Old as dirt. Doing photos, modeling badly, bringing toys to photoshoots. Also doing some pen & paper RPGs, steampunk and general sci-fi. And a whole lot of dogs at once.
Jako że ostatnio Coca-Cola jest na świecie źle odbierana, zacząłem testować produkty krajowe tudzież sąsiedzkie, i odkryłem co następuje:
Kofola smakuje zupełnie inaczej, ale jest dobra. Jedyne ryzyko, że zaczniecie mówić "Achjooo" tudzież "a sme to dojebali".
Cola Jurajska smakuje podobnie do Kofoli, tylko jest słodsza. Pewnie syrop pochodzi z tych samych złóż gdzieś w Jurze Krakowsko-Częstochowskiej.
Cola marki Cola z Auchan da się wypić, jak na absolutną taniochę.
Hoop Cola też się nadaje, zresztą przez pewien czas kupowałem albo zwykłą, albo nieistniejące już warianty sezonowe - najlepsza była czekoladowa.
Polo Cockta nie utrzyma wam kingsajzu w spodniach, ale to nie najgorsza rzecz. To chujostwo smakuje jak wymoczona w oranżadzie guma Juicy Fruit, a do gumy Juicy Fruit mam uraz gdzieś tak od roku 1988. Fuj.
Niestety do Biedronki i Lidla mam daleko, więc testy tamtejszych specjałów będą kiedyśtam.
Specjałów z Biedronki i Lidla nadal nie dowieźli, ale za to mam dwa inne wynalazki.
Tymbark CoLove Wiśnia też ma bliżej do Kofoli i innych egzotycznych wynalazków, zaczynając od tego, że nie jest aż tak przesłodzona jak typowa cola. Wiśniowa niestety jest trochę umownie, mimo przechwałek o 20% soku w składzie. Występują też warianty o smaku limonki i mango, ale mango mam trochę przesyt po ostatnim nadużywaniu Monstera Mango Loco, a limonkowa wersja była tylko w butelce 1,5 litra, czego po wypadku z Polo Cocktą (mieli w sklepie tylko dwulitrowe) nie chciałem powtarzać.
Cola z Puszczy z Cynamonem z Browaru Waszczukowe, jak na coś co kosztuje siedem zybli za butelkę 0,33, jest płaska jak deska. Czuć trochę cukru, trochę kwasu i to już wszystko. Cynamonu nie stwierdzono. Już niegdysiejsza zimowa Hoop Cola była dużo lepsza.
Cola Original z Biedronki jest, jak na produkt z Biedonki, absolutną taniochą, w której mamy cukier, kwas i gaz. W ilościach większych niż w tym craftowym podobno wynalazku z browaru w puszczy. Mimo wszystko, wolę Jurajską, która kosztuje 4,50 za półtora litra.
"Fantazja" Cola, "o smaku jak pamiętasz sprzed lat", to powrót do przerwanej dekady towarzysza Edwarda. Jest gaz, jest kwas, jest za mało cukru w cukrze (przynajmniej przesłodzona nie jest), i jest etykieta zionąca PRLem. Włącznie z nadrukowanym dla picu na dole staroszkolnym wskaźnikiem "najlepiej spożyć do" - kiedyś na takich etykietach datę oznaczało się nacięciami na dolnej krawędzi, pod odpowiednimi liczbami.
Wynalazek ten jest produkowany przez firmę Betex z Knyszyna, która w dziedzinie designu opakowań odwala szczerą i niemal artystyczną boomeriadę, nawet mimo funkcjonowania na rynku dopiero od 1992 roku.
No czy wy to widzicie, przecież ten pomarańczowy wynalazek pewnie wali PRLowskim "Ptysiem" na kilometr.
Smakosz odrdzewiaczy znajdzie coś ciekawego również na wywczasie.
Biral - W Rethymno na Krecie produkują coś takiego. Jest cukier, jest gaz, ale co ciekawe nie ma kwasu, więc całość jest mocno landrynkowa. W porównaniu z siurem z barowego szlaucha z all inclusive, i tak da się wypić.
Według informacji z internetów, wynalazek niby nie jest colą, ale za to zawiera magiczną wodę z Temerii, przez co jest rozchwytywanym towarem eksportowym w Kanadzie.
Z serii dziwnych wynalazków z magiczną wodą, tym razem produkcja z Uzdrowiska Rymanów S.A.:
Celestynka o smaku Cola - ku mojemu zaskoczeniu, ten produkt jest mniej agresywny w smaku niź typowa cola. Mniejsza ilość cukru jest zbalansowana mniejszą ilością kwasu, za to zdrojowa woda jest dość mocno zgazowana, w myśl porzekadła "Przechodniu, beknij sobie".
Żeby nie podkradać z lodówki koledze z pracy kiedy akurat jest na urlopie, wydałem dziesięć zybli na Fritzl-Kolę.
Fritz-Kola - w smaku, nic specjalnego, może trochę mało cukru. Ale to, co wyróżnia ten produkt, to zapach: otóż Fritz-Kola jebie pastą do podłóg. Sprawdza się porzekadło, że co dla jednych jest colą, dla drugich jest podłogą.
Mieliśmy już colę z puszczy, teraz czas na colę z dżungli.
Jungle Cola Genuine - zauważyłem ją na poczcie, czyli w najmniej spodziewanym miejscu, i już po opakowaniu widać, że to coś nietypowego. I owszem, jest zauważalnie bardziej kwaśna, ma nietypowy zapach (może faktycznie orzeszków kola?) i nawet nie jest jakoś drastycznie droga, chociaż jak przypomnę sobie ile puszka coli kosztowała przed tymi wszystkimi opłatami cukrowymi, to pięć zeta jednak jest trochę przesadą.
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
https://www.normaltech.ai/
As a destructive economic pathology, AI is extraordinary. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money – over $1.4T, most of that in the past year – on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI can't do the jobs it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town.
In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed. What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp:
This is just one of the many negative effects of AI that can be traced to the scale of the bubble. Were it not for the imperative to turn more than a trillion dollars of losses into a profit, we would not have the aggressive, site-destroying scraping epidemic. Nor would we see AI crammed into every part of every product and service we use. And of course, in the absence of the investment bubble, businesses wouldn't be firing productive workers and replacing them with defective chatbots.
