Come join me this Saturday, 25 July, where I’ll be vending on SATURDAY ONLY during this weekend’s Cambridge Jazz Festival!
The festival is both Saturday and Sunday in Cambridge’s Danehy Park, Noon—6 PM both days. It’s free, but you can reserve tickets in advance. The festival will take place rain or shine.
I’ll be sharing my vendor tent with my friends and comics colleagues Barbara Thomas and Timothy Wall of Stranger Flavor Comics. Comics galore!
Danehy Park is between New Street and Sherman Street in Cambridge, MA. Parking at the park is limited, and the large parking lot at Fresh Pond Mall is strictly for patrons of the stores. Instead, take the MBTA Red Line to Alewife station, or buses #74 or #83. NOTE: Red Line service from Park Street to Alewife will be running as shuttle buses 21—30 July.
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How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech
THIS SATURDAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.
For a minute there, it looked like Big Tech was on the ropes. Over the past decade, countries all over the world have gotten antitrust fever, from South Korea to Singapore, Europe to Australia, and even China:
Even more important: these international trustbusters shared a common enemy with Biden's antitrust enforcers, like Lina Khan (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB) and Jonathan Kanter (DoJ Antitrust Division), who pursued the most aggressive antitrust agenda America has seen since Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan killed antitrust enforcement a half century ago.
This international collaboration was an especially rich and productive one. Today's global trustbusters have opportunities for collaboration that their Gilded Age predecessors could only dream of.
That's because modern monopolies are likewise global, running the same scam in every country that they operate in. It wasn't like this during the era of the first Robber Barons. John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil had many of the world's economies in chokeholds, but each country got its own, national chokehold. In the US, Standard Oil monopolized pipelines and refineries, but it found different chokepoints in other countries. For example, in Germany, Rockefeller monopolized the ports:
This meant that American and German enforcers had very little to say to one another. Sure, they had a common enemy, but even if US and German authorities commandeered a fleet of zeppelins and used them to ferry documents back and forth between their respective agencies, it wouldn't have done them any good. The fact patterns about German ports had nothing much in common with the cases being built in relation to America's captured oil refineries.
That's not how companies like Google, or Meta, or Apple, or Microsoft, or Oracle work. Like Standard Oil, these companies are planet-girding extraction machines that are strangling the world's economies. But unlike Standard Oil, these companies run the same playbook in every country, meaning that the facts that establish Google or Apple's guilt in Brussels can be translated and used to run cases in the UK, South Korea and Japan.
The opportunities for international cooperation don't stop there! It's been more than a century since the Gilded Age, and the intervening years saw the US enact the Marshall Plan, through which it redesigned the legal systems of countries shattered by WWII and the Korean War. The technocrats who oversaw the Marshall Plan understood that large, monopolistic firms played a key role in the rise of fascist governments in Europe and Japan, and so they transposed America's landmark antitrust laws – like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act – onto lawbooks around the world:
That means that it's not just that the same companies are committing the same crimes everywhere around the world – it also means that most of these countries have substantively similar statutes establishing those crimes. A successful case in South Korea will likely be successful in the UK – providing that the company engages in the same conduct in both countries (which, again, it does).
During the Biden years, the UK Competition and Markets Authority ran these international tech antitrust summits in London where US enforcers and their UK, European, Singaporean, South Korean and Japanese counterparts met to plan a shared strategy to take down US Big Tech:
The presence of America's trustbusters at these meetings was key. Not only were they running a string of wildly successful cases against US Big Tech in America, but just by being there, they signaled that the US government would help foreign governments enforce their judgments against US tech giants. That's key, because – as the Marshall Plan's architects could tell you – giant national monopolies often become a de facto, private, unaccountable arm of the state in the countries where they are born, and can call upon the governments they've colonized to protect them from other countries' attempts to enforce their laws.
