âThe Fagin figure leading Elon Muskâs merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpocketsâ
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While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:
https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/
Journalists like Wired's Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are absolutely crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:
https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/
And Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoop after scoop:
https://www.crisesnotes.com/
But for me, it was Tkacik â as usual â in the pages of The American Prospect who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook. While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Muskâs merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):
Krause is a private equity looter. He's the guy who basically invented the playbook for PE takeovers of large tech companies, from Broadcom to Citrix to VMWare, converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs. He is a master enshittifier, an enshittification ninja.
Krause has an unerring instinct for making people miserable while making money. He oversaw the merger of Citrix and VMWare, creating a ghastly company called The Cloud Software Group, which sold remote working tools. Despite this, of his first official acts was to order all of his employees to stop working remotely. But then, after forcing his workers to drag their butts into work, move back across the country, etc, he reversed himself because he figured out he could sell off all of the company's office space for a tidy profit.
Krause canceled employee benefits, like thank you days for managers who pulled a lot of unpaid overtime, or bonuses for workers who upgraded their credentials. He also ended the company's practice of handing out swag as small gifts to workers, and then stiffed the company that made the swag, wontpaying a $437,574.97 invoice for all the tchotchkes the company had ordered. That's not the only supplier Krause stiffed: FinLync, a fintech company with a three-year contract with Krause's company, also had to sue to get paid.
Krause's isn't a canny operator who roots out waste: he's a guy who tears out all the wiring and then grudgingly restores the minimum needed to keep the machine running (no wonder Musk loves him, this is the Twitter playbook). As Tkacik reports, Krause fucked up the customer service and reliability systems that served Citrix's extremely large, corporate customers â the giant businesses that cut huge monthly checks to Citrix, whose CIOs received daily sales calls from his competitors.
Workers who serviced these customers, like disabled Air Force veteran David Morgan, who worked with big public agencies, were fired on one hour's notice, just before their stock options vested. The giant public agency customers he'd serviced later called him to complain that the only people they could get on the phone were subcontractors in Indian call centers who lacked the knowledge and authority to resolve their problems.
Last month, Citrix fired all of its customer support engineers. Citrix's military customers are being illegally routed to offshore customer support teams who are prohibited from working with the US military.
Citrix/VMWare isn't an exception. The carnage at these companies is indistinguishable from the wreck Krause made of Broadcom. In all these cases, Krause was parachuted in by private equity bosses, and he destroyed something useful to extract a giant, one-time profit, leaving behind a husk that no longer provides value to its customers or its employees.
This is the DOGE playbook. It's all about plunder: take something that was patiently, carefully built up over generations and burn it to the ground, warming yourself in the pyre, leaving nothing behind but ash. This is what private equity plunderers have been doing to the world's "advanced" economies since the Reagan years. They did it to airlines, family restaurants, funeral homes, dog groomers, toy stores, pharma, palliative care, dialysis, hospital beds, groceries, cars, and the internet.
Trump's a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class â like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers' carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins, while the crypto bros run off with their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money. Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples' productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. Musk and Krause, they're like two peas in a pod.
That's why â according to anonymous DOGE employees cited by Tckacik â DOGE managers are hired for their capacity for cruelty: "The criteria for DOGE is how many you have fired, how much you enjoy firing people, and how little you care about the impact on peoples well beingâŠNo wonder Tom Krause was tapped for this. Heâs their dream employee!"
The fact that Krause isn't well known outside of plunderer circles is absolutely a feature for him, not a bug. Scammers like Krause want to be admitted to polite society. This is why the Sacklers â the opioid crime family that kicked off the Oxy pandemic that's murdered more than 800,000 Americans so far â were so aggressive about keeping their association with their family business, Purdue Pharma, a secret. The Sacklers only wanted to be associated with the art galleries and museums they put their names over, and their lawyers threatened journalists for writing about their lives as billionaire drug pushers (I got one of those threats).
There's plenty of good reasons to be anonymous â if you're a whistleblower, say. But if you ever encounter a corporate executive who insists on anonymity, that's a wild danger sign. Take Pixsy, the scam "copyleft trolls" whose business depends on baiting people into making small errors when using images licensed under very early versions of the Creative Common licenses, and then threatening to sue them unless they pay hundreds or thousands of dollars:
Kain Jones, the CEO of Pixsy, tried to threaten me under the EU's GDPR for revealing the names of the scammer on his payroll who sent me a legal threat, and the executive who ran the scam for his business (I say he tried to threaten me because I helped lobby for the GDPR and I know for a fact that this isn't a GDPR violation):
These people understand that they are in the business of ripping people off, causing them grave and wholly unjust financial injury. They value their secrecy because they are in the business of making strangers righteously furious, and they understand that one of these strangers might just show up in their lives someday to confront them about their transgressions.
