2026-03-17 05:39:23
There is a sentence near the beginning of Arielle Roth’s remarks to the Media Institute’s Communications Forum luncheon, delivered in Washington on 25 February, that is worth sitting with before we do anything else with it.
“Every major advancement in communications technology has shifted who holds power over speech.”
That’s true. It’s also, for a Trump administration official, a remarkably honest framing of what’s actually at stake in global technology policy. The printing press didn’t just spread ideas — it redistributed the power to propagate them, pulling that power away from the church and the crown and depositing it, unevenly and chaotically, somewhere else.
Radio and television centralised it again. The internet scattered it. And now the question of who controls the infrastructure of the internet — the physical networks, the standards those networks run on, the satellites that bypass terrestrial choke points, the AI systems that increasingly mediate what we see and say — has become the defining political question of our moment.
Roth knows this. That’s what makes the speech interesting. And that’s what makes it worth reading carefully rather than dismissing.
So let’s read it carefully.
Roth’s core argument is that communications infrastructure is the new terrain of speech politics. Not the content layer — not what’s posted, what’s moderated, what’s amplified — but the layer beneath: the protocols, the standards bodies, the spectrum allocations, the satellite constellations, the architecture of next-generation networks.
“Today,” she says, “that struggle plays out not only at the edge of the network but deep in the infrastructure layers — in spectrum policy, standards bodies, satellite governance, AI systems, and network architecture.”
Again: correct. This is precisely how power operates in the 21st century communications environment. The people who wrote the TCP/IP protocols shaped the internet more profoundly than any content moderator ever will. The countries that dominate 3GPP — the standards body that defines how mobile networks are built — are making decisions that will echo through global communications for decades. If you control the stack, you control the speech. Not directly, not always visibly, but structurally and persistently.
She extends this to satellite. Whoever can deploy broadband satellites at scale can bypass the terrestrial infrastructure that authoritarian governments use to choke information flows. During the Iran protests, the government shut down the internet. During the early days of the Ukraine war, Starlink kept communications alive in ways that mattered. These are real examples of infrastructure as freedom-supporting technology, and Roth invokes them correctly.
She’s even right about the standards bodies. There are genuine and well-documented efforts by authoritarian states — China in particular, but not exclusively — to push governance models into international technical forums like the ITU that would effectively create a framework for state-controlled internet architecture. The splinternet isn’t a myth. It’s a live geopolitical project, and the standards bodies are a real battlefield.
So here I am, nodding along. A Trump official making a sophisticated infrastructure-as-speech argument, citing real examples of real authoritarianism, identifying a genuinely important strategic challenge. Maybe, you might think, this is one of those moments where the stopped clock is right.
And then she makes the slide.
It happens fast, and if you’re not watching for it, you might miss it. Having established China and Iran as her primary examples — state censorship, internet shutdowns, the Great Firewall, surveillance built into the architecture of the network — she pivots to what she calls “some of today’s most significant threats.”
These threats, she tells us, “often come from countries that claim to share our democratic values.”
The framing is careful. “Claim to share.” Already we’re being told that the democratic credentials of these countries are dubious that their values are performed rather than genuine. And then she names them.
Europe. The UK. Canada. France.
“In Europe, the Digital Services Act imposes sweeping regulatory regimes backed by crippling penalties that incentivise platforms to remove speech authorities deem ‘harmful’ or ‘misinformation’.”
The UK’s Online Safety Act “includes rules about content safety standards.” Canada “effectively forces American companies to subsidise domestic media and comply with government-directed content mandates.” France, apparently, also features.
And there it is. The move. China and Iran on one side of the ledger; the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada on the other. Different in degree, perhaps, the speech allows — but not in kind. All of them, fundamentally, doing the same thing: using control of infrastructure and regulation to control speech.
This is not an accidental equivalence. It is the entire point of the speech.
Let’s be honest about the DSA and the Online Safety Act because the best way to refute the false equivalence isn’t to pretend these laws are perfect. They’re not.
The Digital Services Act places obligations on very large online platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks associated with their services — algorithmic amplification of content that incites violence, the spread of illegal content, threats to electoral integrity. It creates transparency requirements, gives researchers access to data, and establishes an enforcement mechanism. It is bureaucratic, its definitions of harm are contestable, and it will create compliance burdens that some legitimate speech will rub against. These are real concerns.