Which brings me to the Trump election, and the subsequent fusion of Big Tech with Trump's government. It started before Trump took office, when he traveled to Davos to warn the world's governments not to try to enforce their laws over his tech companies. Then there was the inauguration, where tech CEOs paid $1m each out of their pockets for a seat on the dais behind Trump. Big Tech ponied up millions for the Epstein Ballroom, and they also provide key material support to Trump's ethnic cleansing program. If you end up in a concentration camp thanks to one of Trump's ICE chuds, you can blame Microsoft for providing the administrative software; Google for providing the location data used to track you down; and Apple for blocking apps that warn you if you're about to get snatched by masked thugs:
All over the world, tech antitrust has gone into retreat. In Canada, ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau created sweeping new powers for the country's Competition Bureau, but now his successor Mark Carney is making equally sweeping cuts to the agency's funding. In the UK, PM Keir Starmer fired the devastatingly effective head of the Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the CEO of Amazon UK:
And in Ireland – the place where European tech regulation goes to die – they've just appointed an ex-Meta lobbyist named Niamh Sweeney to regulate the privacy practices of the US tech giants that pretend to be headquartered in Ireland in order to evade their taxes:
This is especially worrying because Meta has a history of binding its former executives with nondisclosure and nondisparagement clauses that forbid them from ever saying a mean word about Meta, or discussing anything they learned while working at the company. There are no ends to the lengths the company will go to in their war on their ex-employees. Take Sarah Wynn-Williams, who has been fined $111m by the company's arbitrator as punishment for her #1 NYT bestselling whistleblower memoir, Careless People. Meta has told Wynn-Williams that she may not appear in public to discuss anything, not just her book, and now they've sued her for standing motionless and silent for an hour on a stage at a literary festival:
When Sweeney was given the job of regulating her former employers, it naturally raised questions about whether she would be legally allowed to criticize – or even talk about – Meta. Sweeney declined to comment on this at all for seven months, and now, at last, she has issued a heavily lawyered statement that seems to affirm that she will be allowed to do her job:
But a close read of her words tells a different story: Sweeney has affirmed that she's not bound by the same gag order as Wynn-Williams, but not whether she has any restrictions on her conduct in respect of Meta. This shouldn't be complicated: if Sweeney is indeed free to vigorously enforce the law against Meta, then she could have published a statement the day her appointment was made public: "I do not have any contractual restrictions on my ability to discuss Meta or its current or former personnel." If she is truly able to do this job, then it shouldn't take her half a year to issue a weasel-worded, heavily caveated statement.
Having narrowly escaped the existential crisis of democratic and legal accountability, Big Tech has captured a string of states: Ireland and the UK, and (especially) the USA. The fears of the Marshall Plan technocrats have been realized: Big Tech is Trump and Trump is Big Tech, and together, they are executing an authoritarian takeover of the USA and countries around the world.
Without the US as a willing partner, other countries have precious little chance of enforcing their laws (which were originally American laws). Just look at how Apple has point-blank refused to follow Europe's new tech regulations:
(Worse: Trump has blacklisted the EU officials who worked on those laws and has permanently barred them from entering the USA, and has now requisitioned more official EU correspondence from Big Tech companies so he can locate and punish more of Big Tech's official enemies:)
Now that the US state has merged with US tech, every country around the world has motive, means and opportunity to build a "post-American internet" of open source apps running at local data centers:
But don't write US enforcers out of the picture just yet! Writing for The Sling, Tyler Clark calls for "regionalized enforcement" by US states against Big Tech companies:
You see, it's not just international governments whose lawbooks were rewritten through the Marshall Plan that have access to America's antitrust laws. When Congress wrote the Clayton Act, Sherman Act and other US federal antitrust laws, they explicitly wrote in the power of state Attorneys General to enforce them. That means that 50+ state AGs all have the ability to wield antitrust against US tech giants.
It seems Congress foresaw this moment, when federal enforcers partnered with American monopolists, trading open bribes for approval for corrupt mergers and other illegal conduct:
But where the Feds fail, the states can pick up the slack. When states fine US companies and order their breakup, it's a lot harder for those companies to flout those orders – unlike the EU or Canada or the UK, America's state governments are first class actors in the US judicial system.
That's where Clark comes in: he calls for coalitions of state enforcers to take on US Big Tech, filling the void created by Trump's pay-to-play fed enforcers. A (future) federal statute could enshrine this system through "regional FTC enforcement centers":
I like Clark's idea, but I think he's missing a trick: US regional antitrust enforcement doesn't need to lean on the US government for resources and collaboration. There are national governments all over the world whose antitrust laws were created by the Marshall Plan, and those are the same laws that state AGs have at their disposal. And of course, tech companies' crimes aren't just the same in France and Japan – they're also the same in New York State and California.
