readings....

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The Enshittification of American Power

First Google and Facebook, then the world. Under Trump 2.0, US statecraft is starting to mimic the worst tendencies of Big Tech.

"Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.

...

People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. ... When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. .... As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.

For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. Not in a world where President Trump threatens to annex Canada, vows to acquire Greenland from Denmark, and announces that foreign officials may be banned from entering the United States if they “demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies.”

Ever since Trump retook office in January, in fact, rapid enshittification has become the organizing principle of US statecraft. This time around, Trumpworld understands that—in controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security—it has vast machineries of coercion at its disposal. As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, recently put it, “The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.”

So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network. And like the countless startups that have attempted to create an alternative to Twitter or Facebook over the years—most now forgotten, a few successful—other allies are now desperately scrambling to figure out how to build a network of their own.

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Mamdani Did All the Things the Establishment Hates. He Won Anyway.

There’s a growing appetite for something new and innovative growing among the electorate—and an opportunity for Democrats to grow that elect

The Mamdani-Lander bromance has been a rebuke to one of the Democratic Party’s biggest problems as of late: petty infighting and a knee-jerk refusal to transfer power to younger elected officials. Perhaps the best recent example of this was the campaign to prevent Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from heading the House Oversight Committee. Ocasio-Cortez had experience on the committee and would have been perfectly capable of leading it, but Democratic leadership, backed by Nancy Pelosi, fought against her nomination and backed 75-year-old Representative Gerry Connolly, who was dying of esophageal cancer. 

Here, I’ll be direct: This was not troubling; it was enraging. Congress should not be a spoils system where seniority trumps every other consideration, but this is the mentality that many establishment Democrats have. They would rather see the country burn than relinquish one ounce of parliamentary authority to younger Democratic leaders, especially if they might disagree with them and make different choices without asking permission. It’s what led many of them to suggest Mamdani was too young and inexperienced to run for mayor, despite the fact that he has more public service under his belt than Michael Bloomberg did when he ran. For that matter, the great reformist Fiorello LaGuardia became the head of the Board of Aldermen in New York City at the age of 37. 

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Sorry We're Still Mad About the Genocide

A new piece is shocked—shocked!—that people have the nerve to keep questioning Democrats about their support for Israel.

Oh, Democrats are annoyed that people haven’t forgotten that a genocide is still taking place, and that the party has been complicit in that genocide for every single moment of its existence, and that those people would like the party to maybe try not supporting a genocide? Too fucking bad! You know what would stop Democrats from having to take all these boring meetings and ignore all these boring letters? Ending their backing of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Their voters would be happy if they did this; there’s credible evidence that their support for genocide hurt them badly in 2024, and an April Pew poll reported that over two-thirds of Democratic voters now have unfavorable views of Israel. (Side note: weird how, when polls suggest that trans people or immigrants are unpopular, Democrats can’t stop yakking about how they need to reflect voter sentiment, but when polls suggest Israel is unpopular, it’s crickets.) But Democratic politicians, being politicians and thus amoral freaks, think that it’s odd to have values that you keep fighting for even after powerful people tell you to stop.

As for “why no protests now???”: First of all, there very much are protests happening now, all the time. Activists literally took over Trump Tower! The idea that nobody is making any demands these days is bunk. And perhaps part of the reason Democratic activists and their allies aren’t spending all of their time sending Trump letters or making him have meetings is because…he’s not a Democrat???

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Louis Theroux On Returning To The West Bank After 15 Years For BBC Doc ‘The Settlers’ & Being “Perpetrator Focused” — Guest Column

Louis Theroux discusses his BBC West Bank documentary The Settlers, No Other Land and being "perpetrator focused" in a column for Deadline.

But it should go without saying that extremists and ideologues exist in all communities. No one should get a pass. And when they are backed up by those in power, it’s a dangerous combination. It would also be a mistake to allow a phalanx of religious nationalist settlers and their far-right political supporters in government to co-opt Jewish identity and to write off legitimate criticism of their beliefs and their actions as an expression of bigotry.