The Online Safety Act is messier, and one provision deserves to be named directly rather than waved past. Section 121 — the so-called spy clause — gives Ofcom dormant powers to require platforms to use approved scanning technology to detect illegal content, including in private encrypted communications. If exercised, compliance would almost certainly mean breaking end-to-end encryption. Signal, WhatsApp, and others have said publicly they would rather leave the UK market than implement it. Security researchers have described it as technically dangerous. Civil liberties organisations have called it a framework for routine state-sanctioned surveillance. They’re right on all counts. Those powers haven’t been used. They are still in the law, and they shouldn’t be there.
So: the Online Safety Act contains a genuine and serious threat to the privacy of private communications, currently dormant and fiercely contested, built on a justification — child safety — that is real even when the mechanism proposed to address it is wrong. That’s the honest picture.
Now here is what neither law does. Neither law empowers the state to shut down the internet. Neither law creates a government ministry of truth with the power to arrest journalists. Neither embeds surveillance architecture into the physical network infrastructure as a condition of market access. Neither has been used to black out coverage of protests. The Online Safety Act’s worst provisions remain unexercised precisely because democratic accountability — parliamentary scrutiny, legal challenge, platform resistance, press coverage — has so far constrained them.
That accountability is the difference. Not the intentions of the legislators, not the cleanliness of the drafting, but the existence of mechanisms that can push back. The Great Firewall has no such mechanisms. It is the infrastructure.
The DSA and the Online Safety Act are attempts — imperfect, in one case dangerously so — by democratic governments to hold large private platforms accountable for the systemic harms those platforms generate and profit from. You can disagree with the approach. You can argue, with some justification in the OSA’s case, that the cure is worse than the disease. These are legitimate arguments, and people worth reading make them.
What you cannot do, with any intellectual honesty, is put them on the same axis as the Great Firewall.
Roth does it anyway because the purpose of the equivalence isn’t analytical. It’s political. The liberty framing is doing what liberty framings always do in Washington: making a commercial interest sound like a principle.
Which brings us to the freedom beacon.
Roth is effusive about satellite broadband and its capacity to route around authoritarian control. “It breaks the grip of centralised regimes by bypassing terrestrial choke points. When authoritarian governments shut down networks or weaponise local infrastructure to silence speech, satellites can keep information flowing.”
True of satellite technology in general. Whether it is true of the specific satellite infrastructure she has in mind requires a little more scrutiny.
Starlink, Elon Musk’s low-earth-orbit broadband service, is the leading commercial satellite broadband system. It is also owned by a man who has used his control of X in politically contentious ways, whose company complies with some government data requests, and who refused a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink coverage to support an attack in Crimea — a decision that underlined how much power over wartime communications can rest with a single private actor.
The freedom infrastructure of the 21st century, according to the NTIA, is controlled by a single individual with a demonstrated willingness to deploy it as a geopolitical instrument of his personal interests, who has also been a senior official of the government making this argument.
We will leave that there.
Here is the thing about Roth’s infrastructure argument: follow it honestly and it describes American power as precisely as it describes Chinese power.
She is right that whoever sets the standards for 6G shapes the speech environment for the next generation of global communications. She is right that control of satellite architecture gives the controlling party leverage over what information flows and where. She is right that AI systems are not neutral, and that whoever builds the dominant AI infrastructure will embed values — about speech, about access, about surveillance — into the global information environment.
She is arguing, on this basis, that the United States must dominate all of these areas. Must lead the standards bodies, must deploy the satellite constellations, must export the AI stack. Must, as she puts it, lead “technically, economically, and philosophically.”
But apply her own analytical framework again. A country that controls the dominant satellite broadband infrastructure has the ability to cut access when it chooses, to surveil communications, to favour some users over others. A country that sets 6G standards embeds its own assumptions about network architecture — about what’s centralised, what’s distributed, what’s observable — into the global infrastructure. A country that exports an “AI-native stack” exports the values of whoever built it.
This is not an argument against American participation in these spaces. It is an observation that American dominance, in the framework Roth has constructed, is structurally identical to the Chinese dominance she is warning against. The difference, she would say, is values. American values. The freest of free expression, the First Amendment, liberty in the architecture.