The US government isn't the only game in town. American state enforcers have a global buffet of enforcement partners, and those international enforcers need American collaborators who can collect the fines they levy and enforce the breakup orders they issue. It's a win-win (for the people, for international enforcers, and the states) and a big loss (for Trump's tech companies and his corrupt antitrust dingo babysitters).
One place this could start: joint hearings that call ex-Big Tech employees as key witnesses, daring companies like Meta to invoke their gag orders. It's one thing to tell Sarah Wynn-Williams she can't talk to a crowd at a book festival, but Meta has taken the position that she cannot speak before a legislature or regulator, either.
Wynn-Williams isn't alone. The Big Tech companies are laying off employees by the thousands, thanks to their failed 11-figure AI bets. Those ex-employees know where every body is buried. They know where to find the memos that establish their ex-bosses' intent to create and maintain monopolies and the hardest part of any antitrust case is establishing intent.
Together, US states and foreign enforcers have the opportunity of the century – a chance to shatter the power of Trump's tech giants, who are so key to Trump's authoritarian takeover.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.
-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a
~*Spiritual Experience*~
I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.
Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.
He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only
BARELY
enough space for the fireworks
and certainly none for his truck.
So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand.
This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.
He begins,
and this is crucial to what happens next,
by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it
unsecured
on his lawn.
Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.
His process for unloading the fireworks is to
1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls.
2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile
He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things.
3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed
4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup.
5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her.
6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house.
7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too.
8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate
9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed
10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.
Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man?
Answer: Absolutely Not.
There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else.
(This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual)
Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally.
Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.
I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.
However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up.
and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop"
And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."
For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."
I move under the eaves.
"Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled."
"Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not."
"Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."
Sometimes,
the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.
The Gods were not merciful today.
It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this,
But I got to see it today.
Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before.
Oh. I realized as it got closer.
That's RAIN.
Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say,
five to tent square miles,
is instead concentrated into an area of say,
my neighborhood exactly.
So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.
The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel.
Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge.
Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.
My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp.
They do not have a tarp.
They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.
Which is when the hail begins.
"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy.
"HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!"
"OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"
I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic.
The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor.
Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.
So.
I was raised Agnostic
-but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.
---
(If you laughed, please consider supporting my Ko-fi or preordering my book of Strange Stories on Patreon)
Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid
I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me TONIGHT (Jun 23) in TORONTO at Osler Records, and TOMORROW (Jun 24) in NYC at The Strand. After that, it’s Philly and Chicago.
The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ype6c6DdHQY
It's a weird coalition of anti-Big Tech campaigners (who are rightly angry at the platforms' callous disregard for user welfare) and Heritage Foundation-backed culture warriors (who think that if their kids aren't exposed to LGBTQ content they won't come out as queer). While there's plenty these groups disagree about, they share one consensus: there should be a "minimum age" for certain kinds of internet use.
The problem is, there's no such thing as "age verification" for the internet. What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry's commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia:
"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. This nightmare is the surveillance advertising industry's fondest dream, a world where it's literally illegal to avoid their tracking, all in the name of saving kids…from them!
So it's not just a weird alliance of anti-Big Tech crusaders and the conspiratorial right that's pushing for age verification – they are unwitting allies of the very tech industry they think they're fighting. Those tech industry insiders are fully aware that an "age verification" mandate is really a way for the government to teach every child how to use a VPN. They're also fully aware that the next move is to ban VPNs:
Tech bosses are the ones sitting on our shoulders saying, "Go ahead, swallow that fly – it'll be fine. And if you do have to swallow a spider afterward, well, that'll surely be the end of it":
Behind them is a long line of caliper-wielding grifters who claim they can use your phone's camera to distinguish a child who is 17 years, 364 days old from an adult who's just turned 18:
It's beyond farce. After all, whatever harms you believe the internet is inflicting on kids – and there's absolutely some kids who are being harmed by their internet use – those harms all start with surveillance. Your kids can't be targeted by algorithms without the surveillance data that's being used to target them. They can't be funneled into pro-anorexia content or extreme misogyny forums without that funnel being primed by commercial spying.
