a lot of people have reached out to me about their gofundmes so I thought I'd make a post to promote them. all of these have been vetted, so if you're looking for somebody to donate to, consider one of these!
@88mohammed - gofundme (ā¬2,036 raised of ā¬100,000 goal)
@anqar - gofundme (ā¬13,675 raised of ā¬20,000 goal)
@salahaldinahhorsblog - gofundme (ā¬3,864 raised of ā¬40,000 goal)
@hayanahed - gofundme (ā¬60,935 raised of ā¬100,000 goal)
@mayadayyad81 - gofundme ($29,232 USD raised of $35,000 goal)
@musababd - gofundme (Ā£863 raised of Ā£8,000 goal)
@ahmed-mohammed1 - gofundme (ā¬1,901 raised of ā¬30,000 goal)
@salem-baker - gofundme (ā¬1,724 raised of ā¬38,000 goal)
@mohamed-mikki - gofundme ($327raised of $20,000)
@emanfamily - gofundme (ā¬3,186 raised of ā¬38,000 goal)
@tameraldeeb - gofundme (ā¬22,950 raised of ā¬40,000 target)
@mohammedaldeeb - gofundme (ā¬32,054 raised of ā¬55,000 target)
@amlanqar - gofundme (ā¬4,416 raised of ā¬50,000 goal)
@ashraf-family2 - gofundme (ā¬14,660 raised of ā¬20,000 goal)
@mohammedalanqer - gofundme (ā¬48,988 raised of ā¬58,000 target)
@amira-world - gofundme (ā¬17,836 raised of ā¬20,000 target)
@ahmedalnabeeh11 - gofundme (ā¬17,133 raised of ā¬30,000 target)
@neverhate2024 - gofundme ($39,541 AUD raised of $70,000 target)
@emansalem - gofundme (ā¬3,186 raised of ā¬38,000 target)
@bilal-salah0 - gofundme (ā¬70,105 raised of ā¬70,000 goal)
@m0hammed1 - gofundme (ā¬7,711 raised of ā¬25,000 goal)
@ahmedabuyamin - gofundme (ā¬43,140 raised of ā¬49,000 goal)
@bilalassadabedrabou - gofundme (ā¬4,593 raised of ā¬80,000 goal)
@musababed - gofundme (ā¬2,314 raised of ā¬10,000 goal)
@mahmoud-ziad99 - gofundme ($13,156 USD raised of $30,000 goal)
@samerpal - gofundme (kr100,281 SEK raised of kr450,000 target)
@mahmoud-sharif - gofundme ($3,253 USD raised of $60,000 target)
@eyadeyadsblog - gofundme (CHF9,885 raised of CHF20,000 goal)
@zinaeleenyamin (deactivated but the gofundme is still up) - gofundme (ā¬43,140 raised of ā¬49,000 goal)
My mother will die today if she does not receive treatment
This is what the doctors just told me , clearly, without hesitation.
This is not a possibility, This is reality.
I will not forgive, I will not forget anyone who sees this and chooses silence.
My mother is a human being, and she deserves to live.
when you grew up as a lonely uncool girl it will never stop haunting you by the way. you will meet a cool person at a bar or the train station or at a friend's party and you can wear your most stylish outfit and striking eye makeup and you will swear that they can see through all of the facade and see the lonely terribly insecure teenage girl you used to be who desperately wanted to connect and you will swear that they know that there is like an insurmountable gap between you. this will happen forever
People get made fun of for being scared of aging but it comes from the very real fear of being discarded by society thatās why i always say the goal is not to never become old or disabled the future comes for us all the goal is better social policy
[ID: Post on X by OGBlackRedGuard that reads "I worked in homeless shelters. None of the older folks thought they'd end up living there when they were young. In 1996 the dude you see pushing a cart down the street was driving a truck and making hella money. In 1989 the lady passed out on the bench under a garbage bag was hanging out at the club and living her best life. In 1985 the old dude yelling to himself on the corner was chilling on a beach in Mexico on spring break, he has a degree in chemistry. Everybody comes from somewhere and has had a life." Originally posted on 24/09/2025. End ID.]
