December 4 - Today marks the anniversary of the 1969 assassination of Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party (BPP), and of Mark Clark, member of the BPP in Chicago. The Chicago Police killed Hampton and Clark in what many have called summary executions.
Hampton, who was assassinated by the state at age 21, was a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary who built broad unity, transcending deep divides in the working class to fight the systems of white supremacy and capitalist oppression in the United States. [link]
Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn
Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didnāt tell police or the FBI. He didnāt tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.
I'm on a tour with my new book Enshittification: catch me next in Cambridge, MA; Washington, DC and Brooklyn! Full schedule here.
Holy shit I love my internet service provider said no one ever!
Except, some people do love their ISPs. Across American more than 400 community-owned fiber networks, serving more than 700 communities, bring joy and satisfaction to their customers:
Many of these are in blood-red states, the kind of places where it's impossible to find a readable copy of Atlas Shrugged because every page of every copy is stuck together. Nevertheless, these publicly owned networks are wildly popular with their subscribers. What's more, there'd be a ton more of them but for the brutal ministration of ALEC, the far-right, dark money policy shop that convinced multiple state governments to ban community broadband, even in places where there was no commercial broadband service:
One of the great predictors of whether your town will get fast, affordable, future-proof fiber is its history. Many of today's municipal broadband co-ops are descended from rural telephone co-ops, and those telephone co-ops were birthed by the New Deal's rural electrification co-ops. This is the incredibly long shadow that good public spending casts ā a century of successful provision of amenities that substantially improve the quality of life of whole regions.
Take Jackson and Owlsley Counties, rural Kentucky counties in Appalachia, some of America's poorest places. Starting in 2009, the local telephone company, the Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative, started pulling fiber to every home in both counties. To get that fiber over rugged mountain passes, they pulled it on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub." Soon, every subscriber had access to symmetrical fiber broadband at speeds of up to 10gb/s, and the region found itself at the center of an economic revival:
The Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative was founded in 1953, as an extension of the town's electrification co-op, itself founded in the 1930s after the passage of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 (the REA was amended in 1949, allowing electrification co-ops to secure low-cost loans for telephone rollouts).
You don't need to live in rural Appalachia to reap the benefit of publicly backed broadband co-ops. In Minnesota's Beltrami County (pop 46,288; density 18.6 people/square mile, median income $33,392/household), the local co-op Paul Bunyan Communications offers symmetrical fiber at speeds up to 10gb/s. But that's just table-stakes: Paul Bunyan doesn't just offer reasonably priced, reliable, screamingly fast broadband ā it also pays its members whenever too much cash builds up in its bank account. Paul Bunyan just paid out $3.6 million in refunds to its subscribers:
The payouts are pro-rated based on how much you spend on broadband. Customers who were due $150 or less got a credit on their next bill, while customers owed more than $150 got a check in the mail.
Nice, huh? It gets nicer: in 2018, Paul Bunyan paid back its subscribers $2.2 million; in 2022, they paid back $6.3 million, and last year they paid back $3 million. Paul Bunyan employes 160 people in the county, at fair wages, with good benefits. Every dollar Paul Bunyan makes literally stays in the community.
99% of the county has access to fiber from the co-op. Local business growth has outperformed statewide performance. A local aerospace company owner said that the co-op fiber made the difference between running a business with $300,000 in annual revenue and a business making $3,000,000 per year.
All of this is even cooler when you learn about the kind of internet service the rest of Minnesota has had to cope with. A 2019 Minnesota Commerce Department investigation found that Frontier, the state's leading ISP, had unbelievably badly maintained infrastructure. We're talking about high-capacity long-haul wires draped over shrubs and tree-branches:
Minnesotans on Fiber's "free market" service suffered from frequent outages. They paid higher costs for their unreliable, slow DSL lines than Paul Bunyan customers in Beltrami County paid for fiber that was literally thousands of times faster than Frontier's. Unlike Paul Bunyan's cheerful, local customer service, Frontier's service numbers went to "cost-efficient" (busied-out, distant) call centers where you could wait for hours to speak to someone who would either "accidentally" drop your call or simply refuse to help you. Customers frequently lost access to 911 service, and often saw spurious, sky-high charges on their bills that no one would explain or erase.
Frontier "strongly disagreed" with the report. But when Frontier went bankrupt (a year later!), we got a look at its internal operations and discovered just how much contempt the company had for its customers:
By Frontier's own calculations, it could have made an extra $10 billion by investing in fiber rollouts, but it chose not to make that money, because the stock analysts at institutional investment funds would punish any telco that committed to capital expenditures with long-term payouts. Since Frontier's execs were mostly paid in stock, they decided not to risk a drop in their personal net worth, and so they left ten billion on the table and millions of customers stuck on 19th century copper-line infrastructure ā technology that dated back to Samuel Morse and the telegraph.
Frontier was especially interested in customers who had no alternatives ā no cable or fixed wireless companies that could offer competition for Frontier's own terrible service. These customers were booked as an "asset" and their connections were earmarked for substandard maintenance and slow upgrades. The old Lily Tomlin gag goes, "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company." But Frontier really cared about the customers who had no alternative ā they cared about royally fucking those customers.
Ladies and gentlemen, behold the marvel that is the efficient free market!
Municipal fiber is a godsend. It's fast, cheap and reliable, and it is an engine for economic development. Of course, the Trump administration is running away from municipal fiber ā indeed, from all fiber ā as fast as it can, because every fiber installation competes with Elon Musk's satellite based internet service, Skylink:
The thing is, satellite internet makes sense in a few places ā temporary encampments, ships at sea ā but it is vastly more expensive than fiber to install and maintain, and it is millions of times slower than fiber. Nor is this something you can fix by filling the sky with more collision-prone, astronomer-demoralizing minisats ā no matter how many satellites there are over your head, they're all in the same universe and have to share its single, fixed electromagnetic spectrum. Meanwhile, if you want more broadband in your fiber network, you just pull another bundle of fiber (principle ingredient: sand) through your conduit and you add dozens of new universes' worth of electromagnetic spectra that are each isolated from one another.