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Kneecap manager Daniel Lambart on the band's controversial performance at Coachella

Kneecap has come in for some praise and also some criticism following its performance at the Coachella Music Festival in California last wee

(link to Audio Clip • 8 Mins • 23 APR • Drivetime)

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The weird anger of these Border Patrolmen made me think about descriptions in the report of Argentine police and military officers who became addicted to interrogation, torture, and the murder that followed. When the military and police ran out of political suspects to torture and kill, they resorted to the random abduction of citizens off the streets. I thought how easy it would be for the Border Patrol to shoot us and leave our bodies and car beside the highway, like so many bodies found in these parts and ascribed to drug runners.

THE BORDER PATROL STATE    Leslie Marmon Silko (1994)

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Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram

A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly

A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News. The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023. Israel is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far, and Meta has followed suit—widening the net of posts it automatically removes, and creating what can be called the largest mass censorship operation in modern history.

Government requests for takedowns generally focus on posts made by citizens inside that government’s borders, Meta insiders said. What makes Israel’s campaign unique is its success in censoring speech in many countries outside of Israel. What’s more, Israel's censorship project will echo well into the future, insiders said, as the AI program Meta is currently training how to moderate content will base future decisions on the successful takedown of content critical of Israel’s genocide.

...The documents indicate that the vast majority of Israel’s requests—95%—fall under Meta’s “terrorism” or “violence and incitement” categories. And Israel’s requests have overwhelmingly targeted users from Arab and Muslim-majority nations in a massive effort to silence criticism of Israel.

Multiple independent sources inside Meta confirmed the authenticity of the information provided by the whistleblowers. The data also show that Meta removed over 90,000 posts to comply with TDRs submitted by the Israeli government in an average of 30 seconds.

...All of the Israeli government’s TDRs post-October 7th contain the exact same complaint text, according to the leaked information, regardless of the substance of the underlying content being challenged.

Remove, Strike, Suspend

Within Meta, several key leadership positions are filled by figures with personal connections to the Israeli government. The Integrity Organization is run by Guy Rosen, a former Israeli military official who served in the Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit, Unit 8200. Rosen was the founder of Onavo, a web analytics and VPN firm that then-Facebook acquired in October 2013.

..Despite Meta’s awareness of Israel’s aggressive censorship tactics for at least seven years, according to Meta whistleblowers, the company has failed to curb the abuse. Instead, one said, the company “actively provided the Israeli government with a legal entry-point for carrying out its mass censorship campaign.”

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Viet Thanh Nguyen: Most American Literature is the Literature of Empire

One way to understand the dilemma of contemporary American literature in the age of Donald Trump is to see it as an imperial literature. The

They used Franz Kafka as their primary example, and Kafkaesque is an apt description of the minority experience. It is surreal, after all, to live in a self-proclaimed democracy that sees itself as the Greatest Country on Earth, and yet one that deploys enslavement, genocide, incarceration, disappearance, and deportation as standard tactics against minorities. Thus, the sense among American liberals that they now live in a surreal time under Trump II must be put in the context of how minority existence has always been surreal: hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican American citizens deported to Mexico in the 1930s, 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to concentration camps during World War II, and African Americans routinely disappeared, castrated, raped, lynched, massacred, and even subject to bombings and air attacks by white people and the state, from Tulsa in 1921 to Birmingham in 1963 to Philadelphia in 1985.

Writers of color have always written about this surreal contradiction between lofty ideals and brutal realities, which prevents the possibility of a universal humanism. This contradiction is vividly illustrated by the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza, using bombs and political cover provided by Biden and continued by Trump in a bipartisan display of American imperial power. In the name of protecting the Jewish people, the Palestinians are reduced to what multiple Israeli government officials have called “human animals,” an obscene term that simply repeats how Western colonizers have always seen the non-white, colonized peoples whom they slaughtered in the name of civilizing them. The Palestinians and those who support them are the exception to Western Civilization and American Exceptionalism, but to even point this out is punished with increasing ferocity, from censoring, firing, doxxing, and arresting to expulsion and deportation.