Why do tech companies spy on your kids? The same reason your dog licks its balls: because they can, and no one stops them:
America hasn't updated its consumer privacy laws since 1988 (when Congress banned the disclosure of your VHS rentals). The EU has the GDPR, but it also has Ireland, the country where all GDPR cases against Big Tech go to die, because any tax haven inevitably becomes a crime haven:
Other countries have privacy laws to varying degrees, but are grossly outmatched by US tech giants, who have fused with the Trump regime, to the extent that Trump will impose penalties on your country if you attempt to regulate his tech companies – he'll even have your top officials cut off from the internet in retaliation:
Any attempt to save kids from online harms should start with saving kids from online surveillance, but that's the opposite of what we're doing today. After decades of failing to pass and enforce privacy controls for the internet, those same governments are breaking all land-speed records to pass "age verification" laws that make privacy illegal:
The fact that these bills have the firm backing of the tech industry's most controlling, most spying companies tells you everything you need to know about them:
Kids are being harmed by online spying, and so are the rest of us. Whether you think that the algorithm made Grampy go Qanon or you're suspicious that online surveillance data was used to deny you a loan, a job, or a lease, you should want privacy:
You can't protect kids from online surveillance by spying on them. You just can't. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to get you to swallow a fly so they can sell you a spider, a bird, a cat, and an ICE chud in a gaiter, Oakleys and plate carrier (beneath which lurks a stick-and-poke Totenkopf tattoo).
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Maybe Facebook at all signing on to this legislation should be a huge red flag for anyone who actually cares.
also, this is a conflation turning “something needs to be done about social media harming children” and “let’s erect a ID verification wall around most of the internet”
Same thing with brexit conflating “something needs to be done or things will keep getting worse” with “let’s break with our coldest trade partners”
and then pundits are suprised that people are sick of whoever is in charge.
A world where you need ID to use the internet is a world where the government gets to deny certain people from using the internet, and that as a concept should be much more frightening than people are treating it as.
Join me on Tuesday near the Harvard Science Center!
For the past few years, Harvard University has had a huge tent up between the Science Center and Harvard Yard, and this summer they have a series of events that mix farmers'-market type food vendors with arts and crafts.
The first of these events is the Harvard Common Spaces Plaza Open Market: Eats & Arts, this coming Tuesday, and I'll have a booth under the tent with my comics, original art, cards, and more! It is FREE to the public 11:30 AM -- 5:30 PM and will feature 10+ food vendors and 20+ local artists.
The official address is 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA -- but the tent is at the western end of the plaza from the corner of Oxford and Kirkland Streets. But, honestly, you can't miss it.
If you thought parking in Harvard Square was bad, don't even think about it when coming onto campus. I highly recommend you take the MBTA Red Line to Harvard station, or buses #1, #66, #68, #69, #71, #73, #74, #75, #77, #78, #86, #96, or #109. It’s a weekday so all of the bus lines run!
The event is in partnership with Cambridge Arts Council and Artisans Asylum.
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E. J. gives her 5th Zoom reading of 2026, Blaster Al's story “The Death of Granny Fernandez”, with Introduction to The Davenport Continuum
My voice isn't 100% back up to recording standards yet, so I regret to announce that the Zoom reading of "The Death of Granny Fernandez" is postponed yet again -- to 21 June. So there's still plenty of time to sign up!
E. J. gives her 5th Zoom reading of 2026, Blaster Al's story “The Death of Granny Fernandez”, with Introduction to The Davenport Continuum
The May Blaster Al Ackerman Zoom reading is "The Death of Granny Fernandez" (with an Introduction to The Davenport Continuum). The performance is this COMING Sunday, 31 May at 8 PM EDT. Sign up below and I'll email you with the Zoom link on that day.
Story Synopsis: Edgar Allan Poe Messenger editor Stark Lee Davenport, the Old-South Poet of Richmond, VA, is given a copy of a scandalous counterfeit version of his own magazine, only to find himself caught in a trap of recursive narrative.
