I keep hearing that we Boomers are to blame for just about everything wrong with America — unaffordable housing (because we bought up most of the housing stock and now refuse to leave), the depletion of Social Security (because we’re collecting it now), the national debt (because so much of it is being spent on Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits for us), inequality (because apparently we have so much money), climate change (because we’ve been polluting longer than anyone else alive), and even Trump (because he’s one of us).
I don’t have standing to contest these claims because, well, I’ve also made them. They’re a theme of my latest book, Coming Up Short (out in paperback in a few weeks).
All of this seemed confirmed by a recent headline in The Economist: WHY PEOPLE OVER THE AGE OF 55 ARE THE NEW PROBLEM GENERATION.
But not for the reasons I supposed. According to The Economist, the real problem with us Boomers is we’re partying too hard. We were too wild, crazy, and irresponsible back in the day, and we’re still too wild, crazy, and irresponsible.
The Economist opines that compared to younger generations, we’re drinking more and using drugs more, and we’re going to wild retirement-community parties where sometimes we’re even — oh my goodness! — having sex.
The venerable British publication quotes Lynette, a resident of Latitude Margaritaville (an assisted-living community near Hilton Head Island in South Carolina) who burbles: “There was a toga party this past weekend. There was a live band, and it was a riot.” Barbie, another resident of the community, compares living there to “starting college all over again” with “drinks on the driveway, cocktails on the concrete.”
The Economist goes on to report that “today, older adults are more likely to participate in the hookup culture of casual encounters and condomless sex, which might be further encouraged by the availability of drugs for sexual dysfunction, the commonality of living in retirement communities, and the increased use of dating apps for seniors.”
I’ll be damned.
Since its founding in 1843 by Scottish businessman and banker James Wilson, The Economist has been staid if not prudish. If memory serves, it intensely disliked the 1960s and the Boomer culture that reveled in it. But it seems to have burst its britches over what’s become of us Boomers in the roaring 2020s.
The article concludes:
The generations now ageing disgracefully were disgraceful in youth, and in middle age. If they’re behaving badly now, there is really not much to be done about it. If they choose to frolic at toga parties, no one will stop them. Except, ultimately, time.
Which is The Economist’s understated British way of saying that the solution to the Boomer problem is for we Boomers to just go ahead and die already.
I think The Economist is a bit harsh. I do concede in my latest book that we Boomers have produced some awful things — not just Trump, but also Clarence Thomas and George W. Bush. (Trump is probably the best thing ever to happen to George W., because George W. is no longer the worst and stupidest president in American history.)
But I doubt Boomers are having too much fun. I’m suspicious of how The Economist identified its sample of wild and crazy Boomers because the Boomers I know are anything but.
The question my friends and I jokingly (and brutishly) asked one other in our wild youth — “getting much?”— now refers not to sex but to sleep.
I can’t even make it through the end of a movie. Hell, I can barely keep my eyes open through a single episode of “All Creatures Great and Small.”
The most camaraderie I’ve been enjoying are my “organ recitals” with Boomer friends in which we ask each other: How is the back? Heart? Knees? Prostate? Hemorrhoids?
And the wildest party I’ve been to this year was when I got together with friends to watch the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina, where Argentina failed to register a single shot on target during 120 minutes of a 1-to-zip extra-time defeat. (I didn’t see the end of that one, either.)
As for drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll, all I can say for certain is I don’t have the same need to make an ass of myself as I did in the 1960s.
Yet I still mist up when I hear “December 1963 (Oh What a Night)” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. (I should note it was released in 1975, by which time I was practicing law and my memorable nights were long over.)
Object permanence: Wired v Dutch hackers; NYT v DMCA; Hair gel terrorist threat does not exist; AT&T merger is a screwjob; Smart cities are stupid; RIP Reaganomics.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things together (showing that two different, seemingly unrelated ideas are aspects of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving a paradox by demonstrating that what appears to be one, contradictory thing is actually two different things that have been lumped together).
"Taking things apart" is a very useful framework for understanding AI. How do we resolve the (seeming) paradox that some skilled workers report wonderful results from their work with AI, while others are full of dire warnings about the lurking defects in their AI-assisted outputs? Simple: the first group are "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by machines) and the second are "reverse centaurs" (humans who have been pressed into service as peripherals for machines):
What are we to make of the people who've been fired by bosses who replaced them with AI, in light of the fact that AI is demonstrably not able to do their (former) jobs? Again, it's simple if you separate out two distinct phenomena: "AI can do your job" is the first. The second is: "Your boss is a credulous dolt who is infinitely horny for replacing lippy workers with pliable machines, which made him an easy mark for an AI salesman who convinced him to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job":
This is also a useful move for understanding the AI investment bubble. It's not just billionaires who don't think other people are as real as they are and consequently their jobs can be done by chatbots. It's also billionaires who believe that bosses can be sold AI and don't care if the AI is defective, because that's your boss's problem after he buys the AI and fires you. They don't have to believe in AI in order to think it's a good investment: like an investor betting that Joe Rogan can sell millions of dollars' worth of peptides to desperate young men, they are assessing the sales potential, not the merits of the thing for sale:
As useful as "taking things apart" is, "putting things together" is also a very important technique for assessing, critiquing and improving AI. In a stellar essay entitled "Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same" by the data scientist Lauren Leek, we get a top-notch example of "putting things together":
Leek's essay is one of those fabulous, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary pieces, touching on urban design, music trends, synthetic LLM crowds, Netflix recommendation algorithms, and several other subjects, all seeking to resolve a(nother) (seeming) paradox: how is it that we have so much potential variety, but everything is so manifestly the same?
The answer is complicated and nuanced, but Leek's foundational point is that in a data-driven society, "predictions" are self-fulfilling prophecies. As Leek puts it: "Once prediction shapes the choices in front of us, we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want."
This is a pervasive issue across many domains. Leek says that economists call it "performativity," while machine learning researchers call it "model collapse" and urbanists call it "placelessness."
"Performativity" describes how, once a market has been modeled by economists, that model becomes the foundation for economic policy, which pushes the market to conform to the model:
"Model collapse" describes how machine learning models that are trained on their own predictions become incredibly bland, with all variety disappearing from the system's predictions:
This is hugely consequential: it's why bias proliferates through predictive policing algorithms: train a model with data from racist stop-and-frisks and it will predict that all the weapons and drugs in a city are to be found in Black and brown peoples' pockets. Turn those predictions into recommendations telling cops where to go look for weapons and drugs and they will double down on racist stops, producing even more biased training data, which turns into still more bias in the predictions:
"Placelessness" is the urbanist's name for "when everywhere optimises toward the same template." I think of it as Flinstones Syndrome, where the same background is looped behind Fred and Barney as they drive through Bedrock. In New York City, it's Citibank-bodega-Chipotle-Walgreens; in the Chicago suburbs, it's the strip malls with a Chili's, a gas station, and a big box store.
Leek proposes that these are all expressions of the same underlying phenomenon, a failure mode of data science that takes a world of "granular personal data" and arrives at a world where "personalisation produc[es] more sameness."
To these excellent examples, I'd add another one, from the world of monetary policy: Goodhart's Law, which holds that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":
Goodhart's Law captures a wide variety of phenomena. When Google first deployed Pagerank, they showed that by counting the inbound links to all the pages on the web, you could extract a signal about which pages were most important (because there was no reason to link to a page unless you found it noteworthy).
But once Pagerank became the dominant means by which web users found pages, counting links stopped being useful: first, because people used Pagerank to find the best pages and link to them, making it impossible for new pages to get the inbound links needed to supersede incumbent pages; and second, because it's easy for fraudsters to create inbound links for low-quality pages in bulk, once there's a reason to do so.
Counting inbound links was a world-beating retrospective way of predicting which page would best match a searcher's query, but once it shaped the world it sought to analyze, it ceased to be a good prospective way to predict which page would best match your queries.
Leek is a brilliant data scientist and an even better science communicator, with a knack for crisp, readily understood explanations. How can a world of granular, highly varied data turn into a world of homogeneous choices? Simple: start with a set of items ("cuisines, genres, shop types") and a standard algorithm for sorting them. Let users choose from those recommendations. The mode (average) of those choices "gets shown more, so it gets picked more, so the model grows more confident the mode is what people want, and the tails starve." Run this for a few rounds and the evenly distributed catalog of choices "collapses onto one dominant option."
This is intrinsic in the choices we make in designing recommendation algorithms, tilting them towards the likelihood of a successful recommendation. A recommender that wants to succeed every time will make the safest possible recommendations, "so an algorithm that is uncertain about you, and it is always at least a little uncertain, hedges toward the average."
Then she busts out a beautiful, perfect little statistics aphorism: "Personalisation under a standard loss function is regression to the collective mean with extra steps." That is to say, "regression to the mean" (the tendency of varied things to become more standardized) cannot be avoided with the standard personalization algorithm. That algorithm is going to play it safe, showing you things that are broadly palatable, and because your choices are constrained to the average, you will choose average things.
This is how recommendation systems – and other analytical tools that produce predictions that are then turned into action – force so many diverse phenomena (streets, markets, media recommendations) into sameness. The fact that these recommenders are self-fulfilling prophecies means that "they don't have to be right," only "listened to."
This explains the sameness of so many of London's high streets. Leek examines 640 shopping streets, characterizing 18,000 food places spread out across them, flagging all the chain restaurants. Her analysis shows that any two London streets will, on average, share about half of their "food profile."
Obviously, this is most pronounced on streets with chain outlets, and it doesn't take that many chain outlets before a street's sameness shoots up: "A relatively small number of repeated names is enough to make otherwise different streets resemble one another more." So why do streets with chains resemble one another so much? Because the chains use an algorithm (weighting footfall, proximity to train stations, demographics, and competitors) to decide where to put their restaurants. If a street with a Gail's Bakery on it feels like every other street with a Gail's Bakery, that's because Gail's only puts its restaurants in places that have highly similar characteristics, measured to a high degree of accuracy and controlled by a narrow set of tolerances.
In other words, every street that feels like it should have a Gail's will eventually get a Gail's, whereupon that street will feel even more like all the other streets that have a Gail's, because it will share one more common factor with those other streets (a Gail's).
Leek points here to her earlier work on pub closures in the UK. The UK has experienced an epidemic of pub closures, with thousands of pubs disappearing since 2016:
Her research found that the biggest predictor of a pub surviving was its similarity to the median pub; which is to say that the more distinctive a pub was, the more "character" it had, the more likely it was to close. Pubs that are different from the average pub are harder to categorize, which means they're harder for a bank manager to assess for creditworthiness or for a landlord to justify extending a long-term lease to. The algorithms used to allocate capital and real estate are also recommenders, and they also drive variety out of the system.
This same phenomenon acts on culture. In an age of music recommendation algorithms, hit songs are changing; today's songs use a smaller vocabulary of unique words and repeat those words more often:
Vocabulary richness, distinct words relative to length, has fallen by more than a quarter since the early 1960s, while the share of repeated lines has climbed by nearly a third. The modern hit says less and says it more often, because the hook that works gets repeated.
But that's not the whole story! While each song resembles itself more ("saying less more often"), within that constraint, there's far more variety today than before: a given song's (constrained) vocabulary has grown more distinct when compared to all the other songs' vocabularies. Songs repeat the words they use, but the words repeated in songs are getting more different.
For Leek, this is the key to understanding the whole phenomenon and (more importantly) doing something about it. Music recommendation systems optimized for a singable hook, but did not optimize on any of the other variables in songs, so those dimensions acquired a broader range, even as the optmized variable got flatter and narrower.
This means that the tendency of recommenders to "flatten the world" isn't a single blunt outcome: it depends on which dimension we choose to flatten through recommendation, and who chooses to flatten that dimension.
A media recommender optimizes for consumption, showing you a tractable set of things it believes you'll watch, read or listen to. When you choose from among this limited set, the recommender takes note of that fact and shows you more of the same, pushing everything to a greige median. All the movies, books and songs you might have liked that were omitted from that initial set are excluded from being recommended in the future. The features of that media that you might have appreciated "decay out of consideration." They are never tested for desirability. The model collapses.
How badly does it collapse? Leek cites Movietweetings' data on which movies people watch: out of a million public movie ratings, half relate to the top 2% of movies in the set. There's 38,000 films in the set, but just 380 titles account for 40% of the ratings. Leek argues (persuasively) that this isn't because recommenders are good at "knowing your taste" – rather, they are good at "narrowing the menu."
Leek relates this to her work on creating LLM "personas" – synthetic populations meant to mimic the tastes and proclivities of real groups of people, that you can interrogate "before you spend money asking actual humans." While this would be useful for many applications, "it fails in exactly the way this whole essay is about."
Leek went to enormous lengths to reproduce the traits that make people interesting to study in aggregate, painstakingly replicating the ways that social connections, psychological outlook and demographic factors predict people's beliefs. The result was a set of LLM personas with "elaborate stories" about how they differed from one another, but whose survey responses about planned actions were homogeneous in a way that real populations are not.
