Iranian brickwork, arbitrated pillows, smothered comics, and aerogel desalination
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.
This is the 2^5th instance on which I find myself confronting a Saturday morning on which I have a zillion links that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, occasioning a linkdump post; here are the previous 31 installments:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
I like to start these with good news, which is often hard to find these days, but here's something genuinely cool: an aerogel that can desalinate salt water using only radiant solar energy for power:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/this-aerogel-and-some-sun-could-make-saltwater-drinkable/
Aerogels are ultralight materials made of carbon nanotubes; they're incredibly cheap to manufacture in bulk, and each one can have different properties, depending on the deposition and geometry of the 'tubes. The tech is described by Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Xi Shen in ACS Energy Letters:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.5c01233?ref=pdf
You put the gel in some salt water (which can also be contaminated with pathogens, apparently) and it acts as a porous evaporator, causing pure water vapor to rise out of the mass, which can be condensed and drunk. It's not clear how many times you can do this with a given aerogel, but it's exciting stuff.
Moving from aerogel to air travel: an Air Canada passenger named Linda Royle was forced to check her carry-on on a stopover in Toronto. Someone stole her bag and Air Canada refused to compensate her for it (they disqualified her because she couldn't provide original receipts for the shoes she'd bought five years previously). That's frustrating, of course, but what happened next is a lot weirder: she got a call from a pharmacist in St John's, Newfoundland who had been entrusted with her missing bag by Air Canada, on the grounds that they didn't know who it belonged to, and they thought the pharmacist could use the labels on her prescription meds to track her down.
That's not even the weird part! When Linda Royle recovered her bag, she discovered that someone had stolen a bunch of stuff out of it, and replaced it toilet bags belonging to two strangers, a knife, and an Air Canada ticket scanner:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/air-canada-mystery-baggage-1.7592756
After this hit the news, Air Canada suddenly discovered that it was allowed to reimburse her for her stolen stuff even though she hadn't saved all her receipts. This is all about par for the course with Air Canada, an airline that is violently allergic to both checked baggage and customer service.
Air Canada is the airline that was discovered to have a warehouse full of "lost" bags next to Toronto Pearson Airport, none of which they bothered to reunite passengers with, donating the bags to local charities instead:
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/air-canada-passengers-complain-lost-144243835.html
Despite this, the airline registered very few customer complaints. That's because they've fired so many of their customer service reps and replaced them with AI chatbots whose florid "hallucinations" give fliers all kinds of wrong advice, which Air Canada refuses to make up for unless passengers pursue them through several rounds of appeal and then escalate to a government ombudsman:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/
Can't register complaints if you fire all the customer service reps and replace them with malfing dogshit chatbots, amirite?
But you don't have to fire all your customer service reps or invest in chatbots to create an all-consuming accountability sink that can absorb all the risk you create by screwing over your customers. The easiest way to do that is to stick a "binding arbitration" waiver in your terms of service that takes away your customer's right to sue, no matter how much harm you inflict on them.
It's getting harder and harder to move through the world without surrendering your legal rights these days. I've had to walk away from doctors, dentists, taxi companies, solar installers, and car rental companies because they wanted me to click away my right to sue as a condition of doing business with them. What's the point of a system of civil justice if everyone in a position to harm you can force you to swear off using it?
It would be different if arbitration was fair, but "he who pays the piper calls the tune" – that is, arbitrators almost always rule in favor of the corporation that's paying them, no matter how they've screwed over the other party. There are a few exceptions, but things have to be really egregious for this to be the case – as with the Fox show Bones, whose cast were so utterly screwed by Fox that the arbitrator awarded them $179m, issuing a scathing ruling that called out individual Fox execs for their scumbag conduct:
https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/fox-bones-arbitration-emily-deschanel-179-million-1203150879/
But while the corporate-friendly judiciary has a long history of forcing everyday people into arbitration when they get maimed or cheated by a capitalist enterprise, these same judges are always happy to set aside arbitrator's judgements when they go in favor of the little guy, which is exactly what happened with Bones:
https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/bones-arbitration-against-fox-1203200504/
That wasn't the last judge to experience a sudden attack of skepticism for arbitrators' decisions in the face of an adverse outcome for some corporate scumbag. This week, the Eight Circuit overturned a $5m arbitration award that Mike "Mypillow" Lindell was ordered to pay after he lost a bet about whether the 2020 election was stolen:
https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/07/arbitration-for-thee-but-not-for-mike-lindell.html
Lindell offered $5m to anyone who could prove the 2020 election wasn't stolen. A software developer named Robert Zeidman analyzed the voting machine logs that Lindell used as the basis for his claims and showed that Lindell was full of shit. An arbitrator agreed, and ordered Lindell to pay $5m.
