i think a lot of ppl assume food pantries are for if you're completely destitute and have no food in your house at all.
just so you know if you forego certain foods because you can't afford them or you can't "justify" spending the money, you might be able to get that food at a pantry.
i was living in a super wealthy area once where the only grocery store within a 40 minute drive was all fancy upcharged local organic and i literally pretty much stopped eating fresh produce because i couldn't afford it. i went months without eating a carrot or greens or anything that didn't come from a can. sometimes i got frozen veggies.
so sure, i was eating. i wasn't starving. i was getting nutrition. but it was nuts that as an animal on earth where plants grow in abundance, i didn't get to eat any of them fresh. people deserve fresh produce!
one day i was lamenting it and my friend was like, "oh yeah i get all of my produce every week at the food pantry."
i was surprised bc she made the same paycheck as me and i wouldn't have thought of either of us as someone who 'qualified' for food assistance. i went to the food pantry and found out because the median income in our town was so high, i did qualify. more than that, they asked for no proof of income, it was more of a 'if you think you need help, we don't make you prove it,' situation.
for like 8 months i got all of my produce (and eggs!) there every week. and yes if i had made sacrifices elsewhere in my life i probably could have afforded some produce at the local grocery store. i could have, i don't know, skipped seeing the one movie i saw at a move theater once every couple of months and spent the $8 on spinach one time instead of the ticket and had spinach once every couple of months.
but the point is the food pantry had more than enough to go around. if i hadn't taken some of their produce, it would have gone bad. the resource was available to me, and there was no reason for me to crawl on my hands and knees to qualify for it.
resources like food assistance are not available everywhere and they can be very limited and hard to come by. they won't be given out just for fun to anyone. if you ask for assistance and are offered assistance in reply, you need to believe that the assistance is available for you.
if a food assistance program doesn't have resources to help you, it'll say so. there is no harm in asking! you will be told 'yes' or 'no.' but you won't know until you ask.
stop convincing yourself that you don't deserve assistance, that everyone else needs it more than you, that you're taking it from someone else, that you should have nothing at all in order to deserve anything.
you deserve to not only eat but to eat well. if there's assistance for you to access better foods than what you have, understand how fortunate you are, and stop denying yourself that resource!
accessing food assistance at pantries is also a great way to help yr community, because you can spread the word and help normalize receiving food assistance in yr community. you can even become a volunteer and be part of the team providing to you and others (i did that and it rocked)!
my point is, yes, there is always someone who needs something 'more' than others. i have been completely destitute and it sucks. but when i went to the food pantry never once did i think, 'nobody better be here if they have more than me.' i was grateful that we all had support.
the mutual aid food share I volunteer at asks your situation so they can do statistics (we help x many seniors, x many kids, x many ppl who can't afford food) but they don't ask for ANY documentation and they don't turn anyone away even if they answer they're totally food secure. They ask for a $15 donation for a two-week food box but also it's optional, and the sign up says clearly if you can't afford it, don't pay anything.
and like. Honestly policing who's "allowed" to be there would cost more money than it's worth in any sense. So it's very likely your local nonprofit food pantry doesn't police either.
The defining political issue of our day isn't the government’s size. It's who our government is for. Should it work mainly for big corporations and billionaires — or for everyone else?
learning that most restaurant "secret sauces" are just a mixture of totally mundane condiments has really upped my sandwich game. like why shouldn't I combine the bite and seedy texture of stone ground mustard with the creaminess of mayonnaise in one delicious spread?
Hmm. I may have to rethink some things myself. The closest I come to this right now is replacing some of the honey mustard with just mustard because the other elements of the sandwich have stronger flavors and I need to balance that.
(Specifically, I have two sandwiches I alternate between for secondmeal. (It would feel Weird AF to refer to it as "lunch" when I'm eating it around 2am, after I've been home from work for a few hours.)
The first is black pepper turkey (Kroger Private Selection), American cheese (Kraft Deli Deluxe), and honey mustard (Beaver Brand as it's the only one I've found where the mustard isn't completely overwhelmed by the sweet) on marble rye (a local artisan bakery I can't think of the name of).
The second is brown sugar ham (Kroger Private Selection again), sharp Cheddar cheese (Kroger Private Selection), honey mustard (Beaver again) and Dijon mustard (French's), on the same marble rye.
The honey mustard by itself is fine with the turkey and the American cheese, but the ham demands more cheese flavor and that combination demands more from the mustard.)
