slow, grinding work of fighting for better and hoping that favor comes around before we die (it probably won’t).

And you know, maybe if we weren’t all so fucking tired, we’d be able to imagine what that new way might be.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY, EVERYONE!

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This week on my podcast, I read my Microsoft DRM talk, first delivered 20 years and one day ago in Redmond, Washington. It was a viral hit in the nascent blogosphere and became a defining document in the fight against DRM.

Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!

I’m here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I’m not a lawyer — I’m a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.

I lead a double life: I’m also a science fiction writer. That means I’ve got a dog in this fight, because I’ve been dreaming of making my living from writing since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based biz isn’t as big as yours, but I guarantee you that it’s every bit as important to me as yours is to you.

Here’s what I’m here to convince you of:

1. That DRM systems don’t work

2. That DRM systems are bad for society

3. That DRM systems are bad for business

4. That DRM systems are bad for artists

5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

MP3

Cory Doctorow's recent discussion of "Real Innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense" is just great... as far as "Silicon Valley nonsense" is concerned. The "real innovation" parts, instead, is great too but it doesn’t spell out a crucial point, whose omission may mislead people.

On "Silicon Valley nonsense"

Among other things, Doctorow asks "Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation?", and then quotes a great answer from the Apperceptive newsletter:

"Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete."

On that, I couldn't agree more. I have said myself that few things look as obsolete as "innovation" today, that the Metaverse is not progress but a reactionary idea and that the only thing AI Tech Bros created is themselves.

Let's look at "Real Innovation" now

Doctorow observes that "if there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating", but *"there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and _exciting_ innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech", and that is a "green energy revolution - funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act - [that] is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype." Examples of this revolution include:

• 2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022)

• Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

• Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024

• EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

What's missing here?

Again, there is no doubt that the biggest problem with "AI non sense and other hype" from Silicon Valley is that it sucks all the oxygen in the room, leaving no time to even consider different issues. However (click on the "(S)" at the end of each quote to see its source):

1. To get to Net Zero by 2050 we’ll need to utilize from seven to 4.5 times the minerals we used in 2021 - up from 4.4 million metric tons to 30.9 million (S)

2. Smart grids mean higher copper and aluminum use than you could possibly imagine (S)

3. The copper demand alone for building enough solar panels just to maintain steady-state replacement in a full-scale solar deployment would rival present-day global copper extraction indefinitely (S)

4. Seafloor nodules could dramatically reduce the environmental impact of extracting the billions of tons of metals needed for a clean-energy transition (S), but that impact would still be huge, and in any case those nodules are another non-renewable resource that, once taken, could take millions of years to come back (S)

5. If today's demand for EVs is projected to 2050, the lithium requirements of the US EV market alone in 2050 would require triple the amount of lithium currently produced for the entire global market (S)

6. Even ignoring "rare" metals... Steel, concrete, plastic, and fertilizer (that is, food) are fundamental to modern civilization yet we have no idea how to make any of them at required scale without fossil fuels (S). The literal stuff of our daily lives-no idea how to manufacture it, at scale, without fossil fuels. (S)

7. A low-carbon power grid requires much more steel (and other materials) than an infrastructure based on fossil fuels. (S)

8. It is impossible to produce all the new steel that would be needed in electric arc furnaces, simply because there is not enough scrap steel available, and there cannot be, by definition, until steel demand continues to grow (S). Besides, a low carbon grid cannot be made from recycled steel S

9. Beyond a certain penetration level (and well below 100%), adding more renewables becomes prohibitively expensive, and eventually stops (S)

10. Renewables only address electricity generation - at least on paper. The main problem is, that the share of electricity in our final energy consumption is around 20%, and the remaining 80% of our energy use still comes from fossil fuels. (S)

11. That is, the energy transition depends entirely on the availability of fossil fuels. And lacking an energy miracle, it will continue to do so (S), but with oil extraction returning ever less net energy over time... to a point (called "called energy cannibalism") that may make any transition to any other energy source impossible (S). The moment when the world starts to be short of financially sustainable oil could be quite close (S), and possibly come at the same time as peak metals (S)

12. The least-impossible, least-unsustainable, less slow, large-scale miracle of that kind should be cheap nuclear power (S), but even doubling the number of plants completed in 2022 every year for the next 27 years would increase nuclear to only 16% of total electric power generation (S). That's unlikely to happen, even if my own "Liberty Plan for Small Nuclear Reactors" was 100% correct and started tomorrow

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There is not enough

Quoting Doctorow, "All of those [climate tech] workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries" and that's the problem. Let's bring in all the real innovation we can in those fields, please, and let's do it as soon as possible! No question about that! Especially if "much of the net zero roadmap is based on technologies that do not exist today". I do agree that "the "social savings" of climate tech are massive. No issue there.

Now, never mind that lots, if not the majority of the raw matter needed to do all that stuff to move around are not inside "first world" countries, but in places like China, Iran, Afghanistan, New Caledonia, the bottom of contested seas and so on. Never mind that "EVs can't be built on a foundation of geopolitical fragility"". Never mind that.

The point is, if even half of those twelve bullets above are true, and even if all the figures they mention were wrong and the real ones were all half bad as that... there would still be simply not enough raw materials in the world to make all that stuff that should be moved around.

Ditto for workers. Doctorow rightly writes that climate tech is "a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops.".

Again: good, but will there be enough such workers to make and deploy all that physical technology he quotes, soon enough? Can that happen, in countries rapidly aging, that already cannot find enough electricians (S) to expand electric grids as expected by climate tech (S) and electrify everything as needed (S)? Can that happen, in countries whose young people are less and less every year, but still too often running after education" myths"?

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Then, what?

I think it's likely that Doctorow not only already knows all the problems I mentioned here, but also agrees with their magnitude, and indeed the links at the end of his piece do mention those problems. But this is stuff that is never repeated enough, partly because "It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over", and partly because things can still be much better than it may seem by those ominous estimates.

Sensible uses of already existing AI can do a lot of good, but sensible climate tech and a rebooted agriculture are urgently needed, much more than any superhuman artificial "intelligence", and there are not enough raw stuff and people to do both in time. That's it, really. This does not mean that there is no hope and that life can only get worse from now on, no matter what. It only means that there are not enough raw stuff and people to do both in time... until the goal remains "Business as Usual".

It means, to make just the quickest of many examples, acknowledging that keeping the smartphone or computer you are reading this piece on with for twenty more years instead of one or two wouldn't be a big deal at all. Society-wise, it means to tackle, with appropriate tech and policies instead of Sci-Fi dreams, the real problems we already have, with approaches similar to those I outlined at the end of my previous post. The situation is bad, but life can still be good.

Usual final call: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here. And to finish…:

A couple of weeks ago, the Honest Sorcerer discussed "the end of science as a useful tool". I would like to contribute with my own reasons why, even if it were true, it wouldn't be a big deal. Science as useful tool is ending, says the Sorcerer, because:

• anything like the newest smartphone is not a sign of “unstoppable progress”, just the "industrial scale refinement of technologies based on a set of already established principles".