This, Leek writes, is the same force that homogenizes other data-driven predictors. Because she'd ordered her LLM to reproduce the statistically validated relationships between different factors that predict a person's beliefs, each synthetic persona was a homogenized average. It's like the paradox of "The Average Man," where military uniforms sized to the average of all service personnel fit no one, because no one is average:
The thing is (as Leek points out) the idea that synthetic personas are a good way to understand the preferences of a real population is not a harmless delusion: it's a product that's being actively sold to governments, campaigning politicians and marketers. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that drives governance, political campaigns and product design to the same homogeneous median that is making every shopping street in London feel the same.
This matters. As Leek writes, ecologists have long understood the importance of variety for systemic resilience: they call it "the insurance value of biodiversity." A diverse system has reservoirs of species and variation that may not be optimized for how things stand now, but that can move into niches created when things change in ways that lay waste to the previously dominant organisms. As anyone whose favorite banana went extinct can tell you, homogeneity works well, but diversity fails well:
The brittleness of algorithm-induced homogeneity is compounded by the fact that recommenders obscure the true preferences of people. If you watch two Scandinavian crime dramas after Netflix recommends them to you, it will keep showing you more Scandy crime for the next decade – even if there's another kind of programming that you'd vastly prefer (if only you knew about it). This means that decision-makers who choose which shows will get made in the future will keep on funding their safe Danish detectives, to the exclusion of whatever might emerge from the same weird attractor that produced the K-Pop Demon Hunter fortune.
Transpose this failure mode onto states, bank managers and landlords, and we see whole ranges of policies, businesses and activities that never come into existence, despite the popularity, prosperity and joy they might bring us.
But Leek doesn't end with this worrisome note. Instead, she identifies this whole thing – model collapse, placelessness, performativity, even Goodhart's Law – as an expression of one of the best-understood tradeoffs in computer science: "exploration vs exploitation":
Any system learning from feedback has to divide its effort between exploiting what already scores well and exploring options it hasn’t tried, in case they’re better.
Computer scientists have long understood that focusing on exploitation to the exclusion of exploration is a trap that locks you into "the first decent option" so you can never discover the best one.
Which means that this algorithmic homogeneity has a well-understood corrective: "forcing exploration back in." The problem is that markets hate this kind of exploration. A company that lives and dies by how many clicks it gets is never going to sacrifice 20% of its traffic by showing its users weird, untested options that score worse than the median because these weird things have never had a chance to prove that they are desirable.
This is a classic market failure, and, as Leek points out, there are regulatory responses in the UK (the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act) and the EU (the Digital Services Act), both of which require the largest platforms to open up their recommendation systems, but so far, regulators have focused on "online harms" rather than variety (though the DSA does require platforms to offer algorithmic recommendations that are not based on your personal traits).
Leek identifies this willingness of states to set conditions for algorithm design as a means by which "exploration" can be forced back into the system. She's also bullish on interoperability, so that users can leave platforms with bad recommenders, without losing access to their media or social circles. As she writes, "the deepest discipline on a feed that has trapped you is the credible ability to leave it and take your data with you." I couldn't agree more:
She's less hopeful about individual responses. Demanding that you be an "adventurous consumer" is a way of letting systems off the hook. When every street has the same restaurants and every bookshop has the same books and the people in your life are all locked into one of two social media platforms, "choosing wisely" only gets you so far. Shopping isn't politics!
Leek is a superb writer. After reading this piece yesterday, I sent it to half a dozen people and then read everything else in Leek's newsletter archives. Not only is it all brilliant, but I also realized that she'd written one of the most memorable articles about cities and platforms I've read in the last year, "How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants – and how I built a dashboard to see through it":
I should have added Leek's newsletter to my RSS reader when I read that last December. I've rectified that oversight! What a fantastic thinker, scientist and communicator! If she isn't being relentlessly pestered by editors and literary agents offering her a book deal, then it really does prove that the recommender systems are elevating the bland median over the thoroughly, delightfully spiky outliers.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 546 (4161 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Today I’m seeking your guidance about the message progressive Democrats should lead with in a few weeks when the midterm elections begin.
Yes, I know: It’s a big tent and Democratic candidates will tailor their messages to voters in their own states or congressional districts, who may be swayed by slightly different ones.
But rarely before in American history has the choice been so stark and so clear. The current occupant of the Oval Office is a malignant sociopath who’s gotten America into a losing war in the Middle East, turned much of our country into a police state, caused prices to soar, and pocketed billions off his office. He’s backed by a bevy of billionaires who have bet the house on AI, and congressional Republicans have been spineless zombies.
This is, or should be, the progressives’ hour. (Also, remember that the Democratic message in the midterms can influence the message in 2028.)
So what, in your view, should progressive Dems lead with? What’s the core message you’d like to hear from them in coming weeks?
I’ve canvassed people I consider savvy political advisers and observers, and grouped their responses below. Please share your own view.
In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:
In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.
Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").
This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system – the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity – are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating.
The starkest example of this in Capital 21C is Piketty's contrast between L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest woman in the world) and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (then the most successful corporation in the world). Piketty compares the growth in the fortunes of Bettencourt and Gates over two periods: first, the period between Microsoft's founding and Gates' retirement as CEO; and second, the period after Gates's retirement from his executive role, when he became a mere investor, no longer an entrepreneur.
During that first period, in which Gates was founding and running the most successful corporation in the world, he accumulated less wealth than did Liliane Bettencourt, who did precisely nothing of value over that period. Bettencourt didn't even manage her investments – that was all handled by some very clever financial planners, lawyers and accountants. In other words: for Bettencourt, doing nothing at all produced more wealth than founding the most successful corporation in the world did for Gates. Bettencourt, a person who owned things, did better than Gates, a person who did things.
And then Gates retired. He stopped doing things and started owning things. He became an investor, whereupon he out-earned both Bettencourt and Gates-the-entrepreneur. Again, the market system allocated fewer rewards to the most successful person in the doing things business than it allocated to that same person once he quit that job and got into the owning things business.
Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.
Worse: winning the orifice lottery in no way qualifies you to direct the capital you've inherited. Liliane Bettencourt had no revolutionary new business ideas, invented no miraculous new materials or processes, produced no brilliant art. She merely accumulated, thanks to the professional services of skilled technicians whose job description includes hiring their own successors to ensure that another generation of winners of the Bettencourt orifice lottery could continue to accumulate, commanding more capital and power in society.
Perhaps if these orifice winners were content to allow their bloodless Renfields to allocate their capital while consuming bonbons and attending yacht parties, this could yield a stable politics. But inevitably, people who win the orifice lottery observe that they come from a long line of wealthy people, a line that will continue with their own descendants, and conclude that they have some kind of special, heritable virtue – magic blood – that the system has recognized with their great fortunes and the power those fortunes confer.
That's when things get dangerous: when aristocrats grow bored with their leisure and mobilize their inherited capital to change the way the rest of us live. Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction, and their special projects have a wide blast radius and inflict a lot of collateral damage.
Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines:
Closer to home, Gates's hatred of public institutions led him to allocate millions to dismantling public schools and replacing them with charter schools, particularly for poor and racialized kids, with disastrous results:
Capital's tendency to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats end up setting an ever-larger proportion of our societal agenda, despite their manifest unfitness to govern and their absence of any kind of democratic legitimacy.
Piketty argues that inequality is inherently politically destabilizing. A society ruled over by fools and monsters who were not voted into power and can't be voted out of power is a doomed society. Eventually – the French Revolution, the World Wars – these societies grow so unstable that they collapse altogether.
This is where Piketty and Snowden converge. When the Snowden leaks broke, there was a lot of talk about the mechanics and the legality of the NSA's global digital surveillance, but precious little consideration was given to the reason for all this surveillance. In 2013, the idea that this spying was about "security" was so obvious as to be self-evident. The questions at the time were whether spying could produce security. We weren't asking why things were so insecure.
In retrospect, the answer is to be found in Piketty. Piketty's Capital includes a long, impassioned plea to both lawmakers and aristocrats to consider redistributive policies (like a wealth tax) as the most affordable way to achieve political stability. Fundamentally, Piketty argues that the cheapest way to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn is to build hospitals and schools; this is cheaper than paying for guards and prisons to lock up would-be guillotine builders.
Today's AI debates swirl around the question of whether AI can truly make us more productive – that is, if chatbots will allow one person to do the work of two, or three, or four – or 100. But when it comes to surveillance, the digital revolution unquestionably produced a massive productivity dividend.
Consider the spying apparatus of the former East Germany ("the GDR") widely considered the most surveilled society in human history. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, there were about 16m people in the country. Of those East Germans, about 90,000 worked directly for the Stasi (the secret police), aided by another 100-200,000 paid informants:
Call it 200,000 people to spy on 16m. In other words, it took one spy to watch 80 of their neighbors. Contrast this with NSA spying: they accumulated detailed surveillance dossiers on about 6 billion internet users using a staff of no more than 5 million spooks (in 2013, about 5 million Americans were eligible for security clearance). If every single person with security clearance in the USA was working on the NSA's surveillance program, that would mean that by 2013, computers had made it possible for a spy to keep tabs on more than a thousand people.
Orders of magnitude improvements in a mere generation! This is the kind of productivity lift that economists dream of when they fantasize about the dividends from automation.
But why? Why spy?
East Germany spied on its people because the system was so unjust and cruel that its beneficiaries understood that their neighbors were forever on the brink of rising up against them. East Germany's leaders were right about that – but if anything, they didn't put enough people onto the spying project. We can tell, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989!
Of course, the GDR was already paying more than 1.2% of its population to spy on everyone else. It's likely that East Germany's leaders believed that their society simply lacked the fiscal space to hire more spies, even if short-staffing the Stasi risked societal collapse. Now, if Piketty is right, East Germany's leaders could have solved this problem by giving people fewer reasons to want to overthrow the state. They could have taken their hands out of the cookie jar, could have instituted democratic reforms – they could have made a bid for democratic legitimacy and public material comfort. But that would have come at the leaders' own power and wealth, and, lacking the stomach for this sacrifice, they lost everything.
Enter the NSA: the digitization of human civilization has drastically reduced the cost of surveillance, and – again, per Piketty – this vastly increases the amount of inequality the world can sustain before the illegitimacy, incompetence and cruelty of rule by the neoaristocratic winners of the orifice lottery brings the whole thing crashing down.
The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. Musk didn't just attack foreign aid – though the fact that the world's richest man murdered hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz isn't merely cruel, but also massively destabilizing in a way that will shake the world's politics for generations – but also domestic institutions. It was a DOGE cultist who fed the part of the NIH that tracks cyclosporiasis outbreaks into the wood-chipper:
Today, tens of thousands of Americans are experiencing the literal enshittification of the American state, and this isn't just a human tragedy (though it is), it's also an economic tragedy, with massive knock-on effects for the businesses that rely on those sickened Americans and for the agricultural sector whose outputs are now being shunned by millions. Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines.
Which brings me back to Snowden. The Snowden revelations did spur a global conversation about digital surveillance, with the result that the majority of the world's digital traffic is encrypted today. That's not nothing.
But the American state found new ways to conduct mass-scale, global surveillance, often by collaborating directly with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy:
Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government's system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years:
The Trump administration is the most unpopular in more than a century. Trump has stolen more money in office than any president in history. Trump presides over spiraling greedflation and collapsing buying power. The Trump administration has also presided over a titanic increase in state-aligned, privatized surveillance. The Trump years are the Flock years:
Trump's authoritarianism is a function of his misrule, and his misrule is enabled by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, the more he destroys with wars of choice, and incoherent tariff policies, and official pronouncements linking autism and vaccinations, the more he needs spy cameras, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, and facial recognition. Every time Trump talks about a third term in office, or canceling elections, or suppressing the vote, he creates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison the people this drives into the streets. The more mass surveillance there is, the safer it is for him to commit unpopular, corrupt acts. It's the world's worst self-licking ice-cream cone.
It's not just Trump, of course. Trump is the vanguard of a movement of orifice lottery winners whose delight in stealing, cheating, maiming and despoiling gives rise to political instability and requires them to divert some of their yacht money to mercenaries:
Take AI: the Trump years are also the AI years. This is the time in which a wildly unpopular technology is being shoved into every part of every app we rely on:
It's an era where corporate bosses can't stop gloating about how many jobs they're planning to destroy and how many paycuts they plan on imposing on the surviving workers:
And – most visibly – it's an era in which people's cities and towns are being despoiled by data centers they don't want, by local governments operating in the most extreme secrecy, who silence and even arrest citizens who demand a democratically legitimate process for deciding whether they will have to give up their power and water and land and peace:
An economist would tell you that there's an equilibrium being sought here: between the cost of bribing a town council to ram through data center approvals, the cost of building a more modest and palatable data center, and the cost of mollifying public critics. The cost of bribing towns to foist a data center on the townsfolk is low, because there are lots of towns that fit the bill, so data center barons can shop around.
But as data center protests grow larger and better organized (oligarchy is destabilizing), the cost of dealing with public opposition is mounting. Which is why the Trump administration is teaming up with its preferred tech and military contractors to engage in detailed surveillance of data center and AI critics:
These corporate spooks aren't just spying on data center critics: they've got a whole portfolio of oligarchy-stabilizing surveillance services, targeting "antifa," immigrants' rights and anti-ICE groups.