Smart politicians aren't being sucked in by Musk's claim that he can billionaire his way out of the intractable laws of physics. They're pulling fiber, and lots of it. In Utah, the aptly named UTOPIA network is serving publicly owned fiber to 21 cities, and private businesses can offer service over that public system, which means that Utahans have their choice of 18 carries:
To put this in Information Superhighway terms from the 1990s, a symmetrical broadband connection is necessary for you to be a "netizen," while an asymmetrical connection that beams lots of data to you but isn't capable of letting you talk back is what makes you a "mouse potato."
It's grimly hilarious that the right has done so much damage to public fiber rollouts, given their oft-repeated grievances about being "shadowbanned" by dominant services. With symmetrical fiber, every crank could run their own server ā a 4chan in every garage. And if that fiber is provided by the government, then your ISP will be bound by the First Amendment, and legally prohibited from discriminating against customers based on their political speech (something that commercial providers can do to their heart's content):
The New Deal was a mere blip in the American project, but a century later, America's poorest, worst-served people are still reaping its benefits, with far faster, cheaper connections than you can get from the big telcos that have sewn up New York City and Los Angeles. And in some of those places, the public ISP doesn't just shower their subscribers with fast data ā they shower them with millions of dollars.
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:
September 28, 2025 - A group of ICE and Border Patrol agents try to arrest a random food delivery person in Chicago for the crime of looking like a person of color, but luckily the incompetent piece of shit Nazis fucked it up, despite there being like fifteen of them. [video]
Itās still censorship (even if it doesnāt violate the First Amendment)
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:
One of the dumbest, shrewdest tricks corporate America ever pulled was teaching us all to reflexively say, "If a corporation blocks your speech, that doesn't violate the First Amendment and therefore it's not censorship":
Censorship isn't limited to government action: it's the act of preventing a message from a willing speaker from reaching a willing listener. The fact that it's censorship doesn't (necessarily) mean that it's illegitimate or bad: there may be times when it's totally reasonable to prevent a willing speaker from reaching a willing listener. If you own a speech forum (say, a restaurant), and a patron stands on a table and starts declaiming about "illegals ruining America" and you 86 that racist fuck, that's totally OK with me ā even if there a few other racists in the booths are shouting, "Right on, brother!"
But don't pretend it's not censorship. You are managing a speech forum by preventing certain consensual communications from taking place because of your views. Which is fine. It's even fine if you support doing this only in some cases, for example, if you support the right of protesters to disrupt a Klan rally without being removed, but not the right of a racist to ruin everyone's dinner by shouting racist garbage in a restaurant.
That doesn't make you a hypocrite, it just makes you someone who rejects the legitimacy of some viewpoints and believes that it's tactically sound to prevent those viewpoints from being aired. That's a common perspective, and it's a rare "free speech defender" who won't grudgingly admit that there are some protesters whose right to disrupt others' speech they will defend; and some whose disruptions they'll condemn.
State censorship ā the kind that violates the First Amendment ā is also censorship, and it's a particularly pernicious form of censorship, so much so that the First Amendment to the US Constitution broadly prohibits it, and most other countries put some limits on it (for example, Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibits the government from interfering with "freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication").
First Amendment protections for speech seek to prevent the government from limiting speech because when the state interferes with a speaker, they can potentially snuff out that person's message altogether. The racist who gets 86ed from a restaurant can find a Trump rally (or a Klan rally) to mouth off at ā but if the state bans their speech altogether, they have to leave the country to find somewhere safe to speak.
The argument goes that even if you don't want racist speech to have a home anywhere, a ban on government censorship protects your views, too. Rather than letting states choose winners in the "marketplace of ideas," we ask them to act as the speech forum of last resort, and we preserve the right of anyone to speak in any public place, with (almost) no limits on what they can say (in theory, at least).
Let's stipulate to this ā that doesn't mean we must also stipulate that all private censorship is justified. Nor do we have to agree that it is harmless. Private actors can amass enormous power, and use that power to suppress speech that would weaken their power. In other words, they can turn the marketplace of idea into a command economy where arguments about their unfitness to govern our speech choices are stifled.
A good example here is Facebook. Earlier this year, the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams published Careless People, a tell-all memoir recounting the callous, vicious acts of Facebook's top executives, especially Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan:
Facebook doesn't allege that Wynn-Williams's book is factually inaccurate. Rather, they say that her employment contract prohibits her from warning the company's billions of users about its defects so that they can make better choices about whether to trust it to manage their main speech forum.
One interesting (terrible) wrinkle here: Facebook didn't even have to go to court to bring Wynn-Williams to the precipice of financial ruin. They were able to get a private arbitrator (a random dude in Facebook's pay) to hand down a "judgment" fining her $50,000 every time she criticizes Facebook. That's because Wynn-Williams's employment contract contains a "binding arbitration" clause that says that she can't ever have her case heard by a judge:
Binding arbitration clauses were once a rarity, their use legally restricted to resolving contractual disputes between giant companies of equal power. Then, Antonin Scalia changed the law and opened the floodgates, so that today, everyone from your physiotherapist to your solar installer to your boss requires you to give up the right to a hearing in order to transact normal, everyday activities:
Wynn-Williams isn't the only person to face private censorship that limits the ability of the public to hear multiple points of view and make up their own minds about the issues of the day. A host of media figures have been forced out of their jobs for republishing Charlie Kirk's own views on issues like gun control, race, and the acceptable nature of public, lethal violence.
Some of this censorship comes directly from government sources. Take Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins, who has pledged to "use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk":
But even if lawmakers like Higgins stopped bellowing the quiet part out loud, that wouldn't be the end of the government's involvement in censorship. As we see in Sarah Wynn-Williams's case, government changes to contract law can have far-reaching implications for free expression.
Government action also plays an important role in the wave of neo-McCarthyite deplatformings over Charlie Kirk's killing. There's nothing natural about the collapse of the media ecosystem into an inbred collection of hyperscaled giga-conglomerates. The transformation of the internet into "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four" wasn't inevitable.
