#conflicts of interest

[republicansaretheproblem]

[gwydionmisha]

Elon Musk Under Federal Review for Brazen Flouting of Clearance Rules

The world’s richest man and close Trump ally is under investigation for hiding info on meetings with foreign leaders.

Sen. Warren urges Trump to hold Musk accountable for conflicts of interest

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wants incoming presidential advisor Elon Musk to sign an ethics pledge. She speaks with NPR's Michel Martin

Tesla sued by deceased driver’s family over 'fraudulent misrepresentation' of Autopilot safety

The family of a Tesla driver who died in a crash while using Autopilot last year is suing the company.

It's an ethics AND a safety issue. Trump is planning to stop crash/safety reporting Musk's cars.

A more graphic explanation of why we need to monitor this. (Shows crashed cars, but not the bodies). It's from that time Tesla did deadly beta testing that killed and injured a bunch of people.

Better for the billionaire: Rachel Maddow on the fallout when the presidency caters to billionaires

Rachel Maddow looks at the history of crashes by Tesla's auto pilot-driven cars and the sudden priority the Trump transition team is giving

Some of these are mostly focused on the national security implications of Musk, SpaceX, and Starlink, but the conflict of interest over things like Self driving cars matter too. It's a fundamental problem that Trump is basically letting Elon Musk make so many decisions for his own benefit.

[saywhat-politics]

Trump doesn't have “conflicts of interest” anymore. A “conflict of interest” sounds like an unfortunate situation where Trump might choose his own interests over the nation’s. But Trump isn’t conflicted about anything. He's the most corrupt president in American history.

[heliotropepajamas-books]

Fanbinding: Conflicts of Interest by rageprufrock

43rd Project, 61st Bound Book, 2026 Binderary Book #2 Conflicts of Interest (Series) by @rageprufrock Date Completed: February 8, 2026 Size: Folio.  417 pages, 138,105 words.

This is one of my favorite fics despite the fact that I mostly know about Superman through cultural osmosis and minimal exposure to the actual media.  I’m not usually a kid-fic person either but this is one of the best I’ve read.

Colors chosen because they seemed to fit with the characters.  The HTV title on the spine gave me a lot of issues and after it was on I realized I’d left off a letter (watch out for plurals).  It’s a good thing this is for personal use.

This book is actually made of two longer stories and a short, so I had the chance to try a couple different styles of title pages.  I rather like the way they all worked together.  Formatted in LibreOffice Writer with Bookman Old Style as the body font and Gil Sans Extra Bold for the titles since it seemed to fit both the mid-century Superman and Y2K Smallville vibes.  I also amused myself with a million different handwriting fonts for various letters and notes passed in class.  Some people can do very elaborate typesets with amazing illustrations and embellishments.  And then there’s me spending a day and a half waffling about scene dividers before settling on a small line of stars (a grawlix in the Astronomy dingbat font - very versatile). 

Bonus:  I did another set of sewn on-endpapers for this book, which means I had to find thread to match.  I have several generations worth of sewing thread in my house inherited from various relations and I’m pretty sure the one that matched in the end belonged to my great-grandmother.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Drinkslump linkdump

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. After that, it's LONDON (Jul 1) and MANCHESTER (Jul 2).

It's linkdump time, in which I skillfully weave together all the links that I was too busy to cram into the week's newsletter issues. Here's the previous 31 (!) installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

This week's linkdump comes with a great excuse: I was off at the staff retreat for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for intensive policy work (and a lot of team-bonding socializing – I karaoked "The Piano Has Been Drinking") with my colleagues on the front lines of the battle to disenshittify the internet. If you'd like to join that fight, here's a chance to do so: we're hiring a staff technologist!

https://www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.php/jobs?clientkey=28620672D234BF368306CEB4A2746667

Of course, you don't have to work for EFF to make disenshittificatory tech. "Just a QR Code" is a new site that generates QR codes, operating entirely in your browser, without transmitting any data to a server or trying to cram ads into your eyeballs. The fact that it runs entirely in-browser means you can save this webpage and work with an offline copy to generate QR codes forever – even if the site goes down:

https://justaqrcode.com/

One of the best, longest-tenured gatherings of anti-enshittification technologists is HOPE, the Hackers On Planet Earth con spawned by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. After getting evicted from their traditional digs at the Hotel Pennsylvania (which was bought by a billionaire who turned it into a crater and then lost interest), HOPE had to find new digs. The new location, St John's University in Queens, is fantastic, and the last event was so great they decided to go from biennial to annual:

https://hope.net/

But then, Trump hit. HOPE draws a sizable cohort of international attendees and speakers, and most of these people have decided that attending a genuinely fantastic hacker con isn't worth risk being sent to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp by a surly border guard. As a result, HOPE's numbers are dangerously low:

https://www.404media.co/hacker-conference-hope-says-fewer-people-buying-tickets-because-u-s-immigration-crackdown/

Please consider attending! HOPE is consistently one of the best events I've attended. The vibes are impeccable and the information is deep, gnarly and fantastic, and has a long, long track record of just being great.