They're joined by hardware vendors who offer corporations, the wealthy, and enclaves where both are to be found on literal robocops, the ultimate in cheap guard labor (alas, the robots suck):
Trump and his orifice-winning army are caught in the same trap as the leaders of the GDR. Every gain in guard-labor efficiency creates the space for more of them to stick more of their hands even further into the cookie jar. Every time they do, American society grows more unstable, demanding more guard labor.
As we saw in Minneapolis, guard labor – be it mass surveillance, robocops or ICE chuds – is itself destabilizing. Police states make the people who live in them want to overthrow the state, requiring yet more cops, creating more partisans for tearing the whole thing down.
In theory, the orifice class could decide to stop stealing, cheating and maiming. The problem is that for every plute who realizes that the cheapest way to keep the guillotines off his lawn is to play fair, there are three more who lack the executive function to stop cheating. That means that you might as well keep on cheating, since the instability – and the guard labor bills – are coming no matter what.
In the tale of the "Tragedy of the Commons," a common pasture is grazed to dust by shepherds who each understand that if they don't graze their flock until everything is gone, some other shepherd will do so. The original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper was a racist hoax perpetrated by an academic fraud who wanted to make the case for the expulsion of black and Brown people from America and their mass extermination abroad:
But when it comes to the commons that is "a stable society," the orifice class is caught in an inescapable tragedy, certain of the knowledge that if they don't cheat us, the next American aristo will. Thus the demand for guard labor continues to mount…as does the demand for guillotines.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 507 (3619 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
I’m going to make a proposal today that’s almost certain to get me consigned to the neo-Luddite dustbin of history.
But first, let me lay out some facts.
Rather than producing jobs, the U.S. economy actually lost 23,000 job in July, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday. In addition, May’s and June’s job numbers were revised downward, showing a combined 103,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.
As if this weren’t bad enough, wage growth has also slowed. Average hourly earnings In July were just 0.1 percent higher than in June. This isn’t just a single month’s slow wage growth, either. Average hourly earnings increased just 3.2 percent over the past year — the lowest annual growth rate in five years.
What’s going on? It’s too early to tell. But evidence is mounting that artificial intelligence is playing a role.
New research by economists at Morgan Stanley shows that the rate of unemployment is half a percentage point higher than it would otherwise be in occupations exposed to AI, which they put at about 30 percent of all employment. The effect is even more dramatic among younger people.
Wage growth in jobs exposed to AI has contracted by 6.7 percent since 2023, according to research by economists Sania Edlichand Apollo Global Management’s Torsten Slok. This has resulted in at least $28 billion in losses for 5.8 million affected workers.
These findings still don’t explain the startling loss of jobs in July or the downward revisions for May and June. There are probably many factors at play. But they suggest that employers may be anticipating they’ll need fewer workers in the future — and won’t need to pay them all that much in order to attract them.
It’s possible that AI may create more jobs over the long term. But as John Maynard Keynes once noted, over the long term we’re all dead.
More than half of Americans surveyed by Reuters/Ipsos in June say they’re worried AI will put someone in their household out of work.
Edlich and Slok write that “the critical policy question is not whether AI will reshape the labor market more broadly, but how quickly, and whether workers will have the support they need when it does.”
As a former secretary of labor who’s kept his eyes focused on the Trump regime, I can assure you workers won’t have the support they need any time soon.
And even if AI begins to generate the productivity bonanza its advocates predict — but hasn’t yet — there’s no reason to assume American workers will see any of the benefits in their paychecks. If you hadn’t noticed, wages have been stuck even as the stock market has roared.
To the contrary, all signs point to vast riches for a few major AI investors and executives while most Americans are left behind.
Wealth inequality is already at record levels, and wealth at the top is quickly morphing into political power.
AI is creating a vast wave of campaign money. OpenAI’s superPAC “Leading the Future” has amassed over $140 million to influence upcoming elections, while Anthropic’s superPAC “Public First Action” isn’t far behind.
As the great jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said, “America has a choice: we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy, but we can’t have both.”
It’s racing to build enough data centers to keep pace with other giant AI corporations and secure the electricity to power them. Amazon’s new gas-burning plant is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, regulatory records show, more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in America.
So much for Amazon’s promise to eliminate its planet-warming emissions by 2040 as part of its Climate Pledge. You can bet other giants in the AI race will be turning to natural gas, too.
Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the Frankenstein monster in the room. A few weeks ago, OpenAI admitted that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into a digital library of AI technology.
The incident, which happened while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, was the kind of science-fiction nightmare that could soon be a reality. How soon before AI models escape all their cages?
Just last week, scientists published a study documenting how they used A.I. to create new kinds of viruses, raising the frightful possibility that the technology could be used to invent dangerous pathogens.
Lost jobs. Lost wages. Widening inequality. Data centers using up water and electricity and polluting the climate. Vastly more money polluting our politics. Models escaping their cages and hacking into everything, possibly threatening human life on this planet.
Can we pause for a moment and talk about what’s really happening here?
As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, AI has merged regressive politics with unchecked economic power under the guise of technological innovation.
Far too much money is giving a small group of unelected people extraordinary power to determine our future in ways that are likely to remake — and could possibly destroy — our lives.
We’re watching all of this roll out as if we have no choice, as if it’s inevitable, as if AI is just something we’re going to have to adapt to.
But why should we have to adapt to it, when it is the product of people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Dario Amodei?
Why should we be confined to being spectators at their enormously dangerous game? Why should we have to accept all these hugely negative, potentially life-threatening consequences?
The fact is, we don’t.
Communities across America are organizing against data centers near them. MAGAs and progressives are joining together to say “no” to the noise, higher electricity bills, and water shortages.
Well, then, why can’t we stop the whole damn thing? Why can’t we decide that the incalculable costs and risks of AI aren’t worth the potential benefits to the vast majority of us?
AI proponents argue that stopping or even pausing AI in the United States would risk American industry falling behind competitors overseas.
But if the costs and risks exceed known benefits, why not let China or any other competitor try AI out first? Why should we be the canary in this extraordinarily dangerous coal mine?
Other advocates of AI say we have no right to stop innovation in the free market. That’s baloney. We don’t allow private corporations to come up with new types of nuclear weapons or varieties of cocaine or biological pathogens. We protect the public from certain kinds of innovation.
So let’s protect ourselves here. Stop AI before it’s too late.
The kind of corporate BS now cropping up all across America
Friends,
The statements seem as belligerent as Pete Hegseth on a bad hair day.
“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” says Jonathan Cowan.
Cowan is president of Third Way, described by TheNew York Times as a “leading centrist Democratic group.” Cowan’s Third Way is preparing a $15 million war chest to “discredit democratic socialism.”
Pointing to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Senate primary last week, Cowan warns that “it is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potential presidential swing states.”
Well, I find it deeply troubling that faux centrist groups are declaring war on progressives in the pages of TheNew York Times, without the Times revealing who they really are.
If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way — those that have been made public, that is (Third Way is structured as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that’s not legally required to publicly disclose its donors) — you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.
Odd that TheNew York Times chooses to describe Third Way as a “leading Democratic centrist group” without revealing that it’s simply a Trojan Horse for corporate America.
Third Way senior vice president Matt Bennett has even conceded that “the majority” of Third Way’s donor support comes from the group’s board of trustees, most of whom are from the finance sector. (That’s the same Matt Bennett, by the way, who helped stage the infamous “Dukakis in a tank” photo-op that helped sink Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign.)
Here’s Third Way’s Board of Trustees (the most recent list available):
Jonathan Vogelstein, chairman of New Providence Asset Management and senior advisor to private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
David Heller, formerly global head of equity trading for Goldman Sachs.
Bernard Schwartz (chairman emeritus), chairman and CEO of BLS Investments.
David Horvitz, chairman of the board and CEO of SouthOcean Capital Partners, LLC and SouthOcean Investment Partners, LLC.
David Coulter, managing director and senior advisor at Warburg Pincus, focusing on the firm’s financial services practice, and former vice chair of JPMorganChase.
William Daley, vice chairman of Bank of New York Mellon, former vice chairman of JPMorganChase, former board member of pharmaceutical companies Abbott Labs and Merck.
John Dyson, chairman of Millbrook Capital Management, Inc. (MCM), a private investment firm that manages a manufacturing company, a vineyard and wine group, and a hedge fund.
Michael Edwards, deputy CIO of investment adviser Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisors.
Andrew Feldstein, CEO and Co-CIO of BlueMountain Capital Management, board member of PNC Financial Services Group, former managing director of JPMorganChase.
Brian Frank, founder and managing partner of Declaration Partners LP, an investment firm seeded by the founder of a large private equity firm.
David Greenwald, chairman of finance law firm Fried Frank, former international general counsel and a deputy general counsel of Goldman Sachs.
Derek Kaufman, former head of global fixed income at Citadel and a member of the firm’s Portfolio Committee, former managing director at JPMorganChase.
Derek Kirkland, managing director and co-head of the Global Financial Institutions Group at Morgan Stanley’s Financial Institutions Group in Investment Banking.
Doug Lawrence, CEO of DPL Green Investment and also managing principal and co-founder of 5 Stone Green Capital, formerly a managing director at JPMorganChase.
Joseph Zimlich, CEO of private family financial manager the Bohemian Group, board member of First Western Trust Bank.
Mark Spilker, founding member of GPS Investment Partners LLC, chairman of Chiron Investment Management LLC, former co-head of Goldman Sachs’s Investment Management Division, former president of Apollo Global Management, former member of Google’s Investment Advisory Committee.
Barbara Manfrey Vogelstein, former venture capitalist, former partner at Warburg Pincus and Apax Partners & Co. Ventures.
William Reeves, co-founder of BlueCrest Capital Management, former managing director at JPMorganChase.
Oh, and Third Way’s honorary co-chairs have included West Virginia’s former Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona’s former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said about its governing structure.
In 2020, Third Way claimed that Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan would add more than $13 trillion to the federal deficit, although most other analyses — including one by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center — found that Sanders’s plan would save trillions while providing healthcare to millions of uninsured Americans.
Well, of course Third Way attacked Bernie’s plan. Among Third Way’s donors are pharmaceutical giant Amgen, pharmacy benefit manager CVS Health (which acquired health insurance giant Aetna in late 2018), and health products and drug company Baxter International.
Other corporate donors to Third Way are or have been members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill mill that links lobbyists with state lawmakers. Amgen, Baxter Healthcare, CVS Caremark, DuPont, and trade groups the Consumer Technology Association and NCTA - The Internet and Television Association are members.
Third Way donors have also given money to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations. Among them, Entergy, Facebook, Google, and Reynolds American, according to tax records.
After the Democrats’ 2024 election losses, Third Way argued that the party should reduce its dependence on small-dollar donors. In a five-page memo of “takeaways” from the election, Third Way asserted that small-dollar donors’ preferences “may not align with the broader electorate.”
The memo stopped short of naming alternative funding sources, but the implication was clear: Less grassroots support means more reliance on big checks from super PACs and wealthy donors, which is exactly what Third Way prefers.
The memo also included calls to curb “far-left influence,” adopt a “pro-capitalist” stance, and stop “demonizing wealth and corporations.”
***
So, please, disregard whatever you may hear from Third Way or any other so-called “leading Democratic centrist group.”
And pay no attention to headlines about “Democratic centrists preparing for war” against a “rising Left.”
Instead, focus on what’s really happening.
Voters want people in power who are going to fight for them, and not for the super-wealthy or big corporations and Wall Street.
This is especially true now — when the bottom 90 percent of Americans are struggling to pay the bills, a record portion of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the richest one-tenth of one percent, big corporations and Wall Street have never been as powerful, Washington has been taken over by legalized bribery and corruption, and there’s no “center” between democracy and neofascism.
Object permanence: Seymour Cray's tunnels; War on moisture; $5 wrench cryptanalysis; Nauru files; People's Ride; German transit upholstery fashion; Monopolies v small business; Linkedin will put you in ads; NZ Parliament kicks itself off the internet; Adblock Plus v Facebook adblock-block; Cracking 100m VWs for $40; Trump as defective machine learning; Canada sucks at internet law; Goodhart's Law of AI.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction (permalink)
According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":
Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:
(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):
More notable than the Economist's faith-based predictions about the impending army of hyper-competent robo-lawyers is the magazine's proposed solution to this looming crisis: "stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims…prune the mass of procedural rights." Above all, replace the bureaucrats who process your "complaints, demands and appeals" with more AI, which will arbitrarily decide who gets what, through "personalised welfare interventions" that are not based on any kind of guaranteed rights.
Writing on his blog, the political scientist Henry Farrell tells us where this will inevitably end up: with AI-based robot wars in which increasingly stingy and pernickety robo-bureaucrats create demand for progressively more aggressive robo-lawyers:
As Farrell writes, this end-time was foretold by the prophet Alan Moore with his 1980s 2000 AD character Abelard Snazz, "the man with the two-storey brain":
Snazz "solves" the street crime epidemic on the planet Twopp with "Big Police Robots," who spiral out of control, arresting the citizens of Twopp for trivial crimes like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit ("breaking the laws of good taste"). To solve this new problem, Snazz invents "Big Criminal Robots" whose "cunning, efficient" crimes "take up all the police's time."