This is why Unitedhealthcare freaked out so hard about Luigi Mangione's assassination of CEO Brian Thompson â that's not how the game is supposed to be played. The people who sit in on executive row, destroying your lives, are supposed to be wholly insulated from the consequences of their actions. You're not supposed to know who they are, you're not supposed to be able to find them â of course.
But even more importantly, you're not supposed to be angry at them. They pose as mere software agents in an immortal colony organism called a Limited Liability Corporation, bound by the iron law of shareholder supremacy to destroy your life while getting very, very rich. It's not supposed to be personal. That's why Unitedhealthcare is threatening to sue a doctor who was yanked out of surgery on a cancer patient to be berated by a UHC rep for ordering a hospital stay for her patient:
UHC is angry that this surgeon, Austin's Dr Elisabeth Potter, went Tiktok-viral with her true story of how how chaotic and depraved and uncaring UHC is. UHC execs fear that Mangione made it personal, that he obliterated the accountability sink of the corporation and put the blame squarely where it belongs â on the (mostly) men at the top who make this call.
This is a point Adam Conover made in his latest Factually podcast, where he interviewed Propublica's T Christian Miller and Patrick Rucker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_5tDXRw8kg
Miller and Rucker published a blockbuster investigative report into Cigna's Evocore, a secret company that offers claims-denials as a service to America's biggest health insurers:
If you're the CEO of a health insurance company and you don't like how much you're paying out for MRIs or cancer treatment, you tell Evocore (which processes all your claim authorizations) and they turn a virtual dial that starts to reduce the number of MRIs your customers are allowed to have. This dial increases the likelihood that a claim or pre-authorization will be denied, which, in turn, makes doctors less willing to order them (even if they're medically necessary) and makes patients more likely to pay for them out of pocket.
Towards the end of the conversation, Miller and Rucker talk about how the rank-and-file people at an insurer don't get involved with the industry to murder people in order to enrich their shareholders. They genuinely want to help people. But executive row is different: those very wealthy people do believe their job is to kill people to save money, and get richer. Those people are personally to blame for the systemic problem. They are the ones who design and operate the system.
That's why naming the people who are personally responsible for these immoral, vicious acts is so important. That's why it's important that Wired and Propublica are unmasking the "pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" who are raiding the federal government under Krause's leadership:
These people are committing grave crimes against the nation and its people. They should be known for this. It should follow them for the rest of their lives. It should be the lead in their obituaries. People who are introduced to them at parties should have a flash of recognition, hastily end the handshake, then turn on their heels and race to the bathroom to scrub their hands. For the rest of their lives.
Naming these people isn't enough to stop the plunder, but it helps. Yesterday, Marko Elez, the 25 year old avowed "eugenicist" who wanted to "normalize Indian hate" and could not be "[paid] to marry outside of my ethnicity," was shown the door. He's off the job. For the rest of his life, he will be the broccoli-haired brownshirt who got fired for his asinine, racist shitposting:
After Krause's identity as the chief wrecker at DOGE was revealed, the brilliant Anna Merlan (author of Republic of Lies, the best book on conspiratorialism), wrote that "Now the whole country gets the experience of what itâs like when private equity buys the place you work":
That's exactly it. We are witnessing a private equity-style plunder of the entire US government â of the USA itself. No one is better poised to write about this than Tkacik, because no one has private equity's number like Tkacik does:
Ironically, all this came down just as Trump announced that he was going to finally get rid of private equity's scammiest trick, the "carried interest" loophole that lets PE bosses (and, to a lesser extent, hedge fund managers) avoid billions in personal taxes:
https://archive.is/yKhvD
"Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest rate â it's a law that was designed for 16th century sea captains who had an "interest" in the cargo they "carried":
Trump campaigned on killing this loophole in 2017, but Congress stopped him, after a lobbying blitz by the looter industry. It's possible that he genuinely wants to get rid of the carried interest loophole â he's nothing if not idiosyncratic, as the residents of Greenland can attest:
Even if he succeeds, looters and the "investor class" will get a huge giveaway under Trump, in the form of more tax giveaways and the dismantling of labor and environmental regulation. But it's far more likely that he won't succeed. Rather â as Yves Smith writes for Naked Capitalism â he'll do what he did with the Canada and Mexico tariffs: make a tiny, unimportant change and then lie and say he had done something revolutionary:
This has been a shitty month, and it's not gonna get better for a while. On my dark days, I worry that it won't get better during my lifetime. But at least we have people like Tkacik to chronicle it, explain it, put it in context. She's amazing, a whirlwind. The same day that her report on Krause dropped, the Prospect published another must-read piece by her, digging deep into Alex Jones's convoluted bankruptcy gambit:
It lays bare the wild world of elite bankruptcy court, another critical conduit for protecting the immoral rich from their victims. The fact that Tkacik can explain both Krause and the elite bankruptcy system on the same day is beyond impressive.