Even the smallest action matters. A single comment ā even just a dot ā helps this post reach more people. Sharing is a noble act. And donating is the most powerful way to save four childrenās lives.š
Sami went to this place today to bring some flour for his large family who are suffering like many people in Gaza. Sami is putting himself in danger in order to feed his family. He could have bought flour, but there is no source of income for him and his family because of the lack of life and the complete destruction of the infrastructure. Even baby milk is only available at very high prices. Netanyahu says all the people of Gaza must be killed. Even the children must be killed in his view because they were born there. Donate anything to Sami's family, anything that saves their lives.
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.
This more than anything else has made me angry about AI. It's infuriating. It's stupid and unnecessary to do this to the environment. It's not making food. It's not powering cities. It's literally just doing busy work for us so we can cheat at life. It makes me want to break things. I HATE AI for hurting earth. My job is environmentalism. Nothing I do will ever make a fraction of a difference when I'm fighting this. I want to die.
š¬ 95Ā Ā š 36161Ā Ā ā¤ļø 27655Ā Ā·Ā AIās excessive water consumption threatens to drown out its environmental contributionsĀ Ā·Ā Y'all I know that when s
Datacentres, which do not have to report amount of water used to cool servers, leave Environment Agency with no idea of shortfalls
Inference, training, and everyday operations all contribute to the considerable water and power consumption required to run generative AI.
MIT News explores the environmental and sustainability implications of generative AI technologies and applications.
Water use expected to soar in coming years.
AI data centers are rapidly expanding in water-stressed regions, raising concerns over their massive water use and impact on local communiti
If 1 in 10 U.S. residents asked ChatGPT to write an email a week, itād cost more than 435 million liters of water.Ā
š¬ 2Ā Ā š 31959Ā Ā ā¤ļø 30134Ā Ā·Ā Don't use them. Actively remove them from devices you own. Disable them whenever possible. Go out of your way to av
: Keep calm and clear out that inbox. Also maybe lay off the GenAI
can anyone send me a few bucks so I can try to keep food in my stomach and gas in my car? i feel terrible begging but it really can't be helped. im in a rough spot and I don't have any income of my own, I don't have an address, I can't even donate plasma. i really just need a few bucks, im sorry. i live with a couple other. broke girls and I'm trying to do everything I can not to take more money from their empty pockets.
The currency has collapsed, and the entire commercial exchange is on the verge of collapse. The paper value of every $100 is only $60, and the purchasing power of every $60 does not exceed $10. Simply put, $60 is not enough to buy one kilogram of sugar or one kilogram of flour! This means that work is worthless and money has no meaning. If you need $100 a day to secure a single meal of lentil falafel, fava beans, and a cup of tea... everyone is hungry. Those with good morals, principles, and values āāare the most miserable and hungry. We are going through the most difficult times. We are only talking about one thing, so what about the cost of medicine, treatment, transportation, and many other things? Some people think this is exaggerated, but unfortunately, this is the reality. In order for us to survive and be patient, even if only for a short period, we are in dire need of your help and donations. With your donation, I may be able to provide a meal or medicine.
Hi, my name is Dipa and I'm raising money for Nabila . Please take some time to read her story below and donate so that she can travel to re
Help support Dipanwita Roy by donating or sharing with your friends.
every dream, every shred of empathy, every unique desire, all rotted away and replaced by what is needed for power and control. Someone who will, no matter how well you get to know them, never show anything beyond goldfish level thoughts behind those eyes, because there is nothing left. there is a history, there. you can learn what used to be, but for the rest of their life they will never seek anything beyond the most bog-standard socially-normative popularly-affirmed idle pleasures between working, eating, and rest. the death of childhood is the death of a human being.
you can't fix someone when they get like this, either. you try and break them out of their shell and they just give you this sad, hollow, patronizing look. a look that says "you haven't grown up yet, haven't you? you haven't finished becoming a real human being, like me." I think it's a fate worse than death, to be like that.
it's not about "NPCs"!!!! it's about adults who, in seeking to distance themselves from children and the youth, whom they wish to wield violent superiority over (as encouraged by the society which regards children as non-sentient legal property of the family), crush their own non-normative aspirations that might be seen as immature!!!!! it's about people who are so attached to the power and stability of Being Mature that there isn't room for anything else!!!!! Stop misinterpreting my post!!!!! Hits everyone in the notes who's interpreting me wrong!!!!!