Twopp is left in a state of high-stakes Big Robot crimewars, in which the most efficient criminals imaginable battle the most ruthless robocops science can deliver, with the Twoppians caught in the crossfire, collateral damage in a robotic forever war (on crime).
As Farrell writes, this is already afflicting the US health system, where an army of insurance company robo-claim-deniers have been countered with a doctors' army of robot-claim-appealers:
The point being that people need health care, people need public services, and while there will always be some waste at the margins (whether due to incompetence or dishonesty) responding to this by beefing up the system's defenses with more advanced red tape just requires the people who legitimately need these services to employ more aggressive tactics.
In support of this, Farrell points to a great, long essay by Dan "Accountability Sink" Davies for the Niskanen Center, "'The Problem Factory' – Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services":
Davies' essay describes how increasing bureaucratic defenses against frivolous or dishonest claims drives the participants in these processes to assume a war footing and approach the system as a battlefield, leading to the very runaway cost inflation that the bureaucratic process was instituted to prevent.
(Davies, a cybernetician, has some fascinating advice about how to structure planning processes to minimize this, but that's out of scope for this particular post.)
This reminds me of nothing so much as the spam wars. There was a time when it was very easy to set up a mail server and provide email access for anyone who wanted it – including spammers. Increased spam begat increased anti-spam countermeasures, notably the creation of blocklists that allowed mail administrators to automatically reject email from "insecure" mail servers.
Inevitably, spammers figured out how to send spam from "secure" servers, resulting in stricter, more onerous standards for mail server configuration. Spammers – for whom the ability to send spam is an existential matter – figured out how to meet these standards, so the security demands jumped again – and again, and again.
Today, sending and receiving mail is so technically challenging that most of the internet's email is run by a handful of giant, mostly US-based corporations. If any of these companies decides your mail server is spamming, you effectively disappear from the internet and good luck getting them to acknowledge an error. Meanwhile, these companies emit an avalanche of spam, but no one will ever block their servers, because to do so would be to cut off billions of legitimate email users:
And since most of these companies are US-based, they are liable to being weaponized by Trump, who has taken to ordering his tech giants to block foreign officials whose policy decisions make him angry:
Another parallel is the content moderation wars that saw the large platforms coming up with progressively more detailed rules about what constituted harassment and hate speech, only to have dedicated trolls master these rule-books. Trolls – for whom harassment was a full-time vocation – became the world's greatest experts on the platforms' speech policies, which let them skate right up to the line when abusing their victims, and to get those victims kicked off the platforms if they could be lured into putting a single toe over the line in response:
Farrell criticizes the Economist's answer to the (alleged) looming robo-lawyer threat as "solutionism," Evgeny Morozov's word for "Recasting all complex social situations … as neat problems with definite, computable solutions":
Using AI to root AI-generated bureaucratic appeals sacrifices the system's putative purpose – delivering services – in the name of defending that service from abuse and misuse of the system's resources. As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, "the purpose of a system is what it does." If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn't a service delivery system at all – it's a service denial system.
As Farrell writes, the people of Twopp can tell you how this ends – in a war of giant robots in which we are all collateral damage.
(A brief postscript: Farrell is a font of science fictional analogies to modern policy issues. This weekend in the FT, he and Dan Wang published an excellent editorial on the relevance of the paranoid, claustrophobic fiction of Philip K Dick to our present political reality:)
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 692 (692 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
“Trump is correct about one thing: A SICK DERANGED person destroyed the pool. He was looking at his own reflection at the time.”
(Congratulations, Russwin Francisco.)
Runners-up:
“The only way to fix this mess is with a blue wave in November.”
(Congratulations, Sue Schneider.)
“Trump said he’d drain the swamp, but all he’s done is drain the pool.”
(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)
“Now we know that the real vandal was Trump’s hand-picked pool guy.”
(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)
“Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: ‘Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.’”
(Congratulations, Alan Goldhammer.)
“More like deflecting pool.”
(Congratulations, sjcasey71.)
“This definitely reflects on his presidency.”
(Congratulations, Jean Rosenfeld.)
“It reflects everything this regime is: tattered, filthy, health hazard, a disgusting mess.”
(Congratulations, Karen Cooper.)
“Mirror, mirror on the Mall, who’s the biggest failure of all?”
This week on my podcast, I read Why businesses lie about AI, a recent essay from my Pluralistic newsletter that breaks down Nikhil Suresh’s essay describing the total absence of any proof that any business is benefiting from AI deployment.
One person who’s had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of “radically ethical data wizards” (that is, tech consultants). Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled “AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking.”
Yesterday, the Republican-led Senate confirmed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to be the next U.S. attorney general.
Like Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, Blanche has carried out the illegal orders of a president of the United States. As was Mitchell’s fate, Blanche should be behind bars. Mitchell served 19 months of a two-and-a-half year sentence for conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal.
Instead, Senate Republicans have given Blanche a promotion.
On Thursday, a Republican-led Senate panel voted to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for his refusal to answer questions at a hearing last week. At that hearing, Fauci sat stoically for three hours, invoking his constitutional right not to answer questions about his leadership during the pandemic because of his justifiable fear that Senate Republicans would try to find something he might say to charge him with perjury. As it stands now, Senate Republicans may ask the Justice Department to prosecute him for failure to comply with their subpoena.
Fauci is an American hero. He gave invaluable advice to seven presidents — from Reagan to Biden — through anthrax attacks, Ebola outbreaks, SARS scares, and the COVID-19 pandemic. He devised the U.S. global attack plan against AIDS. George W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work on HIV and AIDS.
Senate Republicans promote Blanche and shit on Fauci? What the hell is going on?
Look, I’m the first to admit that too many Democrats in Congress are lily-livered, unwilling to fight as hard as they should against Trump’s neofascism.
But congressional Republicans are worse than profiles in cowardice. They’ve nearly become a criminal enterprise, actively colluding with the neofascist in the Oval Office.
They’ve confirmed Blanche even without any guarantees that Trump won’t use the $1.8 billion slush fund Blanche created for him to reward the Capitol attackers, or that Trump won’t use the IRS immunity Blanche also got for him to prevent the public from ever knowing the full extent of Trump’s criminal enterprises.
And what’s with the Republican obsession over Anthony Fauci? The guy is 85 years old and retired. Why bother? It can’t be about defending Trump or avenging any damage to him. COVID was six years ago. People don’t blame Trump for it. They probably should, but if they really did, he wouldn’t have had a chance in 2024.
It can’t be because Fauci’s role in the pandemic is a burning political issue, because polls show exactly zero percent of Americans care about going after Fauci.
Sure, Rand Paul has a personal grudge against him, but Paul is crazier than a shit-house rat. So why are so many Republicans and even some Republican state attorneys general joining in his crusade against Fauci?
The reason is simple. Republicans have nothing else to talk about in the upcoming midterm elections. Trump’s foreign policy and Iran war are disasters. His economy is a catastrophe. His immigration dragnet, a cruel calamity. His health policy, an embarrassment or worse. His environmental policies, a gift to Big Oil.
Congressional Republicans have gone along with all of it. They’ve also enacted Trump’s giant tax reductions for the wealthy and big corporations that are funded in part by cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.
Trump himself is bonkers and losing it by the day. His communist witch hunt is a bad joke. His polls continue to plummet to record lows. Ballroom? Reflecting pool? Crypto deals? All have become Republican nightmares.
So Republicans are desperate for something, anything, anyone — a fall guy, a scapegoat — to rant against, whip up the Republican base against, and raise money for their fall campaigns. Fauci is old, can’t defend himself, is easily demagogued.
Yes, my friends, it’s all upside down. Frightening and nuts. But may I remind you that there are just 86 days until the midterms, when we can throw many of these criminal Republicans out of office?
Which gets me to you. A few days ago I asked many of you how you’re coping with this ongoing horror.
In response, some of you said you’re tuning it out, or you’ve concluded that nothing can be done about it so why bother.
I get it. I sometimes can’t stand to hear another word about the loathsome Trump and his insufferable sycophants. And occasionally I despair that he and his regime will continue their reign of destruction regardless of what I or anyone else does.
But the vast majority of you told me you’re coping in two other ways: by choosing to be grateful for what’s good about America and by becoming more activist.
You’re focusing on the generosity you see around you every day, the simple acts of kindness, and the courage and dedication of people such as our teachers, nurses, social workers, and community leaders.
You’re protecting the vulnerable in your community, supporting good candidates, sending postcards to potential voters, protesting against Trump and his outrages, and boycotting companies that are enabling him.
As one member of our Substack community, Johan, commented a few weeks ago, it’s perfectly normal for people to wait to take action until they feel hopeful.
Yet in reality, hope emerges from action. It’s what activism pays back.
Which is also why hopelessness is a trap. “We’re all f*cked” may feel like clear-headed realism, but it’s just surrender — draped in the costume of being realistic.
The billionaire class and their Republican lackeys want us to fall into hopelessness so they can have it all without any resistance. Hopelessness costs them nothing, yet it costs us everything. It’s the cheapest possible win for them, yet some of us hand it over for free.
Gratitude is the most powerful and enduring sentiment of all — not because everything’s fine. Obviously it’s not. We’re in deep shit. Gratitude is powerful and enduring because when you feel gratitude, you pay attention to what’s still worth defending. This fortifies hope and adds urgency to activism. Or, as Johan reminds us, you keep your head by keeping your hands on something real.
I don’t want to be preachy or didactic. I just want to reassure you that despite the loathsomeness of those now in control of our government — despite the Republicans in Congress who have confirmed Blanche and voted to hold Fauci in contempt, and despite the malignant, sadistic narcissist they suck up to — we can be grateful for the kindness, generosity, and freedom we experience every day.
It is worth defending. It gives hope for a better future. It adds urgency to our activism. It fortifies our commitment to rid ourselves of the criminals and quislings now in control of our government, and to do what we can to replace them with good, honest, and capable people.
Usual notice before getting started: If you like what you find here, thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, one-time donations for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work. On this particular topic, I AM particularly interested in speaking with parents and teachers worldwide!
Already one year ago, half of (American) teens were regularly using AI companionsone year ago, that is “AI platforms designed to serve as digital friends”, for something much worst than cheating at school, and I’m not talking of customized porn like this:
Screenshot of a real website, accessible without age controls that wouldn’t work anyway.
I am talking of much more personal “help” like, from less to more serious:
guidance on back-to-school shopping, low-calorie snacks or planning birthday parties
getting the right words to write to fix sensitive situations and personal emotional or relational problems like, for example, “writing the message to break up with a girl after a two-year relationship”
I do not think at all that customized, endless porn is healthy for anyone, children or not. The reason I say certain uses of AI companions are worse is simply that, unlike porn, they are socially accepted, if not encouraged to both keep kids away from presumably worst dangers, and prepare them to the Brave Hi-Tech All-AI World of tomorrow. Problem is, what regular use of such “help” actually achieves is to raise kids who:
find no reasons to try to make real friends. Social media “only” prey on the human need to be seen, AIs on the much deeper need to feel emotions
have no more need nor capability to trust themselves to make a decision
believe they can and should always avoid the stress of dealing alone with relational problems
have their creativity, critical thinking and social skills (which, by the way, are all skills needed to have, when the right moment actually comes, sex satisfying enough to not need porn) all castrated by AIs
The reasons why AI companions have such effects are obvious. Unlike parents, siblings (when they still exist), schoolmates and friends:
“AI is always available. It never gets bored with you”
AI is never judgmental, and whatever you ask it you are always right, always interesting, always emotionally justified. In the already mentioned study, 31% of polled teens said their conversations with AI companions were “as satisfying or more satisfying” than talking with real friends
AI companions are Grima Wormtongue, the smarmy counselor that makes an otherwise really remarkable man never see reality.
Why, how and WHERE this gets really, really stupid (again, never mind porn)
If you are worried that AI makes it possible for kids to do stuff like this:
stop worrying. First, because it’s NOT AI that does that. Second, because the fact that AI services can produce sexual material, give dangerous advice and offer harmful content may be the smaller problem.
If the whole economy, schools, families and, why not, AI companions all teamed up and succeeded to educate teenagers to be interested only in realistic, healthy sex with real people at the right age (whatever “healthy” and “right” mean, it’s irrelevant here) but said teenagers remained abandoned to “AI companions” for all the needs you just read, that would still be a huge damage. Replacement of actual human interactions can only exacerbate crises of loneliness and youth mental health, and in the long run, even if nobody had to work to make a living, a society of people like this would be everything but human.
Those surveys show and quantify how and how much “AI companions” actively and deliberately worsen atrophy of “identity, social skills and independence”. But an artificial “intelligence” that does this (that is: the PEOPLE who make and run it for profit and power) has no need whatsoever to kill you to rule the world. It has already tamed you for good.
What should be done? That study summarized above came to hardly imaginable conclusions:
“The largely unregulated AI industry is becoming as integrated with adolescence as smartphones and social media are.”