We've got a lot of work ahead of ourselves. The people in charge of this system â whose names you must learn and never forget â aren't going to go easily. But at least we know who they are. We know what they're doing. We know how the scam works. It's not a flurry of incomprehensible actions â it's a playbook that killed Red Lobster, Toys R Us, and Sears. We don't have to follow that playbook.
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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Just a heads-up about the site making the rounds in this tiktok:
It is an advertisement. Full stop.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Pixsy is one of those sites that reaches out to any user they can find who is using your image -- fair use or not, since it's machine-driven -- and threatens them with a lawsuit for using your stuff without permission unless they fork over $1500 (+/-). They do this to farm settlements, using fear tactics to bully smaller users out of as much money as they can (without actually resorting to lawsuits as they are expensive). They do this because Pixsy keeps a hefty portion of the "settlement" money for themselves, so they're incentivised to leech as much as they can out of the victims per-infringement regardless of legal standing.
Their site is crammed full of feel-good "by creatives for creatives" buzzwords to gain your trust.
Do the research to see if this is a service you really want to use.
I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (TOMORROW, May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (TOMORROW, May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).
Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":
Get that? If control over a key resource is diffused among the people who rely on it, then (Garrett claims) those people will all behave like selfish assholes, overusing and undermaintaining the commons. It's only when we let someone own that commons and charge rent for its use that (Hardin says) we will get sound management.
By that logic, Google should be the internet's most competent and reliable manager. After all, the company used its access to the capital markets to buy control over the internet, spending billions every year to make sure that you never try a search-engine other than its own, thus guaranteeing it a 90% market share:
Google seems to think it's got the problem of deciding what we see on the internet licked. Otherwise, why would the company flush $80b down the toilet with a giant stock-buyback, and then do multiple waves of mass layoffs, from last year's 12,000 person bloodbath to this year's deep cuts to the company's "core teams"?
The entire internet is shaped by Google's decisions about what shows up on that first page of listings. When Google decided to prioritize shopping site results over informative discussions and other possible matches, the entire internet shifted its focus to producing affiliate-link-strewn "reviews" that would show up on Google's front door:
This was catnip to the kind of sociopath who a) owns a hedge-fund and b) hates journalists for being pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud sticklers for "truth" and "facts" and other impediments to the care and maintenance of a functional reality-distortion field. These dickheads started buying up beloved news sites and converting them to spam-farms, filled with garbage "reviews" and other Google-pleasing, affiliate-fee-generating nonsense.
(These news-sites were vulnerable to acquisition in large part thanks to Google, whose dominance of ad-tech lets it cream 51 cents off every ad dollar and whose mobile OS monopoly lets it steal 30 cents off every in-app subscriber dollar):
Now, the spam on these sites didn't write itself. Much to the chagrin of the tech/finance bros who bought up Sports Illustrated and other venerable news sites, they still needed to pay actual human writers to produce plausible word-salads. This was a waste of money that could be better spent on reverse-engineering Google's ranking algorithm and getting pride-of-place on search results pages:
https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/
That's where AI comes in. Spicy autocomplete absolutely can't replace journalists. The planet-destroying, next-word-guessing programs from Openai and its competitors are incorrigible liars that require so much "supervision" that they cost more than they save in a newsroom:
But while a chatbot can't produce truthful and informative articles, it can produce bullshit â at unimaginable scale. Chatbots are the workers that hedge-fund wreckers dream of: tireless, uncomplaining, compliant and obedient producers of nonsense on demand.