• "when the entire industry you're in keeps hitting the repeat button with every product release, then you know that you are in trouble. A big one."

• "Based on the pace of scientific progress till the 1960’s, we ought to be driving flying cars powered by anti-gravitational engines by now. On Mars. But we don’t."

• (quoting a 2010 study on Complexity and the productivity of innovation) "Our investments in science have been producing diminishing returns for some time" (more on this later)

• "AI will certainly generate material prosperity to a select few, but not to society as a whole" (of COURSE, I say)

The Sorcerer then mentions Sabine Hossenfelder’s three hypotheses for lack of scientific progress (denialism, actual lack of more stuff to discover and a badly broken way to do science) and adds his own: "I would argue, and many teachers would certainly agree: we are already well past our peak in human mental capabilities as a culture." (A newer video by Hossenfelder about the genius who is rebuilding physics on the axyom that 1+1 = 2 would support that hypothesis)

The Sorcerer then moves to the much bigger issue that's outside of science as such, presented in Hossenfelder's video about flat earthers:

“[F]lat earthers are the first symptom of a much bigger problem. They show us what happens when people realize they can’t understand modern science, don’t trust scientists and therefore throw out even the most basic scientific knowledge on the rationale of skepticism. […] Sometime in the middle of the 20th century or so we reached a point where modern science just stopped being comprehensible to anyone without a special degree.

I't's not just about science...

This is important because, of course, it isn't limited to science. Borrowing from Srinivasan and Bardi:

• "The faith in the State is plummeting in parallel with that in Science"

• "Science, religion, the law system of a state, and some other elements of society we normally take for granted... are all communication tools. You could define them as "languages.""

But maybe it's not a big deal

The Honest Sorcerer rightly points out that "Technology is not science. It is the application of scientific discoveries." For ordinary people, however, science and technology are pretty much the same thing, and in any case the useful tool whose end would really matter for them is technology, not science. Are they ending? I can't exclude that, having said myself that these days there is little as obsolete as what the most visible people call innovation, and even stuff like the Metaverse is just narrow-minded, reactionary thinking.

Now, let me add my own hypothesis. Hossenfelder is surely right to say that science stopped being comprehensible to anyone without special degrees. However, I don't think that's why people don't trust scientist, or something we should seriously worry about anyway.

To begin with, I argue that common people lost faith in both technology and science not because they do not understand them anymore, but because they do not understand the problems that those disciplines triumphantly declare they solve, or will solve.

That is, the problem is not that quantum physics is impossible to master without years of hard study powered by the right genes, which it is. The problem is when those "languages" are used, by the usual suspects who suck all the oxygen in the media, just to talk, no: sell crap. Especially if it's the crap only they sell.

The problem is that, even if we are tricked to buy them, we are frustrated from the impossibility to understand what's the damned REAL problem and need that e.g foldable smartphones, home appliances that can be bricked WITHOUT your consent or fake autonomous vehicles are supposed to solve and fill. Attempts to really, sincerely believe that certain innovative, maybe even AI-powered services may work at scale better than what we used before can be equally disheartening. Dating apps, anyone?

Apart from that, what's hard to see through all those smokescreens is that there would be nothing bad, even if we really weren't smart enough to do more science, or science really had nothing new and useful to offer anymore.The full paragraph (quoted by the Sorcerer too!) of that 2010 study says:

"Our investments in science have been producing diminishing returns for some time. Within a few decades, our results suggest, we will have to find new ways to generate material prosperity and solve societal problems."

Exactly! Even if that were true, in every field of technology, so what? Really, what would the actual problem be? We reached the end of development of scissors, cups and everything other "oldest mostly-unchanged tools that we still use" centuries ago, but so what? Did those things stop to be useful?

We just have to replace "find new ways" with "go back to, or rediscover" certain ways.

The only way in which the end of science and technology would really be a problem is if they really were the only "way to generate material prosperity and solve societal problems", instead of "the way most fashionable today". But first, that is obviously false: human beings and humanity have always been much more than science and technology. If anything, the problem has always been to see science as THE first or sufficient tool to generate prosperity etc etc.., instead of stuff like solidarity, common sense and real politics in general.

Second, there is still so much to with the science and technology we already have to make us accept any "end" or more exactly temporary stop of science for a few decades. We already have all the science we need to solve REAL problems we actually have now. We already have all the "science" we need to, if not to solve, at least make much more manageable, problems like, in random order:

• city traffic, with public transit and reserved lanes for bikes and, of course, scooters done right

• AI religion (not AI!), with common sense

• costs and slowness of nuclear power, with an SMR Liberty Program

• Impulse shopping, Amazon's monopoly and carbon footprint with making of Amazon a SLOW standard, and Singapore-style shipping

• the end of work, with seeing things in the right order

• almost all the problems created by social media and smartphones, with understanding that they are not the same thing, that RSS is good and so would be really personal clouds

• obesity and some mental health issues, with the good old "Eat Food. Not Much. Mostly vegetables" rule, combined with slowness, at alll levels

• PLEASE, do add other big problems and their solutions with appropriate technology in the comments!

Demand policies like those that from your political representatives, and 99.99999% of any sadness you may feel because science is ending will go away.

Usual final call: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.

This week on my podcast, I read Against Lore, a recent piece from my Pluralistic blog/newsletter, about writing and the benefits of nebulously defined backstories.

Warning: the last few minutes of this essay contain spoilers for Furiosa. In the recording, I give lots of warning so you can switch off when they come up.

One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: “just add the word ‘modified.'”

As in, “Her modified AR-15 kicked against her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger, but she held it steady on the car door, watching it disintegrate in a spatter of bullet-holes.”

Jim’s big idea was that gun people couldn’t help but chew away at the verisimilitude of your fictional guns, their brains would automatically latch onto them and try to find the errors. But the word “modified” hijacked that impulse and turned it to the writer’s advantage: a gun person’s imagination gnaws at that word “modified,” spinning up the cleverest possible explanation for how the gun in question could behave as depicted.

In other words, the gun person’s impulse to one-up the writer by demonstrating their superior knowledge becomes an impulse to impart that superior knowledge to the writer. “Modified” puts the expert and the bullshitter on the same team, and conscripts the expert into fleshing out the bullshitter’s lies.

MP3

Hello, everyone. Very sorry I’ve neglected you. I’m working on a big new trad-WTG post, things have just gotten…complicated in my world. So I thought maybe something lighter and more fun would be a nice palette cleanser while I finish up both the post and the convention in Denmark where I am currently Guest of Honor and Not In My Time Zone. (Hey if you did not know, I am also a science fiction and fantasy writer!)

Yeah, so, well…depending on how many other streams you follow me on, you may or may not know that I have separated from my partner—it its a very stressful, anxiety-churning, financially ulcerating, and uncertain time in my world. I have no other way to excuse my silence but by saying there is pain, and there are ways through it, and not all of them are out loud.

So I made some stupid meaningless art, because that’s the only thing I know how to do when I’m lost. And I thought I’d share it round.

