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https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion
Book review:
In their modern incarnation, these ideas largely originate in science fiction novels. That is to say, they were made up and popularized by people like me, the vast majority of whom made no pretense of being able to predict the future or even realistically describe a path from the present to the future they were presenting. Science fiction is something between a card trick and a consensual con game, where the writer shows you just enough detail to make you think that the rest of it must be lurking somewhere in the wings. No one in sf has ever explained how consciousness uploading could possibly work, and neither have any of the advocates for consciousness uploading – the difference is that (most of) the sf writers know they’re just making stuff up.
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Currently reading! I had to put it down for a book group reading another book. Looking forward to picking it up again!
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf
Book review:
But Wynn-Williams was a lot closer to three of the key personalities in Facebook’s upper echelon than anyone in my orbit: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was elevated to VP of Global Policy after the Trump II election. I already harbor an atavistic loathing of these three based on their public statements and conduct, but the events Wynn-Williams reveals from their private lives make these three out to be beyond despicable. There’s Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he’s a manbaby who can’t lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they’re flying in his private jet. There’s Sandberg, who demands the right to buy a kidney for her child from someone in Mexico, should that child ever need a kidney.
Then there’s Kaplan, who is such an extraordinarily stupid and awful oaf that it’s hard to pick out just one example, but I’ll try. At one point, Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais (he’s repeatedly described as unwilling to consider any briefing note longer than a single text message). When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world. Various teams at Facebook then race around, trying to figure out whether this is something the company is actually doing, and once they realize Zuck was just bullshitting, set about trying to figure out how to do it. They get some way down this path when Kaplan intervenes to insist that giving away free internet to refugees is a bad idea, and that instead, they should sell internet access to refugees. Facebookers dutifully throw themselves into this absurd project, which dies when Kaplan fires off an email stating that he’s just realized that refugees don’t have any money. The project dies.
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I’ve read the book. She is very clearly whitewashing her own actions and choices, but the detail with which she names names, publishes emails in full, etc. makes it seem that she must be speaking truth about the above three (and some others) or she’d be sued into oblivion.
If it’s at least 80% accurate, then yes, these are horrific individuals in ways that are much more damaging on a large scale than I for one had truly understood.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/#simpler-times
… if you allow some fraud, you will also allow through a lot of non -fraudulent business that would otherwise trip your fraud meter. Or, put it another way, the only way to prevent all fraud is to chase away a large proportion of your customers, whose transactions are in some way abnormal or unexpected.
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(Shivers) That’s right out of “The Futurist Manifesto”:
We will glorify war - the world’s only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the
destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others
… Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a “sweet spot” of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate “pivot to AI,” and like so many tech execs, he’s been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues’ work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn’t “more productive,” they’re more exploited .
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms
Ignoring power lets a rich person who buys a starving person’s kidneys claim to be engaged in a “voluntary transaction.” Ignoring power lets private equity funds claim that gouging you on emergency room care and ambulance rides is fine, because you “freely chose” to be rushed to their hospital while dying of a heart attack. If we can all agree that power doesn’t matter, then we can do away with all workplace protections, from the minimum wage to worker safety. Take power out of the equation, and you can claim that any worker on starvation wages who loses an arm in a badly maintained machine “freely contracted” into that situation.
Also:
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Every GOP legislator and especially Congressional committee chairs are scrambling to find cuts that can offset Trump’s plans to make his 2017 tax cuts permanent and then add more cuts on top of that. The failure of Doge to make any appreciable savings has left Trump high and dry, with unfunded tax cuts that will flunk even the most compliant, ass-kissing Congressional Budget Office analysis
The GOP plan will kill all subsidized undergrad loans, meaning that interest will be piled on student loans while students are still at school, so a grad with a four-year degree will also owe four years worth of compounded interest on their freshman year loans. Undergrad loans are capped at $50k, less than half the price of a degree at most state colleges. The GOP members say that the $50k cap covers the “median tuition” – meaning that it is lower than tuition at half the country’s institutions.
Looks like it’s community college for bluehenkids.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup
So, the mere fact that a federal judge had ordered Apple to open up its app store to competing payment processors was not going convince Apple to actually do it. Instead, Apple cooked up a set of rules for third-party payment processing that would make it more costly to use someone else’s payments, piling up a mountain of junk fees and using scare screens and other deceptive warnings to discourage users from making payments through a rival system
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem
Once you understand how corporate growth stories are converted to “key performance indicators” that drive product design, many of the annoyances of digital services suddenly make a great deal of sense.
… this is why you keep invoking AI by accident, and why the AI that is so easy to invoke is so hard to dispel. Like a demon, a chatbot is much easier to summon than it is to rid yourself of
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway
Book review:
Read, an investigative journalist at Curbed, takes us through the history of the “industry,” which evolved out of Depression-era snake oil salesmen, Tupperware parties, and magical thinking cults built around books like Think and Grow Rich. This fetid swamp gives rise to a group of self-mythologizing scam artists who found companies like Amway and Mary Kay, claiming outlandish – and easily debunked – origin stories that the credulous press repeats, alongside their equally nonsensical claims about the “opportunities” they are creating for their victims.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts
The project of convincing investors that tech’s “dopamine hackers” had perfected mind-control with warmed over, non-replicable Skinnerian behavior-mod techniques and mass surveillance sold a hell of a lot of ads. After all, if there’s one kind of person the advertising sector has always been able to sell to, it’s advertising executives, who are the easiest of marks for a story about how easy it is to trick the public into buying whatever you’re selling
I’ve long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn’t that AI can do your job – it’s that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job
Also:
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Regarding the epochalypse, it’s hopefully not as bad as it seems, most devices will move to a 64-bit value, and frankly if this kicks a lot of abandoned, internet-of-shit devices offline that are used as DDOS-Amplifying nodes and privacy invasion vectors, all the better.
However, the wider community needs to roll the fix out widely now so the update process can begin.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman
“Who Broke the Internet?” is a new podcast from CBC Understood that I host and co-wrote – it’s a four-part series that explains how the enshitternet came about, and, more importantly, what we can do about it.
We tell the story of Bruce Lehman, who was Bill Clinton’s IP czar. Anticircumvention was really Lehman’s brainchild, and he had a plan to make it the law of the land. When Al Gore was overseeing the demilitarization of the internet (the “Information Superhighway” proceedings), Lehman pitched this idea to him as the new rules of the road for the internet. To Gore’s eternal credit, he flatly rejected Lehman’s proposal as the batshit nonsense it plainly was.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole
Companies make signing up for subscriptions into a greased slide, and they make canceling subscriptions into a greased pole.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry
The thesis of the show is straightforward: the internet wasn’t killed by ideological failings like “greed,” nor by economic concepts like “network effects,” nor by some cyclic force of history that drives towards “re-intermediation.” Rather, all of these things were able to conquer the open, wild, creative internet because of policies that meant that companies that yielded to greed were able to harness network effects in order to re-intermediate the internet.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/14/pregnable/#checkm8
… adversarial interop has been in steady decline for the past quarter-century. These big companies moved fast and broke things, but no one is returning the favor. If you ask the companies what changed, they’ll just smirk and say that they’re better at security than the incumbents they disrupted. The reason no one’s hacked up a third-party iOS App Store is that Apple’s security team is just so fucking 1337 that no one can break their shit.
I think this is nonsense. I think that what’s really going on is that we’ve made it possible for companies to design their technologies in such a way that any attempt at adversarial interop is illegal.
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