Another beloved, long-running, print based institution is The Onion, which got a new lease on life when former disinformation reporter Ben Collins bought the site after quitting NBC, which had censured him for being too mean to Elon Musk:

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/nbc-news-ben-collins-twitter-elon-musk-1235463474/

Having been burned by corporate journalistic cowardice, Collins decided to revive The Onion's tradition of merciless, trenchant parody. He also revived The Onion's tradition of showing up in the world as a printed artifact, spraying gallons of ink onto tons of vegetable pulp and shipping the result to mailboxes around the world (including mine):

https://membership.theonion.com/

Collins sat down for a long interview with Vanity Fair's Chris Murphy that is full of so many excellent moments and quips that I actually cheered aloud while reading it, more than once!

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/the-onions-ben-collins-knows-how-to-save-media

Collins believes he saved The Onion from "AI death," and I think he's right. Instead, he's produced a site that fights fascism using one of history's most reliable methods, satire: "There’s nothing fascists hate more than getting truly ripped on." Collins points out something interesting about Trump: "He never laughs…He’s funny in the sense that callous people can be particularly biting, but he’s not funny."

Here's his advice to other would-be media barons: "Kowtowing to power— your job is not that, nobody fucking wants that."

Among other things, Collins used The Onion to acquire Alex Jones's Infowars out of bankruptcy, only to have far-right legal shenanigans interrupt the hostile takeover (it's still in the courts).

(Paywall-busting version here:)

https://archive.is/aV2av

Another funny – but much angrier – independent media voice is Ed Zitron, one of the best ranters in technology. Ed's motto is "I hate them for what they did to the computer," a phrase I like so much I used it as the epigraph for my next book. Ed's just published the longest-ever post on his excellent "Where's Your Ed At?" newsletter, called "The Era of the Business Idiot":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

In this post, Ed tried to answer the burning question, "Why are these objectively very stupid people given so much power over so much capital, and the lives of so many of us?" He lashes out at everyone – MBA programs, sociopathic Jack Welch-alikes, the supine press, and more. And he coins a truly excellent epithet for one of our most cherished business idiots, Open AI CEO Sam Altman:

SLOPPENHEIMER.

I love Ed's work, which focuses extensively on the internal ideological and personal traits of business leaders. But I think that any study of the enshittocene – and any effective opposition to enshittification – needs to start with policy, the legal arrangements that create an enshittogenic environment that allow the business idiots to wreak havoc without the constraints of competition, regulation, an empowered workforce or technological countermeasures.

In the EU, the epicenter of enshittogenesis is Ireland, a tax haven that has attracted the largest and worst American tech companies who maintain the fiction that they are based in Eire. But these companies are hardly loyal to Dublin: any company footloose enough to pretend that it's Irish this week can pretend to be Maltese, Luxembourgeois, Cypriot or Dutch next week. To keep those companies from upping sticks, Ireland must not only offer them criminally favorable tax treatment, they have to slow walk or ignore all regulations that discipline the enshittificatory impulses of Big Tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

Writing in Politico, Eoin Drea lays out the ways that Ireland is serving Trump's agenda to protect US Big Tech from EU regulators:

https://www.politico.eu/article/ireland-donald-trump-fines-white-house-washington-uk/

In particular, Drea identifies the risk that Ireland will shelter US companies from enforcement of the Digital Markets Act, the EU's "crowning legislative jewel." Ireland's PM has been carrying water for Trump, pressuring the EU to "considered and measured" in its response to Trump's aggression; he's also vowed to "resist" the EU's digital taxes. Drea argues that centralizing enforcement of EU tech regulation in Brussels and the federal courts will relieve Ireland of the pressure to defend Trump's policies, since they will no longer be in a position to protect tech companies from Europe's rules.