When I had the original idea to do this, several deadlines ago, I figured I'd post it under a paywall. Maybe people would give a little something for original micro-micro fiction.

But honestly I'm just so pleased with it I'm making it an open post so everyone can see what, specifically, is wrong with me that I would, while literally and actually losing hair over multiple by-wooshing deadlines and struggling to pay the cat's medical bills, feel compelled to buy a novelty claw machine which IN NO WAY TAKES REAL MONEY, and fill it with hand-written fortunes/mini-stories as a stress-reliever.

OKAY SO FIRST OF ALL.

Depending on how long you've known me, been following me, and/or reading my fiction, you may or may not know about my THING with claw machines.

My thing is I always win at them.

Now, I have strategies and philosophies about it, and a little knowledge of how the machines work as a last-ditch if none of the aforementioned philosophies or strategies seem likely to work out AND YEAH I MEAN OBVIOUSLY THE PHILOSOPHIES ARE CONVENIENTLY RELATABLE TO LIFE IN GENERAL I AM WHAT I AM. (Number one rule: you cannot care what you get. The goal is not to win a specific prize, it's to beat the machine. To get a prize at all. If you happen to want a prize that's advantageously positioned, good for you, but the ways of the machine are wily. If you care what you get, you've already become attached to an outcome that's mostly outside your control and the machine has won.)

But that all came later, reverse engineered from, and to explain, the fact that since I was about 10 years old, 9 times out of 10, if I walk up to a claw machine, I'm not walking away empty handed.

That bit of The Difference Between Love and Time where the protagonist is ten years old in Ocean Shores, WA, wins at the Time Claw, gets approached by a tiny kid asking her to win for him, which she does and goes forth always able to from then on? THAT SHIT IS ACTUALLY TRUE. It really happened, in that place, when I was 10, and ever since it's probably the only real superpower I got.

I FUCKIN LOVE CLAW MACHINES.

Do I want a real life-size actual one in my house? Of COURSE I do. But those bad boys are anywhere from $2000-$4000 and ain't nobody got cash for that. Not in this economy.

But awhile ago, while I was building the Speakeasy, I had this notion that maybe I could find a little wee dinky one. And when people came to the Speakeasy, they could get a fortune. And clearly they would be super rad cool original fortunes/mini-fictions/tone-poems by me, and in my head all this was just unassailably awesome.

Turns out, you can get a little wee dinky one for a cool $40.

Especially if, for no reason any human could ever fathom, it says BEAR MEAT in large, friendly bubble letters on the front. With a cute cartoon paw print for punctuation.

Spoiler: it did not come pre-loaded with bear jerky.

There were a lot of color and design options available but COME ON YOU KNOW I HAD TO GET THE WEIRD BEAR MEAT ONE. I probably would have given it a whimsical little name, too, but it says BEAR MEAT right on it, and bears have claws, so there's some logic there, and you're just never going to beat that in the Naming Inanimate Things Olympics.

I thought I was ready to go. But the capsules that came with it were way too small to hold folded up pieces of paper comfortably (ridiculously small, like they'd have been lucky to handle a single lonely Skittle) so I had to go order larger ones to achieve my dumb-ass dreams. Dreams that, at that point, I did worry were a bit out of my reach. I didn't have any ideas for shit to write in there, I was way overworked and no idea not immediately applicable to a book or story dared show its face in my brain. But whatever. My brain usually shows up on the night, even if it takes its SWEET GODDAMNED TIME.

So I found a kit full of capsules and toys and stickers that was the same price as plain capsules without toys and stickers, and I have a five year old, so hell yeah I chose that one.

Oh my god, the stickers and toys in that kit saved the whole half-baked scheme. THEY WERE ALL WEIRD AS SHIT. I mean, I guess there were a few fidget poppers and finger skateboards in there, but almost everything in the box looked like it arose unbidden from some seemingly-adorable-but-secretly-highly-disturbing anime I'd never heard of.

Why the fuck is that rat in an ice cream cone. I ask you. THAT IS NOT WHERE RATS GO. F SAFETY RATING FROM THE HEALTH BOARD.

Coming up with fortunes turned out to be not much of a problem at all, given inspiration like that. I spent about an hour writing out whatever popped into my head. I made myself rules no one else cares about but I NEED RULES OKAY. No discarding or editing, composed in pen so no erasing, No longer than five minutes to make each one, then on to the next. Bastian picked the sticker or toy, handed it to me, I wrote the mini-fic to go with it, sealed it up, popped it into the back of BEAR MEAT, and by dinnertime we were in business.

By which I mean not in business at all, as this thing takes only fake plastic novelty coins so it's not like any income whatsoever will ever be generated here, it's just...I don't know. I was moved to do this dumb crap, and now there's BEAR MEAT on my porch.

Now people pull a fortune when they come over and...well, honestly, they rarely know what to do with what they just read. I modeled the style a bit on this old horoscope column that used to run in the Sacramento indie rag when I was a teenager. I highly doubt they were ever based on real astrology, but we loved them for how weird they were. So sometimes people just look at me like I stabbed them in the heart when they read one and I FIND THAT VERY SATISFYING WHAT CAN I SAY?

My last job before I became a full-time writer was as a professional fortune teller (also a thing that sounds fictional but is not, and honestly, kind of amazing training for writing short fiction), and now I get to be that again a little.

Now I know a whole lot of folk pooh-pooh any and all mysticism or "woo" and that's fine. Much like the Claw Machine, I was always weirdly good at it, and while I had strategies and philosophies (YES YES ALSO APPLICABLE TO LIFE), mainly, they were reverse-engineered from what I quickly came to understand people were actually after: a little comfort, a little confirmation that whatever they'd already decided to do was the right choice, a little connection, a little touch of magic, or even the hope of magic, in an unremarkable day.

So don't get mad like I'm claiming to actually predict the future with these. Part of what I have always found very real and sacred about all forms of prognostication, regardless of culture, is the bedrock assumption that there can be and is divinity in randomness. That the card you draw, the stalk you case, the dice you roll, the stars' position at your birth, the flip of a coin, any simple action, has personal and significant meaning. That is so fundamental to the entire concept of fortune-telling it doesn't even get acknowledged or discussed. Without a silent agreement to try to believe that for a second, it all falls apart. Sure, some people believe a subset of humans is just straight-up psychic, but most fortune-tellers use tools that are designed to be randomly arranged/selected/mixed/drawn. And the Schrodinger's Faith the reader and the querent share for a brief moment is that this randomness is not truly random. If we try, we can understand the order this randomness expresses.

It's a terribly human search for, and conscious manufacture of, literary foreshadowing in real life.

Which is why I never called myself a psychic and don't like the word, even when I break out the cards now. I'm not psychic. But I'll tell you your fortune, and on a long enough timeline, it'll probably foreshadow something in your life pretty eerily well.

Stories do that.

And we all need a little hope of magic. Hope that the randomness of life might not be completely pulled out of the ass of the galactic core.

These are some of my favorite fortunes. I know my handwriting is a bit idiosyncratic and many internet folk have visual or other issues that make image-only problematic (which I 100% just typed as problemeatic THE BEAR STRIKES AGAIN), so I've transcribed them for ease of giggles.