I remember reading this book once and someone suggested making golf a priority in your life in order to make business connections. I was floored. There were footnotes about good exercise and outdoor benefits, but the PURPOSE was not to golf or to receive enjoyment, or even to make basic human connections outside of work, the purpose was to make business connections. May this kind of rationale never find me, and in fact, may it fucking cower at the very thought of me.
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.
I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life.
Oh sure, you can tinker in the margins, and you should! Get a repairable laptop, like the Framework, which is the greatest computer I've ever owned, and run Linux on it (I use Ubuntu, which is easy to install). You'll spend two weeks looking around the UI for the thing you need to click on and then you'll stop noticing it altogether, forever:
Access the internet via RSS, and avoid all the algorithmic twiddling and surveillance that subjects you and yours to the depredations of the worst people on earth and their feral algorithms:
https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/
Give preference to high-security, private, open messaging tools like Signal. Open an account on a federated social media service, like Mastodon, and make it a first-class home for your online social life:
Do all this! Do more! You'll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better. But you're not going to fight enshittification this way. Enshittification is not the result of people making bad choices: it's the result of bad policies that produce bad systems.
Enshittification makes for a neat descriptive account, talking about how platforms go bad:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
But the most important part of enshittification is its causal hypothesis: the answer it proposes to why this degradation is happening everywhere, right now:
Here's why you're getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don't have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don't compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they've amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about "fighting for the user." Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.
You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you're going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta.
Likewise, you can use privacy-preserving adblockers in your browser, but the instant you've got to do business with a monopoly that requires you to use their app, you will be totally helpless before them, because anti-circumvention law felonizes modifying an app so it preserves your privacy. An app is just a webpage skinned with the right kind of IP law to make it a jailable offense to install an ad-blocker:
When all your friends are going to a festival, are you really going to opt out because the event requires you to use the Ticketmaster app (because Ticketmaster has a monopoly over event ticketing)? If so, you're not gonna have a lot of friends, which is a pretty shitty way to live.
If you turn your personal campaign to live an enshittification-free life into a set of rigid practices that isolate you from your community, you will be miserable ā and you will undermine your ability to address the systemic roots of enshittification.
That's because systemic problems have systemic solutions. They are addressed through mass movements, impact litigation, political action, street uprisings, mutual aid, and other forms of solidarity and community.
The monsters who benefit from the status quo don't want you to know this. They want to brainwash you with Margaret Thatcher's mantra, "There is no such thing as society." They want you to think that you are a pathetic, atomized individual. They want you to die in a heatwave while gasping out your profound regret for not recycling more diligently and taking more care with your "carbon footprint." They want you to drive around for hours looking for an independent cardboard seller to make your protest sign with, convinced that it's more important to avoid shopping on Amazon than it is to actually show up at the protest outside the Amazon warehouse. They want you to curse yourself for failing to cycle and take the bus in your city where there are no bike lanes and the buses run every 45 minutes and stop at 8PM. If you wanted a livable city, you should have made better consumption choices! Perhaps you could dig your own subway, ever think of that, hmmm?
You, me and everyone we know have all been subjected to a 40-year blitz of anti-solidaristic propaganda, aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals. Don't like your health care? Shop around! Don't like your boss? Quit your job! Under no circumstances should you advocate for either a union or socialized health-care. You're an individual, there is no such thing as society.
"There's no such thing as society" is what you say if you benefit from society (which absolutely exists) and don't want it to change.
To make changes, you have to exist in society. Yes, the Democratic Party is a weak and pathetic failed gerontocracy, but the Democratic Socialists, the Sunrise Movement, and other political groups that are independent of the Dems but still drag them into doing something good, sometimes, all deserve your support.
