#molly white

[fanzines]

'Defend The Internet Archive' linocut print by Molly White. Donate to the Internet Archive (using PayPal through their site). [Image description] Black ink linocut print of a person in a dress reaching for a book on a large bookshelf. Above is “Free people read freely”; below is “Defend the Internet Archive”.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Why Wikipedia works

The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.

If you've ever spent time around Wikipedians, you've doubtless heard its motto: "Wikipedia only works in practice. In theory, it's a mess." It's a delicious line, which is why I stole it for my 2017 novel Walkaway.

But this is one of those lines that's too good to fact-check. The truth is that there's a theory that very neatly describes how Wikipedia works; that is, how Wikipedia is one of the best sources of information ever assembled, despite allowing tens of thousands of anonymous and pseudonymous people with no verifiable credentials to participate in a collective knowledge creating process.

Nupedia, Wikipedia's immediate predecessor, tried to solve this problem by verifying its editors and establishing that they had the requisite expertise before allowing them to write encyclopedia entries in the domain of their expertise. This was an abject failure: not only was it so slow as to be indistinguishable from dormancy (Nupedia produced a mere 20 articles in its first year), but also the fact that these articles were written by experts did not mean that they were good. After all, experts disagree!

Wikipedia jettisoned user-verification in favor of source verification. After all, it's impossible for a group of strangers to agree on the identity of another stranger, let alone what qualifies them to write an encyclopedia entry. Instead, Wikipedia created a process by which a source could be deemed noteworthy and reliable source, then instituted a policy that assertions appearing on Wikipedia had to be cited to a noteworthy and reliable source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources

As I wrote for Make magazine in 2009, Wikipedia doesn't contain factual assertions so much as it contains assertions about facts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091116023225/http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol20/?pg=16

Wikipedia doesn't say "It is a true fact that Cory Doctorow is 54 years old." It says that a website called "Writers Write" published the assertion that my birthday is July 17, 1971:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#cite_note-3

There's no ready way for you to verify my birthday‡, but anyone can verify that Writers Write published this and claimed it was true.

‡ Unless, of course, you are my mother, who does read this blog. Hi, Mom!

Not only did this resolve otherwise unresolvable disputes, but it's also a tactic that got more effective as the internet grew, and more noteworthy sources were digitized and made readily available. A major milestone here was the creation of the Internet Archive's Open Library, which aims to scan and index every book ever published. That meant that the citations to print sources in the footnotes of Wikipedia entries could be automatically linked to a scanned page and verified by everyone:

https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/29/weaving-books-into-the-web-starting-with-wikipedia/

Wikipedia omitted a step that was considered indispensable throughout the entire history of encyclopedias – verifying facts – and replaced it with a new step – verifying sources. This maneuver is characteristic of many of the most successful online experiments: get rid of something deemed essential and replace it with a completely different process, suited to the affordances and limitations of a world-spanning, public, anonymous network.

That's what eBay did in 1995, when (as Auctionweb), it created a person-to-person selling platform that neither verified the identities of buyers or sellers, nor did it use an escrow service that held money in trust until goods were received. Rather, it replaced these existing measures with a new kind of reputation system, whereby reliable sellers could be sorted from scammers by looking at their numeric scores.

That's also what Kickstarter did. Kickstarter is based on a scheme first mooted by John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier in 1998, which they called "The Street Performer Protocol":

https://www.schneier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/paper-street-performer.pdf

In the Street Performer Protocol, a provider of goods or services announces that once a set amount of funds were pledged, they will deliver something. Think of a street juggler who wows a crowd with an escalating series of impressive tricks, before calling out, "For my final trick, I will juggle eleven razor-sharp machetes with my feet – but I will only do this trick once there's $100 in my hat."

Many people tried to implement this as a digital service before Kickstarter. They all foundered on a seemingly insurmountable hurdle: the sellers were raising money to make the thing they were raising money for. All the pre-Kickstarter platforms erred on the side of protecting buyers by holding onto the money until the promised goods or services were delivered. But because the seller needed the money to deliver on their promise, this repeatedly failed. It was a procedural vapor-lock: I can't do the thing until I have your money, but I can't get your money until I do the thing.

So Kickstarter jettisoned the escrow step, handing campaign creators the full payout and then trusting them not to run off with the dough. The platform understood that this would allow a certain amount of fraud and failure, but deemed it worthwhile, especially after they took countermeasures to minimize backer losses, such as verifying sellers, subjecting projects to human review, and canceling any project that failed to meet its funding goals (if you need the money to do the thing, and you don't raise enough money, then you will not be able to do the thing).