(Content warnings: Alcohol abuse, ethnic slurs, attempted grant fraud, identity theft, unsolicited homosexual flirting, mail hoaxes, four-letter words, incest, madness, miscegenation, arson, necrophilia, mopery, murder, infanticide, congenital feeble-mindedness, spirit channeling, narcotic abuse, hallucination, slurs against the disabled, cafeteria fights, bad poetry, desecration of corpses, sexual slang, sexual situations, suicide, disability fetishism, prescription abuse, injury to the eye motif, Confederates in the attic and elsewhere. Recommended for listeners aged 18 and up.)
We gratefully acknowledge the permission granted for this performance by the Estate of Will Greathouse. This performance is dedicated to the late Lon Spiegelman.
This is part of a series of Blaster Al Ackerman readings on Zoom. Readings for 2026:
Wicked Comic Con is this Saturday at the Westin Boston Seaport District -- and I'll be at Table BD 414! The show is FREE 10 AM -- 5 PM at 425 Summer Street, Boston.
A 100% Boston homegrown show dedicated to comic books, comic book creators, comic book art, and cosplay.
I’m coming to GUELPH, ONTARIO THIS FRIDAY (May 8) to deliver the Musagetes Lecture.
One of my bedrock beliefs is that capitalists really hate capitalism. They may name their beloved institutes after the likes of Adam Smith, but they ignore everything Smith had to say about the necessity of competition to keep markets from turning into monopolies:
The theory of capitalism holds that markets are a kind of distributed computer that aggregates trillions of decisions from billions of market participants in order to optimize production and distribution of goods and services, creating a "Pareto-optimal" world where no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
Whether or not you believe that this computer exists and functions as predicted, one indisputable fact about it is that it requires the freedom to choose in order to work. The point of market-as-computer is that it aggregates decisions, so it can only work if everyone is as free as possible to decide.
But that's not the world capitalists want. For capitalists, the point is to restrict other people's choices in order to maximize your own freedom. That's how we get economic doctrines like "revealed preferences": the idea that if a person says they want one thing, but does another thing, then you can tell what they really prefer by looking at the latter and disregarding the former. This is the kind of doctrine you can only fully embrace after sustaining the kind of highly specific neurological injury that is induced by taking an economics degree, an injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. Under the doctrine of revealed preferences, someone who sells their kidney to make the rent has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:
Capitalism is supposed to run on risk: the risk of being overtaken by a competitor drives businesses to deliver better services more efficiently, thus producing a bounty for all. But capitalists really hate risk, hence the drive to monopoly: Mark Zuckerberg admitted, in writing, that he only bought Instagram so that he wouldn't have to compete with it ("It is better to buy than to compete" -M. Zuckerberg):
Capitalists hate capitalism, but they love feudalism. Feudalism is like capitalism, in that you have a ruling class that creams off the surplus generated by labor; but under feudalism, society is organized to protect rents (money you get from owning stuff) over profits (money you get from doing stuff). The beauty of rents is that they are insulated from risk: if you own a coffee shop, you're in constant danger of being put out of business by a better coffee shop. But if you own the building and your coffee shop tenant goes under, well, you've still got the building, and hey, now it's on the same hot block as the amazing new cafe that's driving its competitors out of business:
Douglas Rushkoff calls this "going meta": don't drive a taxi, rent a medallion to a taxi driver. Don't rent a medallion, start a ride-hailing app company. Don't start a ride-hailing company, invest in the company. Don't invest in the company, but options on the company's shares. Each layer of indirection takes you further from the delivery of a useful service – and insulates you further from risk:
Monopoly is to capitalism as gerrymandering is to democracy, a way to strip out any meaningful choice. Think of the two giant packaged goods companies that fill your grocery aisles: Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Practically everything on your grocer's shelves is made by a division of one of these two massive conglomerates. If you try to "vote with your wallet" by buying a low-packaging version of a product, it's going to be sold to you by the same company that sells the high-packaging version. If you switch to an artisanal brand of cookies made by a local family business, Unilever or P&G will buy that company and issue a press release declaring that they made the acquisition because they know "their customers value choice":
Gerrymandering strips your vote of any impact on political outcomes. Monopoly strips your purchases of any ability to influence economic outcomes. Wrap both of them in "revealed preferences" and you get a system that endlessly narrates its ability to deliver choice, and then blames your misery on your having chosen badly.
