I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. After that, it's LONDON (Jul 1) and MANCHESTER (Jul 2).
It's linkdump time, in which I skillfully weave together all the links that I was too busy to cram into the week's newsletter issues. Here's the previous 31 (!) installments:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
This week's linkdump comes with a great excuse: I was off at the staff retreat for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for intensive policy work (and a lot of team-bonding socializing – I karaoked "The Piano Has Been Drinking") with my colleagues on the front lines of the battle to disenshittify the internet. If you'd like to join that fight, here's a chance to do so: we're hiring a staff technologist!
Of course, you don't have to work for EFF to make disenshittificatory tech. "Just a QR Code" is a new site that generates QR codes, operating entirely in your browser, without transmitting any data to a server or trying to cram ads into your eyeballs. The fact that it runs entirely in-browser means you can save this webpage and work with an offline copy to generate QR codes forever – even if the site goes down:
https://justaqrcode.com/
One of the best, longest-tenured gatherings of anti-enshittification technologists is HOPE, the Hackers On Planet Earth con spawned by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. After getting evicted from their traditional digs at the Hotel Pennsylvania (which was bought by a billionaire who turned it into a crater and then lost interest), HOPE had to find new digs. The new location, St John's University in Queens, is fantastic, and the last event was so great they decided to go from biennial to annual:
https://hope.net/
But then, Trump hit. HOPE draws a sizable cohort of international attendees and speakers, and most of these people have decided that attending a genuinely fantastic hacker con isn't worth risk being sent to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp by a surly border guard. As a result, HOPE's numbers are dangerously low:
Please consider attending! HOPE is consistently one of the best events I've attended. The vibes are impeccable and the information is deep, gnarly and fantastic, and has a long, long track record of just being great.
Another beloved, long-running, print based institution is The Onion, which got a new lease on life when former disinformation reporter Ben Collins bought the site after quitting NBC, which had censured him for being too mean to Elon Musk:
Having been burned by corporate journalistic cowardice, Collins decided to revive The Onion's tradition of merciless, trenchant parody. He also revived The Onion's tradition of showing up in the world as a printed artifact, spraying gallons of ink onto tons of vegetable pulp and shipping the result to mailboxes around the world (including mine):
https://membership.theonion.com/
Collins sat down for a long interview with Vanity Fair's Chris Murphy that is full of so many excellent moments and quips that I actually cheered aloud while reading it, more than once!
Collins believes he saved The Onion from "AI death," and I think he's right. Instead, he's produced a site that fights fascism using one of history's most reliable methods, satire: "There’s nothing fascists hate more than getting truly ripped on." Collins points out something interesting about Trump: "He never laughs…He’s funny in the sense that callous people can be particularly biting, but he’s not funny."
Here's his advice to other would-be media barons: "Kowtowing to power— your job is not that, nobody fucking wants that."
Among other things, Collins used The Onion to acquire Alex Jones's Infowars out of bankruptcy, only to have far-right legal shenanigans interrupt the hostile takeover (it's still in the courts).
(Paywall-busting version here:)
https://archive.is/aV2av
Another funny – but much angrier – independent media voice is Ed Zitron, one of the best ranters in technology. Ed's motto is "I hate them for what they did to the computer," a phrase I like so much I used it as the epigraph for my next book. Ed's just published the longest-ever post on his excellent "Where's Your Ed At?" newsletter, called "The Era of the Business Idiot":
In this post, Ed tried to answer the burning question, "Why are these objectively very stupid people given so much power over so much capital, and the lives of so many of us?" He lashes out at everyone – MBA programs, sociopathic Jack Welch-alikes, the supine press, and more. And he coins a truly excellent epithet for one of our most cherished business idiots, Open AI CEO Sam Altman:
SLOPPENHEIMER.
I love Ed's work, which focuses extensively on the internal ideological and personal traits of business leaders. But I think that any study of the enshittocene – and any effective opposition to enshittification – needs to start with policy, the legal arrangements that create an enshittogenic environment that allow the business idiots to wreak havoc without the constraints of competition, regulation, an empowered workforce or technological countermeasures.