The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference. AI's investor story is an incoherent tangle of predictions about AI's future, ranging from the outlandish ("Once we spend enough money, AI will become God and solve all our problems, including our profitability crisis") to the dystopian ("The majority of jobs in the economy will be done by our chatbots, and the employers who previously employed those workers will split the wage savings with us").
None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over trillions to finance this bubble?
I have previously written about one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real. How could they? Achieving billionairehood requires that you inflict pain on vast numbers of people. If you truly believed that those people were as real as you are, you'd never be able to look yourself in the mirror. Whether it's Leona Helmsley's claim that "only the little people pay taxes," or Elon Musk's habit of calling people who disagree with him "NPCs," the whole ideological project of billionaireism is shot through with a kind of solipsism:
This is true even in one-on-one encounters: for the Epstein Class, the children raped on his island weren't fully real – certainly not as real as their own children. It's even more true for the people that billionaires experience as statistical artifacts, such as Jeff Bezos's vast army of drivers and warehouse workers, with their sky-high on-the-job injury rates and the everyday indignity of their piss-bottles. It gets worse for social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg, for whom AI's principal appeal is the prospect of ending socializing on social media, swapping your mulish friends for pliable chatbots who will organize their interactions with you to maximize your platform usage and thus the number of ads you see:
I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that other people will believe in AI.
This is a well-established investment principle. As Keynes wrote, the point of investing isn't necessarily to pick the most beautiful contestant to win the beauty contest – it's to pick the contestant that the other judges will hand the crown to:
In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most – you get rich by identifying the businesses that other investors will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares after the price spike, but before anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than you."
From the perspective of a cynical AI investor, the question isn't, "Can AI do your job?" The question is, "Can an AI salesman convince your boss that an AI can do your job?" So long as enough bosses are convinced to fire workers and replace them with AI, AI valuation will continue to climb, and if they time the market right, they can get out before those valuations crash. This proposition gets even sweeter if the CEO of the AI company is in bed with financial regulators and stock exchanges, and can force your financial advisor to buy his worthless AI stock with "little people's" retirement savings:
A bet that bosses will fire workers and replace them with AI is a good wager. Bosses are absolute suckers for this scam. Bosses hate the fact that they can't translate their plans into action without first having a series of ego-shattering confrontations with workers who actually know how to do things, who insist that those plans are illegal, stupid, impossible or will kill people:
For these bosses, AI is the chance to wire the toy steering wheel they play with all day directly into the corporate drive-train. With enough AI slaves, the boss can run the company all on their own:
In other words, you don't need to be a solipsist to bet on AI. It is sufficient to believe that bosses are solipsists, who can be relied upon to empty the corporate coffers in exchange for worker-replacing magic beans.
This is true in many scam sectors. I'm sure that most of the people who finance the supplements that Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan hawk understand that they're just a way to give yourself very expensive piss. They don't have to believe supplements work to believe that there is an army of desperate and credulous young men who will give anything for the promise they dangle.
Likewise, you don't have to believe that Gwyneth Paltrow can help women "regulate their periods" and "correct their hormonal imbalances" by selling them rocks to stuff in their vaginas. You just have to believe that between patriarchy-induced body shame and patriarchy-driven medical neglect, there's an army of desperate women out there who will buy those rocks and risk their lives by sticking them inside their bodies:
AI is even worse than vagina-rocks, of course. When the bubble bursts, when the seven AI companies that make up 35% of the S&P 500 tank, when a third of the US stock market is vaporized overnight, our governments will reflexively turn to austerity, the go-to response to every financial crisis. Austerity is fascism's best recruiting tool:
When the AI bubble bursts, the defective chatbots that replaced skilled workers will disappear with it, leaving us scrambling to get that work done after the workers who understood it have retrained, retired, or exited the workforce. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:
Long after the AI bubble bursts, we'll be dealing with its catastrophic carbon emissions. The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't up for debate. Once we sink enough therms into the sea, we are losing the ice-caps.
AI is an ordinary technology, but the AI bubble is extraordinary: extraordinarily toxic and extraordinarily dangerous. The source of that danger is financiers, and they are motivated by a mix of solipsism and a belief in other people's solipsism. For them, the most exciting investment hypothesis is that "hell is other people":
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 biggest problem with AI is that there's barely anyone willing to come out and say that the emperor has no clothes. The technology is slathered daily in new layers of bullshit, both by its proponents and, worse yet, its opponents. You have Dario Amodei spin grand promises with a heavy religious flavor in order to con the investors into coughing up forty billion dollars for the development of "Machines of Loving Grace". For that purpose, he sends his envoys to court the Vatican, and here's where things get absolutely mental. Because the dogmatic, fanatical opponents of the tech, whom I call Butlerian jihadis after Frank Herbert's book for the first part and what I have witnessed on the news in the early 2000s for the second, fantasize about crusades, routinely misinterpreting the Pope's statements that describe the technology as useful as long as certain precautions are taken (precautions that are well known yet entirely ignored by hordes of hype-drunk schmucks), but criticize the owners of it as power-hungry egoists that do, indeed, display disturbing solipsist tendencies. Those Butlerian jihadis, just as deathly terrified of the sales pitch as the hype-drunk toasterfuckers are excited by it, refuse to verify whether any of the Grand Replacement Theories spouted from the corporate event stages by the likes of Mira Murati are even true. Instead, they fantasize of acts of terror while being entirely too gutless to commit - in a classic example of armchair activism on social media that narrows down to bullying random people not buying into their lunacy. And curiously, most of them display next to no artistic talent despite concerning themselves with AI being a "danger to artists" (it's still unable to draw hands correctly, people!) because it turned out that the bullshit they made money on, half-assed KOMISHUNS peddled to tasteless swine, went bust as the swine in question fucked off to play with AI for their easily satisfied needs of D&D character portraits, cartoon porn, D&D character porn and so on. They rode the wave of cultural enshittification that's been going on for at least two decades, exploiting the fact that every cultural product was dumbed down and simplified more and more with each passing year, letting them do less for the same asking price, and suddenly they slammed into the wall because creating cultural products of satisfactory quality became automated and idiocratized. Now the schmucks they intended to bilk run around waving whatever shitty bikini animu girl foot fetish pic they managed to wring out of the machine and screaming "GENTLEMEN, BEHOLD!" while they themselves have to find a real job on their intellectual level, flipping, stacking or packing, whatever's available.
