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:
https://afteramazon.world/
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/30/trump-u/#i-think-you-know-what-the-trustees-can-do-with-their-suggestions
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
Also: https://www.cage-tech.com/
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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:
https://epochalypse-project.org/
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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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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/17/odds-and-sods/#cafe-europa
“Oldest democracy” as in, “the democracy with the oldest leaders.” The Democrats are gearing up for the midterms with such repeat offenders as Maxine Waters (86), Rosa DeLauro (82), John Garamendi (80), Doris Matsui (80) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (80). Also running: David Scott (79) who had to step down as ranking House Ag Committee member over health concerns. And: Dwight Evans (70), who missed most of last year’s votes after suffering a stroke.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi (85), Steny Hoyer (85), Danny Davis (83), Frederica Wilson (82), Emanuel Cleaver (80) and Alma Adams (78) won’t say whether they’re running in 202
At 53, I can tell that I’ve lost a step. Sure, I have the benefits of wisdom, but man, I am so tired. Maybe the reason our Democratic leaders have sat idly by and watched as Trump dismantled democracy and installed fascism is that they’re too tired to scale the fences like their South Korean counterparts did?
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/19/khan-thought/#they-were-warned
In episode three, we explore [Robert] Bork’s legacy, and how it led to what Tom Eastman calls the internet of “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” We got great interviews and old tape for this one, including Michael Wiesel, a Canadian soap-maker who created a bestselling line of nontoxic lip-balm kits for kids, only to have Amazon shaft him by underselling him with his own product .
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales
Perlstein read Project 2025 – all of it, not just the individual chapters that were the most lurid and apocalyptic right-wing fantasies. Because Perlstein read all 900 pages, he was able to identify something that nearly everyone else missed, that Project 2025 is full of contradictory plans that are in direct opposition to one another
But the fact that Heritage couldn’t tell one (or two, or three) sides in these debates to go pound sand and elevate a single policy to canon tells us that there are opposing forces in the Trump coalition who are each so powerful that neither of them can overpower the others. These are the fracture lines in the Trump coalition, the places we should apply ourselves to if we want to neutralize the movement, shatter it back into a mob of warring factions.
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and THIS is why we NEED historians… 
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon
Repealing Canada’s anticircumvention laws would mark a turning point in tech regulation. For decades now, countries that are upset with tech companies’ greed and cruelty have created policies that demand that Big Tech wield its extraordinary power more wisely. Think of content moderation laws, or laws that try to get tech companies to share some of their monopoly ripoff money with news outlets. These laws don’t seek to take away power from tech giants – they just try to turn it to socially beneficial uses. This is a huge mistake. For a tech company to control its users’ behavior, it must have power of those users, must observe every action they take and retain the ability to stop them.
Repealing anticircumvention laws in Canada and around the world is the best path forward. Ironically, Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” has created the conditions for every country to liberate itself from America’s grotesque tech policies – and to export our tools of technological liberation to our American friends, who were the first victims of US Big Tech.
Do it.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/duolingus/#class-war
The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a “human in the loop” who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.
Amazon bosses haven’t ordered their tech workers to use AI, just raised their quotas to a level that can’t be attained without getting an AI to do most of the work – just like the Chicago Sun-Times writer who was expected to write all 30 articles in the summer guide package on his own. No one made him use AI, but he wasn’t going to produce 30 articles on deadline without a chatbot.
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