I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY next MONDAY (Mar 24), and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.
I have an excellent excuse for this week's linkdump: I'm in Germany, but I'm supposed to be in LA, and I'm not, because London Heathrow shut down due to a power-station fire, which meant I spent all day yesterday running around like a headless chicken, trying to get home in time for my gig in San Diego on Monday (don't worry, I sorted it):
https://www.mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow
Therefore, this is 30th linkdump, in which I collect the assorted links that didn't make it into this week's newsletters. Here are the other 29:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
I always like to start and end these 'dumps with some good news, which isn't easy in these absolutely terrifying times. But there is some good news: Wil Wheaton has announced his new podcast, a successor of sorts to the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. It's called "It's Storytime" and it features Wil reading his favorite stories handpicked from science fiction magazines, including On Spec, the magazine that bought my very first published story (I was 16, it ran in their special youth issue, it wasn't very good, but boy did it mean a lot to me):
https://wilwheaton.net/podcast/
Here's some more good news: a court has found (again!) that works created by AI are not eligible for copyright. This is the very best possible outcome for people worried about creators' rights in the age of AI, because if our bosses can't copyright the botshit that comes out of the "AI" systems trained on our work, then they will pay us:
Our bosses hate paying us, but they hate the idea of not being able to stop people from copying their entertainment products so! much! more! It's that simple:
This outcome is so much better than the idea that AI training isn't fair use – an idea that threatens the existence of search engines, archiving, computational linguistics, and other clearly beneficial activities. Worse than that, though: if we create a new copyright that allows creators to prevent others from scraping and analyzing their works, our bosses will immediately alter their non-negotiable boilerplate contracts to demand that we assign them this right. That will allow them to warehouse huge troves of copyrighted material that they will sell to AI companies who will train models designed to put us on the breadline (see above, re: our bosses hate paying us):
The rights of archivists grow more urgent by the day, as the Trump regime lays waste to billions of dollars worth of government materials that were produced at public expense, deleting decades of scientific, scholarly, historical and technical materials. This is the kind of thing you might expect the National Archive or the Library of Congress to take care of, but they're being chucked into the meat-grinder as well.
To make things even worse, Trump and Musk have laid waste to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a tiny, vital agency that provides funding to libraries, archives and museums across the country. Evan Robb writes about all the ways the IMLS supports the public in his state of Washington:
Technology support. Last-mile broadband connection, network support, hardware, etc. Assistance with the confusing e-rate program for reduced Internet pricing for libraries.
Coordinated group purchase of e-books, e-audiobooks, scholarly research databases, etc.
Library services for the blind and print-disabled.
Libraries in state prisons, juvenile detention centers, and psychiatric institutions.
Digitization of, and access to, historical resources (e.g., newspapers, government records, documents, photos, film, audio, etc.).
Literacy programming and support for youth services at libraries.
The entire IMLS budget over the next 10 years rounds to zero when compared to the US federal budget – and yet, by gutting it, DOGE is amputating significant parts of the country's systems that promote literacy; critical thinking; and universal access to networks, media and ideas. Put it that way, and it's not hard to see why they hate it so.
Trying to figure out what Trump is up to is (deliberately) confusing, because Trump and Musk are pursuing a chaotic agenda that is designed to keep their foes off-balance:
But as Hamilton Nolan writes, there's a way to cut through the chaos and make sense of it all. The problem is that there are a handful of billionaires who have so much money that when they choose chaos, we all have to live with it:
The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.
We actually have a body of law designed to prevent this from happening. It's called "antitrust" and 40 years ago, Jimmy Carter decided to follow the advice of some of history's dumbest economists who said that fighting monopolies made the economy "inefficient." Every president since, up to – but not including – Biden, did even more to encourage monopolization and the immense riches it creates for a tiny number of greedy bastards.