The contemporary American literary world is in disarray as a result. While many writers are sympathetic to Palestinians, many of their literary institutions have been flummoxed, unable to support Palestinians, name genocide, or use the active voice to identify Israeli agency, even as many writers demand that they do. These literary institutions are a part of empire, supported by the state or by powerful donors who benefit from the imperial machinery.

The genocide in Gaza is therefore not an incidental event that can be ignored but a fundamental event like the Vietnam War, where what is being burned with American weapons are not just nonwhite people but American ideals and the possibilities of euphemism. In the light of that fire, American imperialism is revealed, as well as the complicity of Americans who do nothing, including writers who say nothing.

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The shocking far-right agenda behind the surveillance tech used by ICE and the FBI

Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left. Now their digital dragnet is in the hands of the Trump

"Paranoia about the “radical left” seemed to infuse their business decisions. As part of their plan to use facial recognition in apartment lobbies, they intended to scan the faces of tenants and compare them to mugshots. But Ton-That noted in an email that he also wanted to run them through “any criminal database we have (antifa)” or to see if they were “friends with criminals.” He assumed a link between leftist politics and criminality. “I think every real estate firm will sign up,” he told his co-founders. “Especially ones in diverse areas.”

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Journalists were another target. In May 2017, Bass emailed Cassandra Fairbanks, a far-right activist whom the first Trump administration allowed into press briefings, to ask for the names and emails of reporters in the White House press pool. This would potentially enable Ton-That and his partners to surface social media accounts, pull photos, and, as Bass put it, investigate the “leanings” of the journalists. Fairbanks quickly sent the names and emails of eight reporters to Bass, who forwarded the details to Ton-That. “These shills are high-priority,” Bass wrote. “Dope this is going into smartcheckr,” Ton-That replied. The company later created a “Politicians – Academics – Journalists” category in its biometric database.

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In Trump’s first term, ICE also dispatched HSI agents to racial justice protests that erupted around the country after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. HSI monitored other liberal or left-leaning events, labeling them in an internal document published by the ­Nation as “anti-Trump” protests, including a peaceful 2018 rally in Manhattan organized by a Democratic congressman to protest a white nationalist hate group.

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“All of the evidence we have is that [Clearview] is a corporation that cares not at all about civil rights and that their founders have a potentially ideological agenda inconsistent with democracy,” says Emily Tucker, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. “None of that has seemed to slow down their ability to get government contracts in the US or abroad.”

Nobody in a position to hold the company accountable seemed to care about its far-right DNA—and few wanted to consider that the threat to privacy and democracy might not be an unfortunate by-product of the tech, but rather a feature. Tucker said her organization discussed Clearview’s extremist ties with several Biden administration officials, as well as congressional staffers, and she was surprised and concerned by the lack of follow-up. Most media coverage of the company left the issue unmentioned or, worse, downplayed what was known—one interviewer for the financial magazine Inc. described the extremists at Clearview as “rogue employees” who had “infiltrated the company.”

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Mahmoud Khalil's letter from detention in full

"Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born

"My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn't the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn't the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.

Justice escapes the contours of this nation's immigration facilities.......My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January's ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.

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Bodies of missing aid workers found in Gaza ‘mass grave’ following Israeli attacks | CNN

The bodies of more than a dozen aid workers have been recovered in southern Gaza from what a United Nations agency described as a “mass grav

OCHA, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the bodies were recovered after a “complex, week-long rescue operation” that involved using bulldozers and heavy machinery to unearth the victims and their battered vehicles from under sand.

“Health workers should never be a target. And yet, we’re here today, digging up a mass grave of first responders and paramedics,” Jonathan Whittall, the head of UNOCHA in the occupied Palestinian territories, said from the site.