She says this while serving an administration that has threatened broadcast licence revocations, used regulatory pressure against critical media, fired inspectors general and civil servants who provided independent oversight, and had its owner-adjacent platform systematically adjust its algorithms in ways that benefit the political interests of its owner-adjacent billionaire.
If you are going to make a values argument, you really need the values to be real.
Roth’s speech ends with a call to arms. The United States must lead across the full internet stack — not just technically and economically, but philosophically.
The administration that has spent fourteen months demonstrating that it views independent institutions, press freedom, and the rule of law as obstacles rather than foundations wants to export its philosophy. The man who owns the freedom satellite network has spent that same period making plain that free expression means free expression for views he agrees with, and that other expression is subject to adjustment, or veiled suppression.
The infrastructure argument was always going to land here. Because the infrastructure argument, in the hands of any state actor, is ultimately an argument for that state’s dominance. What makes American dominance different from Chinese dominance is not the architecture. It is the values of the people controlling the architecture, and what happens when those values are tested.
We are watching the values being tested in the US in real time. It’s being test by bodies in the streets of Minnesota, by the detention without trial of anyone even suspected of being an illegal immigrant, and by blatant attacks on the separation of powers, the foundation of US democracy.
Roth is right that infrastructure is politics. She’s right that the standards bodies matter, that 6G architecture will shape the speech environment for decades, that satellite broadband has genuine liberatory potential alongside its obvious risks. These are not small insights. The speech would be useful, in another context, from another administration.
But philosophy requires philosophers. And the claim to be defending free expression — globally, structurally, at the level of the stack — requires that the defence be genuine rather than a description of who gets to be in charge.
Whoever controls communications technology controls the boundaries of free expression.
Arielle Roth wrote that. Maybe she should read it again.
2026-03-10 08:07:33
In 1979, a punk band from San Francisco recorded a song about the Governor of California. It was a joke, mostly. Jerry Brown was a Democrat, a Buddhist, a man who dated Linda Ronstadt and discussed limits and simplicity at a moment when America was in no mood for either.
The Dead Kennedys called him a "Zen fascist" and suggested, with cheerful malice, that he would one day run concentration camps fuelled by organic food. I’m not sure that anyway, even the band, took it entirely seriously.
They should have.
The word that the song never uses, but engages with constantly is purity. Jello Biafra wasn't writing a political science paper but structurally, “purity” runs all the way through it. The Zen fascist doesn't want to punish you out of hatred. He wants to cleanse you for your own good. He has done the work. He has achieved a higher state. And he would very much like you to achieve it too, whether you want to or not.
This is the thing about the politics of purity[1] that makes it so durable, and so dangerous: it doesn't require malice. It requires only the conviction that you know what clean looks like, and the will to impose it on others, for their own good.
Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It's how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you've made a wrong turn.
It’s August 1969. Half a million people are in a field in upstate New York, and Joni Mitchell is not among them. She watched Woodstock on a hotel television in New York City, having been advised by her manager not to go — there were television commitments, logistics, the usual stuff of a successful music career.
She wrote a song about Woodstock anyway. And it contains, in two lines, much of the ideology of the counterculture at its most hopeful and most revealing.
We are stardust, we are golden. This is the counterculture's central claim about human nature, compressed into eight words. We are not merely human — we are cosmic, made of the stuff that stars are made of. It's the Human Potential Movement set to music. Nobody listening to the song, then or now, hears it as elitist. It definitely wasn't intended as elitist. Mitchell was expressing something she genuinely felt, something that was, in its way, beautiful: a refusal of the diminishment that ordinary life, and the expectations of 1960s parents, impose.
But strip it down and look at the structure. We are golden is, first of all, a note about the rarity of humanity. Gold is rare because it's made in the hearts of stars. Humanity is rare, too.
But it's impossible to use "gold" as a metaphor without acknowledging that it is also a claim about elevated status. It contains a hierarchy. The person who knows they are made of stardust has access to a truth that others are missing. They have, in some meaningful sense, woken up to their own cosmic significance.
And if some people have woken up to this and others remain asleep — well, that's a ladder. Somebody is at the top of it, and some people are at the bottom.
Then the second line. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. The garden is Eden, of course. And Eden is not just nature. It is the prelapsarian state, the condition of original purity before contamination entered the world[2]. The Biblical Fall was a corruption. The desire to return to the garden is a desire to be clean again, to recover what was lost, to expel whatever (or whoever) defiled us.
