Meta has launched a Threads app for Meta Quest VR headsets, the company announced on Tuesday. The launch follows Meta bringing the app to its Ray-Ban Display AR glasses last month and the recent news that the platform has crossed 500 million monthly active users.
It seems like a pretty full-featured app. Meta says that with the Threads VR app, you can do things like browse feeds, make posts, like and reply to posts, visit profiles, search, and watch videos - you know, Threads stuff.
"We designed the new Threads app for Meta Quest to make using VR more social than ever," Meta says. "Whether you want to keep up with conversations during a ga β¦
Google TV Freeplay, the company's free, ad-supported streaming service, now supports video on demand. Instead of tuning into Google TV Freeplay's selection of always-on channels, you can now choose from over 10,000 shows and movies to watch whenever you want.
The update introduces titles like Lady Bird, Seventeen Again, and Hell's Kitchen, according to Google's announcement. The company has also expanded its live TV lineup to include more than 300 channels dedicated to news, sports, reality TV, true crime, and more. Some of these new channels include World of Love Island, Yahoo! Sports Network, Bloomberg TV Plus, and The Martha Stewart Chan β¦
The Pixel 11 Pro has a flashy new light on the back. | Image: Google
Last year's Made by Google event for the Pixel 10 resembled a late night talk show, complete with Jimmy Fallon as host, and it aired an hour after the phones were revealed. Spec dives and executive appearances were replaced with celebrity cameos and awkward skits, to the confusion of many diehard Pixel fans. But it served its purpose in reaching a broader audience: Last year's stream racked up 8.4 million viewers on YouTube; the launch the year before only managed 1.4 million.
This year, Google has only escalated matters. For tomorrow evening's livestream, Fallon has been replaced by Trevor Noah, who will lead a "stacked" lineup of celebrit β¦
Google may take the wraps off the new devices well ahead of its Made by Google livestream. On Googleβs website, the countdown for preorders ends on August 12th at 10AM ET β eight hours before its event at 6PM ET. Comedian Trevor Noah will host this yearβs show, featuring notable guests like NBA star Stephen Curry, podcaster Alex Cooper, Indian cricketer Shubman Gill, and Japanese actress Ayami Nakajo. Weβll be live blogging the event, so stay tuned!
Follow along for all the latest news about Googleβs Pixel devices.
Apple is seemingly developing an iOS feature that can verify when a photograph was taken using an iPhone camera. 9to5Mac reports that the iOS 27 beta 5 includes code references for an "Apple Reference Image" system that can embed provenance metadata into iPhone photographs at the point of capture - enabling users to prove where the photo originated, and that it isn't AI fakery.
Apple Reference Image isn't currently live, but a privacy disclosure in the iOS beta notes that the feature will be off by default. When (or if) it does roll out, 9to5Mac says it can be enabled via Settings > Camera > Reference Image > Reference Mode, and that only p β¦
Zoom has patched a major security vulnerability that could allow an attacker to hijack anyone's device during a meeting. In a blog post on Tuesday, researchers at A Security say they uncovered the flaw using "fewer than 20 prompts on publicly available AI models," as reported earlier by Wired.
The exploit involved Zoom's annotation feature, which allows users to draw on their screen while sharing it with other meeting participants. With the exploit, an attacker could join or host a meeting and run malicious code on victims' devices, allowing them to steal data, turn on the camera or microphone, or install malware. The attack required no act β¦
Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn't name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories.
The TMR thumbsticks in the ES Max don't feature a complete reimagining of the technology but measure stick movement in a slightly different way that improves performa β¦
Anyone going to court in England and Wales will be obliged to turn in smart glasses and pick them up when they leave. The ban targets devices such as Meta's and clarifies that existing restrictions on recording devices apply to attire: "There are clear restrictions on taking images or videos within courts and tribunals which is why the use of Meta glasses is prohibited," a spokesperson told The Guardian. β Read the rest
President Donald Trump this week criticized Texas for being anti-data centers, just days after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott paused industry-wide approvals until the companies provide the state with more information on things like power and water use.
βI saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers,β Trump said in a nearly hourlong sit-down interview with Punchbowl News released Friday. βI think itβs a mistake. And Iβm not taking positions, I just think itβs a mistake, because there are other communities that want it. When a community wants it, it means a lot of money is going to come into that community.β
Abbottβs spokesperson in a statement Friday defended the policy move as necessary because less than 10% of data centers responded to the stateβs requests for them to report their power and water usage.
βMany are unaware that [the Electric Reliability Council of Texas] is tracking a more than 500% increase in peak electricity demand. This unprecedented growth could endanger the reliability and stability of the Texas electric grid,β Andrew Mahaleris said. βThe Governorβs pause requires data centers to provide [Public Utility Commission of Texas] and ERCOT with the required information for them to make fully informed decisions. Simply put, Texans must come first.β
The moratorium, which Abbott announced Monday, will require state regulatory agencies to audit proposed data centers seeking connection to the stateβs electric grid and find out whether theyβre receiving tax breaks, how much power and water they will use, what kind of cooling they will use, what efforts theyβve made to reduce community impacts, and who owns the facilities.
Any projects that fail Abbottβs ordered βcomprehensive verification and auditβ should be denied connection to the grid, the governor said.
The move was in contrast to the Republicanβs typical pro-business stature, underlining how the data center debate has put Texas conservatives between Trump and angry constituents in rural, unincorporated areas where The Texas Tribune has reported most planned data centers are set to be located. Texans have mobilized across the state to oppose the new developments, airing concerns that the facilities will drain local water supplies, drive up electric bills and cause noise, light and air pollution.
Abbottβs announcement came after he had previously been bullish about the industry, calling Texas βepicenter of AI developmentβ in November when he unveiled Googleβs $40 billion investment in the state that included data center facility development.