This is the method of the entire conservative project. As Dan Savage says: the thing that unites conservative assaults on voting, birth control, abortion and no-fault divorce is the stripping away of choice. Conservatives are trying to create a world populated by husbands you can't divorce, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, and politicians you can't vote out of office. Add to that Trump's assault on the National Labor Relations Board, his reversal of the FTC's ban on noncompetes, and his protection of "TRAP" agreements that force employees to pay thousands of dollars if they quit their jobs, and you get "jobs you can't quit":
Conservative strongmen like Trump and Musk exalt the value of self-determination – for themselves, at everyone else's expense. Trump's ability to stiff the contractors that built his hotels and Musk's ability to rain flaming rocket debris down on the people who live near his company town require that everyone else be stripped of protections. They get to determine their own course in life by taking away your ability to determine your own. Their right to swing their fists ends two inches past your nose:
Cheaters and bullies hate the rule of law, hence Trump's endless repetition of Nixon's mantra: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." But not everyone can be president, and the world is full of would-be Trumps in positions of power who would like to be able to commit crimes without fear of legal repercussions. For these people, we have something called "binding arbitration."
"Binding arbitration" is a widely used contractual term that forces you to surrender your right to sue a company that wrongs you. Instead of suing, binding arbitration forces you to take your case to an "arbitrator"; that is, a lawyer who is paid by the company that cheated you or maimed you or killed your loved one. The arbitrator decides whether their client is guilty, and, if so, how much that client owes you. The entire process is confidential and it is non-precedential, meaning that if a company rips off millions of people in the same way, each of them has to arbitrate their claims separately, and people who are successful can't share their tactical notes with the people who are next in line to plead for justice.
That makes binding arbitration another key weapon in the conservative movement's war on choice: not just jobs you can't quit and politicians you can't vote out of office, but also companies you can't sue. Binding arbitration is a creation of the Federalist Society and their champion Antonin Scalia, who authored a series of Supreme Court dissents and (ultimately) decisions that opened the door for binding arbitration everywhere:
Given the Fedsoc's role in shoving binding arbitration down every worker and shopper's throat, it's decidedly odd that they invited Ashley Keller to be their keynote debater in 2021, where he argued that "concentrated corporate power is a greater threat than government power":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY5MrHGjVT8
Keller is a powerhouse lawyer, and an avowed conservative, who has pioneered many tactics for overcoming binding arbitration clauses. He helped create "mass arbitration," bringing thousands of arbitration cases on behalf of Uber drivers who'd had their wages stolen by the company. Since Uber has to pay the arbitrators in each of those cases, they faced a much larger bill than they would face in any possible class action suit:
Mass arbitration cases spread to all kinds of large firms that used petty grifts to steal from thousands or even millions of people, like Intuit, who deceive – and rip off – millions of Americans every year with their fake Turbotax "free file" system:
Mass arbitration worked so well that Amazon actually revised its terms of service to remove binding arbitration from their terms of service, because they realized that they'd be better off facing class action suits:
Of course, the point of binding arbitration was never to create a streamlined system of justice – it was to bring about a world of no justice, where you have no right to sue. It's part of the decades-old "tort reform" movement that the business lobby has used to take away your right to sue altogether. Any time you hear about a seemingly crazy lawsuit (like the urban legends about the McDonald's "hot coffee" case), you're being propagandized for a world without legal consequences for companies that defraud you, steal from you, injure you, or kill you:
That's why companies (like Bluesky) are now trying terms of service that also ban you from mass arbitration, while retaining the right to consolidate claims into a mass arbitration case if that's advantageous to them:
But Keller keeps finding creative ways around binding arbitration. He's currently bringing thousands of arbitration claims against Google, on behalf of advertisers whom Google stole from (Google is a thrice-convicted monopolist, and they lost a case last year over their monopolization of ad-tech, where they were found to have defrauded advertisers).
He also just argued before the Supreme Court in a case against Monsanto over the company's attempt to escape liability for causing cancer in farmworkers with their Roundup pesticide:
Keller appears in the latest episode of the Organized Money podcast, for a fascinating interview about his work and outlook, and how he reconciles his work fighting corporate power with his identity as a movement conservative:
Keller's first big, important point is that (basically), capitalists hate capitalism (see above). He cites Milton Friedman, who "always said that the tort system is the best way to ensure that companies behave and follow the rules." For Keller (and Friedman) the alternative to private litigation against bad businesses is "government regulation and the alphabet soup of Washington, DC agencies [that] try and police these companies."