There's obviously a lot more than these, but LIKE THE GENIUS I AM I forgot to take photos of each one before loading up the machine, and ADHD means always having a brain that won't go back and re-do a task even if /especially if the fix is very simple because awwwwww but I already diiiid that. So I wait til someone draws one and make them send me a photo of what they got. So this is what's been "won" so far.

I hope you enjoy these as much as I have been enjoying making them. I'll restock BEAR MEAT soon and continue to share the fortunes if you guys enjoy them--I'm oddly proud of this little extreme, pretty pointless, micro-fiction experiment. POINTLESS ART IS ACTUALLY PRETTY IMPORTANT IN THIS FALLEN WORLD. It's just so much fun to be a Forest Witch with a Cauldron of Destiny next to the mulch and the mosquito repellent!

PLEASE TO ENJOY BEAR MEAT IT IS DELICIOUS AND PORTENTOUS.

Nothing random. Only not yet understood.

***************************

No matter how you look at it, everything is just weird and hard. Mostly because we're all on fire and flying through space and we were all supposed to be dinosaurs but we're not. Might as well love people and make art, fellow failed lizard.

Ducks have interlocking corkscrew genitalia that makes it impossible to separate once the act of mating has begun, even if one duck isn't that into it, and that's why you keep choosing toxic people. You're not even into it, you just have a wound in your heart shaped like a corkscrew-knife.

The male seahorse carries and births thousands of babies and deeply understands both emotional labor and intersectionality, so ease up on what you've been told you're "supposed" to be.

You are an Adequate Monkey. Millions of years of evolution, billions of distant ancestors' lives of pain and passion, the rise and fall of countless eons spinning in an infinite hostile void, all came together to create you and then give you anxiety. HOLY SHIT, CONGRATULATIONS!

Any worker bee can become a queen if it's a space of its own and a TON of royal jelly. But the jelly is excreted by the worker bees in the first place; they could make themselves queens anytime if they read more theory, They should form a union. But this is actually about you. Queens of the World Unite.

This is Philippe. Philippe is pure evil. And he's after you. Philippe is also pretty bad at time management. And executive function. And he can't fly. Evil is usually like that. You'll be okay. Probably.

This is an alligator with an orange on his back. So...obviously nothing matters, existence is meaningless, and chaos rules this vale of screams. But good news! That work thing probably doesn't matter either!

Are you a customer who only wanted a treat and got served a flipping rat-cream cone? Or are you a rat who ate all the rum raisin before anyone caught you and now they have a big problem and you're a rat legend?

You deserve love. So does a footless teal four-armed bashful alien with a broken egg for a heart. But you, too.

This is Rufus. Rufus is an Actually Demonic Pig. But he doesn't let his culture dictate his destiny. He's going to nursing school. He's learning to paint. He volunteers with the Fire Department. So why can't you tell your parents how you feel?

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Here’s the trick: the most important part of the paragraph you just read is that I did not write it this month of May 2024, when Stellantis stopped the assembly line of the electric FIAT 500 in Turin. I wrote it almost fifteen years ago, when FIAT, its workers and their unions were playing exactly the same script about the stop of another FIAT plant, in Termini Imerese. As in, we really haven't learned anything in fifteen years.

But maybe now we are to the point where there is nothing to learn, just an already well established reality to see. We need to see what comes after the car and who will do it, because the car as a mass phenomenon is already dying, for all the reasons I wrote here, and all these that came later:

• High borrowing costs are eroding Americans' appetite for big pickups

• The enormity of many cars, not just American ones, also is a "desire to wall oneself off from the world, to float above degraded infrastructure and the threat of violence even as one contributes to both". That is, a mental and social health issue to solve as soon as possible

• Signals that we already are in the "early days of decrossoverification" and that the "End of Private Cars" has already begun even in American cities keep coming

• More people want what the Dutch already have : "streets that everyone, from the youngest children to the most elderly adults, would feel safe using."

• More and more people will drive their current cars till they fall apart, not because doing so does save a LOT of money, but simply because they cannot afford otherwise.

• For many others, their first electric car may be just the gas-powered one they are driving now

• Smart cars are still so dumb that they may cost you hundreds of dollars just for something as stupid as fuses for talking to satellites that shouldn't even exist (1)

• Driverless will never be really driverless (not soon enough to matter for those who would really want to make or use driverless cars now, at least): not if, as we can learn from the NHTSA investigation, the Waymo company with "an overwhelming lead in making autonomous cars that work", is the same Waymo company that is "not even close" to dealing with road construction and road emergency situations

• Even bigger fantasies like air taxis remain luckily unviable, because if they did become real, they would just move traffic jams up in the air (me, 2018) (2)

• Ford is "shifting its strategy for EVs as demand wanes". The 2024 New York International Auto Show was unimaginable even a few years ago: "no Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, or Maserati...[almost no] German manufacturers".

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What next, then?

I said this years ago, and I'll repeat it now: I fail to see how carmaker stocks can still be considered a long- or even medium term good investment. The mass car of 2024 is just another culture that "rose to the top of their arcs of progress… Only to experience a fall and a subsequent dark age thereafter. And most ironically... developed their most sophisticated technologies right before their demise" (source).

What comes after the cars of today may not even be cars. If you ask me, if cars for mass private transits weren’t dying period, personal hovercrafts would be a cool, real life version of Luke Skywalker's landspeeder, that would be perfect in the real towns of our real world that are already reducing paved infrastructures. On a more realistic level, the vehicles that are powering an EV revolution in India, and generally electrifying faster than basically any other type are not cars, but highly effective rickshaws. An even bigger, even cheaper and easier revolution may be subsidized PRIVATE scooters.

But sticking to cars... The engine type doesn't matter. A mass car industry can exist only if car remains a mass product. In a world where population keeps concentrating in cities, rural residents may certainly still need and keep huge SUVs or pickups, but they would very likely have to build them by themselves, Mad Max style, or pay them as much as a house.

The only "mass" cars that can survive are cars that will bury all current car makers. First, simply because of cost and lack of space, there will be too few, mostly shared cars where most people are going to live (cities) to keep Car Business As Usual profitable. Second, because those cars will have to be beyond the capability of most current carmakers to adapt.

We have billions of battery-operated devices of all sort because their batteries, being small, fungible commodities that only exist in a few tens of fully standardized models, can go inside any device made for them, and even be moved from device to device, anywhere in the world. To survive, cars must become like those batteries.

Imagine a "car" that is only a flat platform you can plug "inside", that is below, any car body you ordered separately, including ones you may rent for special occasions, e.g. going to a fancy wedding.

Imagine a car like that, much simpler, much cheaper because it's much more modular, based on few standardized frames shipped in flat packages like Ikea furniture.

Imagine such a car coupled with laws that make its repair by any independent technician really easy and affordable for decades, with open protocols that directly connect buyers and sellers of spare parts.