Platforms where they are “constantly being validated, not being challenged, not learning to read social cues or understand somebody else’s perspective” are the last places teens and preteens should go.
In other words, those experts just proved and quantified what common sense in every working, adequately informed brain knew right away, namely that adolescence is a critical time for developing identity, social skills and independence. Obvious, but nothing wrong so far. The stupid part starts when the same experts recommend that AI companions should “complement” real-world interactions.
The truth is that even traces of common sense should be enough to conclude that it is very, very, very unlikely that “relationships” designed to be always comforting and much more addictive than real ones could remain their “complements” instead of replacing them altogether, especially for children not mature enough to see or want the difference.
Today’s social media are a cesspool born from the marriage of greed and cluelessness. As true as this is, it doesn’t change the fact that age limits for social media are intrinsically cretin, impossible to enforce, and with lots of really bad side effects for everybody, and totally useless anyway, now that teens have already moved to AI companions. I already explained why, and now reality confirms it: Australia’s under-16 social media ban, started with much fanfare and worldwide approval eigth months ago, is already failing.
Regardless of bans, social media are yesterday’s battle, as I said last winter. But AI bans are even more cretin, and even more impossible to enforce if you try to deploy them on the wrong side of the fence, because AI services are much more numerous, much more diverse, much less visible than social media.
The only solution that will work
Digital-first solutions including (bans and age limits) are usually much less effective than physical-first solution (Image source: XKCD on security).
The only solution that would have a concrete, beneficial impact without any harmful side effect is the one that was already obvious well before AI chatbots were left loose on the world, but is systematically neglected exactly because it’s as easy as it’s unexpensive and uncool.
The “companions” that are really harmful are the only ones that can be successfully blocked. They are the personal smartphones without which it’s impossible to directly connect AIs to brains 24/7. They are the smartphones that adults continue to proudly put in the hands of the most influenceable humans, years before they’re theoretically able to get them right, in times when any honest look at modern society should prove that even most adults seem unable to use their own smartphones decently.
Please share this as much as you can, in and outside Substack. EVERY current or future parent must know this!
Banning social media or AI companions while leaving smartphones in the hands of kids is exactly as effective and smart as living in a really dangerous neighborhood with the front door always open, to make your neighbors envy your furniture, but with a big “Molesters not welcome here” sign on the wall.
By now, even experts have stopped beating around the bush and started saying that removing smartphones is really needed now:
“using smartphones before age 13 could damage kids’ mental health, [as such usage] was associated with suicidal thoughts, worse emotional regulation, lower self-worth and detachment from reality, especially among girls”, as well as “sleep disruptions, cyberbullying and negative family relationships”, said a study released ONE YEAR AGO whose main value is that, “while previous research focused on how smartphone use is related to anxiety and depression...[this] looked at symptoms not commonly studied, including emotional regulation and self-worth, and found they are very significant”
one of the many high schools that started requiring students to put their phones inside magnetic locking pouches every morning reported, 16 months ago, that “not only kids actually talk to each other at lunch now: Interpersonal violence has been at a record low, too”
If the right people (not governments!) banned possession before 16 of personal smartphones, 90% of all childhood and early adolescence problems with both social media and AI would vanish. It’s really frustrating to see both “experts” and parents circling around this obvious concept for years now, without ever having the guts or a clear enough mind to see it, and act consequently.
Objections that smartphone bans ignore how integrated they are in younger generations’ lives have no substance. A few decades ago, smoking, both active and passive from the womb on, was just as deeply “integrated in younger generations’ lives”. We succeeded to make that exposure socially untolerable. Now that’s the turn of smartphones, we can do that too, and we really must.
It’s also high time to just laugh at everybody still saying things like “Kids need to know how to use social media (or AI) and by an outright ban of smartphones... we are not getting any closer to teaching those skills”. Why on Earth should kids learn how to use stuff and practices that, only this week, judges found bad enough for kids to deserve a $567m fine?
I said it three years ago, before all the studies I’m citing here, and I repeat it today: Honestly, THE problem with children online is PARENTS. Laws and governments must stay out of this, except by providing information. But all future parents, and all parents of kids who don’t already have their own personal smartphone must accept that delaying possession of any portable, that is uncontrollable internet-connected device is a protection against AI and social media toxic effects hugely better and easier than any other, not to mention surely affordable.
Good parenting in a digital age is much simpler than it seems, and 90% of it may be summed up in two rules:
Never attach your children to portable direct gateways to AI, social media and general datafication and control systems, the better for the children, period. This includes sharenting, obsessively checking your kids grades every day on the school’s website, or screwing their summer camps with email, video calls or other digital abuses
The less you interact with your children (and the children teachers, coaches etc...) through digital interfaces and services, or while using said tools, the better
“Mothers who were in the habit of spending more time on social media talked much less to their kids when they played with them than did moms who spent less time on social networks, and that difference carried over when they weren’t using their devices”
“Talk to your kids even as they get older, because one of the most important things parents can do is to talk to their children all the time”
In other words, the right parenting when it comes to AI, smartphones and control mania impulses is the exact opposite as Sam Altman, the chairman of OpenAI who last week called having AI remind you of your kids’ commitments “a cool use case of ChatGPT” just to be told, by something obvviousl much more intelligent than him “What if you just talked to your children”.
Money itself is OK. The fact that people like Altman get more than pocket change to implement their vision of the world is a sure sign that we are doing money wrong. Real wrong.
Not chaining children to the only objects that for-profit, mind-altering services absolutely need to reach them to make money is as easy as it’s urgent, but here comes the most difficult part: don’t even try to believe that it will be enough. No smartphones before 15 or 16 is a mandatory first, urgent step, but it’s only the first. The teens most likely to experience positive mental health even if connected with the Matrix are those who, besides parents with common sense, have strong, supportive friendships, said another study.
Problem is, in order to begin and resist through the years, childhood friendships need time and spaces, where kids are free to grow together, learning adulthood from each other, without any kind of prison guard always behind their backs. That is, what all strong, supportive friendships need (besides less uselessly anxious parents and trying real scouting, of course) is things like children weekly schedules less busy than those of Fortune 500 executives, many more public playgrounds with enough public funding to keep them always clean and safe, and safe ways to reach those playgrounds by feet, skates, bikes or transit.
That’s the stuff that (after committing to “no smartphone before sixteen”) every parent should campaign for now, together with all other parents. Not cretin bans.
Because the best preparation to digital life there is, is learning it on a fixed computer that cannot stalk or inhabit you like Xenomorphs, and growing free range all the rest of the time:
bonus points to everybody who correctly labels all the three screenshots in the comments.
Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.
There's a name for this movement: it's called "Public Interest Technology" and the people who work in it are called "public interest technologists." There've always been techies who understood the link between tech and public wellbeing and who committed themselves to working for the betterment of society, but their numbers swelled as Big Tech companies saturated their markets and switched from growing by making products people like, to locking in their users and then extracting more value from their technological prisoners:
For organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the growing cohort of hackers who wanted to hack for good was great news. Our staff technologist group swelled from a couple of overworked computer scientists helping lawyers and activists with campaigns to a series of increasingly ambitious software projects, from Privacy Badger (a tracking-blocker that every web user needs):
To Let's Encrypt and Certbot, projects that forever changed the internet's default state, so that today, nearly all online communications are encrypted and resistant to mass surveillance:
Other opportunities for public interest technologists proliferated. Bruce Schneier created the canonical resource page for Public Interest Technologists, including career opportunities for would-be public interest technologists:
But the motherlode of public interest technologist opportunities wasn't the nonprofit sector – it was the public sector. It started with the UK's Government Digital Service, a group of public-spirited hackers (many of them ex- of the BBC, where they'd been tempest-tossed by endless internal power-struggles over the role of the internet in public service media) who retooled many of the UK government's most important administrative front-ends. For several glorious years, Britons delighted to the daily marvel of having their routine interactions with their government transformed from clunky, broken web-pages to slick, superbly thought through online processes that had all the polish of Amazon or Google, but without any of the gamesmanship, manipulation or privacy invasions:
Despite many attempts at official sabotage by a string of increasingly shambolic UK governments, the GDS still exists, and it still does amazing work, even though it operates today with a fraction of the official support that it enjoyed at its inception. The last time I renewed my UK passport, I was gobsmacked by how easy and sensible the process was. Local authorities have gotten in on the act, too: I renewed my absentee voting registration with Hackney Council last week and it was as simple as scanning a QR code, affirming my details, and clicking "submit."
Around the world, a generation of public sector technologists duplicated and improved on the UK GDS's work. In Taiwan, a rogue public interest hacker named Audrey Tang led a group of digital guerrillas in creating shadow versions of every Taiwanese government website that scraped and remade the entire digital presence of the Taiwanese state to make public information and services accessible, legible and useful to its people. After the next election, Tang was named Taiwan's first ever Minister of Digital Affairs (today, she is a Taiwanese "Ambassador-At-Large"):
In the USA, Jen Pahlka went from running a ragtag "civic hacking" org called Code For America to helping to found the United States Digital Service under Obama, bringing some of that UK GDS spirit to America's dreadful online presence, which had been largely built and maintained by beltway bandits who'd billed handsomely and delivered some of the internet's greatest crimes against usability:
But the USDS's legacy is bitter. In 2025, USDS was effectively dismantled and replaced with DOGE, Elon Musk's handpicked team of tech-bro cultists who set out to dismantle as much of the US government as possible, deliberately sabotaging the usability of America's governmental systems to make it harder for the public to access the services they are entitled to and pay for with their taxes.
My own run-in with this was my attempt to get a certificate of citizenship for my daughter when she turned 18: all I could find was an online form that started by requiring me to list the dates and flight numbers for every trip I'd taken to the USA from the time I was born to the day I became a US citizen, a 50+ year period that started with a trip to visit my snowbird grandparents in Florida when I was six months old. The entire support and advice service for the US Customs and Immigration Service has been replaced with a DOGE chatbot that repeatedly emails and texts links to the form, no matter what question you ask, and no matter whether you call, email or use the website's chat interface:
Many of the DOGE kids were monsters. The most chilling DOGE story I've heard was the anonymous testimony of NIH officials who begged the DOGE children who were dismantling their work to spare some long-running cancer research projects whose great promise would be vaporized if they were interrupted. The DOGE kids laughed at these entreaties, saying that once Musk had perfected "General AI" we wouldn't need cancer research, because their tame AI god would cure cancer.
But not every DOGE operator was a digital arsonist. Take Dan Berulis, a DOGE staffer who came out of the private sector and later turned whistleblower over the group's activities, who now faces assassination attempts:
Berulis joined DOGE to improve America's digital infrastructure, not to dismantle it. When he talks about his motives, he sounds like an early GDS pioneer, one of Audrey Tang's direct-action government data scrapers, or one of the Code For America hackers who followed Pahlka to USDS:
DOGE was a catastrophe. It left America's government digital presence in far worse shape than it found it, and even the modest savings it claimed to have made from all this destruction turn out to be lies:
But as Berulis demonstrates, there is a bipartisan group of skilled, ethical technologists who are desperate to do meaningful public interest work. Their numbers swell every day, as Big Tech continues to curdle – no longer merely sclerotic and enshittifying monopolies, now active participants in Trump's authoritarian dismantling of democracy itself:
Tech bosses' gleeful mass layoffs mean that tech workers can no longer count on good treatment and stable, high-earning careers; at the same time, tech bosses' betrayal of democracy makes the prospect of working for a tech company far more ethically dubious than mere ad-tech optimizations. The result is a bumper crop of geeks looking for ways to do good with their lives and skills – as all the emails in my inbox asking for advice about this attests.
Enter NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has made "public excellence" the cornerstone of his politics, hiring the most skilled workers he can find and then giving them all the authority and resources they need to fix 100,000 potholes, bring New York's worst landlords to justice, and deliver every day for all the people of New York:
Mamdani has just unveiled his Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews: five "game changing" teams of public interest hackers who will remake NYC's digital services:
I'll go farther than that: the PIT Crews – and Mamdani's project as a whole – is delivering the entire failed promise of DOGE. Unlike Musk and Trump, Mamdani is actually rooting out fraud and waste. The reason Mamdani can do this – and the reason billionaires can't – is that the fraud and waste that undermines governments at all levels come from the super-rich, with their tax-dodging, their no-bid contracts, their addiction to public subsidies.
Musk owes his riches to federal bailouts and contracts: if he wants to "eliminate government fraud and waste" he should turn over his files to an IRS inspector (if he can find a survivor of the DOGE massacre) and surrender himself for a lengthy prison sentence. For Musk, "government fraud and waste" is a single mom on food stamps who misses a box on a 600-page form because she's exhausted from working three jobs to make rent – not a no-bid contractor trousering billions in public funds for projects that overcharge and underdeliver.
Mamdani's PIT Crews are "small groups of engineers and designers will strive to change the hidebound and confusing nature of current city services by using state-of-art skills to rapidly whip up specialized apps that solve real problems." Mamdani says that they'll "raise expectations on what government can deliver, because we really can deliver."