The Eight Circuit, meanwhile, decided that the arbitrator "exceeded their powers" and set aside the award. As Credit Slips' Bob Lawless writes, it would be nice if this meant that the next time you were hurt by a dentist, a doctor, a solar installer, a rental car agency, or a taxi company, you could get out of arbitration, but he's not holding his breath: "Something tells me, however, that might not be the case in a more routine consumer dispute."
The house always wins. That's true even when the player is trying to build a casino! In her latest newsletter, Ann Pettifor writes about how "Capitalism Devours Crypto":
https://annpettifor.substack.com/p/capitalism-devours-crypto
Pettifor's writing about the institutional formalization of "Stablecoins," a form of wildcat money that is a modern update of the "narrow bank" notes that triggered a series of financial panics in the 1830s, wiping out a sizable fraction of the US economy. The GENIUS Act, which brings Stablecoins into a legal framework, has helped inflate a crypto bubble worth $4t.
Key to this bubble is to make crypto into a form of government-backed (but only barely regulated) asset, with one of the primary beneficiaries being World Liberty Financial, a company owned by the President of the United States. Other beneficiaries include Michael Saylor's "Strategy" (formerly Microstrategy), whose actual strategy is to sell shares and bonds to buy bitcoin, then use the rising price of bitcoin to issue more paper that it can use to buy more bitcoin, and so on. This is exactly how the South Sea Company ran its operation, leading to yet another global financial cataclysm:
https://www.ft.com/content/45d7c547-f686-4162-bfc3-56d609003bbb
A technology regulated by the US government and heavily manipulated by the US president is the polar opposite of the libertarian rhetoric in Satoshi's original bitcoin white paper, which bitcoin bros cite as gospel when explaining how they're doing something truly different this time.
Pettifor says that crypto is different from Beanie Babies and other bubbles – because this time, the president is in on the scam.
Speaking of the crypto bubble, one striking feature of this bubble is how many of its key players are also involved in pumping up the AI bubble. The AI bubble is a different kind of sleaze from the crypto bubble, but it's every bit as sleazy.
Ever since Openai and Trump's splashy announcement of the $500b "Stargate" plan to build AI data-centers, Ed Zitron, one of the great tech debullshitifiers, has been taking pointed notice of just how vaporous this plan is. In his latest investigation, Zitron shows how the supine tech press has played credulous stenographer to Sam Altman and Softbank in helping to sell a clearly bogus claim about Softbank's investment in Stargate:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/softbank-openai/
Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Bloomberg on down took Sam Altman at his word when he claimed that a new data-center in Abilene, TX was a) part of Stargate, and b) funded by Softbank.
The thing is, neither of these are true. As confirmed by the data-center's own developers, "Softbank is not and has not been involved in the funding for its construction." Softbank is the exclusive trademark holder for Stargate, and Stargate has no legal entity apart from this trademark, so this data-center is not part of Stargate, despite widespread press coverage to the contrary.
What's more, there are no other data-centers on the horizon that are part of Stargate. Which is to say that Stargate, the $500b AI data center program, doesn't actually exist.
Zitron:
Stargate does not exist other than as a name that Sam Altman gives things to make them feel more special than they are, and SoftBank was never involved. Stargate does not exist as reported.
One of the reasons I love Zitron's work so much is that he actually really likes technology and aspires to a world where the promise of technology as a force for human thriving and betterment can be realized. That's what animates me, too, which is why I was so excited to read "Designing Sousveillance Tools for Gig Workers," a paper by a group of computer scientists who worked closely with gig workers to create a design framework for technology that helps workers get the upper hand over their bosses:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.09986
The researcher describe a radical, careful methodology grounded in co-creation, led by the users – the workers – in dialog with the tech experts. The paper's preamble, which sets out the concept of "ethics of care" is almost as interesting as the recommendations that the workers and researchers create together.