In the Oblique Strategies deck, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt counsel us to "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before":

https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

That's what Wikipedia did when it swapped verifying facts for agreeing on sources. It's what eBay did when it swapped validating sellers and buyers for reviews. It's what Kickstarter did when it swapped escrow for acceptable losses, project review, and setting minimum funding thresholds.

Platforms may not know it, but they live by the "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before" maxim. They're forever removing seemingly load-bearing Jenga blocks to see whether the whole thing collapses. After all, it's certainly possible to omit a step and cause a catastrophe.

Kickstarter competitors like Indiegogo tried omitting the funding threshold restriction, passing any amount raised to the creator, even if it was too little to complete the project, but after an initial blush of success, lost a lot of ground to Kickstarter, partly due to customers who felt burned when the project they put money into never delivered.

But that's not the only problem with "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before." Often, the new measure instituted to replace a former bedrock principle turns out to have critical flaws that bad actors can discover and exploit.

So eBay's success conjured up an army of "reputation farmers," who sold a series of low-value items to the public (or to one another, or to alternative accounts they operated themselves), cultivating a high reputation on the platform. Once they reached this high score, they listed a bunch of high-value items (like dozens of $1,000 laptops) and absconded with the money.

And Kickstarter's payment threshold isn't that hard to game: just set a very low funding goal, and you are guaranteed your money. Sure, the funding goal has to be high enough to satisfy a human reviewer, but for many items, it's hard to know exactly what constitutes a reasonable funding threshold.

Then there's Wikipedia. 25 years ago, it seemed easier for a group of strangers to agree on whether a source was noteworthy and reliable than it would be for them to agree on a fact. But while that remains true, it did open up a new avenue of attack: bad actors who wanted to slip lies and spin into Wikipedia could switch from arguing about which facts were true to arguing about which sources were reliable.

That's exactly what's happening today, and it's the conflict that forms the spine of Josh Dzieza's lengthy, magisterial essay on the past, present and future of Wikipedia for The Verge:

https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales

Dzieza describes how compelling and effective the Wikipedia "facts about facts" approach has been. It's such a sweet hack that it converted many Wikipedia vandals and trolls to editors in good standing, who switched from making Wikipedia worse to making it better.

But in an age of endless culture wars, conservatives have turned their sights on Wikipedia. Conservative publications are – empirically speaking – the most falsehood-strewn and conspiratorial branch of the press:

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-political-gap-in-americans-news-sources/

The fact that reality has a pronounced left-wing bias means that many popular conservative publications have been disqualified as reliable sources on Wikipedia, starting with the Daily Mail in 2017. This has the Maga right spitting feathers about "anti-conservative bias on Wokeapedia," and has Maga Congresstrolls demanding that Wikipedia unmask its editors and disclose their identities, a risk formerly confined to Russia, India, China and Turkiye.

The emergence of this threat in the USA is a potential game-changer for the Wikipedia Foundation, which has long relied on its US domicile – and the First Amendment – to protect the core project from political censorship. Wikipedia's status as the best, most trusted source of information on the internet has painted a crosshairs on its back: leaked Heritage Foundation slides detail a plan to force Wikipedia to unmask editors who contribute criticism of Israel to the project.

The Media Research Center has called for the Big Tech monopolists – Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all openly allied with Trump today – to block Wikipedia until it agrees to treat Newsmax, OANN and other conspiratorial publications as reliable sources.

Ironically, one of the things the right hates most about Wikipedia is that it takes affirmative measures to identify and correct its bias, for example, by actively encouraging editorial participation by members of minorities who are underrepresented in Wikipedia's volunteer editor cohort. Right wing demagogues call this "DEI," even as they demand that the government force Wikipedia to institute DEI for conspiracy-addled right wing trolls. As the saying goes, "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

The culture war on Wikipedia isn't the only risk the project faces. Dictators around the world are obsessed with dominating Wikipedia. Dzieza describes how one anonymous editor in a Middle Eastern autocracy was summoned by the secret police, who ordered him to capitalize on his standing as a long-term Wikipedia editor to insert pro-regime materials into the encyclopedia.

One of Wikipedia's great strengths is its structure. While Wikipedia started out as one of the internet's characteristic "benevolent dictator for life" projects, with founder Jimmy Wales taking on the role of "God King" of Wikipedia, Wales voluntarily walked away from his power, creating a nonprofit with an independent board (Wikimedia Foundation) and then handing his veto power over to an Arbitration Committee made up of volunteer editors.