The three-term governorβs Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, has made greater oversight of data centers a key piece of her campaign.
βAbbottβs call for a βpauseβ could be for one day β and no one buys it,β she said in a statement this week. βHeβs taken millions from data center CEOs while giving Texans lip service to non-existent restrictions.β
Trump went on to say that data centers are βtremendously important for the economics.β
βFor Texas to say no to data centers is a mistake in the sense that it could be bigger than oil,β he added.
Disclosure: Google and Punchbowl News have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribuneβs journalism. Find a completeΒ list of them here.
A Circle K shopper posted a screenshot of an AI self-checkout screen that listed a few flavors of Gatorade at a few dollars apiece, then a line item of $8.5 billion for the American Red Cross, according to the New York Post. β Read the rest
Tesla told federal regulators that the headlights on 19,900 Model 3 and Model Y cars were up to nearly twice as bright as the law allows, then argued it shouldn't have to fix them because the defect was "inconsequential" to safety. β Read the rest
This book excerpt is part ofΒ Cafe, TPMβs home for opinion and news analysis.
For most of human history, trying to identify an oligarchy has been difficult. Part of that has to do with the definition of the term βoligarchyβ in the first place. Aristotle first popularized the word thousands of years ago, pointing out that an oligarchy β which literally means βrule of the fewβ β is indeed all about a small number of individuals steering a given country, nation, or empire. But even then, Aristotle added, it wasnβt just about the number of individuals that mattered, but also about how much wealth they controlled. In order to have an oligarchy, a state had to be run not just by the few, but by the wealthiest few.Β
The other part thatβs made βoligarchyβ such a tricky thing to define is that, for centuries, oligarchic figures tended to operate out of sight, or by playing down their impact on politics. Not always, necessarily; the so-called βrobber baronsβ of the Gilded Age β oligarchs by another name β were front and center in American society in the late 19th and early 20th century. But by and large, oligarchs tended to downplay their influence, and even their wealth. Since they could operate as the powers behind the throne, they tended to keep themselves (and their wealth) out of the spotlight, making it even trickier to nail down who an oligarch actually is, or what oligarchy looks like when itβs taken over a democracy.Β
Those two factors β the difficulties in defining βoligarchy,β and the struggles in identifying oligarchs themselves β made analyzing the topic, let alone writing a book about it, an uphill battle.Β
And then, in January 2025, all of that changed. Because there, in the U.S. Capitol, as President Donald Trump once more swore the oath of office for the presidency, stood a suite of men, just off to the side, all standing in a row. They looked out over the audience, smiling in their suits. In that moment, those figures β Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and a small number of others β made oligarchy impossible to miss. Looking out at a man theyβd propelled back to office β at a man who would usher in not only the most corrupt administration in American history, but who is himself oligarchy made flesh β they forced Americans to an inescapable realization. Weβd once, as a country, had a Gilded Age. But now, with more wealth inequality than ever prior, and with more power concentrated in the hands of a small number of select men, we have something else: the Age of Oligarchy.Β
This is neither your fatherβs, your grandfatherβs, nor your great-great-grandfatherβs philanthropy. | Olga Aleksandrova for Vox
Well before he became CEO of one of the most valuable startups of all time, Dario Amodei was a 26-year-old PhD student studying biophysics at Princeton, obsessing over how his money would leave its mark on the world.Β
On what one might assume was likely a fairly modest academic stipend and with no discernible inheritance from his parents, an Italian-American leatherworker and a project manager for libraries, Amodei gave $10,000 in 2009 to a relatively new charity evaluator called GiveWell. Founded by two ex-hedge funders before effective altruism was even a phrase, GiveWell ranked charities primarily by a single dispassionate metric: dollars per lives saved.Β
Key takeaways
The AI boom is set to create a new slate of Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires, many of whom say they plan to give all or much of their wealth to charity.
Much of that philanthropy β which one estimate says could exceed $100 billion per year β will go to causes associated with effective altruism, like animal welfare or AI safety.
This influx of wealth may ultimately reshape American philanthropy in its own rigorously optimized image, with broad implications for how we treat animals, fight disease, and adapt to AI itself.