After the Trump I election, progressives were aghast over the photos of the leaders of all of the major tech companies seated around a table atop Trump Tower:
The outrage was over the fact that these titans of industry were willing to normalize Trump. Boy, did that ever miss the point. The real issue was that all the leaders of the tech industry fit around a single table. Eight years later, the industry had grown so consolidated that the tech industry's top bosses could all fit in a semicircle of folding chairs on Trump's inaugural dais:
It's a terrible mistake to think that the societal risk of these terrible billionaires comes from their individual moral failings. The danger to society comes from the existence of billionaires ā from the transfer of power (to decide who may speak and who may be heard) into the hands of a few very rich men whose collective cowardice can erase whole swathes of public discourse.
The power of those billionaires didn't come from the billionaires themselves. They weren't born billionaires ā the government made them billionaires. These oligarchs owe their existence to presidents like Ronald Reagan, but also (especially) to Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Take Facebook. In 2012, the company faced a serious threat from Instagram, a tiny company that had grown at unheard-of speed, primarily by luring Facebook users to quit the platform and join Instagram instead. Zuckerberg bought the company for $1b. It's not necessarily illegal for a large company to acquire a new competitor, but if the acquisition is an attempt to reduce competition, then it is radioactively illegal and the government is legally required to halt the transaction.
When the Obama administration considered Facebook's Instagram acquisition, it had to decide whether Facebook was motivated by the desire to reduce competition. Lucky for Obama's enforcers, Mark Zuckerberg sent his CFO a memo explicitly stating that he was buying Instagram to neutralize a competitor. For antitrust regulators, this is the equivalent of a signed confession: "This killing was definitely a murder, and I totally premeditated it." That wasn't exactly a surprise ā after all, Zuck's motto (also committed to writing), is "It is better to buy than to compete." Despite this, the Obama administration waved the merger through:
Obama served as Enshittifier-in-Chief, presiding over an orgy of illegal, anticompetitive mergers that transformed the internet as a handful of manifestly terrible men seized near-total authority over who could speak and what we could hear.
We know how the internet collapsed into strangled Habsburg gargling. But how did we end up in a place where a handful of media bosses get to decide who we hear on the radio and see on cable, broadcast and satellite TV?
Thank Bill Clinton, whose 1996 Telecommunications Act eliminated New Deal-era restrictions on media consolidation, paving the way for media companies to corner regional markets, for example, by buying your town's newspaper, radio station and TV station (or to buy the major radio stations in every city, as Clearchannel did).
The effects of the Telecommunications Act on public discourse became evident almost immediately. As Matt Stoller writes, after 9/11, Republicans got the media barons (that Clinton created) to fire popular media figures for opposing George Bush's catastrophic, illegal, blood-soaked invasion of Iraq:
The reason the First Amendment singles out government restrictions on speech, rather than private speech restrictions, is that governments have monolithic power to shut down speakers in ways that private actors (supposedly) can't. But when governments allow a handful of firms to seize control over our speech forums, they vest state-like power in these unaccountable private actors.
If you care about free expression, you have to take notice of private censorship, and not confine your scrutiny to state action. That is especially true when the government is allied with a class of media oligarchs who have sewn up our communications channels.
But even when the government isn't in bed with the media barons, the mere existence of media barons are an existential threat to communications, and not just because the owners of media conglomerates routinely abuse their power over our speech. Once the communications industry has been crushed into to a handful of bros who fit comfortably on Trump's dais, they become the proverbial "one throat to choke" ā a tractably small group of people who can be arm-twisted into serving as off-the-books agents of state censorship:
If you care about free expression, it's not enough to ask yourself whether the government is violating the First Amendment. Any law that lets powerful people enlist the state to silence their enemies, from Scalia's changes to contract law to Clinton's changes to media ownership law, have a profound, detrimental effect on our free speech.
The pandemic shortages forcefully reminded us that any industry with a single point of failure is liable to fail. Billionaires are a single point of failure in our speech regime. What's the point of defending the First Amendment to prevent elected officials from silencing their political opponents if you're willing to let the government give a handful of unaccountable oligarchs that power?
The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.
If you've ever spent time around Wikipedians, you've doubtless heard its motto: "Wikipedia only works in practice. In theory, it's a mess." It's a delicious line, which is why I stole it for my 2017 novel Walkaway.
But this is one of those lines that's too good to fact-check. The truth is that there's a theory that very neatly describes how Wikipedia works; that is, how Wikipedia is one of the best sources of information ever assembled, despite allowing tens of thousands of anonymous and pseudonymous people with no verifiable credentials to participate in a collective knowledge creating process.
Nupedia, Wikipedia's immediate predecessor, tried to solve this problem by verifying its editors and establishing that they had the requisite expertise before allowing them to write encyclopedia entries in the domain of their expertise. This was an abject failure: not only was it so slow as to be indistinguishable from dormancy (Nupedia produced a mere 20 articles in its first year), but also the fact that these articles were written by experts did not mean that they were good. After all, experts disagree!
Wikipedia jettisoned user-verification in favor of source verification. After all, it's impossible for a group of strangers to agree on the identity of another stranger, let alone what qualifies them to write an encyclopedia entry. Instead, Wikipedia created a process by which a source could be deemed noteworthy and reliable source, then instituted a policy that assertions appearing on Wikipedia had to be cited to a noteworthy and reliable source:
Wikipedia doesn't say "It is a true fact that Cory Doctorow is 54 years old." It says that a website called "Writers Write" published the assertion that my birthday is July 17, 1971:
There's no ready way for you to verify my birthdayā”, but anyone can verify that Writers Write published this and claimed it was true.
ā” Unless, of course, you are my mother, who does read this blog. Hi, Mom!