This was a rare and remarkable gesture. The internet has many of these "benevolent dictator for life" public interest projects, and nearly all of them are still controlled by their founders, who may be benevolent, but are far from perfect:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

It's all the more remarkable that the internet's most prominent self-deposing benevolent dictator is Jimmy Wales, a self-professed, Ayn Rand-reading libertarian. While many of self-described leftist benevolent dictators who preside over other key pieces of internet infrastructure decided that their projects needed the long-term control of their founders, it was Wales, a libertarian, who decided that a project of so much collective importance should have collective rule.

But while Wales has stepped down as Wikipedia's God King (and its "single throat to choke" by the world's dictators and thin-skinned billionaires), there is something of his unique genius in the ethos of the project, and its ability to civilly bring together people of many irreconcilable viewpoints to collaborate on something they all value. I've known Wales for decades and count him a friend, notwithstanding the wide gap in our political philosophies.

If you want to be a Wikipedian – and I hope you do – there are many ways to get started. The easiest is probably fixing punctuation errors and typos: when you come across these on a Wikipedia entry, click the edit button and just fix 'em, making sure to check off the "this is a minor edit" box before you hit submit.

But for a more ambitious entree, try this method by veteran Wikipedian – and slayer of cryptocurrency bullshit – Molly White, who, in 30 brisk minutes, shows to go to the library, find a cool book, and use the facts you find therein to make Wikipedia a better, more complete source of knowledge:

https://blog.mollywhite.net/become-a-wikipedian-transcript/

You don't have to be an expert in butterflies, hydrology or the Peloponnesian War to improve their respective entries. You just have to find a useful fact in a reliable source. Go ahead: be the latest person to do what no person (before Jimmy Wales) ever thought of not doing.

Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

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/2025/09/05/be-the-first-person/#to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-thought-of-not-doing-before

Image: penubag (modified) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_logo_%28svg%29.svg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[destrokkit]

The Strawberry Fields Jacket

Our very first project was the DIY Jacket kits. We made screens of the laid-out patterns for American style Bomber jackets with printed images on the sleeves with the main image on the back sections. We started the Cut'n'Sew kits in '68 - it was a huge project with over 100 silk-screens that ran for 4 years. The first Cut'n'Sew designs were Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jayne Mansfield, Baked Beans and The Strawberry. Our Painless Tattoo Collection had taken over the production of the Cut'N'Sew Kits and slowed up progress. The Silver Surfer was the last of the kits - by then we were probably into 1971 and working with that amazing store at 430 Kings Road called Paradise Garage. The Strawberry Jacket idea was our 5th jacket piece. It was in January 1970 - a cold winter's day when we caught the bus to Mayfair. Fortnum & Mason was the only store in the UK with fresh Strawberries - from South Africa - very expensive. They were a luscious red, huge with splendid pips. We decided to run straight over to John Claridge's studio at London Wall to have them photographed while they were still fresh. John Claridge and I had worked together on many projects so he was always ready to help us with the photography. A brilliant photographer in his own right, he produced some amazing dark close-ups which could have taken us in a completely different direction - but we stuck with the first idea. John made a few terrific B/ W close-ups on a white ground of a single strawberry - the best of the bunch. We would superficially create the Red, Yellow and Blue colour screens by making some line and half-tone positives merged together. So in 1972, we plumbed for the Granny Takes A Trip offer to sell the Jackets in satin. All three Granny's outlets stocked the jackets and so did Colette Neville Pret-a-porter, Paris, and Vibrations, Los Angeles. Later in In 1973, Paul McCartney ordered 6 Strawberry Jackets for his first USA tour since Shea Stadium and wore the Jacket on Top of The Pops in the UK. The Strawberry Jacket soon became known as The Strawberry Fields Jacket - a tribute to the Beatles song "Strawberry Fields". Paul McCartney became a collector of our T-shirts.

Source John Dove and Molly White's IG

[yhancik]

Tech Influence Watch tracks how much the crypto and AI industry is spending in US elections

It's run by Molly White, who explains the project here:

I’m launching Tech Influence Watch as AI follows crypto into politics

Most voters don’t know that crypto and AI companies have spent more than $400 million this cycle to buy Congress. Let’s make that spending v

I’ve been running my website Follow the Crypto since 2024, tracking the cryptocurrency industry’s influence on our democracy. The industry spent more than $130 million buying the 2024 elections, and the strategy worked. Pro-crypto politicians have proposed or passed industry-drafted legislation that threatens to open the floodgates to even more predatory crypto products, regulatory agencies were gutted, and crypto executives bought direct access to the President and positions in the White House. Now the artificial intelligence industry is following the same playbook.

[transpondster]

It matters. I care.

When we throw up our hands and say none of it matters, we're doing the fascists’ work for them. They don't need to hide their corruption if

“Who cares? It doesn’t matter anyway.” I’ve come to expect these words in my social media replies to my own work, and elsewhere in response to other journalists doing critical reporting on the abuses of the Trump regime.