That's why the capital class is so insatiably horny for chatbots. Chatbots aren't going to write Hollywood movies, but studio bosses hyperventilated at the prospect of a "writer" that would accept your brilliant idea and diligently turned it into a movie. You prompt an LLM in exactly the same way a studio exec gives writers notes. The difference is that the LLM won't roll its eyes and make sarcastic remarks about your brainwaves like "ET, but starring a dog, with a love plot in the second act and a big car-chase at the end":
Similarly, chatbots are a dream come true for a hedge fundie who ends up running a beloved news site, only to have to fight with their own writers to get the profitable nonsense produced at a scale and velocity that will guarantee a high Google ranking and millions in "passive income" from affiliate links.
One of the premier profitable nonsense companies is Advon, which helped usher in an era in which sites from Forbes to Money to USA Today create semi-secret "review" sites that are stuffed full of badly researched top-ten lists for products from air purifiers to cat beds:
Advon swears that it only uses living humans to produce nonsense, and not AI. This isn't just wildly implausible, it's also belied by easily uncovered evidence, like its own employees' Linkedin profiles, which boast of using AI to create "content":
All of this is very timely, because this is the week that Google finally bestirred itself to commence downranking publishers who engage in "site reputation abuse" â creating these SEO-stuffed fake reviews with the help of third parties like Advon:
(Google's policy only forbids site reputation abuse with the help of third parties; if these publishers take their nonsense production in-house, Google may allow them to continue to dominate its search listings):
There's a reason so many people believed Hardin's racist "Tragedy of the Commons" hoax. We have an intuitive understanding that commons are fragile. All it takes is one monster to start shitting in the well where the rest of us get our drinking water and we're all poisoned.
The financial markets love these monsters. Mark Zuckerberg's key insight was that he could make billions by assembling vast dossiers of compromising, sensitive personal information on half the world's population without their consent, but only if he kept his costs down by failing to safeguard that data and the systems for exploiting it. He's like a guy who figures out that if he accumulates enough oily rags, he can extract so much low-grade oil from them that he can grow rich, but only if he doesn't waste money on fire-suppression:
Now Zuckerberg and the wealthy, powerful monsters who seized control over our commons are getting a comeuppance. The weak countermeasures they created to maintain the minimum levels of quality to keep their platforms as viable, going concerns are being overwhelmed by AI. This was a totally foreseeable outcome: the history of the internet is a story of bad actors who upended the assumptions built into our security systems by automating their attacks, transforming an assault that wouldn't be economically viable into a global, high-speed crime wave:
But it is possible for a community to maintain a commons. This is something Hardin could have discovered by studying actual commons, instead of inventing imaginary histories in which commons turned tragic. As it happens, someone else did exactly that: Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom:
Ostrom described how commons can be wisely managed, over very long timescales, by communities that self-governed. Part of her work concerns how users of a commons must have the ability to exclude bad actors from their shared resources.
When that breaks down, commons can fail â because there's always someone who thinks it's fine to shit in the well rather than walk 100 yards to the outhouse.
Enshittification is the process by which control over the internet moved from self-governance by members of the commons to acts of wanton destruction committed by despicable, greedy assholes who shit in the well over and over again.
It's not just the spammers who take advantage of Google's lazy incompetence, either. Take "copyleft trolls," who post images using outdated Creative Commons licenses that allow them to terminate the CC license if a user makes minor errors in attributing the images they use:
The first copyleft trolls were individuals, but these days, the racket is dominated by a company called Pixsy, which pretends to be a "rights protection" agency that helps photographers track down copyright infringers. In reality, the company is committed to helping copyleft trolls entrap innocent Creative Commons users into paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to use images that are licensed for free use. Just as Advon upends the economics of spam and deception through automation, Pixsy has figured out how to send legal threats at scale, robolawyering demand letters that aren't signed by lawyers; the company refuses to say whether any lawyer ever reviews these threats:
This is shitting in the well, at scale. It's an online WMD, designed to wipe out the commons. Creative Commons has allowed millions of creators to produce a commons with billions of works in it, and Pixsy exploits a minor error in the early versions of CC licenses to indiscriminately manufacture legal land-mines, wantonly blowing off innocent commons-users' legs and laughing all the way to the bank:
We can have an online commons, but only if it's run by and for its users. Google has shown us that any "benevolent dictator" who amasses power in the name of defending the open internet will eventually grow too big to care, and will allow our commons to be demolished by well-shitters:
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:
Todayâs a big day for users of Creative Commons images: Flickr has declared zero tolerance for copyleft trolls, predators who exploit a bug in out-of-date versions of the CC licenses in order to threaten good-faith users of CC images who make minor errors in the way they credit the images.