It was the kind of approach that clearly appealed to Amodei β though it may not have gone far enough for him. In 2010, he wrote a guest blog post for GiveWell dissecting the effectiveness of two of the groupβs top global health charities: VillageReach and StopTB. Both charities could save a life at roughly comparable costs β around $545 β but while StopTB treated or prevented tuberculosis in adults, VillageReachβs interventions mostly saved babies and children. Most people would probably feel that saving a child trumps saving an adult; indeed, even effective altruists often agree on the grounds that children have more life to live left.Β
Amodei, though, viewed that as a liability for VillageReach. An adult death, he wrote, is βperhaps 2 or 3 times worse than an infantβs death,β because adults βare capable of deeper and more meaningful experiences.β As uncomfortable as such a calculus may be, he wrote, βon a practical level one is forced to make difficult decisions with limited funds.β
Though he declared StopTB to have βsuperiority on cost-effectiveness,β Amodei ultimately gave VillageReach higher marks for their tightly controlled βchain of executionβ β the full sequence of steps between a dollar of donation and a vaccine reaching a child. That was important enough to Amodei that, despite his initial reservations, he ultimately gave VillageReach his entire $10,000 donation in 2009 β enough to save, he estimated, the lives of 20 babies across rural Africa.Β
But Amodei hoped the ultimate impact would be even greater. βThe money I give out is not just a one-shot intervention,β he concluded, βbut also a vote on what I want the philanthropic sector to look like in the future.β
The future, it seems, has arrived. Amodei is now a multibillionaire, his fortune poised to skyrocket further if and when Anthropic goes public, as many expect it to do later this year. He is one of dozens of new billionaires and millions of new millionaires minted virtually overnight by the AI boom.Β
There have already been plenty of aftershocks to this emerging AI megawealth, like the stratospheric San Francisco housing market, the nerdmaxxing of sex work, and the proliferation of all-you-can-biohack peptide raves.Β
But the most consequential, and perhaps weirdest, way this burgeoning AI-ristocracy plans to burn through its cash is by giving a huge chunk of it away. Amodei is one of several AI multibillionaires β alongside his co-founders at Anthropic and OpenAIβs Sam Altman β who have pledged to donate most of their wealth in their lifetime. But even their obscene degree of collective wealth β they are worth $111.8 billion as of this writing β is only one slice of an AI bonanza that seems poised to balloon into one of the most consequential waves of American philanthropy of all time, one deeply shaped by the same utilitarian impulse that guided one of young Amodeiβs first big donations.Β
βI am having thousands of conversations with people who are perplexed by their own fortune and determined to give with thoughtfulness and urgency in a way that I havenβt, frankly, experienced before,β said Nick Allardice, CEO of the effective-altruism-aligned anti-poverty group GiveDirectly, whose work is grounded in research on the efficacy of unconditional cash transfers. βItβs just really important that people get started, that they donβt let perfect be the enemy of the good.β
This is neither your fatherβs, your grandfatherβs, nor your great-great-grandfatherβs philanthropy. If Gilded Age industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, a devout baptist, gave in service of their religiosity or, as was the case for Andrew Carnegie, their reverence for civic duty, then most of todayβs AI barons carry forth their own spiritual tradition, one at the very least informed by the vigorously optimized commandments of the effective altruism movement. They appear far less likely to fund Carnegie-style works like opera houses or libraries than they are to put their faith β and their billions β in what they believe they can measure, calculated on the cost benefit analysis of a life saved or an apocalypse averted.Β
In some cases, as Amodei did as a grad student, theyβve already begun the process. βThese are people who have committed themselves to giving back even before they were very wealthy,β said Sjir Hoeijmakers, CEO of Giving What We Can, an organization that developed a campaign popular with effective altruists to give away at least 10 percent of their yearly income, βpeople who have been building the habit of giving for a very long time.β
And it is, to be clear, a very particular kind of giving. Amodei was the 43rd person to sign the 10 percent pledge the year after it launched in 2009, and its roster has since swelled to over 11,000 people, including more than a dozen current or former Anthropic employees. Donations made through Giving What We Canβs platform are on track to grow by 40 percent this year, Hoeijmakers told me, and support for animal welfare charities β a cause particularly and unusually popular with effective altruists β has already exceeded its 2025 total.Β
βWe have the resources available to tackle things that we should have tackled a long time ago,β like eradicating malaria or putting an end to factory farming, Hoeijmakers said. βI hope this funding wave, if it comes, will show that we can actually solve global problems at scale if we put our mind to it and our resources.β
Devoutness has long been a virtue in philanthropy, which largely originated in religious tithing, and there are plenty of worse things to have faith in than numbers. Having a communal guiding philosophy will undoubtedly help effective altruismβs newly flush disciples follow through on their promises far more prolifically and consistently than they would without it. And despite its high profile, less than 1 percent of total philanthropy came from effective altruism last year, according to Hoeijmakers. Most rich people prefer to give to the normie causes, like their alma maters, not to the sort of chronically underfunded global problems β like protecting animals or fighting lead poisoning β that effective altruists justifiably care most about.Β
Now, quite suddenly, thereβs about to be much more money to go around for these causes, which as Hoeijmakers hopes, could help finally address some of the enormous, entrenched global problems that more traditional philanthropists have all but ignored.Β
But such piety also carries its own risks. In a viral Substack post from May, Stripe executive Nan Ransohoff argued β rather dismissively, but not incorrectly β that βtraditional philanthropic orgs and people wonβt cut itβ in this new wave of AI-funded effective philanthropy, that these donors βwill have an affinityβ for βtech-caliber talent and executionβ and will be βby default wary of folks who come from traditional philanthropy.β Ransohoff called instead for Silicon Valley to build its own new ecosystem of funds and βphilanthropic startupsβ to cater to this new wave of wealth, emboldened with the βspeed, intensity, and execution of a top technology startup.β Many of thoseΒ old-school philanthropic people wroteindignantrebuttalstoRansohoffβspiece, arguing against their own obsolescence at a time when a number of the organizations they support are increasingly starved for funding.Β
Those responses are, in aggregate, also correct, after their fashion. The new AI philanthropists will likely aspire to new models and approaches, as Ransohoff rightly argues. But they reinvent the wheel at our collective peril, not least of all because ignoring past efforts and steamrolling over existing infrastructure might make even the most optimized giving less efficient, and certainly less informed, than it would be otherwise.Β
βAcknowledge whatβs here and whatβs working β donβt just ignore it,β said Nicole Taylor, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. βThese folks are transforming our daily lives with their technology, and they have the opportunity to be as transformational with their philanthropy. My fear is that they think that they can do it alone.β
How much money are we actually talking about?
As Ransohoff pointed out in her piece, a lot of money is on the line here β and, along with it, a lot of cautious hope about how it might get spent.Β
Ransohoff posits that if you add up the promises of Amodei and his fellow co-founders, the worth of the OpenAI Foundation β the nonprofit that owns a big chunk of OpenAIβs profits β and rumored contributions from Anthropic employees, then the AI wealth boom could, in theory, lead to at least $37 billion and as much as $100 billion in total annual giving, a sizable boost to the roughly $617 billion that was given in the US in total last year.