In the EU, the epicenter of enshittogenesis is Ireland, a tax haven that has attracted the largest and worst American tech companies who maintain the fiction that they are based in Eire. But these companies are hardly loyal to Dublin: any company footloose enough to pretend that it's Irish this week can pretend to be Maltese, Luxembourgeois, Cypriot or Dutch next week. To keep those companies from upping sticks, Ireland must not only offer them criminally favorable tax treatment, they have to slow walk or ignore all regulations that discipline the enshittificatory impulses of Big Tech:
In particular, Drea identifies the risk that Ireland will shelter US companies from enforcement of the Digital Markets Act, the EU's "crowning legislative jewel." Ireland's PM has been carrying water for Trump, pressuring the EU to "considered and measured" in its response to Trump's aggression; he's also vowed to "resist" the EU's digital taxes. Drea argues that centralizing enforcement of EU tech regulation in Brussels and the federal courts will relieve Ireland of the pressure to defend Trump's policies, since they will no longer be in a position to protect tech companies from Europe's rules.
When it comes to flouting EU rules, of the most egregious "Irish" tech offenders is Meta. In a long article for Ars Technica, Ashley Belanger looks at Zuckerberg's recent statements about Facebook's future as a place where lonely people, having been alienated from their actual friends and families by a system that downranks posts from your social network to create space for ads and boosted posts, befriend AI chatbots instead:
I contributed a little to Belanger's excellent reporting, discussing my work with EFF on what an interoperable Facebook might look like, and how it might set Facebook's prisoners free:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
Mark Zuckerberg's transformation from a historically awful person to a historically monstrous person has been really something to see. In this week's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webtoon, Zach Wienersmith scores a body-blow on Zuck that was so perfect it made me bark with laughter:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gently
I firmly believe that Zuckerberg's transformation isn't due to the decay of his character. I think Zuck was always a creep, as any reader of Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all Facebook memoir Careless People can attest:
Rather, I think the collapse of the internet into what Tom Eastman calls "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four" relieved Zuck of his nagging fear that a competitor would poach his users if he abused them too much. This is the enshittogenic environment at work – when we let firms form cartels, their owners become oligarchs.
Tech is far from the only cartel. In publishing, we only have five major publishers left, and the largest, Bertelsmann, dwarfs the other four. It's hard to overstate how gigantic Bertelsmann is, but here's a trenchant example: Bertelsmann owns Penguin-Random House, and PRH has publishing deals with five sitting Supreme Court justices. This meant that a majority of the court had to recuse itself from hearing a plagiarism case involving a Ta-Nehisi Coates book. It's the first time a mass-recusal has scuppered a Supreme Court case since 1945, when the majority of justices disclosed that they were stockholders in the Alcoa, a monopolist:
Oligarchs are intrinsically enshittogenic. Oligarchs use their money and power to support strongmen who will trade money for government action, like Donald Trump, who offered a private dinner for major holders of his TRUMP shitcoin. The announcement prompted a ferocious bidding war among foreign agents and convicted criminals to buy up Trumpcoins and get a seat at the table:
Trump defenders claimed that the president was just rewarding people who understood the value of his coin, and not selling influence at all. Apparently, the attendees didn't get the memo, with many of them dumping their Trumpcoins the instant they were added to the guest-list:
Joke's on them, though: Trump stiffed them! He showed up, gave a 15 minute speech (practically a haiku by Trump's normal standard of bloviation), then climbed into a helicopter and flew away, hundreds of millions of dollars richer thanks to the suckers left to their rubber chicken banquet:
Those specific oligarchs didn't get a chance to petition Trump to enact their favored policies, but Trump is still delivering for oligarchs. The "Big Beautiful Bill" that was passed in the dead of night last week included a whole raft of "sleeper" provisions, each worse than the last, as enumerated by The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner:
taking away the courts' ability to use federal funds to hold government officials in contempt;
$45 billion for immigration gulags, to be built by Trump's favorite beltway bandits;
a nonprofit killer that lets the president cancel the nonprofit status of any org that challenges him (this died earlier last week and was revived in the "Big Beautiful Bill");
doubling the threshold for estate taxes, so a couple can leave $30m to their heirs tax-free, meaning that only 0.8% of US households will face any estate tax;
gutting the child tax credit, taking away support from 4.5m children of taxpaying parents who lack a Social Security Number and making millions more ineligible;
cutting health coverage for millions of people dependent on Obamacare; and
getting rid of the excise tax on gun silencers.