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Video shared by the UNOCHA showed a bulldozer digging through dirt and moving debris as emergency responders used shovels to reach the victims. Several bodies were seen being pulled from sand, some wearing PRCS vests and showing signs of decomposition.

Early information indicates the first team of aid workers dispatched to the area were killed by Israeli forces on March 23 and other emergency aid crews were struck over the following several hours as they searched for their missing colleagues, UNOCHA said.

“One by one, they were hit, they were struck, their bodies were gathered and buried,” Whittall said. “We’re digging them out in their uniforms, with their gloves on.”

Ambulances, as well as UN and civil defense vehicles, were found crushed and buried under the sand, Whittall added, accusing Israeli forces of trying to cover up the scene.

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The She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything

The rhetoric and logic of the abuse of power operates similarly at all scales, which is why I've found feminism such useful equipment for un

In mainstream discourse, it's become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It's a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right's behavior. It's also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages.

And in the same way the diverse population left of center is supposed to make nice to the right or be responsible for when the right goes wrong. These stories amount to "the left was so annoying about pronouns or liberals made people feel so guilty about plastic straws they had no choice but to get on board with the second coming of the Third Reich and the destruction of the planet." Behind these stories is the assumption that some people matter more than other people, and that we who matter less have to pander to those who matter more – conservatives when they are imagined as straight, as white, as male, as rural, as salt of the earth, as the real Americans, unlike us ethnic/ immigrant/ urban/ non-male/ non-straight people.

...

The always trenchant Rebecca Traister writes at New York Magazine: "Pundits and politicians from across the ideological spectrum have joined in rare consensus: that it was 'identity politics,' known more commonly as 'wokeness,' that is largely to blame for Trump’s destructive return to the Oval Office. Liberals and centrists arrived at this conclusion with a speed and ardor only available to people who’d been dying to crow about this for years. Prominent leftists are also onboard, making one righteous argument at the expense of another."

In fact identity politics as reproductive rights prompted one Democratic victory after another in the immediate wake of the June 2022 overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Joe Biden's huge victory after the police murder of George Floyd and the summer of Black Lives Matter protests, while he promised to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court and protect reproductive rights and the climate, could be seen as a sign that identity politics can also be winning politics. Traister notes "advice that Democrats should get quieter on ideas that are simply the right thing to do and that helped motivate millions to vote for them just reaffirms a pallid insincerity, and is therefore politically suicidal." It's the politics of appeasement, and it doesn't work with abusers on any scale.

Besides, straight white male is an identity too, and the right pushes a hateful, regressive version of those identity politics, though no one blames straight white male identity politics for Republican losses. It was never "he made her do it." Those identity politics are rendered invisible or treated as beyond question. But I'm here to question them.

Because she didn't make him do it.

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I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped

I was stuck in a freezing cell without explanation despite eventually having lawyers and media attention. Yet, compared with others, I was l

It was surreal listening to my friends recount everything they had done to get me out: working with lawyers, reaching out to the media, making endless calls to detention centers, desperately trying to get through to Ice or anyone who could help. They said the entire system felt rigged, designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to get out.

The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.

This is not just my story. It is the story of thousands and thousands of people still trapped in a system that profits from their suffering. I am writing in the hope that someone out there – someone with the power to change any of this – can help do something.

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Except for the Miracles | Olúfémi Táíwò

Finding inspiration in the stories of people like Kariuki and Price is necessary, and something important would be lost if we ignored rebell

Olúfémi Táíwò

no. 57

May 2021

Except for the Miracles

Liberation as the Fine Art of Losing "Confronting the extreme inequality around the globe, and the grotesque imbalance of power, while knowing that time is running short because of climate change, requires staring directly into the face of what Price and Kariuki felt: agonizing, crushing defeat. If we fight this fight—as we should, as we must—we will come up short. Our best shot is not in denying this—but in accepting it—and fighting anyway. ....In Rosa Luxemburg’s last written words before she was tortured and killed, she insisted on the importance of understanding defeat. “The question of why each defeat occurred must be answered,” she wrote. “Was it a case of raging, uncontrollable revolutionary energy colliding with an insufficiently ripe situation,” she wonders, “or was it a case of weak and indecisive action?” Nostalgia for fallen heroes and heroic campaigns cannot displace analysis, and mimicry is only warranted should we desire the fate that befell them."