Yes, the union movement squandered the Biden years, refusing to spend its record-setting cash reserves on organizing, despite the millions of workers begging to join unions. But workplace democracy remains the only way that we ever have ā or ever will ā defeat capital, so join a union, form a union, support a union:
Yes, plastic recycling is a scam cooked up by the petrochemical industry and all the plastic you stick in your blue bin either goes to an incinerator or a landfill, but if you don't support (and join up with) real environmental activists, you're going to roast alive:
https://heated.world/cp/169762317
Yes, Israel is committing a genocide and Brown, Columbia, and other elite universities are capitulating to Trump, whose evangelical base believes that war in Israel will hasten the Second Coming, when all Jews will be cast into eternal damnation. But that doesn't relieve you of your responsibility to act to defend our Palestinian brothers and sisters from the death rained down on them with the weapons our governments send to Israel. That goes double for us Jews, in whose name the slaughter is being committed:
My book on Enshittification is coming out in a couple of months, and the early reviews are already coming in, and they are gratifyingly glowing. But there's a trend in these reviews, a caveat that reviewer after reviewer has raised: my book is "short on individual solutions."
You're goddamned right it is. Because this isn't an individual problem, it's a systemic one.
Sure, live the best life you can, making the best choices you can. But don't kid yourself that this is fighting enshittification.
The reason corporations spy on you isn't because you're too cheap to pay for media, so they must resort to surveillance advertising. Whether or not you pay a tech company, they will absolutely spy on you:
The reason they can spy on you is that the US hasn't had a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you took home. This is the last technological threat to our privacy that Congress has addressed. The reason you are spied upon is because there are no systemic consequences for this surveillance:
The reason gig work companies misclassify their workers as contractors in order to abuse them, steal their wages, and deny them workplace protections is because they can ā not because workers are insufficiently choosy about their employment arrangements.
To fight systemic problems you need to be part of a systemic solution.
For 23 and a half years, I've worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most enshittification-fighting organization in the world:
https://eff.org
EFF is a member-supported nonprofit. We rely on donors like you, and we squeeze our budget hard. For as long as I've been with EFF, I've heard smears about how we're secretly shills for Big Tech and dependent on them for our funding (hilariously I once heard that EFF's reps to a meeting were transported to it in a stretch limo paid for by Intel ā except I was the rep at that meeting, and I took the bus). Here's all of our financial disclosures, see for yourself:
Donating to EFF is one way to fund the systemic rejection of enshittification. But if you want to join the fight ā if you want to be part of a community that fights back ā then you need to know about the Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA):
https://efa.eff.org/allies
EFA is a network of independent community groups that EFF helps coordinate and advise. When one group is in trouble, we connect it with other groups that have overcome the same troubles. When one group scores a victory, held other groups replicate its successes in their towns. Our organizers also help people in communities that don't have EFA affiliates start groups and join the network.
I get it: this is harder work than changing your consumption habits. But it's infinitely more rewarding. You're more than a consumer. You can aspire to more dignity than is afforded to an ambulatory wallet:
You can't fight enshittification. But together, we can.
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
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:
Yes, you are only one
No, it is not enough
But if you lift your eyes, I am your brother
And this is all we need
And this is where we start
This is the day we greet
This is the dayāno other!
The BDS movement has added Microsoft as a whole to their priority boycott target list. This is because of their direct involvement with the occupationās oppression and genocide of Palestinians.
Donāt get rid of any Microsoft products you already own, just cancel any subscriptions to them that you have and donāt buy any products from them (unless it is secondhand of course, in which you donāt give any money to them).
Yes, this includes popular franchises such as Minecraft, Halo, and so on.
If you need a brand new computer, get an operating system that isnāt Windows. If you donāt like Mac, itās about time to start listening to those Linux nerds you rolled your eyes at.
Boycotting is one of the most effective things you as an individual can do. BDS works, this has been proven time and time again.
You're simply never going to convince me that the people who learned how to analyze, think critically, and build up skill sets so they could become genuinely informed and competent in a field and accomplish tasks independently aren't better off than the people who use generative AI as a crutch and replacement for doing anything by themselves. There's not a world where knowledge and skills are a disadvantage, so no, people really don't need to "learn how to use ChatGPT or else they'll get left behind." That's just a marketing tactic to get people to use this product sooner.