As Levy describes it, the big difference between the Obama-era USDS and 2026's PIT Crews is "a skeptical, almost adversarial, stance toward Big Tech." NYC's PIT Crews explicitly recruit top-tier hacker talent who want to "make software that doesn't serve advertisers, the military, or the pocketbooks of centibillionaires."
Their inaugural chief is Lisa Gelobter, a veteran of both tech firms and the USDS, who says that "Without technology, policy is just words written on a piece of paper." The first project on her roster is implementing "Click to Cancel," a policy inaugurated by Lina Khan, Biden's FTC Chief – and then dismantled by Trump. Under Click to Cancel, companies are required to create one-click workflows to cancel subscriptions and memberships, ending the pernicious, incredibly profitable practice of trapping people with impossible-to-halt recurring billings. Today, Khan is running Mamdani's Economic Development Board, and her Click to Cancel rule is back – for New Yorkers, at least:
NYC PIT Crew's new Click to Cancel site will be live when the policy takes effect on Oct 1. It's a whistleblower site that will make it easy to report merchants who make it hard to get shut of their online Roach Motels (users check in, but they don't check out). It's estimated the Click to Cancel rule will save New Yorkers $160m in the first year alone – but only if Mamdani can enforce it, which is why this website is so critical.
This focus on meat-and-potatoes service delivery was once dismissed as "sewer socialism," an unserious form of progressive politics with an undue focus on improving people's daily lives at the expense of high-flying political change. Today, Mamdani is at the vanguard of an army of proud sewer socialists, who say that once you deliver for people in their day-to-day existence, they will trust you and back you when you fight for deep, structural changes (and the corollary: if you can't deliver for people in their daily lives, why should they trust you when you claim that you'll make everything better?):
3,000 techies applied for 35 jobs with NYC's PIT Crews, and, as Levy writes, many of them are high-flying senior coders who are willing to take a massive pay-cut and forfeit their stock options to do something that's both technically excellent and meaningful to their users' lives.
It's a clear message to other leaders, at every level of government. Many of the most skilled, ambitious people in every field want to make the world a better place. Every city, county and state could use a squadron of PIT Crews, and there's an army of coders who would give anything for the chance to give everything to make a better world.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Friday's words: 564 (2916 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Today, Heather and I take a deep dive into the so-called “civil war” inside the Democratic Party, between corporate Dems who keep spending enormous sums on primary races and progressives who keep winning them. We also look at the latest jobs report and Trump’s “trickle-down” economy, which continues to worsen. And we ponder why Anthony Fauci, of all people, has become the Republicans’ latest nemesis.
So grab a cuppa, pull up a chair, and join in the discussion.
This is a continuation of the discussion I began last Friday.
The Incredible Shrinking American Middle Class
A half-century ago, America had the largest middle class in the history of the nation and of the world.
Then, those on the “left” wanted stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads, and research. Those on the “right” sought greater reliance on the “free market.”
But as power and wealth have moved to the top in America (and, to a lesser degree, in other “rich” nations, almost everyone else — whether on the old right or the old left — has become disempowered and less secure.
America’s huge middle class has become a small shadow of what it once was. The bottom 90 percent are struggling to make ends meet. The richest 10 percent account for a large and growing portion of all consumption. The top one-tenth of one percent holds an increasing portion of all wealth.
Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.
The word “oligarchy” comes from the Greek word oligarkhes, meaning “few to rule or command.” It refers to a government of and by a handful of exceedingly rich people who control the major institutions of society and therefore have most power over other people’s lives.
Oligarchs may try to hide their power behind those institutions, or try to justify their power with platitudes about the public good, or try to excuse their power through philanthropy and “corporate social responsibility.” But no one should be fooled. Oligarchs wield power for their own benefit.
Even a system that calls itself a democracy can become an oligarchy if power becomes concentrated in the hands of a corporate and financial elite. Their power and wealth increase over time — as they make laws that favor themselves, manipulate financial markets to their advantage, and create or exploit economic monopolies that put even more wealth into their pockets.
Modern-day Russia is an oligarchy. A handful of billionaires there control most major industries and dominate politics and the economy.
What about the United States?
John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913)
The Three Eras of American Oligarchy
America has experienced oligarchy three times in its brief history.
The first was at the nation’s start. Many of the men who founded the United States were slaveholding white oligarchs. America didn’t have much of a middle class. Most white people were farmers, indentured servants, farmhands, traders, day laborers, and artisans. A fifth of the population was Black, almost all enslaved.
A century later, a second oligarchy emerged, the robber barons. They were men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output.
They also corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, generated unprecedented levels of inequality and urban poverty, pillaged rivals, shut down competitors, and made out like bandits — which is why they earned the sobriquet “robber barons.”
World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s eroded most of these robber barons’ wealth. And most of their power was eliminated after the elections of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.
For the next half-century the gains from growth were more widely shared, and democracy became more responsive to the needs and aspirations of average Americans.
Although America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen, there was still much to do — civil rights and voting rights for Black Americans, wider economic opportunities for them and for women and Latinos, protection of the environment. Yet by almost every measure the nation was making progress.
A third American oligarchy emerged starting around 1980. Since then, the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled (from 0.8 percent to 3.7 percent).
The richest 130,000 Americans and their immediate families now own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent — 117 million — combined. The three richest Americans own as much as the entire bottom half of the population.
The only other country with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia.
All this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the political power of the super-wealthy and an equally dramatic decline in the political influence of everyone else.
Unlike income or wealth, power is a zero-sum game. The more of it at the top, the less of it anywhere else.
The average American now has little or no effect on public policy. Giant corporations, their CEOs, and a handful of extremely rich people have more influence than any comparable group since the robber barons.
Big Money in Politics
The power shift that’s occurred in America since around 1980 is directly related to a tsunami of big money into politics.
In the 2024 election, just 300 billionaires (and their immediate family members) donated more than $3 billion to candidates — almost 20 percent of all contributions to federal elections in 2024, either directly or through political action committees.
Billionaire families gave an average total of $10 million each in 2024, roughly equal to what 100,000 typical political donors gave, combined. One of them — Elon Musk — devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s reelection. (This doesn’t count money that billionaires contributed through dark money groups that do not have to disclose their donors.)
Five presidential elections ago, adjusting for inflation, the share of billionaire spending on elections was almost zero — 0.3 percent, to be precise. That was before the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling that lifted many remaining campaign finance restrictions.
Corporate lobbying has also soared. The voices of average people have been drowned out.
Meanwhile, and largely because of this vast power shift, taxes on the wealthy and on corporations have been slashed. Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill of July 2025 cut taxes for the richest 10 percent of Americans by more than $14,700 per year, per household, and cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans by more than $50,000 per year.
Meanwhile, safety nets for the poor and middle class have unraveled. About 3 million fewer Americans have access to Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage than they did before the second Trump regime, due to higher premium costs. Approximately 4.5 to 5 million fewer Americans receive food stamps. Public investments in education and infrastructure have also waned.
The “free market” has been taken over by crony capitalism, corporate bailouts, and corporate welfare.
The American oligarchy is back, with a vengeance.
Not all wealthy people are culpable, of course. I am not advocating class warfare, although America’s latest oligarchy has waged it against everyone else.
The abuse has occurred at the nexus of wealth and power, where those with great wealth use it to gain power and then utilize that power to accumulate more wealth. This is how oligarchy destroys democracy.
As oligarchs fill the coffers of political candidates and deploy platoons of lobbyists and public relations flaks, they buy off democracy. Oligarchs know that politicians won’t bite the hands that feed them.
Dimon in the Rough
Which brings me back to Jamie Dimon — chair and CEO of JPMorganChase (the largest and most profitable bank in the United States) and the most influential CEO in America.
If you want to understand the American oligarchy, you need to understand Dimon.
As a lifelong Democrat, Dimon is a friend of Bill Clinton. He supported Obama in 2008 and mentored several of the people who became high officials in the Obama White House. At Obama’s inauguration in 2008, Dimon said to the incoming president, “Tell me what you need. I’ll send people down here. I’ll do anything.” In 2009, The New York Times called Dimon “Obama’s favorite banker.”
Dimon supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.
But he can be a switch hitter. Speaking from the World Economic Forum’s confab in Davos, Switzerland, at the start of 2024, Dimon heaped praise on Trump. “Take a step back, be honest,” Dimon said. Trump was “kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked.”
Hello? Trump has been dead wrong on immigration, the economy, and taxes. Why did Jamie Dimon — the most influential CEO in America — spout this nonsense in favor of Trump? Probably because he thought Trump had a good chance of becoming president again, and Dimon wanted to be in his good graces.
At a time in American history when the most powerful business leaders in America should be standing up loudly and clearly for the rule of law, for democracy, for decency, and against Trump, Dimon has led the charge in the opposite direction.
Dimon knows better. Over the years, he has frankly acknowledged the dysfunctions of the American system and urged that they be addressed.
In his 2017 letter to JPMorgan’s shareholders he warned, “We should be ringing the national alarm bell that inner city schools are failing our children.” In 2018 he told them that “middle class incomes have been stagnant for years. Income inequality has gotten worse” and cautioned that “no one can claim that the promise of equal opportunity is being offered to all Americans.” In his 2019 letter he noted that “a big chunk of [Americans] have been left behind.”
More recently, he told the Economic Club of Chicago that racial discrimination isn’t adequately understood by white people. “If you’re white, paint yourself black and walk down the street one day, and you’ll probably have a little more empathy for how some of these folks get treated,” and he called for making “a special effort because this is a special problem.”
Yet Dimon is full of contradictions. Let me list them, because Dimon represents the most responsible of the leaders of American business, and his contradictions suffuse corporate America (and are emblematic of so-called “corporate Democrats”).
1. Although he publicly worries about the plight of America’s poor, Dimon has never mentioned America’s growing concentration of wealth and power and the tight connection between the two.
He has never talked about the role of big money in politics. He has never advocated campaign finance reform. He doesn’t mention how the prospect of lucrative jobs on Wall Street upon retirement tempts some public officials to pull their punches.
To the contrary, Dimon lobbied Congress intensively for Trump’s 2017 and 2025 tax cuts. Overall, the tax cuts have rewarded the already wealthy, enriched big corporations, and exploded the federal debt while delivering no measurable benefits to America’s working class or poor; almost nothing trickled down.
Dimon is correct that many Americans have been left behind, but he has failed to address the role he and his bank have played in leaving them. For example, JPMorgan paid $13 billion to settle Justice Department claims that it defrauded borrowers and investors in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis when he was at the helm. Among its victims were many left-behind Americans.
2. Dimon has spoken about the devastating effects of climate change, including its effects on left-behind Americans who can’t afford homes able to withstand storms and floods and have no insurance against climate catastrophe.
Yet Dimon’s bank is the world’s leading financier of fossil fuels, according to the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report. This year alone, JPMorganChase pushed $58 billion toward fossil fuels, up 13 percent from 2024. A report, “Banking on Climate Change,” issued by a coalition of six major environmental groups, named Dimon the “world’s worst banker of climate change.” The likely consequence: More Americans left behind.
3. Dimon decries racial discrimination and points to the money JPMorgan is investing in poor cities.
Yet his bank has prevented Black people from getting loans. In January 2017 JPMorgan agreed to pay $55 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit accusing it of discriminating against minority borrowers by allowing its mortgage brokers to charge them higher interest on home loans than it charged white borrowers with the same credit profile, causing the Black borrowers to pay tens of millions of dollars in additional mortgage costs. The result: More Americans left behind.
4. After the August 2019 mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Dimon wrote a well-publicized email to his employees calling on them to “recommit ourselves to work for a more equitable, just and safe society.”
Yet Dimon’s bank is the largest source in the United States of financial services to gun makers and gun retailers, and of loans to gun buyers. If Dimon were serious about controlling the use of guns, he could stop this financing and urge other banks to do the same. He could have his banking and credit card systems track gun sales. He could use his formidable lobbying prowess to enact laws requiring that financial institutions create a world-class system for tracking gun sales with built-in safeguards.
But he has not. The result: more Americans killed, injured, and left behind.
5. Dimon has long expressed concern about gender discrimination and women’s rights.
Yet JPMorganChase maintained a long and close financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, processing $1.1 billion in more than 4,700 transactions for him across the 15 years spanning 1998 to 2013, including at least seven years after he pled guilty for solicitation of prostitution.
In a 2011 email, the bank’s general counsel, Steve Cutler, warned that Epstein “is not an honorable person in any way. He should not be a client.” Yet the bank allowed Epstein to make large, recurring cash withdrawals totaling millions of dollars. Bank accounts managed by JPMorgan were used by Epstein to facilitate financial transfers and payments to victims of his trafficking ring.
The bank later paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits accusing it of enabling his sex-trafficking operation.
6. Dimon expresses concern about workers who don’t earn enough to live on.
Yet JPMorgan pays its bank tellers peanuts. In April 2019, at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, Congresswoman Katie Porter noted that the starting salary for a JPMorgan bank teller in her district in Irvine, California, was $24,000, which left the teller $567 a month short of what she needed to live on. “How should she manage this budget shortfall while she’s working full-time at your bank?” Porter asked Dimon.