We're heading into some dark times indeed. It can be hard to imagine things ever getting better, but there was one author who consistently imagined bold, utopian, audacious far futures: Iain M. Banks, whose "Culture" series remain one of the greatest science fiction visions ever published:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
Banks's books are available in cheap paperbacks, and there's no shortage of used copies, but if you're looking to get a truly gorgeous Banks volume, the Folio Society has you covered, with a new, slipcased edition of Use of Weapons:
I love Folio books and often give them as Christmas gifts to the people who matter most to me on my list. This one comes with seven full-page illustrations by Dániel Taylor.
In other publishing news, I got a care-package from my publisher this week: a box of advance review copies of my next book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:
I'm going into the studio to record the audiobook in August, and there's a graphic novel and documentary in the offing.
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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Something that should have occurred to me earlier:
I've been thinking lately about how the ONLY people who seem to be excited and interested in ~AI~ are C-Suite Types, and Of Course They Are, because they're ALSO one of the few classes of society with enough money to be heavily involved in investing, and ~AI~ is the latest scam for pouring investment-dollars into in lieu of genuinely GOOD investments(which, thanks to pro-monopoly policies in the US, are supremely hard to find these days).
Like: it isn't(entirely) that these people are Dense Idiots; they are heavily invested IN ~AI~ startups, and pushing the companies they run to take on ~AI~ contracts WITH these startups actively helps those investments.
“You wake up at what time? 9:30 am? Wow, by that time I’ve already had breakfast and completed all my tasks, in fact, that’s practically half my day already lol. Maybe if you start waking up a little earlier you could actually be a productive member of society”
- A guy who works a low-level data entry job and dropships stuff on Amazon while calling himself an entrepreneur
The long read: There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years
This is a really great article by this lady fucking ripping into business schools and how they should not exist, after 20 years of teaching at them mind you, and I am all here for that...
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Can you write what all of bts would be like as older brother?
Definitely, I would love to have one of them as my brothers! I wrote it with the idea that you’re close as siblings, since if you were distant and not as close they may act differently to what I’ve written. I also tried to make it gender neutral so didn’t mention about bfs and stuff like that! Reminder that this is what I believe they may be like!
BTS AS AN OLDER BROTHER
Members: All members
Kim Seokjin | Jin
I believe Jin would be a very sweet and caring brother, and would be there whenever you need him. He’d know you really well and I think that because he seems to believe that family is extremely important, so he’d always hold you close to his heart. That doesn’t mean you guys wouldn’t fight, because all siblings have their ups and downs. I’d like to think he only finds it necessary to yell, get mad or discipline you if whatever you were doing / saying would greatly affect someone or yourself, almost in a fatherly way. He probably loves asking how your day was, and other things along those lines because he really does care, and always wants to see you at your happiest. Jin would also like to annoy you I think, not a lot but he’d definitely love trying out his lame jokes on you and bugging you once in a while. His jokes would probably end up with you telling him to get out of your room or having a small, joking argument with him. He’d really be an awesome and supportive brother to have!
Min Yoongi | Suga
I think Yoongi would also be an awesome brother, but he shows his affection in totally different ways. He’d probably seem intimidating at times since I think he likes his alone time and sometimes may seem distant. Growing up with him you might acquire the same love for music as he has, so I believe he’d love giving you song recommendations and always asking you to listen to anything new he’s produced. Arguments between you two would probably be heated, but I think only if it was something worth getting extremely angry over. Otherwise, I believe all you would really do is bicker about small, pointless things. I think here and there he’d probably remind you of manners and respect and give you his little life lessons, and would be a good guide. He’s probably also a great support system, I really think Yoongi is probably an awesome person to vent to, and he doesn’t even need to say anything, all you need for him to do is listen. He’d be a different but very loving brother!