I can name four people recognizable enough for others to listen who actually do see AI for what it is and call it out:
Cory Doctorow, see above;
Ed Zitron, another tech journalist not swayed by the PR hype;
Yann LeCun, AI scientist, the only sane one of the three "Godfathers of AI";
And now, the Pope Leo XIV.
And that's about it. There is, of course, Jensen Huang who hints that he sees the bullshit Silicon Valley mafia is pushing daily, but since he makes money on the shovels for this gold rush, he's cynically keeping mostly quiet. The rest obediently eats up whatever horseshit the Silicon Valley mafia is peddling, and the worst ones eat it up But As A Bad Thing™. But do they see the facts or the consequences, like what the machine can really do or how badly the economy will be screwed if the whole thing goes to shit? Nope.
So, Meta has implemented an "AI detector" for Instagram posts and much to my absolute lack of surprise, it doesn't work worth shit. You know, like all of them. But it does one thing that is absolutely fucking hysterical, because it's instant karma:
A whole lot of subpar hack work by the whiniest Butlerian jihadi cunts was marked as "AI-generated", with no way for them to turn it off, and they're going mental. They just couldn't shut their cockholsters about the tech, kept accusing others of using AI based on completely bullshit made-up clues and POW! Meta just bitch-slapped them with the exact witch hunt methods they employed against others. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch of fuckwits if you ask me.
No elo. Miałem frazę. Rozwinąłem ją do pełnego tekstu. Tak więc tu macie oryginał, a tekst leci poniżej:
Stary z kumplami znowu najebał się,
Znów poszli w tango diabli wiedzą gdzie,
Twój stary wstał
(no, no, no, no, no)
U łu hu!
Cud jakiś się stał, bo chociaż całą noc chlał,
Twój stary wstał!
Napruty wrócił jak radziecki wóz,
Taksiarz zygzakiem go do domu wiózł,
Twój stary wstał
(no, no, no, no, no)
U łu hu!
Cud jakiś się stał, bo chociaż całą noc chlał,
Twój stary wstał!
Twój stary wstaał! (hik!)
Twój stary wstaał! (hik!)
Twój stary wstaał! (hik!)
Twój stary wsta- aa- aa- ał
Banner z reklamą dachów przyniósł skądś,
Gdzie do cholery znalazł takie coś,
Twój stary wstał
(no, no, no, no, no)
U łu hu!
Cud jakiś się stał, bo chociaż całą noc chlał,
Twój stary wstał!
Pod drzwiami padł jak ziemniaków wór,
Do rana przespał jak zwyczajny żul,
Twój stary wstał
(no, no, no, no, no)
U łu hu!
Cud jakiś się stał, bo chociaż całą noc chlał,
Twój stary wstał!
Twój stary wstaał! (hik!)
Twój stary wstaał! (hik!)
Twój stary wstaał! (hik!)
Twój stary wsta- aa- aa- ał
Rano do domu na czworakach wlazł,
Esperal chyba w końcu wszyć mu czas,
Twój stary wstał
(no, no, no, no, no)
U łu hu!
Cud jakiś się stał, bo chociaż całą noc chlał,
Twój stary wstał!
Teraz marudzi, że go męczy kac,
Po coś debilu wczoraj polazł chlać,
Twój stary wstał
(no, no, no, no, no)
U łu hu!
Cud jakiś się stał, bo chociaż całą noc chlał,
Twój stary wstał! (wstał-wstał, wstał-wstał-wstał)
Cud jakiś się stał, bo chociaż całą noc chlał,
Twój stary wstał!
I tu historia: oryginalnie zamiast bannera z reklamą dachów pojawiał się śpiewający Mikołaj, którego faktycznie mój kumpel, porobiony czym się dało, przytargał do domu po swoim wieczorze kawalerskim. Ja z kolei idąc do nocnego o trzeciej w nocy wróciłem z flaszką i pluszowym misiem. Co nie ma startu do historii znalezionych w internecie: ludzie po pochlaju znaleźli u siebie w domu cały aparat telefoniczny wyrwany z budki, parkomat, automat z kondomami, wykładziny z fastfoodów, znaki drogowe, pachołki i dziwne elementy garderoby. Więc tak sobie pomyślałem sobie, a co gdyby typ w pijanym widzie zajumał reklamę blachodachówek, taką z gołą babą, jak to w Polsce się zdarza?
There will not be a blanket ban on AI. We intend to develop a policy.
What I just heard on a call at work.
Sanity prevails.
We don't need to rely on ChatGPT for it, for the obvious reasons of privacy - while I seriously doubt that the Sillycunt Valley mob uses every imbecilic baboon grunt of your average user to train their algorithms, sensitive data going out beyond the client company's control to lay in some Nebraska-sized data center hell knows where in order to maintain a LLM's context window for a given conversation is an obvious violation of data security policies.
I will not be surprised if the bureaucracy takes long enough that the Sillycunt Valley mob goes bust in the meantime, but hey, we intend to rely on a local install anyway, and those (as a technology) aren't going anywhere. But we still need rational, factual, technical critique more than any metaphysical bullshit and outright religious amok over this tech.
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
Data brokers are a cancer. There's a direct line from the unrestricted collection, retention and processing of our data to a host of evils, from deepfake porn to phishing scams; from racial discrimination in hiring to ICE roundups of migrants; from targeted election interference to identity theft:
Why do data brokers exist? Because we let them. Congress hasn't passed a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when they made it illegal for video stores to disclose your VHS rentals. All other acts of consumer surveillance are legal. Data brokers spy on us for the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they can, and we don't stop them:
Getting rid of data brokers wouldn't solve all our problems, but it sure would go a long way to solving many of them. Rather than legally requiring platforms to spy on kids (to exclude them from being targeted by platforms' algorithms), we could prohibit platforms from spying on anyone, including kids, meaning kids couldn't be identified (much less targeted) by algorithms or ads:
Data brokers produce mountains of raw material used for every form of scam and torture. It's data brokers who power the gig economy's "algorithmic wage discrimination" system, where nurses and other workers are offered less pay based on how much credit card debt they're carrying:
So the feds (both Congress and the executive branch) have surrendered, and that leaves states alone on the battlefield fighting the privacy wars alone. State legislatures have taken some big steps, but – crucially – they've stopped short of banning data brokers from operating within their borders. Having taken a ban on data brokers off the table, states are left with complex, often unworkable "compromises" that go nowhere.