Such real innovation is the only way for cars to survive, and at some point it WILL happen simply, if nothing else because all the alternatives are already withering away. To make it happen in the least traumatic way possible though, two things are necessary, starting yesterday:

1. Lots of future-, not market-oriented regulation and standardization

2. Super-optimized manufacturing and distribution

The only organization that has both enough influence and is not close, but less distant than any other to the right mindset to make the first point start now is the European Union. The EU just loves to regulate, and this is its real, not perfect but usually beneficial soft power. The only organization that can do the second point soon enough is China. Assuming it’s not already doing just that, of course. Says here, about a Chinese car that sells around $12,000 in China, with craftsmanship comparable to vehicles that cost three times as much:

• Any car company that’s not paying attention to BYD as a competitor is going to be lost when they hit their market

• "Chinese EVs are so good that without trade barriers, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world”

Summing up, the solution, or more exactly the only unavoidable future for a car industry that is also sustainable, whatever you mean by sustainable, looks a lot like managed "rightsizing" by EU-driven regulation of Chinese production of EV, or at least hybrid cars. A hugely difficult task, yes. Wars have happened for much less. But if the EU and China were smart enough to partner on this... Wow!

At the personal level, this means that, wherever you live, your last car will very likely be Chinese but..

Does it really matter, since your next car will likely be your LAST car anyway? Would that be really bad? For whom? If there is one thing we know for sure, is that no matter how the car industry evolves, most of its current employees won't make it to retirement anyway. Their personal livelihood must be guaranteed, but that is a separate problem that would exist and be urgent even if nothing described here happened.

As far drivers and consumers are concerned, a car is just a tool like a screwdriver, not one's dignity. What would be wrong if everybody who needs a car got even better solutions, or a car so good that "pretty much demolishes most other car companies in the world" and lasts at least 25 years, in a world that doesn't make him or her want to wall themselves off?

Usual final call: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.

1. If you don't believe me on satellites, read this, this and this

2. Flying cars? Nah. Also here and here

On May 8th, 1945, what was still standing of an abominable regime that must never return signed its unconditional surrender to allies from all over the world.

Among other things that surrender, celebrated as "Victory in Europe Day" on May 8th or May 9th, also led to the Schuman Declaration of May 9th, 1950, that the European Community and its successor, the European Union, celebrate as Europe Day since 1985.

For these reasons, and because I strongly feel that a better understanding of "Europe" could be really useful for all human beings (including those against any "Europe") no matter where they live, I celebrate this Victory Day/Europe Day relaunching an idea I had sometime in 2015.

Back then, through this article, I discovered the existence of a book titled “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, ”written in 1987 by a Mr E. D. Hirsch Jr..

That book, which contains the “5,000 essential concepts and names - 1066, Babbitt, Pickwickian - that educated (American) people should be familiar with”, was written because “children in the United States are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. They lack cultural literacy - a grasp of background information that writers and speakers assume their audience already has”.

As soon as I read that article, I thought that an European version would be really useful, but had no time to propose it until 2017. Since it didn't succeed, but I dare think it would be even more useful today than in 2017, here it is again. In a nutshell:

• everybody suggests through this poll one or more of the 5000 concepts, people, books, events, works of art, ecosystems, industries, places etc... they think every European should know in 2024 (you can read all the submissions so far here)

• once there are 5000 suitable submissions, I automatically download and reformat as one e-book all the corresponding entries from Wikipedia, and make it available online free of charge, with the same license as Wikipedia

To know why I would do this in this particular ways, and all other details, please read the "How I will build 5000 concepts for Europe, and why" part of my original post and the corresponding FAQs. Before that, however, allow me to outline...

Why you'd want "5000 words for Europe" TODAY

There are at least six big reasons:

• BECAUSE what Hirsch called "cultural literacy" almost forty years ago is even more necessary in an age of deep fakes, crucial elections and highly polarized culture or politics wars, both in and outside Europe

• BECAUSE, even if what I wrote right after the Brexit referendum were false, that is: even if in 2016 young UK voters were not “betrayed” from their own non-voting peers, it's almost certain that at least many Brexiters were not informed enough, and could have used such a book

• In other words: BECAUSE, willing or not, Europeans and their more or less informed choices (starting with the upcoming European Elections) play a non-negligible part in world affairs, and that part will be even more relevant (for better or for worse, is anybody's guess) in a multipolar world. Understanding where those decisions come from, historically and culturally, is helpful even for non-Europeans.

• Also BECAUSE, since Europe sits just besides the only (BIG) part of the world where population will grow, a book like that may make integration of the millions migrants that will reach Europe whether Europeans like it or not a bit easier.

• BECAUSE, whatever Eurosceptics worldwide may believe, the European Union never was about straigthening bananas and similar Euromyths, or about merely making business easier. The real goal of Europe, as A. Cottica said much better than me:

"Europe was never about standards - though they support innovation and growth, and give consumers and business confidence. Standards are just a tool to develop the European single market. And the single market itself is just a machine designed to prevent war.

Europe is about peace. Peace initiatives have happened before, but the European Union is self-reinforcing. Over the decades, EU institutions have enabled, and we the people have built, a dense web of relationships. First it was international trade; then education (Erasmus, anyone?); then business partnerships; then thousands and thousands friendships and marriages. War has become unviable, unthinkable. This was never meant to stop at our borders."

• Last but not least, a book with the 5000 words that every European (or anti-European) should know would be useful BECAUSE, from its General Food Law, Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Right to Repair directive to GDPR, the Digital Service Act, and this year the Artificial Intelligence Act, not only the European Union already is a regulatory powerhouse (see "about peace" above), but also aims to become a "superpower of digital growth".

We can discuss the "growth" part another time, but it's impossible to deny that an European soft/digital "superpower" would counterbalance the very few, extremely powerful companies from just one or two countries that right now dominate every aspect of digital life across the whole planet. That is, if you care about anything digital, any background info on how Europeans came to see certain matters differently from both the US and China could be useful, or at least interesting.

You don't need to agree with me to want "5000 words for Europe"

Those above are my own reasons to have "5000 words for Europe" in one book. I do hope I can complete this project. But even if you completely disagree with every one of those reasons, hate the EU or live on the other side of the planet, I hope you’ll agree that "Europe" is something everybody should know better, even if only to cricitize or fight it. So, thanks in advance for submitting your own suggestions, and for sharing as much as possible this invitation!

Usual final call: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.

No one was more surprised than I was when the American Dialect Society named ‘‘enshittification’’ – my dirty little coinage to describe how everything on the internet is (suddenly, simultaneously) getting (much) worse – to be its Word of the Year. But though the news was a surprise, it was a very pleasant one.

My early writings on enshittification focused on its symptoms, the way platforms decay. The progression of ...Read More

Journalism and classic media in general are in trouble. That's no news, of course, in all the senses "no news" may have. However, there is an interesting development that may come from SOME of those media.

Two weeks ago, P. Fahri wrote in the Atlantic that "Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble", because "the flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing; it’s utterly collapsing."

In that article, Fahri first summarizes a report describing how readership of the 10 largest american conservative websites fell down 40 percent since 2020, then tries to answer "why the falloff has been especially steep on the right side of the media aisle."