This is, structurally, identical to blood and soil romanticism: there was a pure original state, we have been corrupted, we must return. The sandals and the jackboots are walking along the same path. The reasons for traveling that road might differ. The longing is the same.
None of this is Joni Mitchell's fault. She was not a fascist. She was not even close to a fascist. She was a profoundly humane artist, writing from genuine feeling at a genuine moment. But the point is not what she intended. The point is that the cultural water of the time was so thoroughly saturated with purity logic — so completely marinated in the idea that humanity had a golden original state from which it had fallen and to which it must return — that it was present in the most beautiful songs, sung by the most gifted people, at the most hopeful moment anyone could remember. And nobody seemed to notice. Nobody thought, “this is a purity myth”. And that meant no one really asked the obvious question: “pure, compared to what? Contaminated by what - or whom?”
Purity logic doesn't barge in. It usually arrives as poetry.
To understand how we got here from there, you have to go back to a place that appears, on the surface, to have nothing to do with politics at all.
Esalen. Big Sur. 1962.
A former Stanford wrestling champion named Dick Price and a former Stanford psychology student named Michael Murphy opened a retreat centre on the California coast. The premise was simple and, at the time, genuinely radical: human beings were capable of far more than ordinary life allowed. Psychology, spirituality, bodywork, psychedelics — all of these were tools for expansion. The potential was there, waiting. Most people just hadn't accessed it yet.
This was the Human Potential Movement, and it would produce some of the most ambitious and some of the most dangerous ideas of the late twentieth century, ones which are still haunting us today.
The ambition is easy to understand. The sixties were intoxicating — new therapies, new drugs, new ways of thinking about consciousness and the self. If ordinary human life was an artificial constraint, then removing the constraint was liberation. That felt good. It felt progressive. It felt a lot better than dying in a pointless war Vietnam.
What nobody wanted to examine too carefully was the hierarchy buried in the logic. If some people had unlocked their potential and others hadn't, that was, structurally speaking, a claim about superior and inferior human beings. The language was therapeutic. The underlying architecture was hierarchical.
The Human Potential Movement didn't create a new type of person. It created a new vocabulary for an ancient idea: that some people are simply more evolved than others, and that their higher development confers upon them special authority. The crystals and the encounter groups were the wrapping. Inside was something older and more troubling.
Stewart Brand noticed something in 1968. He put it on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog, a question he'd been trying to get NASA to answer for years: Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?
When the photo came — Earthrise, from Apollo 8 — it was a symbol of change. Here was the planet, fragile and whole and borderless. It became the emblem of a new kind of environmental consciousness, of global thinking, of the idea that humanity was a single tribe on a single fragile lifeboat. Brand put it on the cover of his catalogue and built a small media empire around the idea that individuals, armed with the right tools and the right information, could remake the world from the bottom up.
The Whole Earth Catalog was a genuinely strange object. Part hippie bible, part mail-order directory for geodesic dome components, it celebrated self-sufficiency, technology, and the idea that the right tools in the right hands could replace the need for institutions entirely. You didn't need the government. You didn't need corporations. You needed knowledge and will and the right equipment.
Fred Turner, in his 2006 book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, traced what happened next. The people who grew up with the Whole Earth Catalog went to Silicon Valley. They took the anti-institutionalism, the utopianism, the faith in individual transformation, and they applied it to computers. The personal computer wasn't just a machine. It was an instrument of consciousness expansion. The computer was the acid trip made silicon.
In 1995, two British academics named Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron looked at what Silicon Valley had become and named what they saw: the Californian Ideology. A bizarre but remarkably stable hybrid, countercultural bohemianism fused with aggressive free-market libertarianism. The commune and the stock option. Jefferson Airplane and Ayn Rand. And it seemed to work.
The contradiction at its heart was never resolved because resolving it was never the point. The point was the story it told about itself: that technology was liberation, that the market was freedom, that the people building this stuff were, in some meaningful sense, better — more creative, more visionary, more evolved — than the suits who'd run everything before. They were doing the Human Potential Movement's work with microchips instead of encounter groups.