But, of course, the businesses that want binding arbitration and tort reform (so they can't be sued) also want to "dismantle the administrative state" (so they can't be regulated). They're the impunity movement, the "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal" movement, the "heads I win, tails you lose" movement. They're the caveat emptor movement, the "that makes me smart" movement:
They don't want efficient markets, with the ever-present threat of a better competitor putting them out of business. They want feudalism. They want to go meta. They want to have the kind of self-determination you can only achieve by taking away everyone else's self-determination.
I was very struck by Keller's claim to be engaged in an exercise that Milton Friedman identified as the best one for making markets work. One of Keller's most forceful points is that class action suits are especially important for reining in petty, recurrent grifts, the junk fees that are the hallmark of enshittification.
He quotes his old boss, the archconservative judge Richard Posner, who said "Only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $20." But if you multiply a $20 junk fee by ten million purchases, a company can use that fact to make hundreds of millions of dollars. That's real folding money, which is why every company has figured out a way to whack you for a $20 junk fee.
There are two ways to end this racket: one is litigation, the other is regulation, and the capitalism-hating-capitalists who run the world want to kill both. That's why the business lobby smears lawyers like Keller as being "vultures." But as Matt Stoller says, "vultures look aggressive and whatnot, but when you actually get rid of vultures out of an ecosystem, all sorts of things go haywire."
I love this point. Vultures live off the disgusting, rotting crap that would otherwise pile up around us, breeding disease and emitting an unbearable stench. If plaintiff-side, no-win/no-fee lawyers are vultures, then junk fees, wage theft, and the million petty frauds they fight are the disgusting, rotting crap that vultures feed off of – and the harder we make it for our noble vulture lawyers, the more disgusting, rotting crap we have to live with, hence the unbearable stench that is all around us.
Listening to Keller was a fascinating exercise. I thoroughly disagree with him about many things – the way he characterized Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act couldn't have been more wrong – but it's quite bracing to hear a capitalist who doesn't hate capitalism defend it against the vast majority of capitalists, who hate capitalism more than any socialist ever did.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Remember: Capitalism is not an ideology, it is a system. And you are not a capitalist unless you have capital.
(Also: He's referencing an old anarchist joke: Two anarchists were talking about the pragmatic limits of absolute individual freedom. One says to the other, "Why, I should be free to punch you in the nose!" The other replies, "Your freedom ends where my nose begins.")
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E. J. Barnes gives her fourth Zoom reading of 2026, Blaster Al Ackerman’s occult essay, “The Fool”.
This coming Sunday evening, 26 April, at 8 PM EDT, is my next Blaster Al Zoom reading, his occult essay "The Fool". You'll need me to email you the Zoom link, so sign up on EventBrite now!
Story Synopsis: Dr. Ackerman discusses the relative merits of differing portrayals of the “Fool” card from the Greater Arcana of the Tarot.
(Content warnings: Occult references, scatological references, ethnic slurs and stereotypes, vampirism, allusions to unsanitary sexual practices, urine, developmental disorders, insanity, nudity, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, allusion to strategies for preventing child sexual abuse, and perverted Roman emperors. Recommended for listeners aged 18 and up.)
We gratefully acknowledge the permission granted for this performance by the Estate of Will Greathouse. This performance is dedicated to Gerald Simonsen.
This is part of a series of Blaster Al Ackerman readings on Zoom. Readings for 2026:
Sunday, 25 January: “2,976 Vienna sausages”
Sunday, 22 February: “Ack’s Wacks: The Macaroni Column”
Sunday, 22 March: “The Day When Money Will Be Found in the Streets”
Sunday, 26 April: “The Fool”
May: “Introduction to the Davenport Continuum”/“The Death of Granny Fernandez”
All due respect to Tumblr staff for listening and rolling back a feature that was obviously not what people wanted. Like, doing that is actually commendable.
E. J. Barnes gives her third Zoom reading of 2026, Blaster Al Ackerman’s short story, “The Day When Money Will Be Found in the Streets”.