It's been A Week, I'll tell you hwat. Adults and kids do not like to hang around each other all that much. I suspect this is why kids have b
It’s been A Week, I’ll tell you hwat.
Adults and kids do not like to hang around each other all that much. I suspect this is why kids have been–forcefully, by being told to get out of the house or otherwise stay out from underfoot, a request happily complied with by the kids–self-segregating during free time for most of recorded history. I do well with kids in circumstances in which I do not have to force them to do anything arbitrary. I’m not a good ego for other people. But they’re always going to be guarded around me, an adult. My presence, no matter how benign I try to be, is a check. I feel obligated to say “Language!” to cursing, etc, when the truth is I could not care less so long as nobody is being bullied or hurt. The tension is worse when I am trying to get them to sit down and do more school after school. This sense of obligation-to-control grinds against the fundamental mismatch in energy between adults and kids, and nobody has a good time forced into proximity.
Now we have after school care with “enrichment” and the attendant pressure to make that time not just monitored, but productive, marketable, and I get the sense nobody, adult or child, really wants to be there. Doesn’t much matter how ‘fun’ the enrichment is or how much the subject under study is independently desired by the student; it is within the context of an entire afternoon under lockdown. On days with a really rough group I wonder why we don’t just let kids and adults go their separate (desired) ways and mind their own business for a while. There would be less resentment and pushback when it *is* time to rejoin for dinner, etc. Kids want the dignity of autonomy.
I’ll show you untrustworthy.
I get it. The child is still looking out from within me. I’m still in the position where I have to get kids to sit down and do something they do not want to do and probably learn absolutely nothing. And I hate that. And creatures in captivity make their small rebellions where they can, for the nourishment of their own souls and the nurturing of their own dignity, even if it’s something like wielding shoes like a mace by swinging them around by the laces and trying to whack people, for absolutely no offense given I can discern. “He just wants to get sent home. He hates school.” Duh. I’m still dealing with the shoe ninja terrorizing the townspeople. Nothing excuses harming other people, no internal pressure or angst, nothing, but I see the forces pushing the rebellious instinct, somewhere deep down in the brain.
We award adults such impunity and leeway for selfish behavior that we can afford kids no freedom. We’re creating those future adults who go wild at a taste of freedom and fight to keep it. Resentment of lost time and jealous guarding of finally-getting-yours does not make an adult likely to vote to curtail their own freedom to swing their fist because of somebody else’s face. It is no excuse, but it is a cause.
What are the wages of self-control in this system? Nothing–you still don’t get to do what you want, but you’re not getting yelled at, and to many kids that is scant reward next to getting to do what you want.
I’m not playing along if you don’t see me as ‘in’ on the joke.
I see myself in the kids who give me some of the most guff.
I’m lying when I say the police department called me to ask some third graders to help them solve a mystery? No shit, kid. You don’t see yourself as ‘in’ on the joke but as being viewed with condescension, so you’re not going to play pretend. You’re not going to roll with it. Let’s just play Clue or whatever for an hour–we’re stuck here with each other–but your dignity won’t allow it. But I’m getting paid to (1) run an hour of Clue and (2) keep you corralled for that hour, so our desires are fundamentally at odds. Neither one of us wants to be here. Might as well make the best of it. You might even learn something. We might, through banter, even have something resembling fun. But wardens and prisoners cannot forge a rapport without suspicion.
I see myself most in the kids that just want to be left the fuck alone to do their own thing–I think of, from one of my classes, the girl in the back of the class buried in a notebook trying to get some goddamned writing (? whatever it’s her business) done and pretend she has a scrap of autonomy in choosing the course of her daily life. I check in with those kids but if they do not want to participate I leave them alone. They’re not bugging anybody, and I recall too vividly the desire for solitude. She might well have an interest in the subject matter I’m hawking, but on her own terms. Her internal world and intellectual life are taken away from her because some kids, apparently, cannot be trusted not to set the house on fire if they’re left home alone (I doubt this is as prevalent as one thinks, especially if kids are not given the desire to rebel to preserve a scrap of self-determination), or because apparently, some adults cannot be trusted not to drive like it’s fucking Mario Kart through a neighborhood (this one I believe fully). Or, more likely, because writing BTS self-insert fanfiction is not a marketable skill, not something that will get you into college or impress employers, never mind that you are creating your own soul and learning to–useless in the age of generative AI–write. The latter part at least used to be marketable, applicable. Transferable. Self-fulfillment and self-actualization are not skills you can sell as labor and in this age quality of life goes only to the (1) wealthy or (2) winners of the rat race.