This is where DROP comes in. DROP stands for "Delete Request and Opt-out Platform," and it's a new phase of California's privacy regime that kicks off next month. Under DROP, you fill in some paperwork and then the state requires every data brokerage operating in California to delete your data, as well as any inferences they've made about you based on that data:
Implementing DROP is nowhere near as good as banning data brokers. The idea that data brokers should be able to collect, retain and process your data unless you tell them not to implies that everyone starts off wanting to be spied on, and therefore data brokers should assume that unless they hear otherwise, we're delighted to be the subject of commercial surveillance. This is an incredibly stupid supposition, contradicted by all available evidence. For example, when Apple offered iPhone owners a one-click option to block Facebook from spying on them, 96% of iPhone owners clicked the button:
Indeed, given this fact, one wonders why Apple bothers with the "don't spy on me" button at all. Why not have a "do spy on me" button that is unchecked by default, and leave users to dig through their settings to find the option to opt in to being surveilled? Of course, then it would make the fact that Apple spies on its customers and uses the data to target ads (with no way to opt out) a little awkward:
In the absence of a ban on surveillance without explicit, opt-in consent, we are left with the bizarre fiction that most of us want to be spied on, a fiction that pervades the DROP process, making the entire procedure nearly impossible to complete.
To start the DROP process, you must first create a Login.gov ID. This is an incredibly invasive process that involves photographing multiple pieces of ID and taking several selfies using special apps and webpages that hijack your device's camera and processor in a bid to prevent bad actors from spoofing the process. There's a plausible reason for this rigmarole: Login.gov is the authentication system for multiple federal, state and local IT systems in the US, so a fake or stolen Login.gov ID could be used to access your IRS, Social Security, and other very sensitive accounts.
The corollary of this is the promise of Login.gov: once you create your ID (a lengthy, multi-stage process) you won't have to jump through lots of painful bureaucratic hoops to access a wide variety of government services.
DROP didn't get the memo.
After you log in to DROP via Login.gov, you are sent a text message – to the phone number in your Login.gov profile – with a link to access a "secure" website that takes over your camera to let you take a "secure" photo of the front and back of your California driver's license or your US passport. What if you don't have either of those? I guess that means you want to be spied on by data brokers.
Note that these are the same credentials you have to supply to get the Login.gov ID that you've just used to get to this step in the process. In other words, in order to get to the stage where they ask you to photograph your driver's license, you have to have already photographed and validated your driver's license.
Once you complete this (pointless, redundant) step, you're directed back to your computer, where the process continues. Here, you must fill in all kinds of biographical detail, as well as specialized pieces of information, including your car's VIN. This is a piece of information that most people don't have – but which the California DMV does have and could auto-feed into the system, given that you've repeatedly affirmatively identified yourself to the service.
You also have to provide your mobile advertising identifier, a long, unique number that you may or may not be able to extract from your phone, depending on the model and the OS version. If you can't get it that way, you can install an app like AAID, which comes with a long list of – you guessed it – permissions to extract, store and process your private information.
Here's the thing: the whole point of a mobile ad identifier is that apps can access it (this is how they identify and track you). That step, where the system made you switch to your phone and use your camera to photograph your driver's license? That step could have automatically pulled this data off your device. That's the whole fucking point of this exercise: that web-pages and apps can request your mobile ad identifier.
Instead, DROP wants users to dig through their phone's deepest settings and/or install an app to retrieve a 32-digit number, which they then must key into a webform on their computer or in a different app on their phone.
Once you've done this, you must fill in another page of biographical information, including information that you've already provided to Login.gov and information you've already filled in on previous screens.
On this screen, you must also verify your phone number by sending yourself a text and then pasting in a unique number the system sends to you. But remember how this whole thing started? The first step is that you authenticate with Login.gov, which sends a text to your phone so you can take a (redundant) picture of your driver's license. There is no way you could get this far in the process unless you controlled the phone number you've just "verified" with the system.
Next, you must verify your email address, by receiving an email with a unique code in it and keying or pasting that into the webform, too. Again, remember how this process started: with you logging in with Login.gov, using your email address, which the system has already treated as verified since the very start of this (very) long and (very) complicated process.
This whole thing is terrible, and it is predicated on the absurd premise that Californians have to be defended from the threat of strangers who pretend to be them in order to sneakily opt them out of surveillance. DROP requires stronger authentication than any other US government system I've ever interacted with. I file my tax returns with fewer authentication steps. I renew my car's DMV registration with fewer authentication steps. I became a US citizen with fewer authentication steps.
This is either a system with no coherent threat model, or (far more probably), its threat model is that people will use it. This is California's answer to "a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'":
It's especially instructive to compare this process to the steps you have to take in order to "opt in" to having a data broker open a file on you and stuff it full of your sensitive, personal information, which is then sold to all comers:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
It's also instructive to compare this process to the steps a data broker has to take to spy on you and sell your data:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
Though there are many obvious ways this could be made better, I want to stress here that you shouldn't have to do this at all. It's entirely backwards. The process for not being spied on should look like this:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
If anyone is going to be forced to jump through hoops to participate in the mass collection and catastrophic mishandling of private data, it should be the data brokers, not the people they spy on.
This kind of malicious compliance is the inevitable outcome of a process that starts by taking the obvious best measure off the table. The answer to the problem of data brokers is banning data brokers, not creating a demented hairball of form-filling that maintains the fiction that data broker surveillance is consensual.
