I cannot express to you how FAST it has gone. I grew up in a world that does not exist now. We're starting on the path to reverse it, globally. You might not know how much solar has EXPLODED in the last decade or two. It's gone from a side thing, a weirdo novelty that was just Not Viable... to whole countries investing in infrastructure. but we have to keep fighting big oil and fascism everywhere we can in order to keep on this road to a new better less scorching burning earth.

so much cheap generic medication. reverse engineering compounds would be even more financially profitable.

fewer people dead of vaccine preventable illnesses in the global south bc the greatest barrier to distributing some vaccines like hpv is their ip

plant seeds and grafts that come from the plants instead of licensing them. don't invest so much in preventing cross contamination. more localised experimental breeding.

library of the world: every book and journal article in the world could be digitised and be searchable for every person in the world to read regardless of where they live. cheap reprint runs and local translations everywhere.

an online interface where every citation could actually lead to the text in question

freedom from the hell that is DRM software

everytime someone reverse engineered your shitty proprietary software we would all be freed from it instead of them getting DMCA'd

so much hardware would be opened up & therefore made so much cooler.

so many more songs that riff off and sample and interpolate shit from this decade instead of like 70 years ago and more analysis of music that didn't keep getting nuked off the internet

preserving movies and tv shows and games as long as someone, somewhere has the desire to host them

just go publish your fanfic/art/vid as is instead of all us pretending it isn't fanwork or begging the corporation for mercy / licensing

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand/#autodisparagement

More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."

Lukashenka's secret police – still called the KGB – routinely terrorize and kidnap pro-democracy activists, and all forms of protest are banned. It was against the backdrop of this unrelenting oppression that the activists launched a series of whimsical "flash mobs" that challenged the Lukashenka regime's willingness to crack down on even the most innocuous behavior.

One of these flash mobs was an ice cream social: activists converged on a public square to eat ice cream cones. Lukashenka's thugs beat them and dragged them away:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070609164305/http://pics.livejournal.com/litota_/gallery/0000bcch

The protestors thought that by daring Lukashenka to arrest people for eating ice cream, they could create a win-win situation: either Lukashenka would be revealed as the kind of asshole who thinks it should be illegal to eat ice cream, or he'd be revealed as the kind of weakling who couldn't keep a lid on dissent.

Lukashenka took the bait. And took it. And took it. In the years that followed, protesters would be arrested for smiling, clapping, and just standing silently:

https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2011/07/belarus-protesters-rally-on-the-web/

The world learned that Lukashenka was a buffoon, and Belarusians affirmed their view that this buffoon would not hesitate to mete out the most vicious punishments for the most innocuous actions:

https://sci-hub.st/10.1080/25739638.2021.1928880

Speaking of thin-skinned, paranoid, wildly corrupt buffoons who will stop at nothing to silence their enemies, how about that Mark Zuckerberg, huh? Sure, all the headlines these days are about Zuck's intention to transform Facebook into a sports betting site:

https://www.businessinsider.com/metas-zuckerberg-enters-the-prediction-market-arena-polymarket-2026-6

But in the UK, Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers keeps finding new, ice cream grade depths of absurdity to plumb. The whistleblower in question is, of course, Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the internationally bestselling memoir Careless People, which details the criminality she witnesses during her years as the head of Facebook's international relations team:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Careless People is full of revelations about the gross institutional misconduct of Facebook, including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar. But it's also full of stories about the severe personal failings of Facebook's executive team, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg.

These three come off as the most colossal of assholes, cruel, petty and predatory. Sandberg comes across as a sexual abuser who dreams of trafficking in poor people's organs. Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma). Worst of all, though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating at Settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace process after a 50-year civil war because he refused to get out of bed before noon. Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.

It's a terrible company, with awful products, run by the worst people. Wynn-Williams' conditions of employment required her to sign a contract that bound her to silence (nondisclosure), forbade her from speaking ill of the company (nondisparagement), and denied her access to the legal system in all her dealings with Meta (binding arbitration).

How do I protect my sighting of Elvis? Copyright law does not protect sightings. [,,,]

Absolutely nothing about this design is convenient to execute in wood. Every piece is curved, most have compound curves. This is artisan craftsmanship: it's inherently slow, manual, and skilled. Notice, also, that most features of this chair must be thicker and heavier than on the plastic chairs being imitated. Injection-molded chairs can be produced in this shape in a matter of minutes with far less material at very low cost.

The standard one-piece injection molded plastic chair is referred to as a "Monobloc", literally just describing it as a single piece. The history of this chair is fascinating, and it all starts back in 1946, with the D.C. Simpson Monobloc.