The adults in your life do mean well, after a fashion. They are responding to material circumstances.
Frogger only has trouble around cars
To that point, the concern I do acknowledge is actually worse now is traffic. Before even touching the arms race that is consumer choice and, therefore, in a system with zero checks for public welfare, car design, people are faster, meaner, and more impatient, and in the US infrastructure favors the driver at the peril of the pedestrian or cyclist. There is a sense of danger even to the most restrained pedestrian–not helped by incidents like the one this past week in Santa Monica. Is this another example of incidents being publicized to give an outsized sense of danger, the new Adam Walsh looming in the imagination of parents? I do not much buy that there are pedophiles in trenchcoats lurking in the bushes or traffickers waiting to snatch up suburban kids with involved parents (when there is an endless supply of vulnerable kids nobody wants that will come right to them), but I did give up cycling around the city after one too many close calls. Perhaps in self-defense my basal instincts have started to more strongly object to risk as the body ages. But–I don’t on the regular see mystery vans handing out free candy, and I do hear every night drag-racing up and down the linear drag by my apartment, and into the goddamn neighborhood. And I do see roadside memorials. And I, personally, this body, have been almost hit one too many goddamned times. This is something that, had we the political will, could be fixed yesterday, but the American obsession with “freedom to” over “freedom from” again atomizes us against systemic development. (Reminded of this again helping my partner schedule an Amtrak ticket to the hometown and being utterly baffled how the richest country, materially and in military power, in the history of the world, can have such a embarrassingly anemic rail system.)
There has always been this panic that traffickers and drug dealers target “good” suburban kids from “good” families because they are evil and that is what evil people do, for the sheer joy of wrecking a life and out of resentment for the better circumstances of others, but traffickers and drug dealers are ultimately businessmen and there is no profit to stirring up unnecessary scrutiny and trouble by targeting kids with parents who would dedicate their entire lives to fighting to get them back. This “myth” of the “value” of the virginal blonde young valedictorian girl from a Christian family catching a high price on the market of flesh just doesn’t hold water, not in the face of the economics of scale that one can leverage with the endless supply of foster and runaway kids, or kids whose own parents sold them. Parents who give one shit, you don’t need to imprison your kids. Your care and attention existing at all is safeguard enough. This one shit will not keep them from other kinds of mischief, born of material deprivation or lack of opportunity or otherwise, but it is a safeguard against the bogeyman kidnapper. (And, I acknowledge the ‘enrichment’ is a desperate attempt to stave off that lack of opportunity and class disadvantage, but that is another matter. Or is it? Anyway.)
The mental contamination of regimented time
I know they get a “lot” of recess time interspersed. That is good, the bare minimum. But I think of the difference between days when I have “free time” until X o’clock and when I have unlimited “free time”, or at least the timing of responsibilities is at my discretion. During the former there is always that asterisk looming at the periphery of my awareness. Doesn’t matter if I end up spending the same amount of time doing as I wish as I would on the “until X o’clock” days. The mind is clouded. There is a sense of termination, a sense of hurry. A tendency to feel it is not the “right time” after all to start on something. And so, I don’t get much of anything done. And I am further burdened by guilt and a sense of lost time. This pairs poorly with a part-time job that starts in the middle of the day.
I look back to my own childhood during such circumstances (“you have free time until X and then we’re doing X”) and I do not recall such a mental block insofar as Getting Things Done is concerned; I would just lose myself in the task until it was time to stop and so save irritation clouding my mind until that point. So I am perhaps projecting an ‘adult’ sensibility onto these kids in that regard. I do recall the feeling of helplessness and rage, inability to set my own schedule. I do think that is the same.
Luxury desires
Worrying about ‘freedom’ and ‘free time’ and ‘autonomy’ are luxuries we indulge when we are higher up on Maslow’s pyramid. They are worries for one with a full belly and a roof and a lack of bombs going off about every which way. So, I realize these observations are mostly relevant to the American culture I live in, and that of other ‘advanced’, ‘safe’ cultures unbeset by warfare, but this is all that I know firsthand, so it is what I can talk about with anything resembling insight
how long and how many days a week do you think ER doctors work. i think they're right to want to just fucking chill. i want a well rested doctor treating me and not one who just pulled a 24 hour shift and then a 12 and another 12 before another 24, with only a few hours of legally mandated breaks inbetween.
