So, bad news, the bill package containing KOSA, the act that would basically mandate invasive age verification across the internet, is gearing up to be discussed on December 1st 2025, giving all indications of trying to shove it out while everyone's distracted by the holidays.
Not only is KOSA in it, albeit maybe watered down, but it's packaged with a bunch of other censorship bills including the arguably even more dangerous App Store Accountability Act.
Now, I've talked about this before, so I'll be brief, but long story short the bill is so badly written that it basically requires age verification for any website where you can download a program.
This would fuck over everything from Github to The Internet Archive to Mario Fangames Galaxy, to even any site that lets users submit stuff for upload, it is an existential threat to the open internet, I cannot emphasize that enough.
Now is the time to find your House member and call them ASAP to kill this bill, especially if they're on the Energy and Commerce Committee that will be debating this, ideally right before the Thanksgiving holidays and right after, so they know you're paying attention.
If they're Dems tell them it'll be used to censor queer kids, if they're Repubs tell them it'll be used to censor small businesses and innovation, either way tell them about how age verification has been a disaster in Britain and has already lead to major leaks of information where it's been implemented, and especially how KOSA and the ASAA would harm your favorite sites, to give it that personal touch.
We've beat this shit before, and we can beat it again, we just gotta get at it!
Also, the poster above is available under a CC-By 4.0 License as long as I, Thomas F. Johnson, am credited as the creator.
The character, by the by, is an existing one called Sister Marian, and if you want to read where she comes from...
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Photos by Xer S. Rowan, Creative Commons Attribution license
I'm a disabled hobby photographer taking photos for the love of photography and sharing them under a free-to-use-as-long-as-I-am-properly-credited license. For more information about me, this project, and the license I use, visit linktr.ee/DoingItForTheExposure.
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:
To my surprise, my life's work has turned out to be a long series of attempts to get people to engage with the abstract, distant issues of tech policy before it's too late. This is hard, because people naturally devote their attention to things that are concrete and immediate (for very good reasons!).
For nearly 25 years, I've worked with my comrades at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to raise the salience of these abstract, technical ideas. I've come up with metaphors, parables, framing devices, narratives, and then…a dirty little word: enshittification. It turned out that this word, and the minor license to vulgarity it confers, was the secret to unleashing a tide of interest in these issues, to my immense surprise and gratification.
But I don't confine my efforts to coming up with words to engage people on these matters. For several years now, I have been developing myself as a collagist, combining public domain images with Creative Commons-licensed materials to create several collages every week that aim to illustrate these abstract, technical issues in an engaging, visual way:
This got a lot easier with the 2025 publication of my international bestseller Enshittification, and not just because a lot of people read that book. It was also because the US edition, from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux had a gorgeous cover:
That cover featured a (literally and figuratively) iconic variation of the "pile of poo" emoji, with angry eyebrows and a grawlix-scrawled black censor's bar over its mouth. It was designed by the brilliant Devin Washburn of No Ideas studio:
https://www.noideas.website/
Devin's poop emoji became my go-to visual shorthand for illustrating stories about enshittification, an instantly recognizable way to identify my subject matter:
I liked it so much I ordered a couple hundred enamel pins and a couple thousand vinyl stickers featuring the design, and handed them out for free to people I met on my 33-city book tour. Everywhere I went – and every time a video went out showing me wearing the pin – I was inundated with requests to buy this stuff. But my pins and stickers weren't merch (stuff you could buy) – they were swag (stuff I gave away). I had no interest in getting into the merch business!
But you folks kept asking, and also, I really loved that design, so I offered Devin a cash buyout for the rights to his enshittification poop emoji and then I released it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license that lets you use it any way you want, including for commercial products, provided you attribute it and link back to the original:
With all proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most profound and powerful disenshittifying force on the planet Earth!
But because this is CC licensed, you can make your own merch and swag! I made this great print-on-demand lawn flag my for front garden so I could let my enshittification flag fly:
My goal here is to create a free, open, remixable visual language for talking about platform decay, not owned by me or anyone, a part of the commons. Use it to illustrate anything you want, especially if you want to analogize enshittification to other phenomena, like politics or other non-digital phenomena. Semantic drift is good, actually!
You can get the high-rez of Devin's enshittification poop emoji from the internet's three most important repositories of Creative Commons licensed work.
I've supported Creative Commons literally since the very beginning. I worked with Larry Lessig, Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein on the launch of the original licenses in 2002/3, and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first book released under a CC license:
https://craphound.com/down/download/
Creative Commons is one of the most amazing feats of stunt-lawyering ever attempted, and it has been an unmitigated success, with tens of billions of works licensed CC, including all of Wikipedia. Like EFF, CC is a charitable nonprofit that depends on individual donors to keep its work going. The org turned 25 this year (along with my career as a novelist), and they've launched a giant fundraiser to carry their work forward.
As my contribution to the fundraiser, I've provided them with 375 signed, numbered copies of Canny Valley, my (otherwise) not-for-sale, extremely limited edition book of my collages, with an intro by Bruce Sterling. The book was designed by type legend John D Berry and printed at Pasadena's Typeworks, a century-old, family-owned print shop, on 100lb Mohawk paper, with a PVC binding that will last for generations:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/10/canny-valley/
CC tells me there's still some copies of Canny Valley left in the fundraiser. If you're intrigued by my collaging and want to own this very strange and beautiful little artifact, here's where to go:
A library of Solarpunk art and story seeds helping you imagine a better climate future!
A friend of mine launched this website yesterday, it's meant to promote human-made Solarpunk illustrations, so that we'll see less blurry, wobbly, weird fucking skyscrapers covered in vague green blobs attached to Solarpunk-related articles etc.
All the images available are under some version of the Creative Commons license! You can use them for zines, blog posts, papers, social media banners and so on, as long as you give credit and don't restrict others' access to them either.
If you yourself have an illustration you think would be a good fit, you can submit it here :D
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