https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/24/whats-good-for-big-tech/#is-good-for-america
The sight of the CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Tiktok arranged in a decorative semicircle behind Trump on the dais on inauguration day was the final repudiation of the Obama-era notion that tech was somehow committed to democracy (or the Democrats).
For fucks sake, everything everything is meant to be a fuck you to BO and HRC.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted
It’s not that AI artists lack for the big, numinous irreducible feelings. I firmly believe we all have those. The problem is that an AI prompt has very little communicative intent and nearly all (but not every) good piece of art has more communicative intent than fits into an AI prompt.
Also:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies
The reason Facebook was once a nice place to hang out and talk with your friends and isn’t anymore is that Mark Zuckerberg is no longer disciplined by competitors like Instagram (which he bought) nor by regulators (whom he captured), nor by interoperable tech like ad-blockers and alternative clients (which he uses IP law to destroy) nor by his own workforce (who have become disposable thanks to workforce supply catching up with demand). It used to be that Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t really move the enshittification lever in the Facebook C-suite because these disciplining forces gummed it up. He had to worry about losing users, or about users installing alternative technology, or about regulators hitting him hard enough to hurt, or about workplace revolts. Now, he doesn’t have to worry about these things, so he’s indulging the impulses that he’s had since the earliest days in his Harvard dorm, when he was a mere larval incel cooking up an online service to help him rate the fuckability of his female classmates.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/29/jane-mcalevey/#trump-is-a-scab
I gotta go. I’m on my way to a Tesla protest. Maybe you could find one near you to join, too:
TeslaTakedown — join the March 29 GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION - Action Network
But if I don’t see you at this one, I’ll see you on the picket line – with the LA teachers, the federal workers, and everyone else who’s taking a stand against this scab presidency.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/31/madison-square-garden/#autocrats-of-trade
Wilhoit’s definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there’s another definition I like, one that’s more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: “Ask, ‘What’s more important: human rights or property rights?’ Anyone who answers ‘property rights are human rights’ is a conservative.”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc
I’m not an expert on psychotherapy, but I am an expert on privacy and corporate misconduct, and holy shit is the idea of a chatbot psychotherapist running on some Big Tech cloud a terrible idea. Because while I’m no expert on therapy, I have benefited from therapy, and I know this for certain: therapy requires confidentiality.
These companies lie all the time about everything, but the thing they lie most about is how they handle sensitive data. It’s wild that anyone has to be reminded of this. Letting AI companies handle your sensitive data is like turning arsonists loose in your library with a can of gasoline, a book of matches, and a pinky-promise that this time, they won’t set anything on fire.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces
Racial and gender justice matter, of course, but when they’re pursued without considering economic justice, they’re dead ends. The point of racial and gender justice can’t merely be firing half of the 150 straight white men who control 99% of the country’s capital and replacing them with 75 assorted women, queers and people of color. The worst-treated workers in America are also its most discriminated-against workers, so the best way to help women, racialized people, and other disfavored minorities is to help workers: protect unions, raise the minimum wage, defend tenants, cancel student debt, and give everyone healthcare. In the same way that a special tax on incomes over $1m will disproportionately affect straight white men, an increase in the minimum wage will disproportionately benefit women and people of color – as well as the majority of straight white men who are also getting fucked over by people with $1m salaries.
[Fuckface von Clownsitck] is doing mirror-world tariffs: tariffs without industrial policy, tariffs without social safety nets, tariffs without retraining, tariffs without any strategic underpinning. These tariffs will crash the US economy and will create calamitous effects around the world
And it wouldn’t be a CD blog post without proposing:
America’s (former) trading partners can retaliate against US tariffs by abolishing the legal measures they have instituted to protect the products of US companies from reverse-engineering and modification. Countries facing US tariffs can welcome US imports – of printers, Teslas, iPhones, games consoles, insulin pumps, ventilators and tractors – but then legalize jailbreaking these devices
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/04/anything-that-cant-go-on/#forever-eventually-stops
Nolan concludes that Trump is “insane” – that his actions are irrational, disconnected from reality, impossible to understand. For Nolan, the question isn’t “What is Trump trying to accomplish?” It’s “how has this insane man managed to gain control of the government of the world’s richest and mostpowerful nation?”
He’s got a hell of an answer, too:
That, my friends, is the unfortunate outcome of an economic system that has so profoundly failed to enforce economic equality, and a political system that so profoundly failed to protect its democracy from the influence of capital that it allowed itself to be totally captured by extreme lunatics backed by extreme wealth.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish
I’ve been successfully scammed six times in my life. Each time, the scam relied on the confluence of several factors that yielded a fleeting moment of vulnerability that some scammer was able to exploit by being in the right place at the right time. I had to be lucky always, they only had to be lucky once.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care
What’s more, the collusion may have been explicit, not tacit – when a sector is dominated by two giant firms, the upper ranks of both companies are dominated by people who’ve worked at both companies. These people aren’t rivals, they’re peers. They’re executors of one another’s estates, godparents to one another’s children, members of the same charitable boards and pickup sports leagues. They’re lifelong pals. If you think they never explicitly conspire to rig markets – over drinks at someone’s wedding or funeral, say – then I envy you your touching faith in humanity.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever/#oligarchism
The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:
“Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.”
When ordinary people want something that rich people don’t want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.
Also:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/09/cases-and-controversy/#brocolli-haired-brownshirts
So this is a big deal. It means we’re going to get to go to court and argue the actual merits of the case. Things are pretty terrible right now, but this is a bright light. It makes me proud to have spent most of my adult life working with EFF.
Honestly, that’s better than I expected. And still pretty terrible.
So now we need a Eat The Rich thread.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/
Assuming this political will persists, Trump’s FTC will have to prove that Meta deliberately set out to create and maintain a monopoly. In this regard, they will be greatly aided by the best possible witness for the prosecution: Mark Zuckerberg and his giant, flapping fucking mouth. Zuckerberg has repeatedly, explicitly confessed, in writing, in economic and legal terms, to pursuing a growth strategy based on blatantly illegal anticompetitive actions. As Careless People makes clear, Zuck is an arrogant, out-of-touch crank who cannot stop tripping over his own dick.
It can’t come soon enough.
The full article links are always amusing:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/12/pre-authorization/#is-not-a-guarantee-of-payment
Blue Cross’s official excuse for denying the claims was that it was acting in the best interest of the millions of Louisianans it insures: DellaCroce and Sullivan are simply too expensive – it’s not realistic for people in an insurance pool to expect that kind of care . However, Blue Cross executives repeatedly signed one-off, “single case agreements” so that their own wives could get the procedure from DellaCroce and Sullivan.
Blue Shield’s position – the position of the entire for-profit health industry – is that they should be able to grow as large as they can, at the expense of us, the patients. In other words, they are economic tumors – so no wonder they’re on the side of breast cancer.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness
Arguably, we do live in the shadow of such modern demons: we call them “limited liability corporations.” These are (potentially) immortal colony organisms that treat us fleshy humans as mere inconvenient gut flora. These artificial persons are not merely recognized as people under the law – they are given more rights than mere flesh-and-blood people. They seek to expand without limit, absorbing one another, covering the globe, acting in ways that are “economically rational” and utterly wicked.