βThese folks are transforming our daily lives with their technology, and they have the opportunity to be as transformational with their philanthropy. My fear is that they think that they can do it alone.β
Nicole Taylor, Silicon Valley Community Foundation president and ceo
This projection should be treated with cautious skepticism. For one thing, hundreds of billions in cash are not just sitting around in some Bay Area money vault; much of todayβs AI wealth is wrapped up in potentially volatile equity, and many lofty philanthropic pledges ultimately fail to reach their full potential.Β
βWhat people say before they become extremely wealthy, and then how they behave after they become extremely wealthy, sometimes diverge,β said David Goldberg, founder and CEO of Founders Pledge, which recruits tech leaders to donate a portion of their future earnings. It doesnβt help either, he said, that some tech luminaries β namely, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel β have come to treat most philanthropy with disdain in recent years, an ethos that has permeated some parts of the sector. Musk, itβs worth noting, actually pledged to give most of his wealth away himself back in 2012, though, like many other ultra-wealthy signatories of the Giving Pledge, he seems quite unlikely to keep that promise.Β Β
Thatβs not to say AI money isnβt already flowing. Coefficient Giving, a grantmaker that evolved out of GiveWell, is poised to steward a large portion of the coming philanthropic bonanza. For most of its history, the group operated essentially as the private grantmaking operation for Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna. But it recently made a significant pivot towards operating pooled, multidonor funds for anyone interested in causes like lead exposure, farm animal welfare, or questions of AI safety. Just last month, Coefficient Giving announced it would donate $1 billion to GiveWell alone this year, more than five times the $175 million the group initially pledged seven months ago. They chose to do so explicitly, because Coefficient Giving expects to receive much more funding very soon.
Thereβs also the OpenAI Foundation, which has already begun pumping $100 million into Alzheimerβs research, and Anthropic, which recently announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to invest $200 million worth of grants, API credits, and technical support into global health work. And plenty of Silicon Valley elites have begun making promises of their own. Earlier this summer, David Silver pledged to donate 100 percent of his equity proceeds from his UK-based $1.1 billion startup Ineffable Intelligence β the largest commitment in Founders Pledge history β and many signers of the Founders Pledge will see their portfolios skyrocket in response to the coming wave of AI IPOs.Β
But Goldberg does believe thereβs a risk that as people get rich fast, they will donate money βmuch, much slowerβ than they intended, simply because they get βtoo busy, they donβt have the right support, or thereβs some form of analysis paralysis.βΒ
All of this is to say that the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom are not going to function as some sort of charitable monolith. Some, like Musk, probably wonβt give much or anything to charity at all. Others may park their money in donor-advised funds β a kind of secretive charitable investment fund β or, eventually, a private foundation, both of which tend to dole out their money gingerly, meaning donors can enjoy the tax benefits of charity many years before they actually opt to help anyone with their money.Β
Effective altruism is about to have its big break
While its name recognition may be relatively high these days, the effective-giving movement is still on the margins of American philanthropy. But if this new wave is anywhere near as big as everyone says it will be, then that wonβt be the case for long.Β
For the uninitiated, my ex-colleague Dylan Matthews has written plenty on what effective altruism is, but, in sum, it is a movement that believes in goodmaxxing, in the idea of using rigorous research to save the greatest number of lives possible, including future human lives and farm animal lives. Once an EA poster boy, Sam Bankman-Fried sullied the movement in 2022, which may help explain why some prominent adherents β like Amodei and his sister and co-founder Daniela, whose husband Holden Karnofsky co-founded GiveWell β have distanced themselves somewhat from the movement in recent years.Β
But even when donors shy away from the term, the causes and principles of utilitarian evaluation that have defined effective altruism from its early days still permeate the new moneyed corners of Silicon Valley, particularly among those most poised to give a lot β and to give a lot quickly.Β
Ask any animal welfare or global health nonprofit β or, better yet, an expert-led pooled fund with a reputation for rigorous charity evaluations β and they will tell you that they are preparing for, and possibly evenΒ beginning to see glimmers of, a windfall.Β
βWe are very much anticipating a significant influx of funding,β said Dan Shannon, CEO of the Humane League, which fights to end factory farming. βI am cautiously optimistic that this could be a real sea change for us,β because βeven if itβs a fraction of the big numbers being bandied about,β it could do a lot for a movement that operates on less than $300 million per year.Β
He said heβs been speaking with other leaders about the possibility of creating a pooled fund to absorb more cash, which has become an increasingly popular solution for donors who want the rigor of a 2010 Dario Amodei-style deep dive on a charityβs methodology and effectiveness without having to do the math or thinking themselves.
Much of the new EA wealth will likely go toward efforts to make life on Earth better now or in the near future through donations to causes like medical research, animal advocacy, or anti-poverty interventions. But another, more controversial chunk of it will go toward mitigating existential risks, especially that of Silicon Valleyβs own Frankensteinian creation: AI itself.
βIf youβre breaking the world and making money by breaking it, should you just not break it? I wrestle with the question myself.β
David Goldberg, Founders Pledge founder and ceo
Itβs that last cause that has proven most controversial. If these billionaires are so afraid that AI will break the world, then why, you might ask, would they not just stop building it in the first place? Is there not an inherent contradiction, a conflict of interest perchance, in the sense that those tasked with making sure AI does not, letβs say, build a bioweapon, take your kidβs job, or make everyone dumb, are doing so with money made from the very thing theyβre trying to regulate?Β
In other words, βIf youβre breaking the world and making money by breaking it, should you just not break it?β asked Goldberg of Founders Pledge. βI wrestle with the question myself.β In the end, βthis is a technology thatβs coming, regardless of whoβs building it,β he reasoned, and it is better that the presumably good guys β the ones bothering to think about the consequences at all β build it first.
If you broke the world, can you fix it?