Not only did this resolve otherwise unresolvable disputes, but it's also a tactic that got more effective as the internet grew, and more noteworthy sources were digitized and made readily available. A major milestone here was the creation of the Internet Archive's Open Library, which aims to scan and index every book ever published. That meant that the citations to print sources in the footnotes of Wikipedia entries could be automatically linked to a scanned page and verified by everyone:
Wikipedia omitted a step that was considered indispensable throughout the entire history of encyclopedias ā verifying facts ā and replaced it with a new step ā verifying sources. This maneuver is characteristic of many of the most successful online experiments: get rid of something deemed essential and replace it with a completely different process, suited to the affordances and limitations of a world-spanning, public, anonymous network.
That's what eBay did in 1995, when (as Auctionweb), it created a person-to-person selling platform that neither verified the identities of buyers or sellers, nor did it use an escrow service that held money in trust until goods were received. Rather, it replaced these existing measures with a new kind of reputation system, whereby reliable sellers could be sorted from scammers by looking at their numeric scores.
That's also what Kickstarter did. Kickstarter is based on a scheme first mooted by John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier in 1998, which they called "The Street Performer Protocol":
In the Street Performer Protocol, a provider of goods or services announces that once a set amount of funds were pledged, they will deliver something. Think of a street juggler who wows a crowd with an escalating series of impressive tricks, before calling out, "For my final trick, I will juggle eleven razor-sharp machetes with my feet ā but I will only do this trick once there's $100 in my hat."
Many people tried to implement this as a digital service before Kickstarter. They all foundered on a seemingly insurmountable hurdle: the sellers were raising money to make the thing they were raising money for. All the pre-Kickstarter platforms erred on the side of protecting buyers by holding onto the money until the promised goods or services were delivered. But because the seller needed the money to deliver on their promise, this repeatedly failed. It was a procedural vapor-lock: I can't do the thing until I have your money, but I can't get your money until I do the thing.
So Kickstarter jettisoned the escrow step, handing campaign creators the full payout and then trusting them not to run off with the dough. The platform understood that this would allow a certain amount of fraud and failure, but deemed it worthwhile, especially after they took countermeasures to minimize backer losses, such as verifying sellers, subjecting projects to human review, and canceling any project that failed to meet its funding goals (if you need the money to do the thing, and you don't raise enough money, then you will not be able to do the thing).
In the Oblique Strategies deck, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt counsel us to "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before":
https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
That's what Wikipedia did when it swapped verifying facts for agreeing on sources. It's what eBay did when it swapped validating sellers and buyers for reviews. It's what Kickstarter did when it swapped escrow for acceptable losses, project review, and setting minimum funding thresholds.
Platforms may not know it, but they live by the "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before" maxim. They're forever removing seemingly load-bearing Jenga blocks to see whether the whole thing collapses. After all, it's certainly possible to omit a step and cause a catastrophe.
Kickstarter competitors like Indiegogo tried omitting the funding threshold restriction, passing any amount raised to the creator, even if it was too little to complete the project, but after an initial blush of success, lost a lot of ground to Kickstarter, partly due to customers who felt burned when the project they put money into never delivered.
But that's not the only problem with "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before." Often, the new measure instituted to replace a former bedrock principle turns out to have critical flaws that bad actors can discover and exploit.
So eBay's success conjured up an army of "reputation farmers," who sold a series of low-value items to the public (or to one another, or to alternative accounts they operated themselves), cultivating a high reputation on the platform. Once they reached this high score, they listed a bunch of high-value items (like dozens of $1,000 laptops) and absconded with the money.
And Kickstarter's payment threshold isn't that hard to game: just set a very low funding goal, and you are guaranteed your money. Sure, the funding goal has to be high enough to satisfy a human reviewer, but for many items, it's hard to know exactly what constitutes a reasonable funding threshold.
Then there's Wikipedia. 25 years ago, it seemed easier for a group of strangers to agree on whether a source was noteworthy and reliable than it would be for them to agree on a fact. But while that remains true, it did open up a new avenue of attack: bad actors who wanted to slip lies and spin into Wikipedia could switch from arguing about which facts were true to arguing about which sources were reliable.
That's exactly what's happening today, and it's the conflict that forms the spine of Josh Dzieza's lengthy, magisterial essay on the past, present and future of Wikipedia for The Verge:
Dzieza describes how compelling and effective the Wikipedia "facts about facts" approach has been. It's such a sweet hack that it converted many Wikipedia vandals and trolls to editors in good standing, who switched from making Wikipedia worse to making it better.
But in an age of endless culture wars, conservatives have turned their sights on Wikipedia. Conservative publications are ā empirically speaking ā the most falsehood-strewn and conspiratorial branch of the press:
The fact that reality has a pronounced left-wing bias means that many popular conservative publications have been disqualified as reliable sources on Wikipedia, starting with the Daily Mail in 2017. This has the Maga right spitting feathers about "anti-conservative bias on Wokeapedia," and has Maga Congresstrolls demanding that Wikipedia unmask its editors and disclose their identities, a risk formerly confined to Russia, India, China and Turkiye.
The emergence of this threat in the USA is a potential game-changer for the Wikipedia Foundation, which has long relied on its US domicile ā and the First Amendment ā to protect the core project from political censorship. Wikipedia's status as the best, most trusted source of information on the internet has painted a crosshairs on its back: leaked Heritage Foundation slides detail a plan to force Wikipedia to unmask editors who contribute criticism of Israel to the project.
The Media Research Center has called for the Big Tech monopolists ā Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all openly allied with Trump today ā to block Wikipedia until it agrees to treat Newsmax, OANN and other conspiratorial publications as reliable sources.
Ironically, one of the things the right hates most about Wikipedia is that it takes affirmative measures to identify and correct its bias, for example, by actively encouraging editorial participation by members of minorities who are underrepresented in Wikipedia's volunteer editor cohort. Right wing demagogues call this "DEI," even as they demand that the government force Wikipedia to institute DEI for conspiracy-addled right wing trolls. As the saying goes, "When youāre accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
The culture war on Wikipedia isn't the only risk the project faces. Dictators around the world are obsessed with dominating Wikipedia. Dzieza describes how one anonymous editor in a Middle Eastern autocracy was summoned by the secret police, who ordered him to capitalize on his standing as a long-term Wikipedia editor to insert pro-regime materials into the encyclopedia.