Yeah some of us want a 30-hour work week because we've read the experimental research trials. People aren't any less productive and they are happier and less stressed and feel less leisure time pressure.
It turns out that working 40 hours a week is just too much. Full stop, no ifs ands or buts. The tiredness and loss of focus it induces is enough that you're about 25% less productive per hour when you're on a 40-hour work week, and so the extra 10 hours a week cancels out. This effect is a little bit more pronounced for white collar work and a little bit less pronounced for blue collar work, but there's functionally not enough of a difference to care. And people who are working more than that actually become less productive in total.
The thing is that you don't immediately gain the benefits of being fully rested and focused by working less on just one day, or even one week. It can even take months to settle into the pattern of higher productivity per working hour, and that's frankly miraculously quick given that full burnout can take years to recover from. And during that transition you will be less immediately productive. Particularly for people who pride themselves on being hard workers and how much overtime they put in, the notion that working less can get just as much done can feel absurd and even insulting. Because it seems so painfully obvious that you get less done when you do less, and any experiences of being invited to do so feel like they back that up.
But it's true. We are all simply working more than we need to, pointlessly, to no benefit at all. It is an appallingly pointless waste of human life.
The results of several workplace surveys may defy expectations, but the data is clear: shortened work weeks can work for businesses and empl
Also, I don’t actually care if someone is less productive working 30 hours a week or 20 hours a week. We do not need endless productivity and it’s bad for the earth and bad for people. We would be completely fine if everyone was half as productive. Literally we would be better off. It does not matter that a 30 hour work week is as productive as a 40 hour work week. Reject that framing!
in re doctors part of the reason doctors are expected to work obscenely long hours is that educational and licensing institutions deliberately limit the number of doctors in the labor market.
if we want readily available healthcare we don't want limited, overworked doctors. we want MORE, well-rested doctors.
I think education in the US is clearly of a better quality (mostly because of budget) in certain areas like the sciences, but I'm always struck at what they call "essays" and "papers" because it really seems like something I would have written in elementary school. "In this essay I will" they told me not to use first person in academic writing when I was... 10, 11?
Just the mere idea of going for a college career and my learning being writing these basic "essays" to be graded... surely it cannot be that.
Meanwhile in education and pedagogy they seem to be stuck in Skinner's Behaviorism and think Paulo Freire (the standard here in Latin America) is some kind of revolutionary maverick with his outrageous theories like "consider the social background of your students".
And the less said about geography and history the better.
There's no consistency in US pedagogy and that's a huge part of the problem; the quality of education (and facilities, and funding) will vary VASTLY from district to district and school to school. Also, homeschooling is allowed with no oversight and no standard curriculum. Colleges have to do the elementary school shit because there's no way of knowing what shit each student got in elementary school.
Grinding everyone down to the lowest common denominator, trained to obedience and discouraged from voicing disagreements or asking questions is the unspoken goal of the current USAmerican education system.
It's helpful to think of the public school system in the US not as an education system but as a training and conditioning and torture system similar to prison, to create beaten down spineless authoritarian peons that do as they're told, when they're told, how they're told, and do not do anything of their own volition except maybe kill themselves and therefore helpfully give the authority plausible deniability about their deaths.
The evidence-based science-based pedagogy that works is Montessori, and I am a big advocate of Montessori because it centres CHILDREN'S HUMAN RIGHTS.
We are not schooled to be individuals and thinkers, we are schooled to be factory workers, to be Members of Society, to Contribute Meaningfully (and thus make the rich richer).
It's becoming more and more obvious as we plunge headfirst into our blatantly fascist authoritarian state, wherein they want all the thinking and understanding to be done by AI that cannot actually think on its own. If the state kills us, they've brainwashed us into accepting personal responsibility for our fates while also shuttling us into long hallways that lead to very few options, including miserable corporate job, miserable government job, miserable blue collar job, miserable customer service job, or prison, or homelessness. But if we go in a door and that doesn't work out for us, it's our fault for choosing the "wrong" door.
The idea that Americans are free is one of the most disgustingly ironic takes. We are not free, we are cattle being corralled for slaughter, and it starts at a very early age.
“There is no consistency to US pedagogy yet every variation has the same horrific goal” is quite the (incredibly depressing) take.