This Sunday at 8 PM EDT is when I'm giving this month's Blaster Al Ackerman Zoom reading, of his story "The Day When Money Will Be Found in the Streets". Follow the link to sign up on EventBrite, so I can send you the Zoom link on the day of the reading!
Story Synopsis: Red has a close encounter with a talking hog maw.
(Content warnings: Implied sexual activity, raw meat, alcohol abuse, political terrorism, hallucinations, animal cruelty, pyromania, suicidal ideation, clinical insanity, run-on sentences. Recommended for listeners aged 14 and up.)
We gratefully acknowledge the permission granted for this performance by the Estate of Will Greathouse.
This is part of a series of Blaster Al Ackerman readings on Zoom. Readings for 2026:
Sunday, 25 January: “2,976 Vienna sausages”
Sunday, 22 February: “Ack’s Wacks: The Macaroni Column”
Sunday, 22 March: “The Day When Money Will Be Found in the Streets”
April: “The Fool”
May: “Introduction to the Davenport Continuum”/“The Death of Granny Fernandez”
E. J. Barnes gives her second Zoom reading of 2026, Blaster Al Ackerman’s essay, “Ack’s Wacks: The Macaroni Column”.
This is a reminder that this Sunday, 22 February at 8 PM EST, I'll be giving another one of my Zoom readings of a Blaster Al Ackerman story. This one is "Ack's Wacks: The Macaroni Column", which I thought might be appropriate, or perhaps inappropriate, for Valentine's month.
You need to sign up on EventBrite so I'll know to email you the Zoom link on the day of the performance. The reading (though not the Zoom meeting as a whole) will be recorded, and later posted on my Vimeo channel.
Story Synopsis: “When four readers of this magazine, one right after another, sent letters that complimented me on my most recent column I knew there must be something wrong…Their letters seemed to assume that my column had been about macaroni….”
(Content warnings: Profanity in multiple languages, false memory, corpses, necrophilia, racist gambling games, practicing medicine without a license, malnutrition, sexual situations, foul odors, train accidents, circus “freaks”, freak accidents, malapropisms. Recommended for listeners aged 18 and up.)
We gratefully acknowledge the permission granted for this performance by the Estate of Will Greathouse. This performance is dedicated to Monty Cantsin.
This is part of a series of Blaster Al Ackerman readings on Zoom. Readings for 2026:
Sunday, 25 January: “2,976 Vienna sausages”
Sunday, 22 February: “Ack’s Wacks: The Macaroni Column”
March: “The Day When Money Will Be Found in the Streets”
April: “The Fool”
May: “Introduction to the Davenport Continuum”/”The Death of Granny Fernandez”
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
âś“ Live Streamingâś“ Interactive Chatâś“ Private Showsâś“ HD Qualityâś“ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
30 Jan--1 Feb I took a 3-day watercolor workshop with Tim Saternow, under the auspices of the New England Watercolor Society. The workshop was held at the Guild of Boston Artists on Newbury Street. These are the pieces I painted based on photos I'd taken in 2012 in Latvia.
Both were scenes from Rīga, Latvia, when I was there for the month of March 2012 during my Projekt NOASS art residency: one of the famous Cat House in Rīga's Old Town (Vecrīga), the other of a wooden windmill moved from the province of Zemgale to the Latvian Ethnographic Open-Air Museum on the east side of the city.
Both of these pieces are too big to fit on my already large (12" x 17") scanner, so I scanned each in 3 passes; then I stitched the pieces together in Photoshop. Since whatever side of the scan "sticks out" is likely to be distorted by curling up from under the lid of the scanner, I cropped each scan on the side in question -- both sides, in the case of the middle scan. I recently learned -- by accident, really -- a good way to figure out how to overlap the layers: Change the mode of the adjoining layers from Normal to Multiply. This way, it's easy to see how the layers overlap, including while rotating one of the layers to line up properly with the other. But both layers have to be reset to Normal before being merged, and all layers need to be Normal before flattening (i.e. merging into one single layer for the whole document). I did this when scanning the pencils before the workshop, and I did it today with the color scans.
We had our badminton set in the side yard. I don't remember having to throw things to get the birdie out of the tree -- even though there was an oak at one end of our "court" and a crabapple at the other.
Shunpike: The Road Less Travelled @ejbarnes - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