One of Wikipedia's great strengths is its structure. While Wikipedia started out as one of the internet's characteristic "benevolent dictator for life" projects, with founder Jimmy Wales taking on the role of "God King" of Wikipedia, Wales voluntarily walked away from his power, creating a nonprofit with an independent board (Wikimedia Foundation) and then handing his veto power over to an Arbitration Committee made up of volunteer editors.
This was a rare and remarkable gesture. The internet has many of these "benevolent dictator for life" public interest projects, and nearly all of them are still controlled by their founders, who may be benevolent, but are far from perfect:
It's all the more remarkable that the internet's most prominent self-deposing benevolent dictator is Jimmy Wales, a self-professed, Ayn Rand-reading libertarian. While many of self-described leftist benevolent dictators who preside over other key pieces of internet infrastructure decided that their projects needed the long-term control of their founders, it was Wales, a libertarian, who decided that a project of so much collective importance should have collective rule.
But while Wales has stepped down as Wikipedia's God King (and its "single throat to choke" by the world's dictators and thin-skinned billionaires), there is something of his unique genius in the ethos of the project, and its ability to civilly bring together people of many irreconcilable viewpoints to collaborate on something they all value. I've known Wales for decades and count him a friend, notwithstanding the wide gap in our political philosophies.
If you want to be a Wikipedian ā and I hope you do ā there are many ways to get started. The easiest is probably fixing punctuation errors and typos: when you come across these on a Wikipedia entry, click the edit button and just fix 'em, making sure to check off the "this is a minor edit" box before you hit submit.
But for a more ambitious entree, try this method by veteran Wikipedian ā and slayer of cryptocurrency bullshit ā Molly White, who, in 30 brisk minutes, shows to go to the library, find a cool book, and use the facts you find therein to make Wikipedia a better, more complete source of knowledge:
You don't have to be an expert in butterflies, hydrology or the Peloponnesian War to improve their respective entries. You just have to find a useful fact in a reliable source. Go ahead: be the latest person to do what no person (before Jimmy Wales) ever thought of not doing.
Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
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:
The fact that reality has a pronounced left-wing bias means that many popular conservative publications have been disqualified as reliable sources on Wikipedia, starting with the Daily Mail in 2017. This has the Maga right spitting feathers about "anti-conservative bias on Wokeapedia," and has Maga Congresstrolls demanding that Wikipedia unmask its editors and disclose their identities, a risk formerly confined to Russia, India, China and Turkiye.
The emergence of this threat in the USA is a potential game-changer for the Wikipedia Foundation, which has long relied on its US domicile ā and the First Amendment ā to protect the core project from political censorship. Wikipedia's status as the best, most trusted source of information on the internet has painted a crosshairs on its back: leaked Heritage Foundation slides detail a plan to force Wikipedia to unmask editors who contribute criticism of Israel to the project.
The Media Research Center has called for the Big Tech monopolists ā Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all openly allied with Trump today ā to block Wikipedia until it agrees to treat Newsmax, OANN and other conspiratorial publications as reliable sources.
Conservatives created their own Wikipedia competitor years ago, and yet somehow that doesnāt quell their outrage, because nobody else uses it. Itās not that they donāt get a voice; itās that they canāt be the only authority.
Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed
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:
Notwithstanding the pretensions of certain well-paid economists, political economy is not a "physics of human behavior," through which human interactions and outcomes can be quantized and precisely captured through mathematical models.
For one thing, in physics, it's possible to reduce friction, whereas in political economy, friction isn't something you reduce, it's something you redistribute, typically downward, to people with less political power than you.
Think about your job. If you are on a salary, your boss has to pay you even when there's no work to be done, which means that during times where there's no income, your boss still has to pay your wages, meaning that a long slow patch could kill the business.
But if your boss can eliminate or reduce your wages when there's no work, the friction of figuring out how to keep your boss's business a going concern is shifted to you.
Take the "tipped minimum wage," which is the minimum that a restaurateur can pay a server. The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.15/hour, which is substantially less than you can survive on. If your boss fucks up and can't fill the tables in his restaurant, he has to pay you $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage). But if you get just one table in eight hours, where you bust your hump and earn a $41 tip, your boss gets to keep $40.90 of that money and pay you the grand sum of $58.
That certainly relieves some of your boss's friction ā but now you have to endure the friction of figuring out how to survive on $58. Maybe you don't fix your car and instead spend an extra hour at the start and end of your shift on a city bus. That's a lot of friction, but it's your friction. Same for the time you spend lining up at the food bank, the sleepless nights you endure because you can't see a dentist about your rotten tooth, the diabetes test-strips you do without.
Of course, there's plenty of workers who don't even get the tipped minimum wage: in most of the country, "gig economy" workers aren't guaranteed any wages. If your boss ā the company that made your app ā fucked up by charging too much or skimping on ads or having piss-poor customer service, you can clock on for an eight-hour shift and get zero dollars, all the while being available to your boss, just in case they do get a customer. If you're a driver, you only get paid for the time when you're on a delivery or have a passenger, and you bear the expense of the rest of the hours you spend prowling the streets, waiting for a call-out. This allows gig companies to build up a giant workforce that can absorb orders when they come in, while shifting the friction of living on half-wages to the workers who only get paid on the way out to a delivery, but not on the way back.
Return to office? An exercise in pure friction-shifting. The friction your boss experiences from furiously fantasizing about how lazy you're being at home is swapped for the friction you of your commute, the friction of having to reschedule deliveries that you weren't home to sign for, the friction of having to eat a packed lunch or waste your pay on overpriced, additive/grease/salt/sugar-laden quick-service food.
The airline that fires most of its customer service staff shifts operational frictions passengers, from the friction of arriving two hours early to see one of the few check-in clerks to the friction of waiting for three hours on hold to rebook a canceled flight or find a lost bag.