And these aren’t just a few social media responses, they’re expressions of a much broader resignation I’m seeing on- and offline: That caring is somehow naive. That documenting the truth is pointless. That hope is for fools.

Let me be clear: It fucking matters. Truth matters. Documentation matters. Fighting corruption matters. That accountability seems out of reach right now doesn’t change that. When we internalize the belief that nothing can change, we stop demanding change. When we accept corruption as normal, we stop fighting it. When we dismiss documentation of wrongdoing as pointless, we give wrongdoers exactly what they want: permission to continue unchecked and with no record of their actions.

I understand the despair in these kinds of responses. We’ve all watched impeachments fail, courts falter, institutions buckle, and politicians repeatedly trade away democracy for their next campaign check. But giving up on the very idea that truth and morality matter is not just cynicism, it’s surrender.

Without a commitment to documenting truth, all that’s left is propaganda. And we’ve already seen this play out in what were once some of the most respected publications

_________

We all have a blog or newsletter we believe isn’t getting enough respect or traction or attention. For me, the #1 person who fits that definition is Molly White. She started out with a blog called “Web3 Is Going Great”, about all the scams and thefts and lies associated with crypto and blockchain and big tech, including daily in-court coverage of the Sam Bankman Fried trial (remember that?). She still covers that beat on her “Citation Needed” blog, but she’s also been writing extensively about the crypto grifting of the Trump family and White House staff. I’d recommend her newsletter to anyone.

[beastlyarchive]

Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia

The world's richest man has joined a growing chorus of right-wing voices attacking Wikipedia as part of an intensifying campaign against fre

[librarianrafia]

AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?

AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.

"But there is a yawning gap between "AI tools can be handy for some things" and the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument that "well, they can sometimes be handy..." doesn't offer much of a justification.

...

When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.

...

But I find one common thread among the things AI tools are particularly suited to doing: do we even want to be doing these things? If all you want out of a meeting is the AI-generated summary, maybe that meeting could've been an email. If you're using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre, auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them? Or is it just middle-management busywork?

...

Costs and benefits

Throughout all this exploration and experimentation I've felt a lingering guilt, and a question: is this even worth it? And is it ethical for me to be using these tools, even just to learn more about them in hopes of later criticizing them more effectively?

The costs of these AI models are huge, and not just in terms of the billions of dollars of VC funds they're burning through at incredible speed. These models are well known to require far more computing power (and thus electricity and water) than a traditional web search or spellcheck. Although AI company datacenters are not intentionally wasting electricity in the same way that bitcoin miners perform millions of useless computations, I'm also not sure that generating a picture of a person with twelve fingers on each hand or text that reads as though written by an endlessly smiling children's television star who's being held hostage is altogether that much more useful than a bitcoin.

There's a huge human cost as well. Artificial intelligence relies heavily upon "ghost labor": work that appears to be performed by a computer, but is actually delegated to often terribly underpaid contractors, working in horrible conditions, with few labor protections and no benefits. There is a huge amount of work that goes into compiling and labeling data to feed into these models, and each new model depends on ever-greater amounts of said data — training data which is well known to be scraped from just about any possible source, regardless of copyright or consent. And some of these workers suffer serious psychological harm as a result of exposure to deeply traumatizing material in the course of sanitizing datasets or training models to perform content moderation tasks.

Then there's the question of opportunity cost to those who are increasingly being edged out of jobs by LLMs,i despite the fact that AI often can't capably perform the work they were doing. Should I really be using AI tools to proofread my newsletters when I could otherwise pay a real person to do that proofreading? Even if I never intended to hire such a person?

Or, more accurately, by managers and executives who believe the marketing hype out of AI companies that proclaim that their tools can replace workers, without seeming to understand at all what those workers do.

Finally, there's the issue of how these tools are being used, and the lack of effort from their creators to limit their abuse. We're seeing them used to generate disinformation via increasingly convincing deepfaked images, audio, or video, and the reckless use of them by previously reputable news outlets and others who publish unedited AI content is also contributing to misinformation. Even where AI isn't being directly used, it's degrading trust so badly that people have to question whether the content they're seeing is generated, or whether the "person" they're interacting with online might just be ChatGPT. Generative AI is being used to harass and sexually abuse. Other AI models are enabling increased surveillance in the workplace and for "security" purposes — where their well-known biases are worsening discrimination by police who are wooed by promises of "predictive policing". The list goes on.

[alanshemper]

Follow the Crypto

Follow the cryptocurrency industry’s influence on 2024 elections in the United States.

Molly White's (@molly0xFFF) new project tracking cryptocurrency industry spending in the 2024 campaign cycle