In a nutshell, Fahri argues that the obvious culprit is Facebook, because:

• since 2018, Facebook has been "deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members", also on Instagram and Threads

• conservative digital media are much more dependent on social-media referrals than "prominent mainstream and liberal sites", simply because the former are newer.

Just for the record, that "deemphasizing" from all social media is THE reason why I was forced to open this Substack, since newsletters are the next best thing to do, if not the only way left, until people refuse the solution explained below.

Back to Fahri, his thesis is that, when social media (and Google!) started to strangle publishers and adult discourse in general, "prominent mainstream and liberal media" already had already, much more than right-wing ones, established brands, lots of staff and paying subscribers to weather that storm. Therefore, they are suffering, but much less than the on average much younger right-wing outlets, for which the only way to be visible was to excel at "injecting irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people's feeds".

This makes sense, but even if it were completely wrong it would not matter for this post. Here, I want to speculate about one specific consequence that this collapse of right-wing reach may have for the web at large. A consequence that would be surely beneficial for everybody, regardless of their political opinions.

What I hope is that, if the surveillance and censorship of social media is really hurting them so much more than their adversaries, right-wing media will conclude that they have no other way to survive than go back to the future.

You see, there has always been a way to see all the news from all your favorite sources in one place. A way that is much more efficient, much less distracting and much, much harder to control or block than social media. Oh, and also much less expensive to for publishers, at least in the long run, than any other alternative.

That way, available for more than twenty years now, is good old plain websites, with RSS feeds and RSS newsreaders.

RSS what???

An RSS feed is a small text file that contains titles and possibly excerpts of all the latest posts or comments from the website that publishes it. EVERY website management software existing today generates RSS feeds automatically, every time it's necessary, unless its webmaster deliberately turns them off (and if he does, he should be fired right away)

Why RSS is good for people

With RSS, every web user can automatically download and read all the headlines or comment notifications from every source she wants, as one unaltered timeline, in one window, with dedicated software programs, or web services, called RSS newsreaders, or RSS aggregators. With such programs, everybody can do that without enduring any advertising, centralized surveillance or any middlemen. Even without subscribing.

Reading all the news only, say, twenty minutes per day, at whatever time is best for YOU, is as easy with RSS aggregators as it's impossible with social media that only make your world smaller and harmfully faster. Indeed, many problems of social media of today would disappear if they just removed instantness and important people could post online only two minutes per day. If everybody started reading and commenting news only via RSS, and started using "social media" or instant messaging only to share (as little as possible) really personal stuff, like "Pizza tonight?" or "Here's my holiday pics", life and politics would be much more productive. But let's go back again to right-wing media and their collapse.

Why RSS is good for all publishers, right-wing or not

That's simple: any website that manages to convert its readers to RSS can merrily tell Facebook, Twitter and every other similar platform to f * * ck off. And it can keep 100% of any advertising revenue they may find.

Of course, you may ask, if RSS is so great, why are more and more website editors and owners so stupid to not display the links to their RSS feeds to all their followers, alongside those to their social media accounts? Why don't they put the RSS feed icon before those of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and what not? Doing it is extremely easy and surely not harmless, not doing it is unbelievably stupid.

The answer is, I don't know. All I can say is that the problem isn't limited to right-wing media. So many publishers of all kinds (including "most effective communicators"!) do this stupid mistake that if I wanted to list them all in the ”Snob RSS” Hall of Shame I proposed years ago, it would be a full time job.

The biggest sin of ALL media in the last 15 years is not promoting or failing to denounce Trump, Orban, Le Pen, Meloni... or the woke, or the anti-woke, or everything else you may dislike. It has been to not tell their readers, every day, "this idea of connecting via social media is totally cretin and suicidal, both for us and for you. Follow us with RSS instead".

Right-wing media, saving RSS to save themselves.

What I hope is that Breitbart, Daily Caller, Drudge Report, The Federalist, Fox News, and all the other right-wing media quoted or not in that piece are really suffering social media so much to finally realize, before their adversaries...

... that the only way to survive, that is to remain always, surely, directly visible to their followers that is already available and stable since 2002, the only way that (with the exception mentioned below) won't cost them a dime whatever kind of website they already have, is to:

• give up any hope that other "platforms" may save them

• tell all their readers, every day starting yesterday, "let's meet directly, without those damned liberals in the middle: get an RSS newsreaders NOW, it's free"

• tell all their current or potential sponsors and advertisers "give your money to us, not Big Tech", because even at cheaper rates they'd get to keep all the money

The exception is that doing so implies having to host and moderate readers' comments. To that, I answer that yes, it is a cost, but since it's exactly the refusal to pay it that brought publishers to social media, that is to their ruin, it's still a much better deal than dying.

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So, I sincerely hope that right-wing media switch back to RSS en masse, and are successful, which is NOT the same as "I sincerely hope right-wing politics win". This is only about getting a World Wide Web where politics and everything else are less hysterical, a bit more mature than kindergarden tantrums and without omnipotent gatekeepers.

If right-wing social media recover influence and financial sustainability thanks to RSS, I can't exclude that some morons will propose to outlaw RSS. The Streisand effect that would unavoidably follow would help RSS, but it's not necessary. If right-wing media recover thanks to RSS, everybody else will be forced to notice how much better a way to stay informed RSS is.

Right-wing media may help everybody to Make the Web Great Again.

Why not? Stranger things have happened. And while we're at this, let me present you...

The other web thingy that right-wing media are ALREADY doing right

Right-wing websites, and extremists sites in general, don't hide their content behind paywalls, and are also happy to pass it to AI bots. Now, I KNOW that writers must be paid (please consider a paid subscription or donations, see below!) and I am no friend of AI as it is today. But it's impossible to complain that AI just amplifies prejudices and biases, or that people are gullible, misinformed “baskets of deplorables” and so on, if only one side regularly gives both people and bots all they could read:

Usual final call: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.

Earlier this week, Henry Oliver wrote a passionate piece to argue that smartphones are not the source of all social ills. I fully agree, but I also think that, especially as far as children are concerned, he made a bad job overall to describe certain issues and how to deal with them, for at least a couple of reasons.

First, some excerpts

Here are, in italic, six quotes from Oliver's piece, with my comments attached.

1: This is two quotes actually, separate but related:

• Tech companies are called attention merchants and algorithmic exploiters.

• I prefer smartphones to what came before. It’s easier to be uncontactable

With all we know in 2024 about how tech companies work, I doubt they themselves would question the "attention merchants" label, and if I listed here half the bookmarks I have about the first sentence, this post would be three times longer. On the same topic, the second sentence, and the whole piece in general, doesn’t mention at all that, if it's easier to be uncontactable by humans, it's almost impossible to be untraceable by the same companies, which in the big picture is probably a bigger problem.

2: [N]ow the psychologist Jonathan Haidt is promoting the idea that smartphones and social media have “rewired” the brains of a generation of children, which makes them depressed and anxious. ... But Haidt’s claims are not uncontroversial... The evidence is less certain than it appears.