The thing about US education is that it’s largely decided on a very, very local level. Which means that there are definitely school districts where this is the case. But there are also districts that prioritize genuine learning, social-emotional intelligence, and more than the decidedly outdated factory production model.
Also the limited number of doors idea is a very cynical take. Are there no shortage of miserable jobs out there? Sure. But this isn’t the 1950s; there’s no expectation that you *stay* in your miserable job. You can leverage the experience from your miserable customer service job into a better one; you can move from your government job to a well-paid corporate one or vice versa; you can take your knowledge from all of these and freelance, or start your own business, or discover a job that you actually enjoy. All that hustle culture “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is utter bullshit. Do what you love and you’ll probably stop loving it as much because now you have to do it. But. I have a job that pays decent money, where I like my colleagues and genuinely enjoy doing what I do, and also at the end of the day I can log off and do stuff I love. You don’t have to be a miserable cog in a suffering machine. It feels fucking twee to say “that’s what the fascists want you to believe,” but it’s true. Despairing people don’t fight back.
If you’re still in school and you feel like you’re in a pipeline leading to a narrow hallway with limited choices, know that’s despair talking. There are possibilities. Find the things you love and do them, find your people and love them, look for your happiness in unexpected places.
Apparently it's American Education Day on the internet. It is incredibly uneven, not great compared to the rest of the world (both in comprehensiveness of content and in pedagogical theory/practice), and getting worse. But it's not a complete trash fire yet.
Something about me is that due to Allergy Reasons I have had extremely little fast food in my life but a culvers location has opened near me and this particular one will let you ask for gluten free fries & I haven't stopped thinking about them. I need more. The texture is so much better than the baked fries I've been having at home. I need Oil. I feel like the united states military
Being a celiac haver whose family went gluten free when I was a baby so I simply haven't Had a lot of Normal People Foods makes me feel like a space alien but it's so good when I Do get to have them. Just found out about fries. Like fried in oil fries. They come in a little paper cup and everything. I'm entering my fries era
Vulcan in starfleet who starts trying Earth foods & gets really into various forms of fried potatoes. It's similar to some baked plomeek bullshit they ate at home but a little bit heavier which is nice for staying warm in the colder climate. Having a great time with a completely blank expression
If you are DIAGNOSED with a neurodivergency, if you could choose to be neurotypical, would you? If you have multiple, choose the neurodivergency that bothers you the most
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There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Miami, Burbank, Lisbon! Full schedule here.
As the old punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." It's a gag that's particularly applicable to monopolies: once a company has secured a monopoly, it doesn't just have the power to block new companies from competing with it, it also has the power to capture governments and thwart attempts to regulate it or break it up.
40 years ago, a group of right-wing economists decided that this was a feature, not a bug, and convinced the world's governments to stop enforcing competition law, anti-monopoly law, and antitrust law, deliberately encouraging a global takeover by monopolies, duopolies and cartels. Today, virtually every sector of our economy is dominated by five or fewer firms:
These neoliberal economists knew that in order to stop us from getting there ("there" being a world where everyday people have economic and political freedom), they'd have to get us "here" – a world where even the most powerful governments find themselves unable to address concentrated corporate power. They wanted to drag us into a oligarchy, and take away any hope of us escaping to a fairer, more pluralistic world.
They succeeded. Today, rich and powerful governments struggle to do anything to rein in Big Tech. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney contemplated levying a 3% tax on America's tax-dodging tech giants…for all of five seconds. All Trump had to do was meaningfully clear his throat and Carney folded:
Canada also tried forcing payments to Canadian news agencies from tech giants, and failed in the most predictable way imaginable. Facebook simply blocked all Canadian news on its platforms (this being exactly what it had done in every other country where this was tried). Google paid out some money, and the country's largest newspaper killed its long-running investigative series into Big Tech's sins. Then Google slashed its payments.
These payments were always a terrible idea. The only beneficial part of how Big Tech relates to the news is in making it easy for people to find and discuss the news. News you're not allowed to find or talk about isn't "news," it's "a secret." The thing that Big Tech steals from the news isn't links, it's money: 30% of every in-app payment is stolen by the mobile duopoly; 51% of every ad dollar is stolen by the ad-tech duopoly; and social media holds news outlets' subscribers hostage and forces news companies to pay to "boost" their content to reach the people who follow them.
In other words, extracting payments for links is a form of redistribution, a clawback of some of Big Tech's stolen loot. It isn't predistribution, which would block Big Tech from stealing the loot in the first place.