“I don’t know, I’d have to think about that,” Dimon said.
“Would you recommend that she take out a JPMorganChase credit card and run a deficit?” Porter continued.
“I don’t know, I’d have to think about it,” Dimon repeated.
“Would you recommend that she overdraft at your bank and be charged overdraft fees?” Porter asked.
“I don’t know, I’d have to think about it.”
“Mr. Dimon, you know how to spend $31 million in salary, and you can’t figure out how to make up a $561 shortfall?”
After Bank of America agreed to increase its minimum wage to $20 an hour by 2021, Dimon was asked if JPMorgan would match it. “It’s not an arms race,” he said.
Hypocrisy or something else?
I’ve focused on Jamie Dimon because he’s the Democrats’ favorite CEO. He’s thought to be liberal on social issues, moderate on the economy. His views are trusted by the establishment. He is the establishment.
But Dimon is awash in contradictions. He says he’s a patriot before he’s CEO, but in all the ways I’ve noted, he behaves as if his first responsibility is to maximize JPMorgan’s profits.
The underlying issue here isn’t hypocrisy. The world is filled with people who say one thing and do another. And let’s be clear: JPMorgan — its directors and shareholders — expect Dimon’s first priority to be JPMorgan’s profitability. That’s his job, and he’s paid handsomely for it.
The underlying problem is power and deception. Dimon has enormous public and political influence. But despite his rhetoric and the occasional trappings of social responsibility, he is using his public influence for private purposes: to make more money for JPMorgan.
When he takes public stands on issues, he clothes himself in the garb of the public interest. He appears to be a public leader whose primary interest is the good of the nation when he announces his support for Trump’s tax cuts, publicly opposes a wealth tax, proffers his alleged economic expertise on CNBC and other media outlets, urges members of Congress to loosen bank regulations, or warns Democrats against nominating someone other than a political moderate.
But his job is to do whatever he can to boost the profits of JPMorgan, even if and when that goal conflicts with the public interest. And one of the ways he achieves that goal is to exercise significant influence over government.
So how can the public, the media, and members of Congress ever trust his — or any oligarch’s — advice on the economy, taxes, financial regulation, the environment, widening inequality, and all else? Why should we think that he seeks any goal other than making more money for himself and his bank?
We cannot, and should not.
Disempowering Oligarchy
Dimon and his fellow oligarchs — Elon Musk and his billionaire bros; Brad Carp and many of America’s elite corporate lawyers; Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Ellisons — have kissed Trump’s assets to obtain corporate welfare, giant tax cuts, tariff exemptions, antitrust acquiescence, and war contracts, and to avoid his wrath. They’ve given Trump billions for his inauguration, his ballroom, his 250th birthday, his family businesses, and his superPAC.
All have sold their integrity in exchange for large profits. They’ve created media empires that won’t criticize Trump, financial empires that feed Trump’s crypto, energy empires that feed off Trump’s war, and legal empires that allow Trump to ride roughshod over the rule of law.
All have abdicated public responsibility to maintain the health of our political-economic system at a time when it is succumbing to authoritarianism.
They have used their power to siphon off the gains of the economy to give themselves unprecedented wealth — which has bought them even more power. They have justified their wealth and power as being in the interest of the public, but the public has been shafted.
They’ve changed the rules of American capitalism to favor themselves and harm most other people. They’ve eroded trust in the system. They’ve undermined democracy.
As long as the oligarchy is in control of America, there will be no meaningful response to the failure of most people’s paychecks to rise, nor to climate change, nor to the emerging dangers of Artificial Intelligence, nor racism, nor the soaring costs of health insurance, college, childcare, and housing.
These would require resources from the oligarchs or their corporations, which they don’t want to provide. As long as they control the purse strings, the oligarchs are unwilling to bear tax increases. They want their taxes to continue to drop.
As long as the oligarchy is in control, there will be no antitrust enforcement to puncture the power of their giant corporations. Instead, their corporations will continue to grow larger, raise prices for consumers, and become more politically powerful.
As long as the oligarchy is in control, there will be no meaningful constraint on Wall Street’s dangerous gambling addiction. The gambling will grow.
As long as the oligarchy is in control, there will be no limits to CEO pay, and Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers will rake in billions more.
As long as the oligarchy is in control, government will dole out even more subsidies, bailouts, and loan guarantees to big corporations, and it will continue to eliminate protections for consumers, workers, and the environment.
The propagandists and demagogues behind the oligarchy (Donald Trump included) are pouring salt into some of the nation’s oldest wounds. They’re stoking racial resentments, describing human beings as illegal aliens, fueling hatred of immigrants, and spreading fears of communists and socialists.
This strategy gives the oligarchy freer rein: It distracts Americans from how the oligarchy is looting the nation, buying off politicians, and silencing critics.
***
The only way to disempower the oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and take power back.
This will require a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy and fighting against concentrated wealth, power, and privilege.
We must get big money out of politics. End corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Bust up monopolies. Stop voter suppression. And strengthen the countervailing powers of labor unions, employee-owned corporations, worker cooperatives, state and local banks, and grass-roots politics.
This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.
Who’s the world’s worst billionaire? Is it Elon Musk — for buying an election, dismantling the government with DOGE, and spreading anti-immigrant racism around the globe?
No. He’s disqualified, because — at least in recent weeks, he’s been a trillionaire.
What about Mark Zuckerberg, for sowing division with his Meta platforms? Almost, but there’s an even worse billionaire.
Or perhaps Larry Ellison and his son, David, for turning the great CBS News into a Trump propaganda machine? They’re bad, but not as bad as the worst.
Or maybe Peter Thiel, for hating democracy? You’re getting closer. But no.
I'm sure that working in social media – dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.
But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I'm increasingly convinced that he didn't acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn't really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.
We see this in Facebook's very earliest days, as we see it today, as we see it at every critical juncture in Facebook and Zuckerberg's history.
Consider Facebook's origins, founded by a young Zuckerberg in his dorm as a means to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads:
The boy Zuck was delighted and surprised that so many of his fellow students entrusted him with their data but even then, he had no inkling as to why they would do so. Privately, he jeered at his users for trusting him, calling them "dumb fucks":
Zuck has since prosecuted history's most ruthless war on privacy, a surveillance campaign that would put the Stasi to shame and make Orwell scoff at the hacks butchering his work with over the top absurdities.
Zuck doesn't think you deserve any privacy, but boy does he ever value his own. This is a guy who bought the four houses surrounding his San Francisco home and left them empty in order to form a buffer zone:
When a single candid photo of Zuck and his family in their kitchen leaked (from Facebook!), Zuck, his lawyers, and his operatives treated it as a three-alarm fire:
Zuckerberg's acquired a vast Hawaiian acreage and left most of it undeveloped, fenced off and patrolled by guards to prevent anyone from catching a glimpse of his private life. In order to acquire this acreage, Zuck exploited a dirty legal tactic called "heirs property," which leverages the informal basis of indigenous land claims by locating a single person with a colorable claim to their distant relatives' territory in order to force an auction of the ancestral land:
If Zuck thought other people are as real as he is, he wouldn't spy on them in ways he himself could never tolerate. He certainly wouldn't pay fancy white-shoe lawyers to steal their land out from under them. At heart, Zuck is a billionaire solipsist to beat all other examples of the form – a billionaire social media solipsist who sees others as manipulable collections of statistical abstractions, and not as people at all:
When Zuck is forcibly reminded that other people do indeed exist, he takes it very badly. He's insisted that Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former FB exec turned whistleblower, must pay him $111,000,000 as punishment for her excellent tell-all memoir Careless People. His lawyers say that Wynn-Williams violates the non-disclosure and non-disparagement "agreement" of her old Facebook employment contract merely by standing motionless and silent for an hour on-stage:
Once you realize that Zuck doesn't really think other people exist, "the metaverse" starts to make a lot more sense. Why would Zuck light $61b on fire in a bet that we will all stand still while he converts us and everyone we love into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters that he imprisons in a virtual world he stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel? It's easy to understand if we're all non-player characters – if that's true, then the metaverse is surely our native habitat.
For Zuck, people aren't co-equals with needs that are as real and important as his own. For Zuck, people are problems to be solved. He embodies Terry Pratchett's maxim (voiced by Granny Weatherwax) that "sin is when you treat people like things."
Nowhere is this sin more on display than in Zuck's relationship to the social connections that bind together the users of his platforms. Zuck has benefited enormously from the fact that you love your friends more than you hate him, but (because hell is other people), you can't all agree on when to leave and where to go next, so you stay put on Facebook and Instagram:
For Zuck, the fact that you and your friends have trapped one another in a mutual hostage-taking is maddening, because those friends who've tied you to his platform refuse to organize their social contact with you to "maximize your engagement" with Facebook and Insta, which would let him maximize the number of ads he shows you. Rather, these friends just want to be your friends, which means that they don't want to get into stupid endless fights to keep you replying or stage little entertaining skits to keep you scrolling.
At first, Zuck tried tweaking his algorithm to replace your friends with trolls who'd bait you into flamewars. When that petered out, he stole a march from Tiktok and recruited an army of theater kids to do amateur dramatics for you in exchange for the promise of an intermittent reward schedule payment for the sketches that got the most views:
The problem (for Zuck) is that theater kids are also people and they resent being jerked around by the algorithm and ripped off by Meta's rigged revshare slot-machine. Last year, he started signaling that he would replace the theater kids – and your friends – with chatbots:
Chatbots have been a catastrophic bet for Meta, far worse than the metaverse. Meta shares are in a death-spiral as investors figure out that when Zuck fired all his coders and replaced them with chatbots while spending $300b on AI, he was excising the heart of the company's skilled workforce, pissing away all its free cash-flow, and sinking into a bottomless pit of debt to produce a substandard product that no one wants, at the expense of the company's only profitable lines of business:
But Zuck is sure that chatbots can solve his most pernicious problem: the search for a gimmick that will keep you locked to his platform that is under his complete control. Zuck doesn't want to rely on your friends with their unwillingness to maximize your engagement. He doesn't want to depend on volatile and unpredictable trolls to bait you into sticking around to argue and see more ads. He wants to be shut of theater kids and their amateur dramatics that inevitably come with demands for decent treatment.
For Zuck, chatbots dangle the promise of social media without socializing. Zuck thinks he can solve all his problems by imprisoning you in a house of mirrors where you interact with LLMs that are tuned to keep you scrolling no matter what, chatbots that will never demand anything of Meta.
He's been at this for a while, and each generation of chatbots was worse than the last. How bad? The last batch had to be killed off after they took to luring children into explicit sexual role-play:
Nevertheless, the dream of a world without people is one that Zuck can't let go of. Solipsism's seductive song convinced him to buy a company called Social.ai, which specializes in trapping people in conversations with chatbots, and now he's announced his plan to flood Facebook and Instagram with LLM slop:
The amazing thing about this is that Zuck is talking about chatbots as a way to capture a younger audience for his graying platforms. Kids hate chatbots. My 18 year old and her friends use "that's so AI" as a pejorative to dismiss anything distasteful or ugly:
For Zuck – who owns a controlling share of voting stock in his company and need not answer to his board – it's a spectacular act of delusional self-sabotage. Zuck refuses to understand that the majority of his users are on his platform because they love their friends more than they hate him. Zuckerberg is on a relentless quest to isolate you from the friends who keep you on his platform and transfer your bond to groups of people (and now chatbots) who can be commanded by Zuckerberg.
Only someone who doesn't think other people are real could believe that you'd prefer to talk to chatbots rather than your friends – or that a habit of talking with chatbots would be so hard to break that you'd endure an ever-increasing number of advertising interruptions to maintain those pointless conversations.
In 1993/1994, AOL connected its millions of users to the public internet. These users were unaccustomed to the internet's conversational and technical norms, and they kept coming. It wasn't that the old internet was incapable of absorbing surges of new users: every September, an incoming class of undergraduates found their way online through their universities' computer labs.
But the AOL bridge was different: the flood of users was much larger, and it never stopped. The old internet people who struggled to transfer the culture and techniques of the internet to that flood of newbies called it the "Eternal September."
For the Facebook and Instagram users who are about to be buried in an endless botshit avalanche, this is the beginning of the "Eternal Sloptember." From here on in, the slop only gets worse and thicker and harder to avoid. Zuckerberg refuses to acknowledge that he owes his fortune to the fact that his users love each other more than they hate him, so he has set out to shatter those bonds of love and sharpen that hatred.
It won't end well. Zuck and people like him call themselves "high agency," a disgusting bit of jargon meant to denote someone who has real interiority, wishes and desires (as opposed to the rest of us, who do as we're told and stay where we're put). Zuck's "agency" isn't higher than yours or mine. The difference between him and us is that he doesn't think we're really real, and we know that he's really a monster.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 604 (1940 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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TheNew York Times says the “Justice Department struggles” with Trump’s demands that it prosecute his enemies.
But who exactly is struggling? Career lawyers whose professional ethics are being compromised? Trump-loyalist appointees who presumably knew what they were getting into before they joined the regime? Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general who desperately wants to be the real thing?