If youâd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, hereâs a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
First things first: Flickrâs new community guidelines prohibit copyleft trolling: âFailure to allow a good faith reuser the opportunity to correct errors is against the intent of the license and not in line with the values of our community, and can result in your account being removed.â
https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines
If you are targeted by a copyleft troll who demands that you pay them because of minor errors in your Creative Commons attribution, hereâs how to report them and get them kicked off Flickr forever:
Now, some background. Early versions of the Creative Commons licenses have a bug, a clause that says that the permissions conferred by CC licenses âterminate automatically upon any breachââââthat is, if you violate any term of the license, it ceases to be in effect:
Core to the CC licenses is the idea of attribution. When you use a Creative Commons image, you must name the creator and link to the original, and name the license and link to it. Many CC users donât understand this; they use an image and add something like âImage: Cory Doctorow/Creative Commonsâ with no links or specific licenses.
Under the pre-4.0 versions of the license, this can be construed as a âbreachâ which âterminatesâ the CC license. Thatâs where the copyleft trolls come in.
Copyleft trolls post CC-licensed stock art and then wait for a naive person to make a minor attribution error, and then they pounce, sending a legal threat and a speculative invoice demanding hundreds or thousands of dollars, under the threat of a $150,000 statutory damages award.
This is deeply unethical conduct. As I wrote when I was targeted by one of these creeps:
If you put a CC license on your work, its explicit message is, âI want you to re-use this.â Not âI am a pedantic asshole with a fetish for well-formed attribution strings.â The point of CC is not to teach the world to write attribution strings: it is to facilitate sharing and re-use. If you are a good-faith user of CC licenses, then your response to an incorrect attribution string should be a request to correct it, not a threat to sue for $150,000 in statutory damages.
Unethical as this conduct is, itâs also big business. One company, Pixsy, is responsible for a long-running shakedown campaign, working with scammy photographers to send out demand letters to unsuspecting Creative Commons users.
And many of those photographers rely on Flickr to bait their traps.
Thereâs a reason for this. Flickrâs early years were a period of enormous innovation. Flickr was the first mobile photo-sharing site, and it invented numerous community features that turned it into a thriving hub for photographers, amateur and professional alike. Flickr was also an interoperability pioneer, offering an API that let any user move their photos to a rival serviceâââa tacit pledge to keep your business by being better than the rest, not by locking you in.
I know all this because I was an early advisor to Flickr, and because, in a weird way, I am partially responsible for Flickr. You see, before Flickr, I was carrying on a long-distance relationship from San Francisco with a woman in London, and we were both alpha testers for a social game called GameNeverending.
One day over breakfast with GNEâs founder Stewart Butterfield, he asked me how things were going in my romantic life. I answered that things were great, but mentioned that my girlfriend and I were struggling to share the pictures we took in our daily lives with one another. Stewart said, âWell, thereâs a photo-sharing feature for GNE on the roadmapâââwhy donât I bump it up and weâll see if other people use it, too?â
They did. In fact, the feature was so popular that within a few months, GNE relaunched as Flickr, jettisoning the game entirely and focusing on just that one feature. I stayed on the advisory, and one of the things I encouraged was the plan to roll out Creative Commons licenses for Flickr imagesâââand I made sure everyone knew about it when Flickr became the first CC-enabled image site.
(I also married the woman I was carrying on that long-distance relationship with and today we have a 15 year old daughter!)
But after Flickr was sold to Yahoo, it joined Yahooâs haunted armada of Web 2.0 ghost-ships, tossed back and forth in the storms created by the dueling princelings of Yahooâs bloated management layer, who spent more time sabotaging one another than they did making anything anyone else wanted to use. Yahoo eventually sold off all of those holdings at fire-sale prices to Verizon, who neglected them still further.
An abandoned ship is easy picking for the rats that live in its bilges. Pixsy and its photographers actually became official Flickr partners, pitching themselves as a way for photographers who didnât want their images shared to hunt down infringersâââeven as they facilitated a revolting campaign of copyleft trolling that depended on Flickr as their base of operations.