When it comes to flouting EU rules, of the most egregious "Irish" tech offenders is Meta. In a long article for Ars Technica, Ashley Belanger looks at Zuckerberg's recent statements about Facebook's future as a place where lonely people, having been alienated from their actual friends and families by a system that downranks posts from your social network to create space for ads and boosted posts, befriend AI chatbots instead:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/meta-hypes-ai-friends-as-social-medias-future-but-users-want-real-connections/

I contributed a little to Belanger's excellent reporting, discussing my work with EFF on what an interoperable Facebook might look like, and how it might set Facebook's prisoners free:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Mark Zuckerberg's transformation from a historically awful person to a historically monstrous person has been really something to see. In this week's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webtoon, Zach Wienersmith scores a body-blow on Zuck that was so perfect it made me bark with laughter:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gently

I firmly believe that Zuckerberg's transformation isn't due to the decay of his character. I think Zuck was always a creep, as any reader of Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all Facebook memoir Careless People can attest:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Rather, I think the collapse of the internet into what Tom Eastman calls "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four" relieved Zuck of his nagging fear that a competitor would poach his users if he abused them too much. This is the enshittogenic environment at work – when we let firms form cartels, their owners become oligarchs.

Tech is far from the only cartel. In publishing, we only have five major publishers left, and the largest, Bertelsmann, dwarfs the other four. It's hard to overstate how gigantic Bertelsmann is, but here's a trenchant example: Bertelsmann owns Penguin-Random House, and PRH has publishing deals with five sitting Supreme Court justices. This meant that a majority of the court had to recuse itself from hearing a plagiarism case involving a Ta-Nehisi Coates book. It's the first time a mass-recusal has scuppered a Supreme Court case since 1945, when the majority of justices disclosed that they were stockholders in the Alcoa, a monopolist:

https://www.newsweek.com/five-supreme-court-justices-sit-out-case-rare-move-2074666

Oligarchs are intrinsically enshittogenic. Oligarchs use their money and power to support strongmen who will trade money for government action, like Donald Trump, who offered a private dinner for major holders of his TRUMP shitcoin. The announcement prompted a ferocious bidding war among foreign agents and convicted criminals to buy up Trumpcoins and get a seat at the table:

https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-memecoin-dinner-guests/

Trump defenders claimed that the president was just rewarding people who understood the value of his coin, and not selling influence at all. Apparently, the attendees didn't get the memo, with many of them dumping their Trumpcoins the instant they were added to the guest-list:

https://protos.com/trump-token-15-since-dinner-as-40-of-guests-dump-by-dessert/

Joke's on them, though: Trump stiffed them! He showed up, gave a 15 minute speech (practically a haiku by Trump's normal standard of bloviation), then climbed into a helicopter and flew away, hundreds of millions of dollars richer thanks to the suckers left to their rubber chicken banquet:

https://link.nymag.com/view/640f640416f22cc291043cebntiap.15g1/0da0f946

Those specific oligarchs didn't get a chance to petition Trump to enact their favored policies, but Trump is still delivering for oligarchs. The "Big Beautiful Bill" that was passed in the dead of night last week included a whole raft of "sleeper" provisions, each worse than the last, as enumerated by The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-05-23-ten-sneaky-sleeper-provisions-trumps-big-beautiful-bill/

Among these:

taking away the courts' ability to use federal funds to hold government officials in contempt;

$45 billion for immigration gulags, to be built by Trump's favorite beltway bandits;

a nonprofit killer that lets the president cancel the nonprofit status of any org that challenges him (this died earlier last week and was revived in the "Big Beautiful Bill");

doubling the threshold for estate taxes, so a couple can leave $30m to their heirs tax-free, meaning that only 0.8% of US households will face any estate tax;

gutting the child tax credit, taking away support from 4.5m children of taxpaying parents who lack a Social Security Number and making millions more ineligible;

cutting health coverage for millions of people dependent on Obamacare; and

getting rid of the excise tax on gun silencers.

We're heading into some dark times indeed. It can be hard to imagine things ever getting better, but there was one author who consistently imagined bold, utopian, audacious far futures: Iain M. Banks, whose "Culture" series remain one of the greatest science fiction visions ever published:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

Banks's books are available in cheap paperbacks, and there's no shortage of used copies, but if you're looking to get a truly gorgeous Banks volume, the Folio Society has you covered, with a new, slipcased edition of Use of Weapons:

https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/use-of-weapons.html

I love Folio books and often give them as Christmas gifts to the people who matter most to me on my list. This one comes with seven full-page illustrations by Dániel Taylor.

In other publishing news, I got a care-package from my publisher this week: a box of advance review copies of my next book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

I'm very proud of how this one came out as a book, but I'm just as excited by how gorgeous this book is as an artifact:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54540006021/

I'm going into the studio to record the audiobook in August, and there's a graphic novel and documentary in the offing.

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/2025/05/24/erin-go-ugh/#raider-of-the-lost-arc

[twopoppies]

I was just reading an article about the Black Keys firing Irving Azoff as their manager and cancelled a tour because of it , wilddddd they were open about it and not giving a damn if there was retaliation from crusty irv lmao. Harry should be taking notes , you don’t have to be stuck with the same fucking creeps your entire career if you see they are doing you wrong or do not have your best interest in mind 📝

I really need for you guys to stop making statements like this because it’s apples and oranges. Harry Styles career and his connection to the Azoffs is absolutely nothing like the situation The Black Keys had. And they actually were concerned about retaliation and say so very clearly.