Even if the AI bubble pops, and if the much-discussed giving boom ends up smaller than many anticipate, it could still lead to significant changes for some of the worldβs most neglected problems. And if it is close to as big as itβs expected to be, then what happens next could be gravitationally transformative, reshaping how the world lives, considers animals, and adapts to its most disruptive technological breakthrough in a century.Β
βI donβt think most people think about factory farming as something that could actually be eradicated. Full stop,β Shannon said, but βmy grandparents lived in a time without factory farming, and I think my grandchildren could live without factory farming,β and βthat could ultimately be the legacy of this wave of philanthropy.β
Ending the pervasive use of cages β βprobably the cruelest way that animals are treated on industrialized factory farms,β says Shannon β could cost as little as $500 million over 25 years, or less than 1 percent of the $60 billion that Ransohoff estimates Anthropic employees may have sitting in donor-advised funds, thanks to Anthropicβs generous early gift-matching policy, which could quickly turn into real cash once the company goes public.Β
βThereβs so much needless stupid, preventable suffering in the world. We live in this time of so much abundance, so much wealth, so much technological development, and yet, there are so many people who have been left behind.β
Nick Allardice, GiveDirectly CEO
Developing a new vaccine costs an average of $886.8 million, which may sound like a lot, but it is equivalent to less than 6 percent of Amodeiβs newfound fortune. It is less than what the OpenAI Foundation has pledged to invest in disease research and other causes next year alone.Β
Then, thereβs, perhaps, the biggest target of all. Ending extreme poverty everywhereΒ would cost just over $300 billion annually, according to one analysis β which is a hefty price tag, but less than one-fifth of what the wealthy spend on luxury goods each year. βThereβs so much needless stupid, preventable suffering in the world,β said Allardice of GiveDirectly. βWe live in this time of so much abundance, so much wealth, so much technological development, and yet, there are so many people who have been left behind.β If this new wave of giving is wielded well, he said, then βwe have the potential to collectively raise the floor of human experience.β
Thatβs a lot of responsibility to place on the shoulders of a bunch of bustling young tech workers still processing what it means to be quite suddenly, dazzlingly wealthy. It is also a lot of faith to place in an industry that has left more Americans feeling scared than hopeful about what a future flush with AI portends.Β
If you aim to fix global poverty, but the technology that made you rich also threatens to make everyone else poor, then whose side are you really on? To be clear, many of the AI-ristocracy have fretted, often apocalyptically, over the implications of their creation long before most of us knew we had anything to worry about. But that doesnβt mean they know how to fix this, and, at the very least, they will not do so alone.
The last time the ground shook from such a supermassive earthquake of wealth was arguably during the Gilded Age, when robber barons and industrial tycoons turned American charity β until then, mostly almsgiving and poorhouses β into big business. They seeded enormous philanthropic empires like the Rockefeller Foundation and beloved institutions like Carnegie Hall. But, even as their exorbitant fortunes made life indisputably better β birthing the modern library, the yellow fever vaccine, and many social services β they were often built atop systems of vicious exploitation. When those systems changed, as they did eventually, it did not come from the benevolence of industrial barons, but from sustained public pressure for better labor protections.
Effective giving was born out of the conviction that many of the worldβs most important causes go vastly underfunded, which, in turn, demand relentless prioritization of the limited funds that exist. If those causes are no longer underfunded β a plausible scenario if AI wealth continues to grow at the pace many expect it to β then that might change the calculus of how effective altruists decide whatβs worth funding. It might even open up some wiggle room for new causes, including somewhat less measurable β but not necessarily less impactful β approaches. βNow weβll be thinking more about what we can do with a lot of resources; which larger problems can we solve?β said Hoeijmakers. βYouβll put slightly less relatively into evaluating every small dollar on the margin.βΒ
This already seems to be happening, to some extent, at places like Coefficient Giving, which, in recent years, has begun adding new funds for causes like housing policy reform that fall out of effective altruismβs traditional purview. βWe donβt want to be only appealing to the subset of people who happen to be interested in effective altruism,β CEO Alexander Berger told my colleague Bryan Walsh last year. βOur aim β and so far weβve seen some success β is being a resource to people who have never heard of effective altruism or are not interested in it or donβt find it very motivating or welcoming. And I think thatβs good.β
The optimal outcome here is not that Silicon Valley wealth edges out everything else, but that the siloes begin to break down altogether and that there is enough money to go around that the sector no longer needs to make overly intellectualized trade-offs, like young Amodei sitting in his dorm room, ascribing a number on the relative worth of a parent versus a child.Β
βItβs tough to find the right balance between caring and hard-nosed realism,β he wrote at the time, βbut it is possible, and it is, as far as I know, the only way to truly change the world.β Heβs about to search for that balance on a much bigger scale.
Europe wants to kick its U.S. tech habit, butΒ itβsΒ struggling to detangle itself from AmericanΒ data analytics firm Palantir.Β
The problem is, the companyβs tools are already deeply embedded in critical sectors across the bloc like policing, nationalΒ defense and health systems. A report released today also shows that the tech firm has found ways to pay minimal taxes in Europe. On the show, hosts Zoya Sheftalovich and Ian Wishart discuss European alternatives and why detaching is easier said than done.
Next, our colleague Seb Starcevic has interviewedΒ Mediterranean CommissionerΒ DubravkaΒ Ε uica.Β The role that was originally thought to be low profile has instead thrust the Croatian official into the limelight as various crises hit the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
Plus: Three new foods are being added to the EUβs list of products with geographic indicators. These are the labelsΒ given to products that can only be made in a specific region, like Champagne or β¦ yes, you guessed it, halloumi.
Questions? Comments? Get in touch! You can message us or send a voice message to our WhatsAppΒ hereΒ or atΒ +32 491 05 06 29.