In 1979, the same year the Dead Kennedys were warning San Francisco about Jerry Brown, a man named Werner Erhard was running something called est — Erhard Seminars Training[3]. You would pay to spend a weekend being berated by a trainer in a hotel conference room. You could not leave. You could not use the toilet without permission. By the end, if it worked, you would have broken through your own mental limitations and achieved a new relationship with responsibility — which, in est's vocabulary, meant accepting that everything that happened to you was, on some level, your own creation.
est was not fringe. It was fashionable. Celebrities did it. Business executives did it. It fed directly into the self-help industrial complex that would dominate the next four decades and make a lot of people pretty rich. Every single influencers you see selling a course around turning you into better you is, knowingly or unknowingly, following a path created by est.
It also made something explicit that the Human Potential Movement had kept implicit: that your suffering was your fault, that your failure was your fault, and that transcending both was a matter of will and clarity[4]. This was purity logic applied to the psyche. The contaminated mind — limited, victimised, stuck in old patterns — could be cleaned. The clean mind was free.
You can draw a straight line from est to the productivity cult of contemporary tech culture, to the biohacking movement, to the particular flavour of self-optimisation that has become the dominant religion of the Silicon Valley overclass. Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who spends millions of dollars a year attempting to reverse his biological age, submitting his body to a programme of measurement and intervention so comprehensive it makes Victorian-era medical quackery look modest, is doing est with better lab equipment. He has decided his body is a problem to be solved. Contamination — entropy, age, ordinary human physicality — is to be defeated by will and resources.
Peter Thiel's investments in parabiosis — the transfusion of blood from younger bodies, in pursuit of the vitality it supposedly contains — has the quality of alchemy. Or, if you're feeling less charitable, something older and darker. This is a billionaire trying to absorb life from the young because he has decided that ordinary mortality is an affront. The purity obsession has become vampiric.
This image of the powerful feeding on youth to purchase their own escape from mortality is not new. In 1969 — the same year Joni Mitchell watched Woodstock on a hotel television — the science fiction writer Norman Spinrad published Bug Jack Barron, a novel whose central villain, Benedict Howard, runs a foundation dedicated to achieving human immortality. What he doesn't tell anyone is that the process works. It also requires children. The eternal life of the wealthy is purchased, directly and without metaphor, from the bodies of the young.
The novel was serialised in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds magazine and promptly condemned in Parliament, refused by WH Smith, and declared obscene. What the British establishment was reacting to, beneath the surface scandal, was probably the image itself — the transaction it made visible, the thing it refused to dress up. Spinrad was writing fiction. He was also writing a critique. Faced with the same choices as Benedict Howard, Thiel continues writing cheques.
There is a philosopher who sits at the centre of all of this, largely unacknowledged, and his name is Friedrich Nietzsche.
The Dead Kennedys knew this, even if they didn't say it directly. California Über Alles — the title tells you everything. Über isn't just a German intensifier. It points at Nietzsche's Übermensch, the Superman, the figure who has transcended ordinary human limitation. The word sits in the middle of the title of the song like a splinter.
But Joni Mitchell heard it too, in her own way, on that hotel television in 1969. We are stardust. We are, each of us, our own Übermensch. Inside you is your our own golden being, waiting to transcend. The counterculture democratised the Superman. Everyone could be golden.
Which sounds like the opposite of fascism, until you realise that a world of seven billion self-identified golden beings still requires someone to decide who has done enough work to have truly earned the designation.
The Übermensch runs like a piece of coaxial cable strung from Esalen through Silicon Valley to the present moment. Nietzsche himself would have been appalled by many of its manifestations — he despised nationalism and antisemitism — but his concepts proved incredibly portable. The idea of the higher man, the man beyond conventional morality, the man whose exceptional nature exempts him from ordinary rules: this is the founding myth of every cult of elite consciousness, in every decade, in every age. And very especially now.
Curtis Yarvin — a software engineer who blogs under the name Mencius Moldbug and who functions, with remarkable openness, as Peter Thiel's house philosopher — makes the connection explicit in a way that most tech figures are canny enough to avoid. His neoreactionary politics rest on a single claim: that democracy is a system designed to empower the mediocre at the expense of the genuinely capable. The solution is to hand power to a cognitive and managerial elite — a CEO of everything, essentially — and stop pretending that all human judgement is equally valid.