In its own way, this process reminds me of the whole "carbon credit" fiasco. The answer to too many carbon emissions is to democratically decide to ban certain kinds of carbon emissions. But that would require states to do things, rather than simply "nudging" a process that is guided by "the market." So we end up with these junk "credits" that companies manufacture by promising not to log forests, many of which are already wildlife preserves and/or subsequently burn down:
The best critique of this whole thing came in 2021 from the Climate Ad Project, who produced a short video in which people were allowed to kill one another provided they purchased "murder offsets":
In a state of nature, murder exists. We, as a society, have decided this is bad. Rather than creating "incentives" not to murder, we just banned murder. Admittedly, we still get some murders, but when these happen, we don't treat it as "a mispricing of the anti-murder incentive" – we treat it as a crime.
The commercial surveillance industry may not be a criminal enterprise (yet), but it is the source of a torrent of crime, a flood of crime, a tsunami of crime. Every piece of your information that a data broker possesses exposes you to the risk of being victimized by a criminal. For this reason, I strongly believe that you should go through the tedious, performatively difficult DROP process:
https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/
But let's not pretend that this is good – or even adequate. There is no demand for being spied on. There is no basis for taking such enormous care in making sure people aren't maliciously removed from surveillance databases. If these databases exist at all (they should not), then we should make spies go through all this paperwork, to prove that you do want to be spied on, and unless they manage it, then spying on us should be treated as the crime it is.
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:
I'm shocked. The local bureaucracy over here in Middle-Eastern Europe still has its roots deep in the communist times and mentality, and even I am not subjected to this kind of ridiculous "The 12 Tasks of Asterix" nonsense.
I mean, come on, this is something straight out of The Place That Sends You Mad from that very movie.
You have some shithead who can barely doodle an animu girl sell KOMISHUNS of weapons. And unfortunately for him, I instantly recognized the design he blatantly plagiarized in order to bilk some rube for lunch money.
Like, bitch, that's Dead Man's Tale from Destiny 2, but blander and dumber. The same stock, the same muzzle brake, the same dovetailed gold front sight. But to make it look different, the middle part was replaced with some idiotic blocky setup with a revolver cylinder that just looks lame. Some poor sap at Bungle took the effort to cook up a weird space cowboy rifle, like, Winchester Model 1873 with luxurious wood and gilded bits, and this hack just rolled up and blatantly traced half of it in order to fleece a schmuck. And while I'm letting tracing actual firearms like the MTs-255 shotgun (on which The Ghoul's revolver from Fallout TV series is based on) slide, that asshole also ripped off the Submachine Gun Visually Distinct From A MP5 For Legal Reasons from Grand Theft Auto V and Battle Rifle from Halo games:
And worst of all, he's asking money for it. Like, motherfucker, if I was copying the work of others this closely, I would not dare to put a price tag on it, for obvious reasons. Which is also why you don't see me running an AI-powered Onlyfans page with nudes made with my #Photobooth From Hell.
That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.
This guy inspired me to repair my own macbook. First of all, you should know that I am not… like, I have to look up HOW to look up what my computer specifications are. Tech, that ware either soft or hard, is not a subject in which I experience comfort or competence.
But my puppy peed on my keyboard, and I asked the apple store, or the fucking mac cafe, or the godsdamn Computer House Chill Zone or whatever cute ass name they have for their bullshit store, and they said it would be TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS TO REPLACE MY KEYBOARD. I’m not even exaggerating.
So I asked the internet, well how hard IS it to repair? And I saw this guy’s video, and while I am no techie, I AM fueled by spite, so I was all “oh, they do that shit on purpose specifically so they can charge me $1200 bucks or make me buy a new computer hunh? FUCK THEM” and I bought all the tools I needed for about $25 and I bought all the parts I needed for about another $25 and I watched a few tutorial videos, and I replaced my own keyboard.
So, once you are doing the actual deed, it becomes pretty obvious that they are finding creative ways to make this much harder than it has to be on purpose. On thing that stood out to me is, instead of all the tiny screws being the same size, there are about two dozen very slightly different sizes. They could easily be all the same size, or like, two sizes at most, but no.
These mother fuckers will take a panel that screws into place and they’ll use a different size screw for each corner. They are so close that you almost cannot tell them apart visually, but they each will only screw into the matching corner. Like, it’s a pretty clear “fuck you” to anyone trying to do repairs.
anyway, this guy is also fueled by spite, and doing holy work, and I have mad respect
ifixit also makes kits and instruction for nearly every part for consoles, computers, phones, tablets, just about anything. We’ve replaced multiple parts on our old 3Dses at this point. It’s not nearly as hard as you might assume and very worth it to learn how to repair your own electronics.
Google Has The Chance to Do The Funniest Thing Ever
It's fun being a monopolist, or a damn-near-monopolist running on the laziness and ignorance of majority of humans. Like Google.
Wall Street Journal is suing them over showing up in the search results in a way they don't like. Reddit doesn't want to get paid sixty million bucks a year for decade-old shitposts from their site turning up in the search results either.
Google has the unique capability to fuck both over millions of dollars worth of traffic. All they need is to be maliciously compliant in a peak Švejkian way. And trust me, it will be absolutely hilarious.
You have a problem with being in our search systems, used daily by hundreds of millions of people worldwide? Great, we will remove you from them. Like, entirely. No listing, no positioning, no SEO, no summaries, nothing. Because fuck you, we won't be rebuilding our multi-billion system for your stupid asses.
You don't want to get paid for our multi-billion system serving the idiotic claptrap the morons frequenting your website shit out over a decade ago? Fantastic, you won't get paid and we will serve it to the users of our multi-billion system for free anyway. Up to and including anything your idiot users posted five seconds ago. Because fuck you, we won't be rebuilding our multi-billion system for your stupid asses. And if you have a problem with that, we can remove you from it. Entirely.
Much like Facebook doesn't serve anything resembling news to the users in Canada because fuck the news sites from Canada, Google can gently remind the WSJ dinosaurs who means more on the internet and, consequently, in the world.
Because the WSJ and the rest of the media industry feels entirely too comfortable with staggering amounts of dickovers intended to shake people down for money. Unfortunately, Google was never one for pompous displays of ego, so they won't do it. Schade, keine Freude.