Jung Hoseok | J Hope
Oh man what a great brother to have! I think Hoseok would be such a good sibling, he’d be a great person to have around when you’re down in the dumps. He hates seeing you sad and always wants to see you happy, but he also knows his boundaries and when not to bother you. Like the others, he’d also be a good guide, always caring for your safety and warning you when he thinks you’re doing things you shouldn’t be doing. He’d love to teach you dancing, and even if you weren’t interested he’d always want your input on a piece of choreography he’s working on. I think as a sibling he may bug you sometimes with his loud and energetic personality, but since he is Hoseok and your older brother how could you not love him?! He’s a happy ball of sunshine that just wants his younger sibling to be the same!
Kim Namjoon | Rap Monster
Namjoon would be a bit like Yoongi, but he’d show his affection more than him. He’s always willing to listen to you, letting you vent and talk about problems whenever you need to. Just like Yoongi as well, his love of music would also be a part of being his younger sibling, he would always give recommendations and asking for input on raps and things he’s made. I think in a lot of ways, he’d be helpful. He’s a smart guy and would help you in a lot of aspects of your life. Unlike the others I don’t think he’d be as strict on everything, and you probably wouldn’t fight a lot, he’d most likely tell you to live your life the way you would like to, of course he’d always mention what he thought on things that were bad or unsafe. He’s someone to definitely look up to as a younger sibling, I think he’d always try to be a good role model for you. He’d always be proud of your accomplishments and is always willing to show it, he’s really a great brother as well. Namjoon would give lots of great advice that would shape you into a great person.
Park Jimin | Jimin
Jimin is one who holds family very close, and thinks it’s an extremely important aspect of ones life. Jimin would most likely love to tease and bicker with you, but that’s his way of showing his affection. He knows when to stop and when he’s gone too far with his teasing, and although he hates doing it sometimes, he’ll always apologize and comfort you. In fact, he’d also be willing to comfort you when times are rough and you have problems. Jimin would always try and spend time with you, whether it was at home watching movies, or doing something else. His family is important to him so he’d always find time to spend it with you! I believe he’d probably be the most strict about things, getting angry easily when you’ve done something wrong, but it’s really all in love and he’s just looking out for you. All in all, Jimin would be a good brother, he finds you an extremely important part of his life and despite his teasing, he’d love you lots and always be by your side when needed.
Kim Taehyung | V
Taehyung loves kids, and that’s no lie. It wouldn’t matter what age you are, a baby, teenager, adult, he would cherish you. Just like Jimin, he finds that family is very important. Your relationship with him would include a lot teasing, and mischief. He’d be very attached to you, and would love spending time with you. Taehyung and you would probably cause a lot of ruckus together, since you were in diapers and until you’re old, you two would always know how to have a little fun in every situation. He’d love to embarrass you as well, and would always mention how much he loves you, just so you don’t forget. On a serious note, I think he’d also be a brother you could rely on and find comfort in. Whenever you need advice, Taehyung is there. He’s someone who would take the blame if you ever did something wrong, he cares about you so much that he would hate to see you sad. Despite his goofiness and love, I believe he can still get very serious and will always teach you right from wrong when needed, even if you don’t want to hear it. Taehyung would be a goofball, but would love you unconditionally and would never be afraid to show it.
Jeon Jungkook | Jungkook
He’d almost be like a best friend really, always telling you stuff and you doing the same. Jungkook would probably love getting competitive with you, always challenging you at things, video games, sports, anything he could possibly win at really. You two would have lots of trust in each other, and he’d always be there when needed. I think he’d also be quite strict, not as much as Jimin but quite close. Although, Jungkook does seem to be quite a free spirit sometimes, I believe he’d make sure his younger sibling was a very respectful, well mannered person and would put you in your place when you’ve done something wrong. Just like Taehyung, he’d probably love embarrassing you, but he knows his limits and when to stop. Your arguments would be more like pointless bickering, because I really think he’d hate yelling at you so instead he’d try to be lighter on you and sit you down and have a serious, mature conversation. I think you two together would also be funny, with him always wanting to embarrass you and win everything, you’d have some good times. Jungkook is the youngest of the seven so I think he wouldn’t be quite as amazing at giving advice of his own since he’s only become an adult recently and has his own growing up to do, but would always be willing to give his input where he can!