The depravity of copyleft trolls is truly boundless. Take Marco Verch, a prolific copyleft troll who hosts nearly 47,000 photos on Flickr. Verch hires low-waged gig work photographers through platforms like Upwork to take photos, then harasses people who make minor attribution errors:
Verch boasts that his predation lets him work for four hours a week, leaving him with ample time to focus on his hobby, running. Verch is a truly prolific predator, and his attacks have made untold numbers of victims miserableâââincluding the small Dutch charity that was forced to shut down after paying his ransom demand. Pixsy has been Verchâs US counsel and filed dozens of suits on his behalf.
Back in 2021, I got hit by Pixsy on behalf of a photographer named Nenad Stojkovic, with a claim that I had failed to attribute his image correctly. The email threat was truly vicious, calculated to strike terror into the recipientâs heart and prompt swift payment of $600, for using a freely licensed image whose market value had been set by its creator at $0.00.
There was just one problem: I hadnât flubbed the attribution string. I helped with the launch of Creative Commons. I was CCâs first European director. Whatâs more, I have decades of experience fighting bullies and trolls and I knew their threat was bullshitâââno court would award them the damages they were seeking.
So I wrote about it, publishing the text of my correspondence with Pixsyâs staff and management, and calling on Flickr to make changes to prevent their tools from being abused to victimize innocent people, like forcing users with CC 2.0-licensed images to relicense them as CC 4.0, which guarantees users the right to 30 days to fix attribution strings.
The reason I thought Flickr might take this in hand is that it is finally under decent, responsive leadershipâââsince 2018, Flickr has been owned by Smugmug, a family-owned business that really cares about photographers and the open internet.
Flickr hasnât taken all of my suggestions yetâââmy understanding is that they are laboring under enormous technological debt thanks to years of neglect by Yahoo and Verizon, and even small changes require weeks of all-hands technological work.
But what they have done is modify their policies to create a de facto CC 4.0 environment for their users, by promising to terminate the accounts of any user who repeatedly threatens legal action over bad attribution strings without first offering a 30-day grace period.
Flickrâs done more than that, actually. For one thing, they ditched Pixsy, severing their relationship with the company (Pixsy still lists them on its âpartnerâ page). They also created the Flickr Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to providing long-term, responsible stewardship for their CC and public domain image respositories:
https://www.flickr.org/
For its part, Creative Commons published an excellent âStatement of Enforcement Principlesâ for its licenses that unequivocally rejected the way that Pixsy and other copyleft trolls abuse the bug in its older licenses:
In the months since I published my article detailing Pixsyâs attempt to shake me down, two things happened. First, I got a legal threat from Kain Jones, Pixsyâs CEO, who demanded that I get on the phone with him, the the alternative being âescalating things legallyâ:
Jones also falsely claimed that naming the employees whoâd threatened me violated the GDPR, which is extremely on-brand for this whole mess. While I donât claim to be the worldâs greatest expert on GDPR, I did lobby in Brussels for it, and I do have German specialist lawyers on tap who are happy to explain that Jonesâs threat is absolute nonsense.
As I noted in my followup to Jones, he seems incapable of interacting with the public or his critics without making legal threatsâââand not just any legal threats, but legal threats that are grounded in an unhinged, and, in my opinion, deliberately deceptive theories of the law.
Pixsy continued to rattle its sabers for a while after this, tweeting that Iâd made errors in my description of its business operations but declining to correct those records in response to my and othersâ requests for further detail. It is my opinion that Pixsy failed to correct the record because my accusations were and are substantively correct.
But even after I stopped hearing from Pixsy, I continued to hear from its victims. I routinely receive distraught emails from everyday people who thought they were doing the right thing by using Creative Commons-licensed images in their work, and who now face a remorseless onslaught of threats from Pixsyâs team. Some of these people have been targeted on behalf of Nenad Stojkovic, just as I was.
These people beg me for adviceâââwill Pixsy sue? Can they ignore Pixsyâs demands? I give them my condolences and tell them that I canât promise them that a company as vindictive, greedy and morally bankrupt as Pixsy wonât bring a lawsuit. Every time, I wish I could offer them more.
Well, now I can: if you are targeted by a copyleft troll for using a Flickr-hosted image, narc them the fuck out. Tell Flickr about them. Flickr no longer tolerates copyleft trolling, and they will terminate repeat offendersâ accounts.