But Biden changed that. Thanks to the "Unity Taskforce" that divided up the presidential appointments between the Democrats' corporate wing and the Warren/Sanders wing, Biden appointed some of the most committed, effective trustbusters we'd seen for generations:
After Trump's election, there was some room for hope that Trump's FTC would continue to pursue at least some of the anti-monopoly work of the Biden years. After all, there's a sizable faction within the MAGA movement that hates (some) monopolies:
But last week, Trump claimed to have illegally fired the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC: Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter. I stan both of these commissioners, hard. When they were at the height of their powers in the Biden years, I had the incredible, disorienting experience of getting out of bed, checking the headlines, and feeling very good about what the government had just done.
Trump isn't legally allowed to fire Bedoya and Slaughter. Perhaps he's just picking this fight as part of his chaos agenda (see above). But there are some other pretty good theories about what this is setting up. In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller proposes that Trump is using this case as a wedge, trying to set a precedent that would let him fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell:
But perhaps there's more to it. Stoller just had Commissioner Bedoya on Organized Money, the podcast he co-hosts with David Dayen, and Bedoya pointed out that if Trump can fire Democratic commissioners, he can also fire Republican commissioners. That means that if he cuts a shady deal with, say, Jeff Bezos, he can order the FTC to drop its case against Amazon and fire the Republicans on the commission if they don't frog when he jumps:
The future that our plutocrat overlords are grasping for is indeed a terrible one. You can see its shape in the fantasies of "liberatarian exit" – the seasteads, free states, and other assorted attempts to build anarcho-capitalist lawless lands where you can sell yourself into slavery, or just sell your kidneys. The best nonfiction book on libertarian exit is Raymond Criab's 2022 "Adventure Capitalism," a brilliant, darkly hilarious and chilling history of every time a group of people have tried to found a nation based on elevating selfishness to a virtue:
If Craib's book is the best nonfiction volume on the subject of libertarian exit, then Naomi Kritzer's super 2023 novel Liberty's Daughter is the best novel about life in a libertopia – a young adult novel about a girl growing up in the hell that would be life with a Heinlein-type dad:
But now this canon has a third volume, a piece of design fiction from Atelier Van Lieshout called "Slave City," which specs out an arcology populated with 200,000 inhabitants whose "very rational, efficient and profitable" arrangements produce €7b/year in profit:
This economic miracle is created by the residents' "voluntary" opt-in to a day consisting of 7h in an office, 7h toiling in the fields, 7h of sleep, and 3h for "leisure" (e.g. hanging out at "The Mall," a 24/7, 26-storey " boundless consumer paradise"). Slaves who wish to better themselves can attend either Female Slave University or Male Slave University (no gender controversy in Slave City!), which run 24/7, with 7 hours of study, 7 hours of upkeep and maintenance on the facility, 7h of sleep, and, of course, 3h of "leisure."
The field of design fiction is a weird and fertile one. In his traditional closing keynote for this year's SXSW Interactive festival, Bruce Sterling opens with a little potted history of the field since it was coined by Julian Bleeker:
Then Bruce moves on to his own latest design fiction project, an automated poetry machine called the Versificatore first described by Primo Levi in an odd piece of science fiction written for a newspaper. The Versificatore was then adapted to the screen in 1971, for an episode of an Italian sf TV show based on Levi's fiction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tva-D_8b8-E
And now Sterling has built a Versificatore. The keynote is a sterlingian delight – as all of his SXSW closers are. It's a hymn to the value of "imaginary futures" and an instruction manual for recovering them. It could not be more timely.
Sterling's imaginary futures would be a good upbeat note to end this 'dump with, but I've got a real future that's just as inspiring to close us out with: the EU has found Apple guilty of monopolizing the interfaces to its devices and have ordered the company to open them up for interoperability, so that other manufacturers – European manufacturers! – can make fully interoperable gadgets that are first-class citizens of Apple's "ecosystem":
It's a good reminder that as America crumbles, there are still places left in the world with competent governments that want to help the people they represent thrive and prosper. As the Prophet Gibson tells us, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." Let's hope that the EU is living in America's future, and not the other way around.
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:
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I spent every penny I made.  Knowing that I would usually receive an annual bonus, I would buy something from Best Buy or somewhere else a year in advance on credit, with no payments and no interest for a year. When my bonus came, I would pay off whatever I bought in the prior year and then buy something else. I would literally spend my bonus a year before I received it! I did this year after year.