Ja pierdolę, chcę czasu. Czasu na odstresowanie, żebym miał czas na rysowanie. Bo nie dość, że przyszedł mi do głowy pomysł na rysunek kulistego rekina ("I came in like a REKIN BALL!" 😅), to jeszcze mam z tyłu głowy plany narysowania Iron Warriora z WH40K w ekspresyjnym hełmie do memów o Predictabo, a @gutz-spilled zainspirował mnie do choćby naszkicowania interfejsu do serworamion na plecach techpriesta z tego samego uniwersum.
Why aren’t AI companies competing directly with their customers?
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:
"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.
As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.
Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?
This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"
Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"
Of course, they might answer, "We need your money now so we can make god later." That's why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor's job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just open your own hospital? If you've got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant's job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service? If you've got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school?
If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want as much cash as possible? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022?
I think the only reason this question doesn't come up more frequently is that we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:
The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom. Take the world of online grifters, who don't just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they also peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other "wealth influencers'" insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets:
The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on other scam services (November Kelly calls this "The world's most expensive 'inspect element'"):
It's an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that's not true – there's even more money to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta!
So it's not surprising that we don't ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they're immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?
Corporate LLMs from the Sillycunt Valley, no matter whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or whatever fucking else, are the peak "you will own nothing and you will be happy" bullshit.
If you're easily duped, much like every business idiot out there, they can hold your productivity for ransom while shaking you down for more and more tokens after it turns out that those scant few employees you didn't fire blow through the entire supply you paid for without any tangible results, and not even through malicious compliance or intentional sabotage. Either you stuck with complete cretins happy to get paid bubkes and firmly believing the machine can do the job for them, or the machine, predictably, doesn't work for shit.
Those things aren't for the centaurs, very much unlike the locally-run open-source solutions that, for starters, don't try to rip you off and just do whatever you command to the best of their ability (which isn't much, arguably, but can be serviceable if backed up with good old elbow grease and some out-of-the-box thinking). They're not aggressively marketed as the Second Coming either, because the intended customer isn't a fucking rube willing to eat up just about everything. They're not some noisy disruptions peddled from a big corporate event stage - more often, they come as tailored applications with an use case, thanks to being developed by people more adjusted to reality and having experience with what they intend to automate this way.
Legalizing jailbreaking, raiding the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in America is a much better response to the Trump tariffs than retaliatory tariffs.
For one thing, this is a targeted response: go after Big Tech's margins and you're mounting a frontal assault on the businesses whose CEOs each paid a million bucks to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais.
That's right: we need to punt the Big Tech broligarchs right in the cunt, so hard that they're gonna die of starvation mid-flight. It's becoming clear that all the copyright laws are there to fuck us while the corporate molochs just do as they please, locking people out without any clear reason, gathering data they have no business gathering, and yet screaming and going apeshit when anyone - be it a researcher, a legislator or a smaller outfit in a different field - tries to help themselves to their data.
We need to jam a screwdriver into the guts of this corporate machine, and make the products serve us. Bullshit like Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive or the Device of Malicious Corporate Abuse as a whole is a whole load of anti-competitive practices written into the law itself, and if there's anything the politicians are deathly afraid of, it's turning laws around in order to benefit the people and not the corporations. People can't do shit, maybe break a few unrelated windows or torch a few unrelated cars on the stick end, to which the government can and will respond with a disproportionately larger and heavier stick, and nothing whatsoever on the carrot end, while the corporations can grant you a nice golden parachute in the form of a board seat after you become unelectable thanks to being an infinitely corrupt motherfucker.
And I'm not talking exclusively about Gerhard Schroeder. There's also Mitch (with a capital B) Glazier, the CEO of RIAA, whose 1999 stunt that fucked the music artists and had to be reversed in an act of legislative emergency landed him that very position. In the Record Industry Association of America, the same gang of copygrifters that goes after anyone supposedly fucking music artists by bootlegging their songs.
It's very likely that name doesn't mean anything to you. But let me tell you who Mitch Glazier is. Today, Mitch Glazier is the CEO if the RIAA, with an annual salary of $1.3m. But until 1999, Mitch Glazier was a key Congressional staffer, and in 1999, Glazier snuck an amendment into an unrelated bill, the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, that killed musicians' right to take their recordings back from their labels.
This is a practice that had been especially important to "heritage acts" (which is a record industry euphemism for "old music recorded by Black people"), for whom this right represented the difference between making rent and ending up on the street.
When it became clear that Glazier had pulled this musician-impoverishing scam, there was so much public outcry, that Congress actually came back for a special session, just to vote again to cancel Glazier's amendment. And then Glazier was kicked out of his cushy Congressional job, whereupon the RIAA started paying him more than $1m/year to "represent the music industry."
(src)
The entire corporate fuckery doesn't narrow down to entertainment and computing hardware. We're talking tractors, cars and trains - just imagine that a locomotive, something that a typically government-funded company paid tens of millions for, just gets bricked because it stopped in the general vicinity of a specific location, and the specific location in question is an "unauthorized" train repair yard.
There's one more European company that relies on anticircumvention that I want to discuss here, because they're old friends of CCC: that's the Polish train company Newag. Newag sabotages its own locomotives, booby-trapping them so that if they sense they have been taken to a rival's service yard, the train bricks itself. When the train operator calls Newag about this mysterious problem, the company "helpfully" remotes into the locomotive's computers, to perform "diagnostics," which is just sending a unbricking command to the vehicle, a service for which they charge 20,000 euros.
This happened. The media reported it. The government did jack smack shit. What any responsible person in power would do is blacklisting the company, maybe even sending investigators in and arresting the executives just in case.
But I know this: the Polish government is the exact opposite of responsible people. And the current one is unable to intimidate a gummy bear, much less a corporate executive or a corrupt politician. They couldn't stop the last presidential election being rigged on the orders of the US ambassador who pressured the Speaker of the Sejm to swear in the supposed victor without investigating the mounting cases of "discrepancies" in vote counting that would most probably turn the narrow victory into a sordid loss, because a right-wing knucklehead known for fraud (the statute of limitation of which ran out while he was protected by the previous ruling party), ties to organized crime in the form of local football firms and, supposedly, pimping (there's no solid evidence because it supposedly happened two decades ago and nobody who values their kneecaps remembers anything) was more useful to the Republican Party.