As I wrote this today, I went back and revisted Pixsy CEO Kain Jonesâs letter to me and I was struck again by its absolute rank hypocrisy, the sheer sociopathic lack of self-awareness it displays. Jones presides over an empire of bulk legal threats, carefully drafted to frighten blameless people into sending him money they canât afford and donât owe. In this correspondence, his company tells its victims that they are liable âregardless of knowledge or intent.â Victims are told that correcting their error will not suffice, because it âdoes not resolve the period of unlicensed use.â
And yet, in this letter, Jones calls on me to show understanding because âpeople occasionally make mistakes.â He scolds me for my âvitriolâ in my naming and shaming a senior executive who boasts on Pixsyâs website of having âoverseen over 140,000 casesââââthat is, who sent these outrageous letters to more than one hundred and forty thousand people and organizations.
Unlike Kain Jones, I am a working artist. I make my living from the sale of my creative works, not from tricking people whoâve made innocent, trivial legal errors into sending me hundreds or thousands of dollars. Unlike Marco Verch, I donât pay anonymous randos small sums to create new works, slap my name on them, and then threaten blameless people in the name of defending artistsâ rights.
And I sometimes have to police my copyrights. The world is full of quick-buck scammers who rip off my work, including my Creative Commons-licensed works, often with the assistance of some of the worldâs largest corporations:
These people are engaged in what Douglas Rushkoff calls âGoing Meta.â They donât do anything useful, but rather, they create a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:
This is the passive-income brainwormâââa parasitic, end-stage capitalist hustle that cloaks itself in high-minded rhetoric even though it is the very lowest of bottom-feeders. Pixsy claims that it is primarily an artistsâ defense tool, but the company conspicuously refused to tell me what share of its income comes from real copyright defense, and what share comes from copyleft trolling.
Whenever I think back on Kain Jones and his outrageous legal threats to meâââfirst the one that falsely claimed I had violated a Creative Commons license, and then the one that insinuated that calling him out broke the lawâââthe thing that outrages me most is his assertion that he is a defender of artistsâ rights.
What an outrageous and grotesque claim that is. A man who presides over a powerful corporation that devotes its considerable energy to tormenting people who used Creative Commons licenses as they were intended to be used sends a legal threat to a working artist and he styles himself a champion of the arts? If I wrote that into one of my bestselling novelsâââwhich generate revenue by making people happy through artistic expression, and not by terrorizing people with deceptive and unethical legal threatsâââIâd be accused of absurd, overbroad parody.
Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Hereâs how you can: Iâm kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazonâs Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because theyâre DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.
[[Image ID: John Milton's 'Fall of Lucifer,' modified so that God's light emanating from heaven is coming out of the Flickr blue-and-red-balls logo.]]
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These sites:
https://ar.inspiredpencil.com/pictures-2023/tribal-ferret-tattoo
https://artpictures.club/
have been busted for illegally redistributing my "Ferret Trybe: War Dance" art. There are TONS of stolen images on these sites. I suggest checking them if you've ever posted your #art online. I'm not sure if you can reverse image search a particular domain, but #pixsy.com will find them pretty quickly with their free alert service. That how I found out.
Of course, the copyright and abuse emails for both sites came back "undeliverable". They probably think people who want their art removed won't know how to find ways to report them. I do. Here are the hosting and registrar for both.
https://ar.inspiredpencil.com/
Registrar: [email protected]
Host: cloudflare.com (have to sign up, sign in and use abuse report form)
https://artpictures.club/
Registrar: [email protected]
Host: cloudflare.com (have to sign up, sign in and use abuse report form)
No, I'm not being petty here. From now on, when I catch people #stealing my work, I'm going to publicly post their info on whatever site I find them. I'm sick and fucking TIRED of having to waste time I could be spending on #art and posting merch tracking these #assholes down and reporting them. SO, if you don't want a lil wanted poster on my feed, don't steal my stuff! #artthieves #artthievesbusted #artthievesonblast
#Update
Cloud flare claims they're a "passthrough" and can't remove content from sites. đĄ Seriously? Then why do they have copyright infringement as one of the reasons for an abuse report?
David Plastik, His Shitty Copyright Trolls and a pic of Bruce Springsteen's albums.
David Plastik, His Shitty Copyright Trolls and a pic of Bruce Springsteenâs albums.
So apparently some bald headed loser named David Plastik hired some really, really shitty copyright trolls to scan the internet and harass people who may have seen, shared or posted his little pictures all of which for what we see are watermarked. Then they use their automatic systems to try to find his pictures on the internet by the headline of the story or the link name and send out harassingâŠ