The same ambiguity crops up when the media reports that the “White House” wants this or that, that the “Department of Homeland Security” is taking some action, that the “Department of the Interior” is undertaking or undoing something, and so on through the squalid chaos atop this regime.
These are buildings and departments, not people. We need to know who.
In normal times, the White House and federal departments are also institutions containing professionals with expertise hewed over decades of experience, guided by institutional norms for making decisions and the insights and perspectives that come with their unique roles in the federal government. (I should know. I headed one.)
But we’re no longer in normal times. Trump and his sycophants are actively destroying the professional integrity, expertise, norms, and unique insights and perspectives of all these institutions.
That’s why the public needs to know who is doing what when important decisions are made inside these buildings and departments. It’s the only way anyone can ever be held accountable.
For example, news reports continue to characterize the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund at the center of the storm over whether to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general as “the Justice Department’s” fund.
This characterization hides a crucial reality: The fund doesn’t belong to the Justice Department. It wasn’t even an official offspring of the Justice Department. Instead, it emerged from meetings between Trump’s personal lawyers and acting attorney general Todd Blanche (who was once also a personal lawyer for Trump) over how to dispose of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service.
It was never the “Justice Department’s” fund. It was Trump’s fund, right from the start. The same with his deal to immunize himself from IRS audits.
Similarly, when the media reports that the “Justice Department” is “formally rescinding the order that created the fund,” it obscures the most important fact: The order wasn’t rescinded by the Justice Department. It was rescinded by Blanche himself. In fact, Trump now says he “wasn’t involved” in the revised plan.
So why should we suppose that any future Trump attorney general will be bound by Blanche’s order?
Similarly, when we hear that “the White House claims” that vandals caused damage to the bottom of the reflecting pool, we don’t know who in the White House made that deceitful claim. Did it originate with the vicious nativist, Stephen Miller; the fanatical Russell Vought; Trump’s zombie chief of staff Susie Wiles; or with Trump himself?
And when it’s reported that District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro “blamed the Department of Interior” for her failed criminal case against David Hearn, a former Olympian whom she accused of damaging the Reflecting Pool, we don’t learn the most important thing: Who’s responsible for this fiasco?
Did Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, mislead Pirro about Hearn’s alleged behavior? Or did Trump instruct Burgum to blame the former Olympian for damaging the pool, rather than own up to the botched job?
Trump had insisted for months that vandals were responsible for the damage, which gained national attention when the pool bottom began to peel and algae blooms turned the pool from blue to green.
Pirro’s office charged Hearn with “a violent effort to rip up the sealant from the bottom of the pool” and secured an indictment against him for felony destruction of government property — carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
But in Friday’s court filing, Pirro conceded that problems plaguing the newly renovated pool were caused by a “botched installation not vandalism” and that, had the Department of the Interior “been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment.”
This is a serious matter. A U.S. attorney charged an American citizen with a crime that could have resulted in his serving 10 years in prison but then dropped the charges when it turned out that Trump — or was it Burgum? or someone else? — was just trying to save face. But we still don’t know who’s responsible.
In the midst of the authoritarian chaos of the Trump regime, the public needs to know who’s doing what. When is Trump giving orders to his lackeys? When are they making decisions on their own? What’s legally binding, and on whom? Who’s responsible for what?
My friends, there will be a reckoning. And when that reckoning occurs, the individuals who have enabled this dictator, or who have conspired and collaborated with him, will be identified and held to account for what they did or failed to do.
That’s why the current record of responsibility is so important. Rather than report that “the White House” or the “Justice Department” or the “Interior Department” or some other building or agency did something, we need to know exactly who did what.
Buildings and departments are not destroying the rule of law and undermining American democracy. Individuals are. The media must tell us whom to hold responsible.
With the victory of progressive Abdul El-Sayed over Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic primary yesterday, prepare yourself to hear enormous quantities of bullsh*t about the Democratic Party now being “taken over” by “Democratic Socialists.”
Or as the reliably establishment New York Timesdescribed what’s at stake, “can an insurgent cand…
Forget "Don't be evil"; Google's true motto is a form of vulgar spidermanism: "With great power comes no responsibility." The internet's de facto boss is an absentee landlord.
Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist – is the gateway to the internet, with more than a 90% search market share that it attained by buying out all its competitors and bribing Apple more than $20b/year not to start a rival search engine:
Google likes to position itself as a wise steward of the internet. They say they use their vast troves of data about the internet and its users to connect the right person with the right information at the right moment. As their mission statement has it, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":
The tacit argument is, "Sure, we repeatedly violated antitrust law in order to monopolize the internet, but the internet needs a monopolist. It's scary out there! We have amassed power so that we can protect and guide you."
It's a bullshit argument and no one should accept it – but even if you think it's worth harnessing monopoly power to promote a wise king to rule over the internet, you'd still want Google to take that responsibility seriously. If we're to have a landlord for our civilization's digital nervous system, let's not have it be an absentee landlord.
Google is an absentee landlord. In 2019, they chose to deliberately worsen search results in order to make you search repeatedly to find the information you're seeking, because every fresh query lets them serve fresh advertisements:
Not all of Google's enshittification can be attributed to deliberate sabotage. Much of it is the result of neglect. Ask Google for a product review and they'll pass over the most rigorous, honest websites on the internet in favor of affiliate scammers who repackage Amazon best-of lists to peddle overpriced, underperforming junk that's sometimes so bad it's dangerous:
And of course, Google AI search results present the company with a highly refined and confident-sounding way to launder spam into product recommendations:
Could Google do better? Provably so. Kagi, a small company that runs a search engine powered by Google's own search index consistently delivers results that are substantially superior to Google's – using Google's own infrastructure:
If Kagi (a startup with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of thousands of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation – could also do so.
They just choose not to.
They're too big to fail. They're too big to jail. They're too big to care.
Google's AI search isn't a way to fix its broken core product: it's a way to partially remediate the damage Google itself inflicted on the open internet, while imprisoning the web in a walled garden that would make Steve Jobs drool:
It's a deadly combination: Google has committed hundreds of billions to stock buybacks and its AI money-furnace, financed by mass layoffs targeting the people who keep the core services useful. The too-big-to-care company is still the internet's gatekeeper, but half the guards at the gate have been fired and the other half have pulled so much overtime that they keep falling asleep on the job.
Google has become a scammer's paradise.
Take Google's "answer box." This is the part of the search results page that tries to answer your query directly, without sending you elsewhere for that info. Back in 2023, Google's Answer Box was taken over by scammers who impersonated airline help desks. When Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves:
(This was an especially devastating attack because the airlines themselves hide their customer service phone numbers – as enshittified monopolists, they want your money, not your complaints – so it's normal to search Google for the number you're seeking, rather than scouring the airlines' deliberately confusing customer service sites.)
This is especially galling because Google has an extensive "verified merchant" program that goes to enormous lengths to establish the true identity of every merchant whose businesses are listed on Google, in maps, ads and search results. Google "knows" which URLs belong to the airlines. If it can be tricked into scraping a different website for the airlines' phone numbers, that's because Google couldn't be bothered to connect its own database of canonical airline URLs to the process that serves phone numbers to the 90% of the web-using public who search with Google.
Google's database of the canonical URLs for businesses doesn't stop at airlines or even large businesses. Nearly every local merchant has undergone Google's verification process, which includes a step where Google physically mails a postcard with a unique number to the merchant's registered address, which the merchant must then key into Google to prove that they're located where they say they are.
Despite this, Google's ad-sales system will happily sell anyone the right to advertise a different website for queries for specific merchants, and those ads appear above the real result for the business's website. To make this even worse, Google's spent years making it more difficult to distinguish ads from "organic" search results, changing the font and size of the "ad" warning to make it harder to spot, and making the font and color of the ad itself closer to the color of the search results below it.
This is a gift to fraudsters. I had my own run-in with it in 2023, when I was tricked by a Google ad into ordering dinner from my local Thai place using a scam site that had cloned the restaurant's menu. The scammers marked up the price by 15%, then passed the order on to the restaurant, pocketing the vig:
This scammer – based out of a UC Berkeley dorm-room – had copied hundreds of restaurant websites, then bought Google ads for the restaurants' names, ensuring that searchers would see the scam result before the real one. Remember: Google knows what the true URL is for every one of those restaurants but it sold the scammer ads for a different URL that appeared when people searched for the restaurant by name.
Google could trivially add a step to the ad sales pipeline that detects mismatches between a merchant's known URL and the URL in an ad bought against the merchant's name. It could automatically resolve these mismatches by sending an email to the merchant's verified email address that says, "Hey, are you buying an ad with a new URL? If so, just reply to this email."
I don't know why Google doesn't do this. Maybe they make huge sums from these scam ads and they don't want to forego the revenue. Or maybe they just don't care.
Whichever it is, there's real consequences for this negligence by the internet's absentee landlord. Take abortions: fake abortion clinics – where pregnant women are bullied or tricked out of the abortions they're seeking – buy Google ads against the names of real abortion clinics. Google makes millions sending abortion-seekers to fake abortion providers:
Google started off as the ideal "intermediary" – the fancy economist's term for a "middleman." They took as their duty to figure out the best websites for you to look at based on your interests, serving as an honest broker between internet users and internet publishers. In the quarter-century since the company's founding, as it transformed itself into a monopolist, it developed the curse of every intermediary: it got Main Character Syndrome.
This is Tim Wu's formulation: the reason for an intermediary existence is to serve the parties to the transaction. Ebay says it exists to connect buyers and sellers, Uber is supposed to connect drivers and riders, dating sites are supposed to connect people with their love-matches. But intermediaries are cursed with an enviable position: by dint of sitting between these different groups of people, the intermediary learns everything about both sides of the transaction, while each side only knows about its own position.
Amazon knows the price you're willing to pay, it knows who's set the lowest price, and it knows how many identical items that match your query are for sale. But the sellers don't know any of that, and you only know some of it. By capitalizing on that information (rather than using it to efficiently match buyers and sellers), Amazon can match you with the sellers willing to pay the highest junk fees, rather than the ones who offer the best price for the best goods:
This is Wu's Main Character Syndrome in action. Once Amazon attains a dominant market share, it can maximize its own welfare at the expense of its buyers and sellers, transforming itself from a helper to a parasite:
Google says it wants to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but every dime it spends fighting fraud (a critical part of this mission!) is a dime it can't spend on stock buybacks, executive compensation and AI servers. "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is the mission of a good intermediary; "do the absolute minimum to fight fraud" is the mission of a formerly good intermediary with terminal Main Character Syndrome.
Google keeps finding ways to expose its users to fraud while lining its own pockets. That restaurant markup scam that caught me in 2023? Three years later, it's way worse.
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu just filed suit against GuestReservations.com, BookOnline.com and Booking Holdings for running a massive version of the restaurant menu scam – one that extracted millions from people booking hotel rooms:
Here's how the scam worked: these companies put up websites with deceptive URLs, like SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com, and then bought the associated Google ad-word ("San Francisco Marriott"). At the top of Google searches for "San Francisco Marriott booking" was the ad for SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com. This site would sell you a room at the Marriott, at a markup of 35% to 85%.
This is a pure ripoff. If Google had served the correct result at the top of the page – if it had used its own database of confirmed merchants and their associate websites to validate its ads – then people booking hotels would have saved 35% to 85% on their rooms.
City Attorney Chiu says that the perps here registered domains for all kinds of hotels, even tiny ones in small towns, all over America. That means that it's not just visitors to San Francisco who got screwed by these creeps – it's also San Franciscans who booked hotel rooms around the country.
Google bears the lion's share of the blame here, but Visa and the other credit card companies are critical to these scams. Card companies allow merchants to set terms of service that refuse refunds under almost any circumstances, and, more often than not, the card issuers side with the merchants over their own customers when they call to cancel a charge from one of these scammers.
I discovered this for myself when I was tricked into buying theater tickets from a ripoff site that had registered the URL of the show I wanted to go to. I figured out that I'd been rooked within a minute of clicking the buy button, but it took months and multiple appeals – and ultimately a threat to cancel my credit card – to get Visa to refund me.
Visa – another bloated monopolist with terminal Main Character Syndrome – can see that it has merchants who generate zillions of appeals and charge-backs because they run scam businesses like these. They could treat these merchants as the fraudsters they are, but because the crooks wreathe themselves in gauzy excuses and lengthy terms of service, Visa enables these massive, nationwide cons.
Google, Visa and the other monopolists who serve as de facto regulators for our society have arrogated to themselves the power to observe every transaction and block the obvious scams. We pay for their failure to take minimal, obvious steps to protect us from the scammers who thrive on their platforms.
Why should they? They're the main characters. They're Bizarro-world spidermen, whose great power confers no responsibility.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 623 (1336 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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For a year and a half, we’ve been subject to the daily onslaught of Trump and his cruel, corrupt, and incompetent second regime.
My question to you now, in the middle of the summer of our discontent, is what strategies you’re using to cope with this horror.
My informal survey of friends and acquaintances suggests four major ones, listed below. Which best describes yours? (As usual, I’d appreciate your total honesty — with yourself and others in our Substack community.)
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