When I first heard about the new Apple Upgrade program, which lets you lease devices like iPhones and MacBooks for a monthly fee, I was offended. It amounts to paying a tithe to one of the worldβs richest companies just to borrow devices for a couple years, rather than buying them outright. You could then choose to purchase the device, which is outdated at that point, or upgrade and keep paying that monthly fee. You may never own an iPhone again.
Then, as my mind wandered to the stack of old phones in my closet, it occurred to me: Whatβs so great about owning these things to begin with?Β
Apple, of course, would love to sell you a new iPhone for keeps. Its most advanced model, the iPhone 17 Pro Max, will set you back $1,200, a price thatβs expected to rise soon due to the global shortage of storage and memory chips. You can sign up for an installment plan β most carriers offer these, as does Apple through its credit card β and pay it off in two to three years. Or you could lease the thing for $35 a month under the new Apple Upgrade program. You can pick a 12-, 24-, or 36-month lease, depending on the device, and you donβt get to keep the phone at the end of the term unless you decide to buy it by paying off the remainder of the retail price in one lump sum. (This is similar to the controversial rent-to-own model you find at places like Rent-a-Center.)Β
For the financial side of the new program, Apple has partnered with none other than Klarna, the βbuy now, pay laterβ giant. When you go to lease a new device, Klarna runs a soft credit check and decides if youβll be able to cover the monthly payments. When I asked Klarna, the company did not tell me where it draws the line here, but itβs worth noting that critics have accused Klarna of a lack of underwriting and of lending to people with subprime credit scores. If you miss three consecutive payments, Klarna will terminate the lease agreement and possibly send a collection agency after you.
βHow do I know people arenβt getting a good deal here? If they were, Apple wouldnβt be offering it.β
Aaron Perzanowski, University of Michigan law professor
While there was some speculation last week that Apple might lock people out of leased devices if they failed to pay their bill, Apple confirmed to me that it will not put limitations on device functionality due to missed payments or default. If you want to cancel the lease, you face an early termination fee. If you choose to keep paying the monthly fee, you can keep upgrading with new lease agreements for new devices every few years, existing in this cycle indefinitely.
βI donβt think people are getting a good deal here,β said Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at the University of Michigan and author of The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy. βHow do I know people arenβt getting a good deal here? If they were, Apple wouldnβt be offering it.βΒ
Buy an iPhone? In this economy?Β
If youβre someone who likes to get a new iPhone or MacBook on a regular basis, Appleβs new leasing option might make a lot of sense. The monthly fee to lease these devices is cheaper than the payment plan to buy them, and electronics are depreciating assets. If you own one, you can sell it or trade it in for credit toward a new device, but theyβre all worth less and less as time goes on. Furthermore, Apple eventually stops supporting old devices through software updates, so they might just stop working at a certain point. Put another way: You may own the phone, but youβre still just licensing the software that makes it work.
Renting an iPhone does sound bleak, though. The United States is suffering through an affordability crisis as prices across the board rise in the face of new tariffs and new wars. Meanwhile, AI is promising to transform the way we work if it doesnβt simply steal our jobs first, adding further insecurity, and the data center boom is making electronics more expensive. This era of economic anxiety is pushing people to use βbuy now, pay laterβ services like Klarna and Affirm to pay for groceries or a tank of gas. (These companies faced scrutiny by state attorneys general a few years ago for operating like predatory lenders.) And now Apple, surely suspecting that many people canβt afford to pay full price for new phones, is inviting us to rent our devices at a monthly fee that undercuts the path to ownership.Β
Apple could have just called this the Apple Rental program, by the way. Lease sounds nicer, though, like something you do with a car.Β
βIt is funny that they frame it as not a loan but as a lease,β Louis Hyman, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink. He added that βleasingβ has class implications, suggesting that youβre either someone who needs to have the newest things but canβt afford them, or that youβre so wealthy, youβre indifferent to money.
Suffice it to say, the bulk of people who will soon be leasing their iPhones are probably not the ones who are indifferent to money.
Apple adopts its final form
The new Apple Upgrade program is the companyβs latest customer acquisition strategy. As the rising price of hardware has made cheaper Android devices or the refurbished market more attractive, Apple is offering upgrade enthusiasts and budget-minded users, including people who simply couldnβt afford to buy Apple products in the past, a deal to join the companyβs ecosystem. After all, keeping people supplied with new iPhones and MacBooks also helps keep them subscribed to Apple services, like iCloud, which now makes the company more money than Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, and other accessories combined.
If Appleβs financial future hinges on getting more and more people to subscribe to these services, itβs only natural that the company would want to lower the barrier to entry. So Apple is betting that by letting people use but not own its products, it will extract more profit in the long run through lease payments and subscription fees. After all, it wasnβt that long ago that it seemed like nobody was interested in upgrading their iPhone, since the new phones looked so much like the old ones. Now, Apple is just trying to get everyone on autopay, effectively subscribing so that they get the latest devices when they come out.
Thereβs not necessarily any harm in giving people a cheaper way to access expensive but useful products. For more than a century, installment plans have enabled people to buy modern conveniences like sewing machines, radios, and eventually, televisions. Leasing is a popular way to keep yourself in a new car, sometimes with free maintenance. Meanwhile, cellular carriers have a long history of helping their customers buy phones. Nearly two decades ago, you could get an iPhone 3G for $199, thanks to subsidies from AT&T, which the company recouped in service fees over the course of your contract. Sprint and T-Mobile have even offered unlimited upgrades through leasing programs of their own in years past.