One of those researchers is Saiph Savage, who is the co-organizer of next week's ACM Collective Intelligence conference in San Diego, where I'm giving the evening keynote on Aug 5:
https://ci.acm.org/2025/speakers/cory-doctorow/
And speaking of a) great tech events and b) an ethic of care, everyone who can get to New York from Aug 15-17 should absolutely plan on attending Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in Queen's. HOPE is one of the oldest hacker cons in the world, organized by the 2600 Magazine folks, and it is human-scaled, human-centric, and dedicated to liberation through technology.
HOPE has just announced a bunch of student scholarships, so if you're not able to come up with the door fee (or the heavily discounted streaming-only ticket), HOPE is still something you can do!
https://www.2600.com/content/hope-updates-more-speakers-and-student-scholarships
One of the things I adore about hacker cons is the way they embody the hacker ethic that every 10 foot wall that some stupid corporation builds around your tech should be met with an 11 foot ladder. The ability of technologists to disenshittify the tools we love is key to resisting enshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/23/resto-modding/#itch-scratchers-r-us
Here's a 10 foot wall that I'd love to see comprehensively scaled: Eschelon, maker of "smart" home gym equipment, just remote-fucked all of the hardware its customers had purchased by pushing out a software downgrade:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/firmware-update-hinders-echelon-smart-home-gym-equipments-ability-to-work-offline/
The downgrade breaks compatibility with apps like QZ, which allow you to connect your Eschelon gear to third-party services like Zwift, which "shows people virtual, scenic worlds while they’re exercising." QZ also lets Eschelon owners make their workouts better in other ways, like automating resistance adjustments.
By blocking QZ, Eschelon can force its customers to sign up for its own, inferior $40/month service. When companies pull scams like this, they often claim that they need to do so in order to remain in business, but here's some even worse news: thanks to the new software that Eschelon just forced into its customers' devices, these devices will no longer be able to run at all if Eschelon goes out of business. This is a bad design under any circumstances, but when deployed by a company that is sufficiently desperate to rug its customers in this way, it's a dismal sign indeed. At this point, you'd have to be pretty gullible to buy a new Eschelon device, given the strong likelihood that both the company and its products are headed for the scrapheap.
This is classic enshittification, of course, a subject I'm so obsessed with that I've written an entire book about it, which drops on October 7:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
The early reviews are rolling in for the book now, starting with Booklist:
This is Doctorow in full-on angry author mode; he pulls no punches here, naming names and calling out guilty parties . . . Readers will be upset, informed, and inflamed.
Not to be outdone, Publishers Weekly writes:
A razor-sharp yet subtly optimistic look at the soul-sucking state of the internet.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780374619329
Meanwhile, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman writes,
Cory Doctorow’s neologism was an instant hit, neatly encapsulating the public’s growing disappointment, sometimes bordering on rage, with what was happening to internet platforms. His pithy summary of the process was also brilliant.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=277517&post_id=169092636&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=444vl&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
I'm heading out on tour with this one in October, hitting the US (Seattle, Boston, DC, NYC, NOLA, Chicago, LA, PDX, Miami and Madison, CT), Canada (Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto); and the UK (London, Hay, and possibly Glasgow).
With all that travel on the horizon, it's time to draw this linkdump to a close, but I'll leave you with a couple of lighter stories as palette-cleansers. First, there's "Smothered," a documentary about the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers streaming free at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/smothered-the-censorship-struggles-of-the-smothers-brothers-comedy-hour-2002
The Smothers Brothers were a musical comedy act who worked savage political commentary into their act, and when they refused to pull their punches, CBS's president canceled their show, for fear of pissing off Richard Nixon, a thin-skinned, authoritarian, dishonest vindictive Republican president. What I'm getting at here, is that Colbert is in good company.
Here's a couple of my favorite Smothers Brothers bits: first, the classic "Mom Always Liked You Best," which my Dad used to recite all the time when I was growing up, until we could all hit the line "Bark, chicken, bark" at the drop of a hat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXH_hFqBPCs
And then there's "Chirp Goes the Nightingale," which my daughter and I used to sing at bedtime after I read her a story, which would reduce us to tears of laughter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ1NfuHphOw
Finally, as a little digestif, please enjoy this article by Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner on the miracle of modern Iranian brickwork, one of the most exciting new developments in architecture of this century (notwithstanding that the US is determined to bomb it all into rubble):
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/iranian-brick-architecture/
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
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/2025/07/26/manifolds/#bark-chicken-bark