However, there are some importantly comments in this article that have to do with what we’ve been talking about in terms of the shady nature of this business and the monopoly that exists between Ticketmaster, live nation, promoters, Irving, etc etc etc.

[…] they canceled the entire tour, reportedly due to low ticket sales, and subsequently fired their management — which included industry heavyweight Irving Azoff — and PR team. Two weeks later, in a since-deleted tweet aimed at Azoff, drummer Patrick Carney wrote, “We got fucked. I’ll let you all know how so it doesn’t happen to you.” (In another deleted tweet, Carney sarcastically wrote of Azoff, “So great to know you are always looking out for the artist.”)

What specifically was shocking to you?

Carney: To generalize: to see how consolidated the industry has gotten and how connected things have become. It’s mind-blowing. And there’s just a lot of shared interests across the business side of this. When you’re an artist trying to interface with that and trying to receive helpful and constructive strategy and business input, you realize that that whole world is more deeply connected than I had ever really thought.

Let’s get into some details. Two weeks after the tour was canceled, a rep for Azoff said the split was “an amicable parting.” Is that how you would characterize it?

Carney: [Pauses.] I mean, we fired their ass. Shit happens. We spent a lot of time making Ohio Players and turned it in in October 2023 and had all this time to plan how we were going to tour. Things got off to this weird start where I was waiting for these European dates to pop up because our plan was to go to Europe first. We ended up getting nine shows sent to us [on] a three-week tour. There’s absolutely no way to make money [from] that.

We kept having to move shit around for a Manchester show because there was a venue that our management company co-owned and wanted us to play, and it wasn’t ready. After going to Europe 30 times in our career for tours, this was the most poorly orchestrated tour we had been on. The shows were incredible, but [it] just became the first sign that maybe there was some poor organization happening.

When did the relationship with Irving Azoff sour?

Carney: The ultimate answer to this is that it’s a broader thing. I don’t even want to mention that guy’s name. I want to look at this from a bigger perspective. The essential thing that we learned here was how many management companies are directly connected to a company that runs every single aspect of promotion in this country. This whole industry is so intertwined from ticketing to promotion to the management company. But essentially as artists — and this is the thing that we care the most about — it’s almost impossible to talk about this…. You’re dealing with management companies that co-own festivals with this other company. You’re at the [whims] of these people who have other interests.

So when you’re called into a manager’s office and he suggests something to you, I was naive enough to think that that was on the up-and-up. And more and more, it’s just not. So it’s a hard thing because I don’t think Dan and I want to sit here and look like whining bitches. But we got a little bamboozled here.

Patrick, last year you tweeted: “We got fucked. I’ll let you all know how so it doesn’t happen to you. Stay tuned.” How do you feel you got “bamboozled”?

Carney: Well, I had to delete it, so I didn’t get sued.

Who threatened to sue you?

Carney: No one threatened, but it was a big no-no to even talk about what’s going on here. There’s a concentration of connectivity that eliminates competition. [For] a capitalist society to function, there has to be competition. And if everything’s connected and all the interests are shared on one side, there’s no way to compete. Our tour, we had about 10 [arena] shows that were not doing great. They were just in rooms that they shouldn’t have been in.

So in any situation like this tour, we might’ve had to take one on the chin and find new venues to play in certain cities, but instead we were advised to cancel the whole tour. We were told … there were other venues being booked, and it was all going to get into more intimate rooms, and it would be great. But that wasn’t accurate. That didn’t exist.

It’s all very fucked up, and the bottom line is that we can’t even really talk about it because we won’t be able to work.

Full article here

I think these two quotes are especially important to consider in terms of Harry’s situation:

“The essential thing that we learned here was how many management companies are directly connected to a company that runs every single aspect of promotion in this country. This whole industry is so intertwined from ticketing to promotion to the management company. But essentially as artists — and this is the thing that we care the most about — it’s almost impossible to talk about this…. You’re dealing with management companies that co-own festivals with this other company. You’re at the [whims] of these people who have other interests.”

And this:

“It’s all very fucked up, and the bottom line is that we can’t even really talk about it because we won’t be able to work.”

[islandmanpa]

#AMERICA DESPERATELY NEEDS TO GET RID OF THESE DISGUSTING LIBERAL, #LEFTIST, #DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED #JUDGES‼️😠🤬🤮

ANY OF @TheDemocrats !!!!!!

[hale-my-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Trump's Stance Appears Unlawful !!!

No One Is Above The Law & Violates The Emoluments Clause