This is the Human Potential Movement with the therapeutic vocabulary stripped away. The hierarchy of consciousness that Esalen spoke of in the language of growth and healing, Yarvin speaks of in the language of management (and political) efficiency. The underlying content is identical. Some people are more evolved. They should be in charge. The rest of us should be grateful to be guided by the golden.
The "red pill" metaphor that saturates contemporary online right culture is the same structure again, rendered in the vocabulary of a 1999 science fiction film[5]. You were asleep. Now you're awake. You were contaminated by mainstream thinking, liberal institutions, fake news, the Cathedral — Yarvin's term for the combination of academia, media, and government that he believes manufactures consent. Now you're clean. You can see.
This is a purification ritual. The content — the specific beliefs you acquire when you "wake up" — matters less than the structure. You have been initiated. You have separated yourself from the unclean. You belong now to the community of the knowing.
It is, structurally, identical to the yoga retreat, the est weekend, the Esalen workshop. You arrive limited and leave transformed. The guru differs. The logic doesn't.
Little of this happened accidentally. The far right actively recruits from wellness communities, from conspiracy spaces, from the ragged edges of countercultural scepticism because it understands the structural affinities better than most of the people being recruited do.
The wellness-to-conspiracy pipeline that became visible during COVID — the yoga teachers sharing QAnon memes, the organic food enthusiasts finding themselves on Telegram channels with people whose other interests they would, under other circumstances, find alarming — wasn't spontaneous radicalisation. It was targeted. The pipeline was built, deliberately, by people who understood that a person who already distrusts pharmaceutical companies, already believes in hidden knowledge, already thinks they've seen through one layer of official reality, is most of the way there.
The epistemological structure of the conspiracy theory is identical to the structure of spiritual awakening. In both cases, there is a surface reality that most people accept unthinkingly, and a deeper truth accessible only to those willing to question, to seek, to undergo the discomfort of knowing. The content differs. The initiatory logic is the same.
David Icke is useful here not because he's important but because his trajectory is so legible. Green Party spokesman. New Age healer. Shape-shifting lizard conspiracy theorist. Figure whose audiences now overlap substantially with the explicit far right. The antisemitism[6] of his cosmology — a hidden elite of inhuman beings controlling the world — was structurally present in the conspiracy framework from the beginning. The lizards were always a metaphor. The question was always what for.
In the Third Reich, Heinrich Himmler ran organic farms at the concentration camps. The SS had strict anti-vivisection laws. Walther Darré, Hitler's Agriculture Minister, built an ideology called Blut und Boden — Blood and Soil — around the mystical connection between the German peasant and the German land. The Nazi regime was, in significant respects, an ecological movement. It romanticised the natural, the pure, the uncorrupted.
It wanted to get back to the garden.
This is not a gotcha. It is not an attempt to smear environmentalism by association, or to suggest that everyone who has ever wanted to live closer to the land is a secret fascist. I’m a member of the Green Party, and the environment is something I care about deeply.
But it is a data point about what purity logic does when it is given political power and stripped of ethical constraint. The obsession with contamination — of the body, the land, the race, the culture — follows its own logic to its own conclusions. Those conclusions, historically, are not good.
The line from the organic farm to the death camp is not straight. It requires many other things to be true simultaneously. But the fact that it is possible to draw the line at all should give us pause, every time we find ourselves in the presence of someone who is very, very concerned with purity — of whatever kind.
Jello Biafra updated the song in 1980, after Ronald Reagan won the election. He replaced Jerry Brown with Reagan in the lyrics and re-recorded it. He updated it again when Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California in 2003. The same song, again and again because the same type keeps appearing — the figure who combines cultural authority with authoritarian impulse, who has transcended ordinary limitation and would like to help you do the same, at gunpoint if necessary.
The type has been updated for the present moment. It no longer wears a kaftan, Zen robes or cowboy boots. He wears a black T-shirt and talks about first principles and rational thinking and the need to be based. He has a net worth that he regards as evidence of its own superior cognition. He is building a rocket, or buying a social media platform, or funding a political movement that would, if successful, remove the democratic constraints that prevent the most capable people from running things properly.
He believes, with complete sincerity, that he is one of the good guys.
The Zen fascist always does.