Canada is a wealthy nation, but only 41m people call it home. The EU is also wealthy, and it is home to 500m people. You'd think that the EU could get further than Canada, but, faced with the might of the tech cartel, it has struggled to get anything done.
Take the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. In theory, this law bans the kind of commercial surveillance that Big Tech thrives on. In practice, these companies just flew an Irish flag of convenience, which not only let them avoid paying their taxes – it also let them get away with illegal surveillance, by capturing the Irish privacy regulator, who does nothing to defend Europeans' privacy:
It's hard to overstate just how supine the Irish state is in relation to the American tech giants that pretend to call Dublin their home. The country's latest privacy regulator is an ex-Meta executive!
For the EU, Ireland is just part of the problem when it comes to regulating Big Tech. The EU's latest tech regulations are the sweeping, even visionary Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. If tech companies obeyed these laws, that would go a long way to addressing their monopoly abuses. So of course, they're not obeying the laws.
Apple has threatened to leave the EU altogether rather than comply with a modest order requiring it to allow third party payments and app stores:
And Trump has made it clear that he is Big Tech's puppet, and any attempt to get American tech companies to obey EU law will be met with savage retaliation:
When it comes to getting Big Tech to obey the law, if we wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.
But the fact that it's hard to get Big Tech to do the bidding of publicly accountable governments doesn't mean that those governments are powerless. There's one institution a government has total control over: itself.
The world's governments have all signed up to "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize reverse-engineering and modifying US tech products. This was done at the insistence of the US Trade Rep, who has spent this entire century using the threat of tariffs to bully every country in the world into signing up to laws that ban their own technologists from directly blocking American Big Tech companies' scams.
It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business making an alternative Facebook client that blocks ads but restores the news. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business with a product that lets media companies bypass the Meta/Google ad-tech duopoly.
It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't go into business modifying your phone, car, apps, smart devices and operating system to block all commercial surveillance. If companies can't get your data, they can't violate the GDPR. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't sell you a hardware dongle that breaks into your iPhone and replaces Apple's ripoff app store with a Made-in-the-EU alternative.
Anticircumvention law is the reason Canada's only response to Trump's illegal tariffs is more tariffs, which make everything in Canada more expensive. Get rid of anticircumvention law and Canada could get into the business of shifting billions of dollars from American tech monopolists to Canadian startups and the Canadian people:
Anticirumvention law is the reason the EU can't get its data out of the Big Tech silos that Trump controls, which lets Trump shut down any European government agency or official that displeases him:
American monopolists like John Deere have installed killswitches in every tractor in the world – killswitches that can't be removed until we get rid of anticircumvention laws, which will let us create open source firmware for tractors. Until we do that, Trump can shut down all the agriculture in any country that makes him angry:
For a decade, we've been warned that allowing China to supply our telecoms infrastructure was geopolitical suicide, because it would mean that China could monitor and terminate our network traffic. That's the threat that Trump's America now poses for the whole world, as Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only rivals and competitors, and he will stop at nothing to beat them.
And if you are worried about China, well, perhaps you should be. The world's incredible rush to solarization has left us with millions of solar installations whose inverters are also subject to arbitrary updates by their (Chinese) manufacturers, including updates that could render them inoperable. The only way around this? Get rid of anticircumvention law and replace all the software in these critical systems with open source, transparent, owner-controlled alternatives:
Getting Big Tech to do your government's bidding is a big lift. The companies are too big to jail, especially with Trump behind them. That's why each of America's Big Tech CEOs paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the dais at the inauguration:
Even America can't bring its tech companies to heel. When Google was convicted of being an illegal monopolist, the judge punished the company by sentencing it to…nothing:
But ultimately, breakups and fines and interoperabilty mandates are all forms of redistribution – a way to strip the companies of the spoils of their decades-long looting spree. That's a laudable goal, but if we want to get there, we must start with predistribution: halting the companies' ongoing extraction efforts, by getting rid of the laws that prevent other technologists from unfucking their products and halting their cash- and data-ripoffs.
Do that long and hard enough and we stand a real chance of draining off so much of their power that we can get moving on those redistributive moves. And getting rid of anticircumvention laws only requires that governments control their own behavior – unlike taxing or fining companies, which only works if governments can control the behavior of companies that have proven, time and again, to be more powerful than any country in the world.
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:
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