In a world that's still arguing about stuff that's way easier to measure, from superconductivity to average temperatures, expecting any claim on social science issues like these to be really uncontroversial does not seem realistic to me, but never mind. What I am sure about, from both my own experience as parent and decades of volunteering for teenagers, is that the solutions that Haidt proposes have merits of their own, and above all that they are much, much more feasible and scalable than what Oliver suggests. I'll get back to this in the final part of this post.

3: Do we really believe that the effects of this new technology are so different to, say, the arrival of landline phones and cars?

(at least) As far as children are concerned... Hell, yes. No one, child or adult, could ever influence, or be influenced by, hundreds to millions of peers simultaneously with one phone call. As far as cars are concerned, and without negating what Oliver says about them in the next point, the same children who hurt themselves with smartphones know pretty well by themselves how stupid it is to run in front of a car, not to mention that children don't get to drive cars wherever they want, whenever they want, when they are still in primary schools.

4: The most persuasive argument isn’t that phones cause unhappiness on their own, but that it exacerbates an existing trend. Children used to be much more free to play outside and take risks. Cars ended that. It is impossible to allow modern children the run of their neighbourhoods as they had in the 1950s when we have traffic levels (with heavier, faster cars) of modern times... Similarly, teenagers began reading far fewer books decades before smartphones were invented. Phones may have exacerbated that trend, but they certainly didn’t cause it.

This part makes much more sense. Please check the "Stranger Things" part of this proposal of mine to see how I suggest to rebuild cities to fix the "play outside" problem. However, it still leaves important things out, and doesn't end looking in the right direction anyway. The last sentence is true, but not a valid reason to have a personal smartphone before one is 14 or older. Even the reading issue is true, but does it prove that smartphones aren't bad for children in many other ways? If anything, that's an argument for giving every child not smartphones but ebook readers, that is devices that would bring thousands of books right on their nightstands, but without openings to cyberbullying.

Again on cars: yes, they do make kid's lives much harder, but what ended outside play (yes, since decades before smartphones) is overparenting that suffocates children with parents' fears of everything that may lie outside, from aliens to scratches, with parents' pressures to be champions in as many fields as possible, as early as possible, and with parents attaching smartphones to their children just to control them every minute. Still, none of this justifies the confusion I'll cover shortly.

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5: Without the danger of passing cars, [her daughter] has something closer to an old fashioned childhood: free time, where she takes risks, without being constantly supervised. If we can solve that problem, many children will likely be much happier. It isn’t all about phones.

I've said myself that parents must let children play alone outdoors, before worrying about social media. This said, allow me to complete, not criticize, the "danger of passing cars": I obviously do not know how things are where Oliver lives. But I've seen lots of neighborhoods, in Italy and abroad, where the same children who wouldn't live long if they tried to play in the middle of the streets could safely walk on sidewalks and pedestrian crossings, to school or to some friend's place, if only their parents hadn't been made paranoid or snob by systemic pressures (coming also, who would have known, through smartphones).

6: And amongst all this clamouring, we risk overlooking the immense benefits of phones and social media.

1. Standing up against the overmighty state is much easier with social media.... There’s a reason why access is limited in China and Russia.

2. On a more mundane level, phones and social media give us access to the world in a way that was unimaginable to previous generations:

This is one of the weakest part of Oliver's piece. Point 6.1 is true in theory, not in a world where much top-down political control happens just through social media that government have learned how to turn into partners, or block altogether, since at least the Arab Spring. As far as children are concerned, instead, the same point is just irrelevant, because it just doesn't matter how many good things adults may do with a smartphone. To see it, take that sentence, replace "social media" with "assault rifles in every home", then go check how many of the same people who do think that's the best idea ever would give their children an assault rifle to use unattended, 24/7.

For the other point, which is one of the two main issues I have with Oliver's piece, here is how he describes that unimaginable access:

In the last few days social media has meant I booked tickets to a Sally Rooney event, discovered a new piano recording by Vikingar Ólafsson, watched the science explainer videos of Sabine Hossenfelder, messaged a scientist on Twitter and been sent their research paper, discovered and read a short story by Somerset Maugham, learned that Beethoven had a low genetic predisposition towards musical accomplishment, discovered a magazine of Nigerian literary criticism, and watched a video with my children of a komodo dragon eating a pony whole (recommended). Other things I have done include reading a poem by John Donne, using AI to explain a technical article I didn’t understand, chatting with subscribers to my Substack about Shakespeare, and writing about how late bloomers find their calling in life. And this is not to mention the pictures of my baby nephew that I get sent on WhatsApp.

The problem here, that Oliver himself lays out very clearly, is that he is not a meaningful sample on which to base any conclusion or policy on these issues. Not at all, and I say so as a compliment. Oliver is a successful writer with, quoting the first endorsement on his own website, "a rare talent: smart, funny and insightful".

In the same days when Oliver and every other adult with comparable natural skills, birth lottery luck, education and income as Oliver were doing all those marvelous things above, many more human beings of all ages, as in "one to ten thousands times more", were using the same phones and social media for little more than losing sleep to kitten videos, conspiracy theories, culture wars and so on.

Oliver himself tells us that he homeschools his children, that is that his children are automatically shielded from all the pressures or worst they'd have to endure in a classroom full of peers with smartphones. Again, good for them, but hardly a valid sample for general conclusions.

The other example Oliver makes, a woman evidently born with all it took to make "her passion become her career" as a social media strategist (that is an active user, among masses of passive ones of phones and social media) further strengthens the same point: what Oliver and everybody else like him can achieve only thanks to "phones and social media" is wonderful, no doubt. But it's no evidence on which anybody should base any policy or advice for the other 99 point something per cent of human beings.

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The main problem: misunderstandings promoted to laws of nature

Yes, of course adults and kids who lock themselves inside smartphones wouldn't do it if the rest of their lives didn't suck. We can also accept, at least as first approximation, that "phones and social media" just exacerbated pre-existing negative trends, rather than creating them. That's nothing else than the very nature of everything digital: it greatly, greatly amplifies and accelerates everything it touches, both good and bad.

But there is digital, and then there is digital. In his piece, Oliver does outline the solution, that is "find ways of maximising the benefits and minimising the negatives - as we do with many things", but doesn't tell, or see, what the most effective ways are and why.

Here is the most important point that is completely absent from Oliver's piece, and so many still fail to see: the internet, the Web, social media, personal "stationary" computers (including laptops) and smartphones or tablets are five SEPARATE things, that must remain as separate as possible, at least in the minds of parents, educators and policymakers. The dumbest tech-related mistake done in the last 15 years may be just the equation internet = smartphone, which reached the status of law of nature for NO reason whatsoever, except digital ignorance.