I won't be surprised if, when push comes to shove, the entire right-wing clown show is going to vote against repealing Article 6, and the local media will come up with whiny shit takes about how it hurts our famously neglected artists (who pissed away whatever money they made on booze, drugs and fancy cars, and when the expiration date for their career hit badly enough not to even get them gigs at New Year's Eve parties for the shittiest TV station or local council, started crying that they have no retirement funds to speak of) and local industry (that consists mostly of rights holders to brand names outsourcing the production to China). And then every fucking bunch of inept cretins in power will spend entire decades weaseling out of EU obligations to legislate it into local law. They all just love riding the White House dick.
TODAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.
Here's an irony: the "gig economy" is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app.
The reason this is ironic is that the "gig economy" is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won't share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture.
Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public's understanding of the gig companies' business is fragmentary and thin.
But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber's business operations.
In a new American Prospect longread called "The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility," Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering "flexibility" that lets workers "choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around":
This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company's efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California's Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state's landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris's brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign's corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor.
On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.
Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok.
In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum).
This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.
This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It's the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly.
For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.
But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.
Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too – when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:
But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.
This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):
Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.
Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same rides, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:
This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:
(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)
Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).
As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement – rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.
Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.
Weil has been in many forums – including that Massachusetts courtroom – where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs – but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections."
Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy":
The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide":
But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.
The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted.
What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:
https://vimeo.com/1203473793
This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:
The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.
This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying:
The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):
In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop – once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:
The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer:
Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility – they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.
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:
In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum).
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 "designated survivor" is one of the weirder aspects of America's (very, very weird) political system.
Each year, during the State of the Union address, when both houses of Congress and the President are all under one roof, a single political figure, in the line of succession for the presidency, is spirited away to a hidden bunker, just in case the US legislative and administrative branches are decapitated in a single, spectacular terrorist strike:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_survivor
Initiated during the 1950s, designated survivors are a paranoid relic of the Cold War, but they're also a relic of an era when America was a less chud-dominated, more technocratic land. It's a longtermist sort of procedure, in stark opposition to vibes-based MAGA chaos in which the Mad King makes daily announcements of new wars, tariffs, monuments, and existential threats to the nation.
America's ruling class have always sought an equilibrium between its pure Id of hatred for labor, autocratic yearnings and apocalyptic fantasies, and its patient, scheming Ego, the author of endless FedSoc judicial nominee listings, Projects 2025, and decades-long schemes to overturn Roe and reverse the New Deal.
(Democrats have their own version of this, of course – the endless contest between the McKinsey wing of the party's right and its infinitely embroidered Machin-Synematic Universe.)
The problem is that once the atavistic, impulsive elements of your project escape containment, the resultant turbulence sucks everyone else into their chaotic vortex. How can you plan for anything when you're buffeted by endless stunts, feints, and distractions?
Nowhere is this failure to plan more vivid than in the age distribution of both chambers of the US legislature, its presidential candidates, and its judicial appointments. What's more, this is equally true of the Democrats and the Republicans.
The equilibrium of all of America's key institutions is brittle: legislative majorities are often just one or two seats wide. Key federal circuits and the Supreme Court are knife-edge balances. We keep getting presidential races between septuagenarians and octogenarians.
The question here isn't whether old people can be good at those jobs. They obviously can be. The problem is actuarial: old people are far more likely to die, or suffer severe medical episodes, than younger people. This is a fact of life that every person understands, and the older you get, the better you understand it.
I'm 55. 20 years ago, it was unusual for just one of my peers to die in a given year; now I lose a couple every year. It could be me next (my doctor just informed me that I am cancer free, following excision, radiotherapy and immunotherapy). Anyone who pretends this isn't true is setting themselves and the people around them up for terrible things.
If you're a writer, this means making plans for the smooth management of your literary estate. For the past couple decades, John Scalzi has been my anointed literary executor. He's a great choice: a fabulous writer with a good head for business and a strong handle on my politics and artistic sensibility, whose personal ethics are above reproach. The only problem is that John is a couple of years older than me, which means that he'd be a great executor if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, but not if I keel over with a heart attack in 20 years.
So this year, I added a second executor, Molly White, who is also a fantastic writer, also extremely ethical and also very attuned to my politics and literary sensibilities. Molly is 20 years younger than me, and she has relevant experience: she's also the executor of the literary estate of her great-grandfather (EB White).
In the unlikely event of my untimely death, Molly and John will do a great job running the estate (which mostly will consist of reviewing my agents' recommendations). And if John keels over right after me, Molly will be fine on her own.
Of course, the only reason I need a literary executor is that my kid is only 18. At 18, she's a remarkable, level-headed, ethical young person, but she's not yet fully formed. Literary history is filled with descendants who take over a literary estate and run it in terrible ways. The most notorious example here is Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce and a colossal asshole:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_James_Joyce
The most likely destiny for my literary estate is that I will grow older alongside my daughter, who will mature in ways that make her a perfectly suitable literary executor (in addition to being the beneficiary of my literary estate) and in a few years I'll send a note of thanks to John and Molly and change the paperwork. But in the unlikely, awful event that my kid runs into serious challenges that make me question her judgment and probity, I'll be covered.
That's what planning is all about: thinking through various scenarios, including low-likelihood, high-salience ones that have easy mitigations, and taking appropriate and proportionate steps to avoid disaster.
You know: like squirreling away a designated survivor in a bunker far from DC during the State of the Union.
This is what makes America's political gerontocracy so weird. In their true hearts, the nonagenarian (1), octogenarians (5), septuagenarians (27) and late sexagenarians (7) in the US Senate know that they could keel over at any moment, and that in a 53:47 Senate, this could spell doom for their political project.
Sure, Mitch McConnell might be secretly dead and that's bad and weird. But it wouldn't be exceptional. We're talking about a legislature whose members sometimes disappear for months, only to be discovered in care homes with advanced dementia, while still somehow holding office:
It's a legislature whose most prominent grandees cling to power at the very brink of death's door, long after they can be effective leaders, just so they can anoint their successor during the next election:
Elections have consequences, but special elections, called after the sudden death of an elderly lawmaker, have wild consequences.