Southwest really takes the cake here. Remember a couple years ago when Southwest stranded one million passengers over Christmas week because its computers had all crashed? Turns out that the main thing SWA was doing with those computers was running a friction-shifting shell-game with its airplanes, pilots, flight attendants and passengers. SWA would sell tickets for more flights than it had planes, and then cancel the flights that had sold the fewest tickets:
That's quite a magnificent piece of friction-shifting. SWA is relieved of the friction of buying and maintaining a fleet of planes. The don't have to bear the friction of guessing which planes will and won't be full in advance. But SWA passengers get all the friction and more, when their flight is cancelled because other people ā whom they have no control over ā failed to buy enough tickets for it.
Southwest "reduced friction" for its shareholders at the expense of its employees and customers. Other businesses "reduce friction" for one favored group at the expense of another, like Google, whose Youtube Content ID system makes it trivial to file a copyright takedown notice but hard-to-impossible to get your work reinstated when you are falsely accused:
That's shifting friction from large rightsholders (who can get infringing work removed without a trial) to creators (who don't get a day in court before their work is censored).
Meanwhile, food delivery platforms shift friction onto restaurants, conscripting them into delivery services without their permission:
And onto drivers, who don't even rate the tipped minimum wage. For all that these companies come up with names for themselves like "Seamless," they are 100 percent seam, but those seams are shifted onto people without political or economic power.
The MBA mind-virus turns its victims into "optimization"-obsessed zombies, but what they mean by "optimization" is that you will optimize your life to their benefit. HP uses software locks to "optimize" its printer business, forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon:
A better world is one in which the people optimize corporations and billionaires ā by cutting them down to size and shattering their power. It's a world in which amassing obscene amounts of money and market power creates friction, in the form of endless regulatory and tax scrutiny. It's a world where public transit has priority and private cars are taxed for slowing the rest of us down as we go about our days. It's a world where workers are frictionless: protected from noncompete agreements and baroque wage theft schemes like those used to impoverish service and gig workers. It's a world where bosses experience friction, in the form of obligations to the workers whose labor generates their wealth.
I really believe that ā politically speaking ā friction can't be destroyed, only redistributed. And I'm fine with that, really ā provided we're redistributing it upwards.
As a salaried worker, my company passes friction on to me by overcommitting and underresourcing their service, so that I have no access to either support or thinking time and if I'm on holiday I have to pick up the same amount of tasks just in a shorter time. They also pass on the issues of dealing with this back to me through the stringent business cases required for recruitment and the gatekeeping of access to time codes for accounting for my time.
In a step up from tipped or gig workers, my take home pay is protected. But they will take every ounce of energy and time they can squeeze from me either in doing my job or in jumping through hoops to demonstrate that I'm doing the job.
Gaza is being completely destroyed. We must stop ignoring it and support whoever we can and save whoever we can. Please donate to Nader so we can save him and get him out of Gaza safely. Please donate here if you can.
Please don't ignore us and what we are going through. Donate to us, please. Come on guys, we need 3,000 euros and we will achieve our short goal. Please donate to us now so that we can achieve it today. Please donate. We depend on you to live.
Please donate and help Nader end his suffering and the suffering of his family. He is working hard to save his loved ones from the war of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Please donate and save him.
We are living under bombardment, amidst hunger, deprivation, and skyrā¦ Nader Family needs your support for Help us overcome all this loss an
The world has become indifferent and it is as if those in Gaza are not human beings. This is terrible. I am here dying of hunger and I ask the world to help me and donate to me. Please put yourself in my place. What would you do? Please donate to us. We need your support.
350 people have shared my post and read my story.No one donated My friend, we are dying here and we need your support. Please provide us with some money and donate to us, please.
Oh and I want to fight all the Gen Z kids who are like āteehee, weāll just do lavender marriages instead!ā Some of us are adults who want equal rights and protections under the law of our land.
Yeah, we wanted legal marriages because your spouse's horrid family could show up, get you kicked out of the hospital, steal all of their stuff, and there was nothing you could do about it.
When my wife went in for surgery before we got married, it was me and her horrifically homophobic mother in the surgery center waiting room and I knew without a doubt that if anything went wrong, I would be expected to leave without any access to her belongings, the pictures of us on her phone, or the funeral itself, and the obituary would not mention me or our relationship at all.
And that was after almost a decade of marriage equality! The fear and anxiety leading up to that surgery and the recovery process after reinforced for me just how important marriage can be. Itās a form of self-determination.
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:
Forget surveillance capitalism ā let's talk about surveillance infantalism: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.
After the Snowden revelations, I started to wonder about something fundamental: why spy at all?
The answer I came up with at the time is that the ultra-rich (and the states they have suborned) have a fundamental understanding that the more unfair a society is, the less stable it is. The more unstable a state is, the more its ruling class have to expend on private security. No captain of industry wants to arise from his sarcophagus of a morning, only to discover a mob of hoi polloi building a guillotine on his lawn.
As Thomas Piketty argues, there comes a point where it's cheaper to make society more fair ā say, by building hospitals and schools ā than it is to pay for all the gaiter-wearing gun-thugs you'll need to weed out the guillotine-building projects that spontaneously erupt under conditions of gross unfairness:
Mass surveillance shifts the guillotine equilibrium in favor of being greedier, by making it cheaper to identify and neutralize incipient guillotine-builders, which means that you can raise the greediness floor without seeing a concomitant rise in your guard labor bill.
And there's lots of money to be made by raising the greediness floor, the corollary of which is that any time you fail to act with sufficiently shameless greed, you leave a ton of money on the table. That's the substance of the shareholder lawsuit against Unitedhealthcare, alleging that after Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United CEO Brian Thompsonā”, United failed to screw enough patients hard enough:
ā” Luigi didn't do it. I saw him playing pinochle in Los Angeles that night, and I'll swear to it in court.
