#collective action

[cafiffle]

Starbucks is on strike and are asking for a full boycott. If you're someone who visits Starbucks often, please take this opportunity to stand in support of the workers who make your drinks, and don't cross the picket line.

Here's their bsky if you want to follow along for updates.

[thoughtportal]

TODAY (January 23, 2026): Hundreds of thousands in Minnesota braved -10°F weather to march through downtown Minneapolis as part of the statewide general strike demanding ICE out of the Twin Cities. via BT News

[clotheshorsepodcast]

This weekend I thrifted the cutest book ever....like I literally gasped when I pulled it off the shelf in the craft book section of Freedom Thrift near Blue Ball (real town name, I promise).  

The book is called "Soft Toys to Stitch and Stuff," a Farm Journal Craft Book, published in 1983.  Sometimes I think I've seen all the cool weird vintage books...and then I encounter a new one.   As soon as I opened this one, I knew the images had to be used for some Clotheshorse-isms about fast fashion, consumerism, and wealth inequality.  Also, I definitely need to make some of these animals because they are all amazing!

Which one is your favorite?

ETA: A lot of you are asking me to scan patterns from this book for you. Unfortunately my scanner is too small for that. But the good news? Is that you can find the whole book here: https://archive.org/details/softtoystostitch0000bens

[markscherz]

The frogblr community has mysteriously disappeared with no notice or explanation. Reblog and add a frog to show @staff we need our community back!

I’ll go first.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tiktokification shall set us free

Angelenos! I’ll be at the Los Angeles Festival of Books SUNDAY (Apr 19) for a panel called “Nature or Nurture: How Humans and AI Are Changing Each Other” with Adam Becker, Joanne McNeil, and Lucas Cantor Santiago.

Mark Zuckerberg has a problem with your friends: they're the reason you signed up to use his platform, but they stubbornly refuse to organize your socialization to "maximize engagement." Every time you and your friends wrap up a social interaction and log off, Zuckerberg loses revenue.

After all, by definition, you and your friends have a lot of shared context. You probably feel mostly the same way about most things. You probably mostly consume the same kind of media. You probably mostly consume the same kinds of news. You and your friends make each other's lives better in lots of ways, but typically not by surprising one another. On a typical day, no friend of yours is going to absolutely floor you with a novel thought or finding that sparks hours of furious conversation and argumentation.

And speaking of argumentation: you and your friends probably don't argue that much – I mean, sure, you'll have "friendly disagreements" (again, by definition), but if there's a friend who sparks furious, frustrating, irresistible feuds that drag on and on, chances are that person won't be your friend anymore.

Facebook experienced sustained, meteoric growth by letting people connect with their friends, but Zuckerberg quickly came to understand that his path to revenue maximization ran through nonconsensually cramming strangers' posts into your eyeballs, in the hopes that you would lose yourself in long, pointless arguments.

But that, too, hit a limit. Most of us don't like having our limbic systems tormented by strangers. As anyone who is sick to the back teeth of just hearing the word "Trump" can attest, living in a trollocracy is exhausting.

Enter Tiktok. Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don't make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you "engaged" with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you'd stare at the longest with a "heating tool" that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn't give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those "content creators" are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms' owners and executives. They may be more "engaging" than your friends, but they're also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What's a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is "AI creators." An "AI creator" is like a "creator" in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a "creator," it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform's shareholders and executives. It's the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

But there's a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms' single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so "sticky." The platforms don't "hack your dopamine loops" – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can't even agree on what board-game you're going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it's time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends' unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

The key word here is fungible. A feed composed of things posted by people you have a personal connection to is non-fungible: it cannot be swapped for a feed of things posted by strangers. Your friends fulfill a very specific purpose in your life that strangers – even extremely cool strangers – cannot match.

On the other hand: one feed of algorithmically selected, entertaining amateur dramatics is broadly equivalent to any other feed of algorithmically selected amateur dramatics. That goes double for feeds whose performers are "multi-homing" on more than one platform – whether you see the extremely charming and interesting Vlog Brothers in a Youtube feed, a Tiktok feed or an Insta feed makes no difference (to you – but it matters a lot to the platform bosses). That goes quintuple for feeds composed of AI slop, which is literally the most interchangeable video that modern science is capable of producing.

All of which is to say: the platforms are deliberately feeding their most important commercial assets into a shredder, in a fit of pique over your friends' unwillingness to act like chatbots. Every day and in every way, the platforms are making it easier to leave them for some rival's service, chasing the billionaire solipsist's dream of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/17/live-by-the-swordlive-by-the-sword/#unfriending-tom

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/17/for-youze/#forever

[our-trans-punk-experience]

tumblr reversing the system change already might be the best example of collective action yielding positive results I've ever seen

[intoxicatingimmediacy]

It's the End of American Science As We Know It

We have 45 days to express our opposition to catastrophic changes.

It's the End of American Science As We Know It We have 45 days to express our opposition to catastrophic changes.

[...] These rules, which we have 45 days to comment on starting May 29th, will affect every federal agency, affecting Housing, Education, Health and Human Services, NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy among all the others.

I urge you to read Elizabeth Ginexi’s detailed summary. The broad brush strokes reflect the historical authoritarian moves described in my talk:

Diminishing or eliminating peer review in favor of political appointee decision-making. The peer-review process is where experts anonymously assess scientific proposals and outcomes on the basis of their expertise. Removing this means that funding decisions will be made on the basis of political sensibilities, rather than scientific sense.

Targeting climate change research, which is our best hope for sustaining all life on Earth. U.S. government agencies are some of the biggest climate change research organizations in the world and gutting their capacity to do this work literally puts the future of our species at risk.

Targeting and cutting research by and about disfavored minority groups (specifically trans people and anyone doing “DEI,” where it’s clear “DEI” is primarily a placeholder for “Black people” in the eyes of this administration).

Political litmus tests for researchers that allow grants to be cut if the researcher is a member of a civil rights organization the administration doesn’t like, even when their membership activities are kept completely separate from grant activity.

Total control over researcher conference attendance.

Functionally this means a political takeover of university research apparatuses by encouraging universities to censor their researchers.

This will also function as fiscal influence over professional societies through cuts to researcher attendance of conference and membership dues.

These changes are dystopian and ecologically unsustainable. They also completely unravel the American scientific enterprise in a way that is so thorough that you’d think only someone who really hates the United States would do this.

[...] Here’s What You Can Do

Submit a comment opposing these changes. You can use Elizabeth Ginexi’s summary to help you highlight the problems. YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE A GOOD WRITER TO DO THIS! JUST WRITE WHAT IS IN YOUR HEART!

This is a federal government issue, but it will affect the states because many of them get grants from the federal government. Contact your state reps — House and Senate — and governor and urge them to publicly and vigorously oppose these changes. Yes even if they are Republican. Remind them of how this will hurt farmers who get funding from the Department of Agriculture, state public health infrastructure, etc. These rule changes are almost certainly illegal under Congressionally-passed laws, and we need the states to be ready to sue if they get implemented.

Contact your Congressional representatives. Phone calls are better than emails, but do the best you can. You can use 5 Calls to find the numbers. Yes you need to call Republicans. Be a thorn in their side, even if you think they won’t listen.

Tell everyone who will listen. Forward this email. Text people the link to Elizabeth Ginexi’s summary.