Apple previously worked with Citizen One Bank to offer loans to customers who wanted the option to upgrade their iPhones every year. The payments were higher and they included a fee for AppleCare, but every year, you could trade in your current phone for a new one. If you didnβt want to upgrade, you could simply keep paying the installments, and youβd eventually own the phone. Most carriers now give you the option to set up a payment plan to purchase a new device that simply amounts to the retail price of the gadget divided by the number of months youβll need to pay it off, usually 24 or 36, with zero interest. That makes it easier to get your hands on an iPhone Pro Max, and if you pay it off in full, itβs yours for life β or until Apple convinces you to buy another new iPhone.
The difference between paying those monthly installments and paying a monthly lease agreement, of course, is that the former puts you on the path to ownership. The latter simply puts you on a path to make a decision: Do you want to buy the thing and recoup some of the money youβve already spent, or do you want to keep making payments?Β Β
βWhat ownership ideally gets us is independence,β Perzanowski said. βIt gives us autonomy. It gives us the ability to function in the world without relying on third parties.β He went on to explain how moving from owning a product to leasing it means youβre stuck with that third party. βIβm tied to that manufacturer in a way where they get to exert a fair amount of control over my behavior,β Perzanowski said. βHistorically, weβve been primed, especially in the United States, to resist and reject that kind of control.β
One great thing about owning an iPhone or a MacBook outright is that if you lose your job to AI, you donβt have to come up with a monthly payment in order to keep using those devices to apply for new jobs. Another great thing about ownership is that should you need a couple hundred bucks, you can sell that old phone or laptop and pocket the cash. Maybe the best thing about owning these devices is that you can repair them and keep using them for many years β or at least until Apple stops supporting them.Β
That doesnβt mean leasing never makes sense. If your digital life revolves around always having the newest devices and you upgrade every year or two no matter what, you might actually save money by doing so through Appleβs leasing program. If you need an iPhone or MacBook right away but canβt afford to pay full price or even cover the monthly payments on an installment plan, a one-year lease could be a good solution.Β
Invariably, when you lease anything, youβre entering into a contract, one that comes with consequences if you break it. Leasing an iPhone means youβre tied not only to Apple but also to Klarna for the next 12 to 36 months. If something goes wrong β you lose your job, you lose or break your phone, or you simply donβt want the device any more β youβre subject to the terms and conditions of these big tech companies. If you keep renewing your lease, you may very well end up spending more on a phone than you would have if youβd bought it outright. That would be fine with Apple, of course. It has shareholders to please.
Correction, JulyΒ 30, 1 pm: This story originally misstated how the previous Apple upgrade loan program worked; it allowed phone trade-ins every year, not every two years.Β
Object permanence: Grampa's backyard Disneyland; Elizabeth Warren on monopolies; Spotify v Apple (antitrust edn); Exxon lobbyist confesses; "When the SparrowΒ Falls."
Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
"Carcinization" is a curious biological phenomenon: given enough time, across many environments, many species will evolve into crabs. The body-type of a crab, with its low center of gravity, sideways gait (useful for evading predators), ease of concealment and protected organs is suitable to many different environments:
Lately, I've watched the American Big Tech platforms as they underwent their own form of technocarcinization, which is when every tech company turns into Facebook.
For a long time, it seemed to me that you could make sense of the tech platforms by placing them into one of four quadrants on a 2Γ2 grid, in which one axis denoted "control freakishness" and the other, "surveillance."
Each quadrant had its own canonical company. The most surveillant/least controlling company (top left) was Google. They would let you roam the whole wide internet and exert no control over your conduct, but would spy on you wherever you went. The least surveillant/most controlling company was Apple, who imprisoned you in its manicured walled garden, but promised never to spy on you. The non-spying/non-controlling option is free/open source tech (of course), which doesn't care what you do, and doesn't watch you do it. And the most spying, most controlling company was Facebook, a company whose products did everything they could to imprison you within their virtual walls, from which vantage they could effect maximal surveillance.
I've used this comparison many times over the years. I included in my 2023 book The Internet Con, along with the joke that Tiktok's position on the grid was so far up and to the right (maximum surveillance and control) that we'd had to put its logo on the back cover. Enough people took this joke seriously and wrote in to complain that they'd gotten a misprint without the logo that we added it to the paperback:
The grid was useful, until technocarcinization started to push all the tech companies into that top right quadrant. Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance β they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you:
Apple can't even claim to protect you from third-party surveillance. Sure, they block Facebook from spying on you, but they have barred ICE Block, an app that tells you if there are ICE chuds hunting in your neighborhood, looking to kidnap you and send you to a concentration camp. Apple declared ICE mercenaries to be a "protected class":
And thanks to Apple's control-freakery β which prevents you from overriding Apple's decisions about your own devices β once Apple decides to spy on you or sell you out to fascist goons, there's nothing you can do about it:
Then there's Google, the company that ran a free-range livestock operation in which you could roam wherever you liked, because they could always find you when it was time for the slaughter. For years now, Google has been moving inexorably to the kind of control-freak nonsense that you used to only find in one of Apple's crystal prisons.
For example, every year or two, Google floats a proposal to use secure hardware in your device to rat you out if you've got an ad-blocker, privacy blocker, or other aftermarket add-on that lets you choose how you experience the digital world:
Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other peoples' resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden:
Google also took the idea of a free/open browser and ran with it, rehabilitating some discarded Apple code and turning it into Chrome, the internet's most dominant browser β by far. Now, Google is nerfing that browser's plug-in architecture in a way that blocks all kinds of user-tunable options, including and especially ad-blocking:
And Google has also announced that they're going to turn Android into an iPhone, making it both technically challenging and radioactively illegal for you to install software of your choosing on your own property:
Google is adopting every one of Apple's worst practices, and Apple is adopting all of Google's worst practices, and so they're both turning into Facebook: technocarcinization!