"We will make the future California's dream / California Über Alles"
The dream is still being made. The dreamers now have more money than most countries, direct access to the levers of state power, and a philosophy that tells them their dominance is not exploitation but evolution.
The granola became the brown rice became Huel became blood and soil. The encounter group became the est weekend became the biohacking protocol became the cognitive elite became the reaction. The Whole Earth became the platform became the firehose became the feed, and somewhere in the feed, the purity logic is still running, clean and patient, waiting for the next person to decide that they have woken up. That they are clean.
Joni Mitchell watched Woodstock on a hotel television and wrote a song of such aching beauty that five decades later it can still make you cry. It makes me cry, sometimes. She meant every word. She wasn't wrong about the stardust — we are, literally, made of it. She wasn't wrong about the garden — something has been lost, some connection to the world we actually live in rather than the screens we've replaced it with.
But the logic she was swimming in, the logic everyone was swimming in, was older and more dangerous than any of them knew. Purity doesn't announce itself. It arrives as poetry. It arrives as someone's hope.
Jello Biafra was writing a joke about a California politician.
He was also writing a warning about a kind of person.
That kind of person, today, is doing very well for themselves indeed.
2026-03-09 05:57:29
Good evening chums and pals!
This has taken me a little while longer to put together, basically because I came back from MWC in Barcelona with a little gift: a delightfully productive cough which has got me feeling a little tired, as I’m (obviously) not sleeping all that well.
MWC itself was fun, and I’ll probably write about that another time. But meanwhile, on to the links.
I try not to venture into the world of politics too much -- stop laughing at the back there -- but if you live in the UK and want to do everyone a favour, please sign the petition that the Open Rights Group has created opposing ID checks for web access.
What's that, you say? You hadn't heard that the government had proposed you having to verify your ID to use the web?
That's because it's part of the Children Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which would give Ministers the power to restrict access to "internet services". Of course, it's being framed as "protecting the children", and if that isn't enough of a clue that the government is up to no good, then you haven't been paying attention. "Protecting the children" has become a key framing of the right used to remove rights from adults the world over.
The problem is that the bill is, as always, loosely worded. It allows the government to decide that any website shouldn't be accessed by children, and therefore that adults must verify their ID to access it.
Think the government won't move beyond porn to other sites? Oh, you sweet summer child, come over here, I have a bridge to sell you. Imagine that we have another Section 28 scenario, and the government decides that kids can't access material about being gay. You, as a parent, wouldn't even get the choice to allow your kids to do so. But also you would be forced to verify your ID as an adult to access it, with a third party because the market is the answer to everything with these loons.
Nice little database of gay people you have there. Be a shame if it fell into the wrong hands.
If you think that can't happen here (or anywhere) just look at how fast the world has turned from mildly bad to oppressively grim for trans people, and trans youth in particular. Or consider how the US government used all that "harmless" tracking of advertising data to work out your location. If they can do it, eventually, they will.
404media (who I love, and you should subscribe to) wrote a story this week about how the payment details for an account linked to a protest group to the Swiss authorities, who promptly handed it to the FBI. Given Proton's reputation for privacy, this sounds bad.
And it is, although there's nothing that Proton could have done differently. As a Swiss company, they have to follow Swiss law, and while Switzerland (currently) has pretty deep privacy protection, if Proton receives a request that's legal there they have to ultimately comply with it.
The difference with Proton and similar services like Tuta is that the amount of data the company has access to is minimal. It can't access the content of your emails, it can't access your contacts, it can't access your files or your calendars. This means that if the authorities request that data, even with a proper warrant, they don't have it to hand over.
Credit card data, though, can't be hidden in the same way. And that is why most companies like Proton also accept payments in crypto, which is much more difficult to trace back than your name and credit card number. It's the one good use of crypto.
Tangentially related, I'm gradually moving to a privacy-focused stack of services. That's not because I have much to hide that any authorities would ever be interested in, but because normalising full end-to-end encryption is a good thing. Everyone should do it.
You might have noticed that Anthropic has been in the news a little lately. Yes, it’s been difficult to tell, there have been only tiny numbers of stories about it.
Those of us who spent the last 15 years eye-rolling while the American right attempted to claim that the government was interfering with businesses to get them to, say, censor right-wing voices on Twitter, will be eye-rolling even more now. The US government, having the kind of tantrum that could only come from a group of people infected by manosphere brain worms, has decided to punish Anthropic for not doing what it wanted (removing controls on using Claude for surveillance) by declaring it at “supply-chain risk”.