Look again at all the wonderful things that Oliver did with “social media”: first of all, none of those things requires social media to work in ways that, no matter how personally immune Oliver is, are designed to be addictive. But even if social media were not addictive and were able and willing to filter out toxic content, the most important truth to grasp is that:

• anybody, children included, can do all those things with a stationary device placed in one's kitchen or living room, instead of a smartphone

• and that that mere change of device makes a world of difference

To see how big that difference would be for adults, imagine a world with all the same social media and online services as ours, but without smartphones, just with camera-equipped good old cellphones. That is, a world where you'd still be reachable wherever you are, and able to do everything Oliver wrote, but... in order to engage in flamewars, or share on Instagram all the food pictures taken in some fancy restaurant, you'd have to wait until you're back home, where you could attach your camera to your computer. In such a world, would you waste more or less time and stress than today?

Back to my main beef with Oliver's piece, that is Haidt and children with smartphones: regardless of the validity of his data, Haidt is not saying that smartphones, the internet or even social media should disappear. When you cut to the chase, the main if not only thing that Haidt says is only that giving uncontrollable personal smartphones to children less than 14/16 years old was a huge mistake that should end yesterday.

But this does not mean at all to give up all the good things children can do online. There is a lot that children can and should learn since primary school about the internet, the web, online communication, digital creativity and so on. But NOTHING of that requires a personal smartphone, with its intrinsic illimitability. This is what Oliver seems to completely ignore, or at least to completely fail to communicate, when he writes that "As with so many of the things teenagers start discovering, the aim should be to teach them the best use of it". What's the point of teaching or promoting the best use of the internet... just with the one tool that is much more dangerous than all the others, but not necessary at all?

What to do then?

The right thing to do is just what Oliver himself leaks out in a couple of sentences, that get hidden by all the rest. The first is when he writes to be "appalled that my thirteen year old brother has a smartphone and is allowed to waste so much time on it."

That's where the solution is. The difference between giving children a family computer they can use, possibly while other family members are around, only between homework and dinner, and a smartphone is very simple. It's the same difference there is between telling a child "hey come here and help me cut the bread with this knife", and giving her the same knife to carry around, 24/7 unattended, to use in any way hers or some stranger's brain may suggest.

In the first cases, the children get to learn and do cool, useful things, with almost no risk. In the others, "what could possibly go wrong?" is not even funny.

Adults are another story for another day. As far as children go, the reality we all actually live in is the one in which:

1. almost all real children less than 14/15 years old do not have the skills AND the education AND, above all, parents with enough skills AND time to help, to use smartphones without harm (ditto for teachers, in case you're thinking schools could or should ever do enough)

2. therefore, the children for whom a smartphone is at best an expensive ballast, at worst a mental health polluter and always an electronic tag are surely many more than those who can and do use smartphones to enrich themselves without any negative consequence

3. both categories of children could do almost everything Oliver does from a normal computer in their living room, which just by its own nature, location and built-in "time limits" would eliminate almost all the dangers

Corollary of all of the above: at the end of the day, it doesn't even matter how accurate Haid's data are. Or, as I wrote four months ago, it doesn't really matter whether "social media" is good or bad for "kids". Even if all THIS critic of Haidt's work, newer than those linked by Oliver, was all true, there is nothing to lose and lots to gain (even financially...) from giving children less than 14/15 years old only stationary home computers and broadband, NO smartphones. Only the first devices give access to pretty much everything positive children could need or want, age too quickly but still much slower than smartphones but block, just by being stationary where relatives can walk by, a BIG LOT of exposure and opportunities for negative outcomes.

So, please learn to distinguish between "smartphone" and "internet" or "social media". Give children stationary internet soon, but delay as much as possible the uncontrollable, unsuperviseable access to the whole internet and to the continuous, digitally distorted pressures from equally unprepared peers that smartphones couldn't avoid being, even if their makers wanted.

Who should do it? Easy: follow Oliver, again, when he writes "I don’t want to ban my brother from using... the internet wisely." This is NOT something that laws or mandatory "age verification" schemes that would never work as advertised could or should do. Thanks, but no thanks. Not giving children a smartphone before they are 14/15 years old is something that only parents can and must do. It's as simple as that, really.

Usual final call: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.

Note: the way this Substack works is that every public essay has a follow up piece under a paywall for the part I wanted to say but either didn’t have space for or, more often, didn’t want to deal with drive-by goblin-screaming by bad-faith internet vultures. This piece, somewhat unusually, follows on from two: Take My Life, Please: The Media's Will They/Won't They Love Affair with American Fascism Prepares For Its Terrible Wedding Night and Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

A little over a year ago, I started this digital space with an essay on, well, digital spaces. It was two months after Musk had taken over Twitter—oh halcyon days of innocence and youth! Everyone I knew, followed, was professionally connected to or wanted to be, whose politics I agreed with, whose morals I admired, all of them were very busy at that moment in time, very loudly proclaiming that they could not possibly stay on Twitter given Musk’s obvious econo-cultural malfeasance and vividly telegraphed nasty intentions.

It felt inevitable. A sorrowing sort of twilight moment. We were sure we’d lose track of each other, because it was just so clear no one could possibly support that new incarnation of Twitter being run into the ground by braying, slobbering, panting jackasses in jackboots.

Because purity is so important, you see.

We simply cannot support anything or anyone who slips up a bit ideologically, even a little bit. There’s no such thing as a necessary moral compromise, don’t you know? No situation ever has or ever shall occur in which a good person might make a politically fraught choice in order to further the cause of progress. Every stance, every word, every action, must exist in perfect virtue, without one single solitary speck of ethical contamination, a thing which a real living human person can definitely do. Every position and policy must hover at the absolute bleeding edge of tomorrow’s most enlightened progressive thought. Doing otherwise will bring fury raining down from the digital heavens. Managing to thread the needle will be rewarded with absolutely nothing, certainly not votes or political support or even a slight nod of acknowledgement.

Because obviously I just can’t vote for Joe Biden. Yes, the alternative is grinding, authoritarian far-right fascism. I feel just peachy about letting that happen (to other people, I literally cannot imagine it ever affecting me, why yes I am the working class proletariat salt of the earth, you’re too kind), but I will not, not ever, NEVER OH NEVER SHALL I check a box next to someone who…has had to suck it up and quietly work with people they don’t like and profoundly disagree with in order to accomplish any version at all of the things I keep saying I want!

AND I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT FROM THE PAID ACCOUNT I NEVER DELETED ON ELON MUSK’S CRATERED HEARTLESS NAZI-INFECTED HAZMAT DUMPSITE TWITTER WITH A STRAIGHT FUCKING FACE.

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In conflict, we find clarity.

We all hold contradictory views: We love our families, but they drive us crazy. We want more housing in our cities, but we don’t want our property values to decrease with expanded supply. We want better schools, but we recoil from a 0.1% municipal levy to fund them.

It’s normal to hold contradictory views, but when those views come into conflict, how we act shows ...Read More

• Leserbriefe
• Rückspiegel an Helm und Brille
• Selbstverwaltete Fahrradläden im Ruhrgebiet – das Beispiel »Balance«
• Gelesen
• In eigener Sache: Mitbewohner/Mitbewohnerin gesucht
• Hohlspeiche
• Impressum

Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and every single billboard is advertising some kind of AI company. Every business plan has the word “AI” in it, even if the business itself has no AI in ...Read More