Since I had no savings, I sold stock options I’d received from my employer so that my family could attend my sister’s wedding in Hawaii.  We planned to visit my brother-in-law’s family in California in the following year.  However, when it came time for the trip in the fall of 2008, the market was tanking and my stock options were worthless. I had to cancel the trip. It was humiliating.
I’ve mentioned before that the market crash of 2008 is what marked the beginning of my interest in stocks. But the last post got me thinking; specifically, what was it that caused me to make the switch from spender to saver?
The Journey
Thinking back, the shift actually began at around the same time. It’s amazing how seeing your 401k chopped in half can focus the mind. Prior to this, I was just kind of floating through life with no concrete long-term plans.  The 2008 crisis shook me up and inspired me to start looking for ways to mitigate economic risks that I’d never even noticed before. Saving money and buying precious metals was part of it. Increasing personal resilience by planting fruit trees and starting a garden was another step we took. Unfortunately, I also thought that “spreading the word” and political action were solutions as well.
This is where I can point to a second pivotal event in my journey. In 2011, I was spending a lot of time (and money) making music with my band, Rothbard.  We were invited to participate in an event called Libertopia in San Diego. We played our set and the rest of the time I listened to many of the speakers. The overarching theme and philosophy I took away from that conference literally changed the trajectory of my life.
I realized that it’s futile to try to “mobilize a majority”.  There’s no need to try to conjure up a “consensus”.  For the first time in my life, I ascertained the true essence of government; coercion. The majority forcing it’s will on the minority is immoral and I want no part of it, even if my ideas happen to be in the majority. Secondly, the elusive if not impossible goal of trying to change the minds of enough people can become convenient excuses that ultimately keep me spinning my wheels but going nowhere.
The reality is I can live a rich life of freedom NOW without these things.
Prior to this, I had been fixated on a lot of the doom and gloom out there.  Out of control government spending and debt, stifling regulations, corrupt politicians, etc., etc. Of course, there are plenty of negatives I can and did focus on, but wasting my limited time and energy fretting about things out of my control left me feeling frustrated and unhappy.
Governments will do what governments do. Politicians will continue to do what politicians do.  I can’t control them. I can, however, improve society by leading by example; by presenting it with “one improved unit“, as Albert Jay Nock has said.
The truth is, the people and institutions I thought were holding me back, can actually do little to stop me from living a life of freedom.  All I had to do was define what being free meant to me and then find creative ways to get there.  As I started confronting the obstacles in my path, I found that many of them existed only in my mind.
Let me give you some idea of how Libertopia elevated my vision. Prior to this event, I was arguing with my HOA about my right to put a Ron Paul sign in my front yard.  I was also spending a lot of my free time going through boxes of coins looking for copper and silver.
After the event, my wife and I looked at investment property in the Dominican Republic and then purchased a rental house in San Antonio.   I also started getting serious about learning how to make money with stocks.
Key Concepts
Given that background information, I’ve isolated two key concepts that were instrumental in my transformation from spender to saver.
A clear vision – once you get a clear picture of where you want to go, it makes all of your other decisions so much easier, including your spending decisions.
Viewing money as capital – Basically, this is the realization that you can use money to make even more money. This hit me as I started to make money with stocks. I even got a taste of this when I saw the value of the gold and silver coins I had purchased rise in value.
Of course, no two people take the exact same path, but I hope this little walk down memory lane is helpful to you on your journey towards a life of freedom.
how I went from spender to saver was originally published on
Statist Fallacies: "Libertopia" - The Art of Not Being Governed
Utopia? No, just a significant improvement ;)
h/t +Andrew Turner
#Libertopia #Utopia #Voluntaryism #Disseminate
The Art of Not Being Governed originally shared:
“So you’re going to go on record stating that in 'Voluntaryist Utopia', everything that is currently provided to the citizenry by the state would continue to be available to everyone in at least an equally hassle-free manner?”