What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression:
Control lets platforms block competing products, extract massive junk fees to the businesses they connect you to, and control repair and end-of-life, forcing you to replace hardware by blocking parts and independent service:
It turns out that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half-right. The other half is, "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Pay, don't pay: companies will productize anyone they can. And thanks to our enshittogenic policy environment β where the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money β you can always be productized:
This is independent of the kind of person running the company. Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions. He can ignore or fire his board members at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people.
By contrast, Google and Apple are no longer run by their flamboyant founders, who were every bit as prone to folly as Zuck. They were constrained by their shareholders, which meant that the blast-radius of Steve Jobs's worst ideas (like treating his otherwise curable cancer with green juice) were confined to his own person.
Today, Apple and Google are run by bloodless business sociopaths who go to enormous lengths to project an air of sober adulthood. And yet, these people β who would never be caught dead bow-hunting their own livestock or climbing into an MMA cage β have steered their companies into Facebook's quadrant on our enshittification 2Γ2.
I think this shows just how much the enshittification of tech is a matter of the policy environment, not the personalities of the people involved. Sure, the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the reason they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab:
And in the meantime, there is one inhabitant of the 2Γ2 that hasn't drifted up and to the right: free and open source software. It's still snugly nestled in the low-surveillance/low-control box, and if you live in that box, your life will be much, much better for it.
There's no better time to make the switch: with RAM and storage prices through the ceiling and OSes growing ever-more bloated with AI and spyware (but I repeat myself), this is the moment to rehabilitate that old computer with Linux:
"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
Currently writing: "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 β excluding any serialized fiction β 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.
Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed" (permalink)
Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed seeks to describe the ideology that gave rise to Elon Musk, the social forces that gave rise to that ideology, and the terrible future that ideology seeks to bring about:
The book's starting point is that "Muskism" isn't merely the things Musk says, believes and does. It's the ideology that coalesces around him, from the people in his wake and the people he follows. Just as Henry Ford neither defined "Fordism" nor precisely practiced it, "Muskism" is centered on Elon Musk, but it's not Elon Musk's creation.
So what is Muskism? To answer this question, Slobodian and Tarnoff enumerate the factors and influences that produced Musk himself. There's apartheid, with its "rational" system of technocratic authoritarianism, which blended together a life of luxury and plenty (for white settlers), brutal surveillance and state violence (for the Black majority) and fascist control over speech (for everyone), combined with a meat-grinder draft that saw young men of Musk's age being called up to suppress liberation uprisings.
Peak apartheid coincided with peak personal computing, the moment where PCs (and then, modems) were getting cheaper and faster, propagating like mushrooms, offering a young Musk access to a broad world outside of the fascist bubble of South Africa, inspiring global ambitions in Musk.
Closer to home, there's Musk's family: his grandfather, a grandiose and vicious white supremacist who moved to South Africa from Canada because of his love for apartheid and racial hierarchy. There's Musk's father, a violent and abusive fool.
Muskism is also a new variant on techno-libertarianism. Traditional techno-libertarianism seeks to dismantle the state β or better yet, exit from the state, in the manner of an Ayn Rand hero. Techno-libertarianism is intimately bound up with settler colonialism, ever on the hunt for an "empty land" (terra nullius) that can be settled without committing the original sin of expropriation, the gravest offense in a religion organized around the total sanctity of private property:
Muskism doesn't seek to exit the state, it seeks to colonize and control it. Long before DOGE, Musk was playing the organs of the state to his own tune, securing massive contracts and subsidies for his solar and rocketry businesses, relying on the massive, deep-pocketed government to keep his businesses afloat.
Obviously (DOGE!), Muskism also seeks to dismantle the state, but only the parts of it that can be transferred to Musk's own private hands. Muskism is about big governmentβ¦for Musk, but not for you. It embodies that important conservative value summarized in Wilhoit's Law:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
This is Musk through and through β a man who demands the right to call innocent strangers "pedo guy" without legal consequence; and also wields the power of the state to shutter businesses that boycott his platform because of its shitty practices:
Musk grew up on science fiction novels and weaves stfnal tropes through his offerings (for example, calling his chatbot "Grok"). There's no shortage of reactionary politics in science fiction, but Musk doesn't confine his sf-inspired cosmology to reactionary literature. He's famously very fond of the Wachowskis' "Matrix" movies, and leans heavily into the metaphor of the Matrix in explaining his interest in wiring people directly into computers, in characterizing opposing political beliefs as "mind viruses," and in calling his political enemies "NPCs":
But Musk's relationship to this metaphor differs in a subtle and important way from the right's "Red Pill" rhetoric. Musk doesn't want to break out of the Matrix β he wants to control the Matrix. He wants to decide which opinions you're allowed to see and discuss (because "most people have weak firewalls for bad ideas"), he wants to beam ideas directly into your neural link, and he wants to abolish any form of workplace democracy, conquering the world with South African baasskap (boss-ism):
Throughout this slim volume, Slobodian and Tarnoff tease these strains of thought out of Musk's deeds and utterances, and in the systems that he has built or colonized through acquisition. The authors are offering more than a psychoanalysis, though β they're surfacing the material basis for Muskism, the benefits it delivers to its adherents, and the victories it has racked up.
They reveal the method in Musk's chaotic and bullying management style, and recount the times Musk has successfully shattered sclerotic processes to make real breakthroughs, especially in aerospace. You'd be hard pressed to read these passages without feeling some grudging admiration.
Muskism gets stuff doneβ¦sometimes. At a cost. A high cost. Tarnoff and Slobodian count that cost, identify who pays it, and conjure up the world in which those costs continue to mount for all of us.
It's a chilling vision, a Torment Nexus dystopia run by someone who thinks cyberpunk was a suggestion, not a warning.
"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
Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work β excluding any serialized fiction β 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.
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