Douglas Colborne Simpson was an architect mostly active in the 40's and 50's, designing a lot of classic mid-century style buildings in Vancouver, Canada(1). In 1946, as part of a government project to find new uses for materials developed for WWII, he and engineer James Donahue developed the design you see above, simply called the Monobloc(2). Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about this chair as it was only ever a prototype, and no modern examples have survived, nor have most of the records surrounding it(3). To my knowledge, we don't actually know if this was technically injection molded, or crafted some other way. We can't even be sure if it was technically the inspiration for the designs that followed, but no matter the case it has lent its name to the entire genre.

Plastics technology was simply not what it is today back in the 1940's. Most people would have had very little plastic in their homes, most likely just a few pieces of Bakelite (the first commercially viable plastic, made from a formaldehyde based resin in a Bakelizer, the best name for any industrial manufacturing equipment ever). Over the following few decades, however, as a wider variety of plastics were both developed and came down in price to the point of commercial viability, the concept of the plastic chair was revisited, and the first folks to revisit it were Helmut Batzner, in 1964, and Joe Colombo, in 1965.

This, is the Bofinger chair, Batzner's design:

The elements of D.C.Simpson's Monobloc were pretty alien compared to todays mass-manufactured plastic chairs, but here we start to see some more modern elements come into play. The first thing you probably notice is the front legs, which have that characteristic visible 90 degree bend in them for added rigidity, plus a much more comfortably leaned back and slightly scoop-shaped seat. We also see much more support in the back rest, with broad triangles allowing for a more efficient use of materials without losing back support.

Similar to Simpson, Batzner was not an industrial designer, but an architect, and this chair had a very specific purpose. Batzner and his team designed it as part of a project to build a new theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, which required a large amount of additional seating which could be easily packed away into storage or distributed around the theaters rooms by the staff (4). As such, it was designed to be both lightweight and stackable, so several of them could be moved by one person, and they could be stored compactly. This piece of furniture was a huge hit a the theater, and was so popular that 120,000 units would ultimately be manufactured and sold around the world, with each one taking just 5 minutes to produce (4).

Around the same time, Joe Colombo enters the scene with this:

Colombo was an artist in several mediums who, after taking over his families appliance company in the 50's, made the shift towards architecture and interior design, and started designing a wide array of trend-setting furniture(5). The chair shown above is known as the Universale (sometimes referred to as the Chair Universal 4867), designed in 1965. This chair differs pretty greatly from the ones that came after it, it many ways it represents a different path that could have been taken, but it's also very widely referenced as an inspiration for what is broadly considered the origin of the white plastic chair the world over.

Enter: the Fauteuil 300

This is, arguably, the first iteration of the white plastic chair we all know today. Designed by Henry Massonnet in 1972, the Fauteuil 300 and it's imitators are, collectively, the single most widely used piece of furniture in the entire world(6). Before that, however, it was something else entirely: works of art.

What might be hard to recognize in hindsight is that all of these chairs described so far were not everyday objects. They were on the forefront of modern design, they made use of brand new materials and manufacturing processes, and at the time they were each made, they were slick, stylish, and fairly expensive. Despite the speed at which they could be manufactured, these innovative, high-end chairs rose sharply in cost up through the early 1980's due to the sheer demand for them. They weren't cheap spare seating you stuck in the garage, they were placed at dining tables and on fine patios, and they were a wildly popular talking point. That's not to say their expense justified their artistic value, but rather that their expense and popularity was a product of their status as highly contemporary and boundary-pushing designs.

With the price of plastics declining after the 70's, the increasing accessibility of injection molding to manufacturers, and the widespread popularity of these designs, copycats proliferated rapidly, and eventually drove the price down. This era, in the 80's and 90's, is when these chairs became cheap an ubiquitous, and where they became manufactured the world over.

And here is where we reach this piece, "Plastic chair in wood", by Maarten Baas, and a piece of the history I've left out so far. The Monobloc was designed to be made out of wood. Like the the other chairs designed by Joe Colombo, like the chairs that predated the Simpson, the Monobloc was designed with the intention of using laminated plywood, but as the artists and designers behind them began to experiment with new materials they fell in love with the idea of making them from plastic, and so they did. They redesigned and redesigned until they made something that would be impossible to make in wood at a price most people could afford, but which could be made from plastic in mere minutes. The organic curves and thin profiles would take so much time, so much waste material, so much skill and effort to create if made of wood that they could never be furniture, they could only be art. Baas' chair is a perfect, beautiful reflection of that.

That, in brief, is the history of the design of the white plastic Monobloc chair, but it's not all there is to know. In fact, it's kind of just the start. I've linked my sources below, but I would strongly recommend checking out the German documentary Monobloc, by Hauke Wendler. It goes over the history, but it's far more interested with what the Monobloc means, and what it's place is in our world today. The impact it's made, the better and the worse, and what it says about us. It's fascinating, and well worth your time.

sources below.

The Rorschach test is pseudoscientific and untrustworthy, and should absolutely not be used as a serious analytical tool. Here's the list of all the standard images, along with details about how practitioners are supposed to interpret your interpretations of them: https://www.dandebat.dk/eng-personkort.htm