Of course, anyone can die suddenly. 15 years ago, one of my dearest friends, a contemporary, went to bed in seeming perfect health and never woke up. He was only 44. I still miss him, every day:
But the likelihood this happening goes up the older you get, and once you cross a certain age threshold, odds rise sharply. If you're part of a political project that's laying and executing long-term plans whose outcomes turn on hair-fine majorities, this should factor into your thinking. The failure to do so can throw everything you've worked for into disarray:
It's not limited to the legislature, of course. The Supreme Court's slide into its role as handmaiden to totalitarianism began when the dying Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to step down, because she wanted her successor to be picked by the first woman president:
The amazing thing here is that RBG made her name as a master strategist, but when it came to this incredibly consequential matter, she set strategy aside for hubris:
Security practitioners know that anyone can be hacked or scammed, and that the biggest vulnerability of all is to be so confident in your own procedures and discernment that you assume it could never happen to you. If you think you can't get scammed, you are a danger to yourself and others:
By the same token, any politician in their 70s or 80s who thinks that they can't suffer a stroke or heart attack or the kind of lapse that makes you freeze up during a presidential debate is a danger to their party, their politics and their nation:
This isn't about how healthy or robust any given politician is or feels; this is about the cold reality of actuarial tables. The older I get, the more those actuarial tables factor into my own decision-making. The fact that our political classes seem to think that they can choose the time and manner of their passing is baffling.
This, as an aside, is making me think of writing something about the local political system. The men at the top of it are still the ones that sat at the Round Table of 1989. And they display the mentality of a Middle-Eastern colonel, not training replacements lest they will replace them before the colonel in question keels over.
It's particularly noticeable when you look at the upstarts, typically recruited from among the aides, secretaries and gofers of the ancient apparatchiks while severely lacking knowledge but making up with arrogance instead.
That’s a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization. (...) It also established a handy streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap.
There were signs. And portents. And all the miles of writing on the wall. And everyone ignored it.
The idiots on the internet are upset that a guy who stole a mediocre idea from a forum for chuds and sold it for millions to the Hollywood media industry just allowed the Hollywood media industry to do their usual Device of Malicious Corporate Abuse bullshit and slap hundreds of folks trying to hop on his stolen mediocre idea bandwagon. So now he's begging them not to cancel him, because it's not his fault, yada yada, he can go fuck himself while doing his usual hypocritical splits.
But, let's go back in time, to the year of 2012 and Cory Doctorow's warnings about where we were heading back then. Because we have arrived at the destination.
This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose network—the PC and the Internet. If you think of computer software as a feature, a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that’s running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature. The heuristic would lead you to think that a computer unable to run spreadsheets or games would be no more of an attack on computing than a ban on car-phones would be an attack on cars.
We made pocket-sized general-purpose computers work as phones while retaining general-purpose computer functions. We connected them to the general-purpose network. And now the corporations peddling those computers to us are loading them with more and more spyware just to stop us from using them for the purposes they were designed for.
In one famous incident—a gift to people who share this hypothesis—Sony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs and terminated them. It also hid the rootkit’s existence by causing the computer operating system’s kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive.
And now that very same fucking Sony, the Sony that harassed musicians for decades for playing classical pieces like Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, has the gall to sue a company for analyzing music files publicly available on the internet. And the internet idiots are cheering.
On the network side, attempts to make a network that can’t be used for copyright infringement always converge with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. Consider SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, which bans innocuous tools such as DNSSec—a security suite that authenticates domain name information— because they might be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. It blocks Tor, an online anonymity tool sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and used by dissidents in oppressive regimes, because it can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures.
In fact, the Motion Picture Association of America, a SOPA proponent, circulated a memo citing research that SOPA might work because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan. It argued that because these measures are effective in those countries, they would work in America, too!
If you failed to notice, the entire "intellectual property rights" shitshow benefits massive corporations and sinister cabals, erm, "associations" they form to control the market. Nobody else. Certainly not the artists who are exploited as cash cows while being paid bubkes. And not you, period. Dodgy t-shirt shops can steal your fan art, and you can't do shit about it without drawing the attention of the massive corporation that owns the intellectual property rights to the characters you just drew, which means they will skullfuck you first, and that dodgy online store maybe. Because you're easy pickings, and the dodgy store probably functioned under five different aliases in the last decade in order to dodge legal responsibility.
The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and the PC, copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish—not a war.
Except, you see, it's barely happening because other sectors aren't really that susceptible to what's on the internet and what PCs do. It's always the Music And Film Industry Association of America and copygrift enforcement gangs from other countries coming after people and companies because of some kind of copyright bullshit.
The trajectory of 3D printing will raise real grievances, from solid-state meth labs to ceramic knives.
This did not happen. Mostly because it turned out that the publicly available small-scale 3D printing technology barely delivered on the grand science fiction promises. It's good for toys, it's good for prototyping, and only a few hysterical lawmakers in locales well-known for hysteria over certain topics are trying to legislate nonsensical but not copyright-related bullshit when it comes to 3D printing. Meanwhile, massive corporations that make money on stuff that started as open-source nerd toys are suing the nerds trying to keep the whole thing open-source, bypassing invasive proprietary software solutions.
Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”
And Google gleefully said "Yes, we can!", trying to kill ICE tracking apps and peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted communicators with their recent "verified vendor signature" bullshit intended to prevent people from side-loading those exact apps.
We haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.
The corporations bypassed that one as well, by not allowing us to run software processes on our devices with an ingenious idea: instead, they have us connect to their devices, thousands of them stacked in gargantuan data centers, through their protocols that they monitor in order to make sure we're not "stealing" their precious copyrighted content. They intend to take away physical media that hold that very content outside of their direct control. Why worry about selling MP3s that can be copied between devices if you can lock all of those MP3s down on your servers and transmit them over proprietary protocols to already locked-down devices? The same is true for movies. Even video games are not immune.
And when the corporations try to market new software for entirely new applications, nothing drives them as mad as free alternatives they can't control. And what do the nerds do? The same thing they kept doing with open-source games for the last two decades: they test if the general-purpose computing hardware they got their hands on can run those free alternatives. Plus ça change.