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What the Fossil Fuel Industry Learned from Anti-BDS Laws

Attacks on Israel’s critics have become the template for efforts to suppress climate activism, gun control advocacy, and other progressive m

Attacks on Israel’s critics have become the template for efforts to suppress climate activism, gun control advocacy, and other progressive movements.

Alex Kane

April 4, 2022

In late 2016, as a Republican member of the Texas state legislature, he co-authored legislation that banned the state from doing business with companies or individual contractors who withheld their investments or services from the State of Israel. The legislation, later signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, is meant to combat the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, which calls for boycotts of Israeli products, divestment from corporations that do business in Israel, and sanctions on the state.

Isaac realized he could apply a similar logic to those who might seek to hobble the energy industry. Prompted by his conversations with fossil fuel executives, he drafted legislation preventing state agencies from contracting with companies that boycott or divest from fossil fuels.

..Palestinian rights advocates say the wave of bills targeting climate activism show how attacks on Israel’s critics have formed the basis for the suppression of other kinds of progressive activism. “They’re shrinking the space for public debate and action on some of the most important issues of our time,” said Meera Shah, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, which defends the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists. “It points to why it’s so dangerous to permit this kind of Palestine exception to speech. Because not only is it harmful to the Palestinian rights movement—it eventually comes to harm other social movements.”

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Mahmoud Khalil Is the First Activist to Be Disappeared by Trump

The detention and attempted deportation of Khalil is a test by Trump to see how far he can go—and a test for us to see how hard we will figh

Mahmoud Khalil is the first person Trump’s administration has disappeared for political reasons. The choice of victim is extremely strategic. Defending Khalil invokes political costs they don’t believe either Columbia University or the Democrats are willing to incur. So far, they are correct.

...The Democrats, in a move that should surprise no one at this point, have made no moves at all. Did anyone think they would, for someone like Khalil? That party is so allergic to even the appearance of support for the Palestinian people that the Harris campaign ordered volunteers to mark fundraising feedback that involved Gaza as “no response.” In fact, they refused to even categorize opposition to genocide “out of fear that [the] category would be leaked.”

.....“Terrorist” has always been a remarkably elastic word. For over two decades now, America has used that label to justify atrocities—usually against people who are brown, Muslim, and/or from a country we despise. The Trump administration’s use of terrorism to justify the blatantly illegal disappearance of a peaceful activist—whose ties to Hamas appear to consist exclusively of opposition to ethnic cleansing—stretches the term even further. By all appearances, they’re just getting started.

In January, the House reintroduced a bill to designate “Antifa” as a domestic terror organization. Trump has repeatedly declared his intent to prosecute people released without charges during the 2020 protests. Kash Patel’s FBI recently announced that it would stop monitoring far-right extremism and instead focus on “things like BLM and Antifa.” Patel does not need a bill or even an executive order to make that happen; he can crack down on BLM terrorists all by himself with the FBI and the ATF, plus assistance from Kristi “puppy-killer” Noem’s DHS as needed.

...Those of us outside the halls of power have far fewer options. We can contact our representatives and demand that they condemn Khalil’s detention and take some of those actions I just listed. We can e-mail Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong and demand that the school condemn Khalil’s detention ([email protected], [email protected]). Action Network has a great tool that can help you e-mail your representatives and Columbia’s administrators all at the same time. The ACLU has Know Your Rights training twice a month that can teach you how to keep your community safer if the regime keeps pretending to care about the law sometimes.