But there's another way in which surveillance abets rampant billionaireism: when companies spy on us, they can change the rules of their services to increase how much we pay them, and decrease how much they pay us. When companies do this to their customers, they call it "personalized pricing" ā but everyone else calls it what it is, surveillance pricing:
When a company charges you more than someone else for the same service (say, Uber jacking up the price of a ride because your phone battery is about to die, or an airline charging you extra because they know you have a funeral to attend), they're effectively re-valuing the dollars in your bank account. The fact that the cab-ride that costs you $20 and costs someone else $15 means that your dollar is only worth $0.75.
But companies also do this to the workers they pay, something Veena Dubal calls "algorthmic wage discrimination":
For example, the apps that hospitals use to hire contract nurses first buy their recent financial information from an unregulated data-broker, checking to see whether the nurse has a lot of credit-card debt, because if you owe a lot on your Visa, the app can offer you a lower hourly wage and you'll still take the shift:
This is re-valuing your labor. If my credit-card debt means that I get $20/hour for a shift that would pay you $25/hour, the app is saying that my hours are only worth 80% of what yours are worth.
This kind of price-fixing is an example of a phenomenon I call "twiddling," which is when a company changes its underlying business logic (prices, costs, recommendations, search rankings) on a per-user, per-session basis to shift value from customers and suppliers to shareholders:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
There's lots of kinds of twiddling: the fact that apps generate so much fine-grained, up-to-the-second surveillance telemetry about our use of them means that zuckermuskian social media bosses can make pretty good guesses about how many ads and boosted posts they can enshittify into our feeds without us switching off the app:
If you were studying all this stuff in an MBA program, they'd call it "optimization." Mass surveillance allows the optimization of guard-labor, by identifying threats to the status quo for targeted enforcement, which is much cheaper and effective than indiscriminate enforcement. Commercial surveillance allows buyers to figure out the most an individual consumer will pay, and raise prices accordingly; and to calculate the lowest wage a worker will accept, and lower pay accordingly. Commercial surveillance allows companies to "optimize" their products to be nearly so enshtitified that we quit them, but not quite, maximizing the value they can shift from us to them.
To be free people, we don't merely need to be ungovernable.
We need to become unoptomizable.
How do we do that? Well, there are lots of policies that would make it harder for the ultra-rich to "optimize" us so that we are easier to fleece and abuse, but every "optimization" starts with surveillance. After all, you treasure what you measure, and if you can't observe a worker or a customer ā or a citizen getting ready to build a guillotine ā you can't optimize them.
That's where "privacy first" comes in. There are a lot of people angry about a lot of problems that are all rooted in the unregulated, unrestricted practice of mass surveillance by governments and their corporate partners:
Pulling together people angry about being turned into deepfake porn, people angry about parents who've gone Maga or kids who've become anorexic; Fox News cultists angry about the use of reverse warrants to identify Jan 6 rioters or Tiktok millennials quoting Osama Bin Laden; immigrants angry about ICE plundering commercial databases to locate their next victim; and people angry about online racial financial, hiring and housing discrimination makes for a hell of a coalition.
If we make it illegal to spy, we make end the conditions for rampant billionaireism. We become unoptimizable.
Billionaires are overgrown toddlers, after all. They don't acknowledge the humanity of others ā indeed, they probably don't even believe that the rest of us are really real (we're "NPCs"):
The point of billionaireism is to escape: to escape any mutual obligations to others, any duty to give moral consideration to your workers or your customers or the voters you're trying to hoodwink with a torrent of manipulative, dishonest media messages. It's to do whatever you want, to move fast and break things, from rocketships to the night sky. It's being able to shout down anyone who says "NO!"
That's the drive behind "libertarian exit" projects, where people dying of terminal billionaireism attempt to colonize some "empty place" where they owe nothing to anyone:
It's why billionaires are obsessed with tunnels and skycars (escaping the inescapable geometric reality that the only way to move a lot of people through a city is on public transit):
It's why they build luxury bunkers, so they can wait out "the Event" in comfort while the not-quite-real people on the outside rebuild civilization, whereupon they can emerge with their AR-15s, bomb-collared mercenaries, and thumb-drives full of bitcoin and assume their rightful place as Frazetta warlords with a harem in every fortress:
It's a life without friction, because all of that friction has been offloaded onto us, through the process of optimization. The gig economy lets a billionaireist enjoy the pleasures of round-the-clock staff without having to pay workers to sit idle. You just summon a worker whenever you want a burrito or a massage or a blunt, and they only get paid while they're "on the clock" for your task. The fact that this means that an ever-larger fraction of the world has to scramble in mounting desperation to stay clothed, fed and housed is a hell of a lot of friction, but it's not your friction. They've been optimized ā to your purposes.
Become unoptimizable.
In a fair society, we'd have transparency for the powerful and privacy for everyone else: we'd know every time Elon Musk's jet took off and where it was going so we could surround the landing strip with angry protesters ā and Musk wouldn't know a single thing about his workers, his users, or anyone else. He would experience us through the same veil of total ignorance through which he experiences his children.
Thatās nearly seven people every single hour. 87 of those people were seeking aid. 771 more were injured. In addition to the deaths by direct violence, the number of people who have died of forced starvation has risen to 193. The World Food Programme says that their current efforts, which are being blockaded by Israel, are āa drop in the ocean of needsā.
Twenty people were killed and several others injured when an aid truck overturned amidst the traffic jam. This incident is a result of the extremely chaotic distribution conditions.
Please my friends we need help so much I really don't know what to say please donate for my family and also life here is killing me I wish I could die instead please donate for me my father's health is deteriorating please share the post Donate also please donate donate and do not ignore
Please friend Ibrahim verified by @gazavetters On list number 25, please we donāt want to stop here, letās help him together, he really deserves help. I saw Nasser crying and saying I want food, please donate to them, please.
"The normalization, the acceptance, the embrace, the belief that a settler-colonial project can be reformed, can be saved, that it's somehow not rotted to the core, needs to be combated. When you normalize the right of one settler-colonial project to exist, you're letting colonized people know that your solidarity is conditional... Any excuse you give for normalization of a settler colonial project is fundamentally a betrayal to colonized people all around the world, especially when you yourself are a settler... Let me make this plain: If you accept 1776, how are we to believe that you reject 1948?"
-Deculturation, "Superman, Colonialism, and Decolonization!"
We are at a moment in the genocide of Palestinians where even those directly, tangibly implicated in the atrocity are unable to deny the sheer scale of death.
This doesn't mean the tide is turning on public perception. Instead, it just means that the specific aim of propaganda used to justify these conditions is shifting.
Netanyahu denies outright the widespread starvation, and Trump meanwhile acknowledges starvation but blames Palestinians and argues for more US "food centers" in Gaza. These two discourses are happening concurrently while the the US and Israel are working together to block actual aid from reaching Gazans and funneling everyone into GHF death traps.
GHF is run by a longtime agent of US imperialism and a prominent evangelical christian zionist, and these "aid" sites are staffed by privately contracted mercenaries. They are located near Israeli military posts. Every single day these sites are used to massacre starving people.
Pay attention. There is no real disagreement happening. There are many forms of genocide denial, and many forms of genocidal propaganda.
If someone claims to be opposing Israel's genocide of Palestine but they do not oppose the colonization of Palestine, they do not support a free Palestine. If people will argue for aid and ceasefire, but will not argue for the right to return and for the abolition of Israel as a settler-colonial state, they do not support a free Palestine.
Messaging that objects to the current moment without recognition of the structural context is normalizing propaganda. This functions as an international pressure valve, allowing the global north to maintain an illusion of moral authority and to scale back to tactics of genocide just beneath whatever drew international attention. They present themselves to the "solution" of the atrocities produced by their control.
One cannot sincerely oppose genocide without opposing settler-colonialism. Settler-colonialism is inseparable from genocide in its goals, practices, and ideological justifications.
We must fundamentally object to the settlement of Palestine, and never let colonial propaganda to distract from the demand of liberation from the river to the sea.
My friend Ahmed is only 16 years old. Two years ago his home was destroyed by Israel, and his family has been homeless, displaced many times, and lives in a tent. He is disabled, his brother is injured, and they struggle to afford medicine and food.
Yesterday the occupation cut off the water to his entire area. The global humanitarian nutrition advisor for CARE, an international humanitarian organization fighting global poverty and hunger explained: "We have seen, from case studies of starvation, that it takes up to 60 days before the body fully shuts down if the person has access to water. If you donāt have access to water, you can die as quickly as three to five days."
Israel bombed the infrastructure center and the sewage and wastewater destroyed their family's already dilapidated tent. They desperately need to buy a new tent and to get access to water as soon as possible.
Adding insult to injury, tumblr recently deleted Ahmed's blog. His new blog is @ahmedaldaniii and his fundraiser has been vetted by @gazavetters, number 198 on the list.
Please, this is an urgent request! Donate to Ahmed's family.
My name is Ahmad Aldany. I am reaching out to you from the heart of the daily suffā¦ Ahmed Aldany needs your support for Help Ahmed and his f
Please guys help us we are going through the hardest time of our lives because of the hunger, disease, death and genocide we are going through please please please help us by donating so we can buy some food and medicine and buy a new tent š„ŗā¤ļø
Netanyahu is now admitting what the intention was all along, the complete takeover of Gaza. Displaced people are already forced into only 25% of Gaza, and now Israel wants to reduce it to 0%. The Israeli settler-colonial project can only be complete through the genocide of Palestinians. They have been destroying infrastructure, killing the environment, killing the people, starving the children.
The longer the blockades are in place, the higher the cost of everything sores. Price gouging of medicine and food is at an all-time high as thousands starve. On top of this, financial transactions coming into Palestine are charging higher commission rates. They are now charging 55% commission.
This means that you could donate $100 USD, and a person in Palestine will only receive $45, and that $45 can be the cost of just a single kilo of flour. Do you understand? The entire structure of global capitalism is enabling the starvation of Gaza.
I haven't eaten anything since yesterday. That's right. I'm tired and starving. I came here to ask for your help. Please help me and donate to me. I really need help and I'm suffering. Please donate.
Nader's campaign supports him as well as seven family members: his my mother Iman (50 years old), his father Ahmad who suffers from cancer and urgently needs treatment (55 years old), his brothers Muhammad (15 years old), Omar (22 years old), and Abd al-Salam (27 years old), Abd al-Salam's wife Aya, and their daughter Iman (3 years old).
Sometimes it is quite depressing to be on Tumblr. I recently had to block another account saying shit like 'Gaza deserves to be bombed' on a Gazan's post saying how the children have not eaten anything for days. There are so many Palestinians asking for support because they are literally starving to death and yet the majority of blogs here wouldn't even share a fundraiser post. These donations to families in Gaza are literally life-saving! And when they are asked to share these posts, they just ignore them because they don't think these fundraisers are 'trustworthy enough'. Ok, some of you are asking how the fundraisers are vetted out of genuine concern for Palestinians in Gaza, I understand and I'm always happy to provide info on how fundraisers on Tumblr are vetted (x, x, x, x, x, x), but so many of you are using this as an excuse to make yourself feel better about ignoring starving Palestinians being killed and not helping them.
Ibrahim (@aburakhiaibrahim) is starving. His family consists of 28 people and there is no food for them to eat. Yesterday he tried to get the food from the airdrop, but because the aid landed very close to the army, he couldn't go and get the food or else he would be killed. They could only turn to the markets for food, which is very expensive. I am asking you to please help. Donate if you can, if not, please at least share his fundraiser so that it may reach someone who can donate.
Dear Compassionate Community,
My name is Samah, and I comā¦ Samah Aburakhiaā¬ā needs your support for Seeking Safety: Support My Family's
Vetted! vetted by @/gaza-evacuation-funds, #336 on vetted fundraiser list by el-shab-hussein, nabulsi, and MohAyesh, #802 on Butterfly Effect Project vetted list!
Tagging for reach~ Please dm me if you want of the mailing list! Thank you!