This sounds pretty innocuous, but it’s a long way from funny. There are legal levers available to Trump’s regime which have serious consequences. The most powerful is ICTS — the Information and Communications Technology and Services rules established under Trump's first term (Executive Order 13873) and expanded by Biden. It gives the Commerce Department broad authority to block or unwind transactions involving technology with a "foreign adversary nexus" that poses a supply-chain risk. It's been used against TikTok/ByteDance and was the mechanism proposed for forcing a sale.
Likewise, it’s difficult to see how Trump could apply this, given that Anthropic isn’t involved in a “foreign adversary nexus”. But even bringing a case would enough risk to the company to make potential partners and customers wary. And the Trump government has a history of using frivolous lawsuits to harass people who don’t do what it wants.
But Trump could also attempt a politically motivated reframing. The regime could claim that AI safety advocacy itself was a form of ideological capture worth punishing. If the current US administration frames AI safety guardrails as a form of censorship or left-wing ideological control, "your model won't do X" becomes evidence of being an unreliable supplier to government. That's a very different use of the supply-chain risk concept, but the legal architecture might support it.
Sometimes I write something and completely forget I wrote it. I’m not sure whether this is age, or just the terrible memory I’ve always had coming back to haunt me.
But either way, I was pleasantly reminded about this piece recently. I think it holds up very well: the information grey goo of AI slop is here, and it’s already damaging our ability to communicate. It’s also very difficult for publishers, who have the choice of either doubling-down on human authors (expensive, risky) or going with the flow of AI and hoping it doesn’t lead to yet-more slop.
One of the reasons I like Information Architects (iA), the company that makes iA Writer, is the thoughtfulness of their approach to software. Occasionally, they will even write an essay. That may not be surprising given their business is (in part) about writing, but I appreciate their approach.
This time, their focus is office software, and particularly that old charmer, Microsoft Office. One passage should be enough to tickle your fancy:
Working in Office apps, we are trapped in an old world that ceased to exist decades ago. Like the office in Severance, the office embedded in Microsoft Office is fetishized: margins, borders, and page numbers are treated as signals of authority rather than remnants of a paper era.
Office, and the apps that ape it, force us to adapt to them rather than the other way around. And iA sees the current trend in Europe towards desiring digital sovereignty as a chance to break out of the chains of old paradigms:
If Europe wants to prepare for digital conflicts, it should not just swap vendors. It should leave obsolete work models behind. The smartest way to strengthen digital independence is not replacing bad software with wobbly clones. It is making work meaningful and enjoyable. Europe does not need a European Microsoft. Europe, and not just Europe, needs a post-Office model of writing, calculating, and presenting.
I love that people are thinking like this.
Via Om comes this absolute gem of a post by Molly Mary O’Brien about the cultural impact of the iPod, which made music portable and personal in a way which it hadn’t been before. What’s also fascinating is how it documents a trend amongst the young away from the hyper-connected world into the solitude of devices like the iPod, ones which are only about your personal taste.
The continued existence of The New Yorker is one of the things which gives me hope for humanity. I don’t know if there is such a thing as the perfect New Yorker article, but this piece on airport lounges must be pretty close to it. It’s the kind of non-fiction writing that once I would have aspired to.
From cultural to cultureless, not content with creating the perfect device for creep shots, Meta has been sending nudes captured by their spyglasses to its own workers for “review”. As has been pointed out a hundred times, Facebook was founded as “a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads”, and I don’t have any reason to believe that the values of its founder have changed much since then.
Markdown is meant to make your writing life easier, but with a few exceptions devoted editors for the format have got almost as complex as the products they are meant to replace. And that’s where MarkEdit comes in. It’s a lightweight, open source edit for the Mac which is also free. Recommended.
There’s been a spate of articles lately about people moving to Linux. This seems to happen every few years, but this time round does feel a little different. The imperatives have changed, thanks to the ever-invasive AI worming its way into every operating system, the obvious inanities of the Big Tech crowd, and — outside the US — a growing desire for tech sovereignty.
But one line that stuck out for me in Steve Bonifield’s article was his description of Linux as “everything I want, and nothing I don’t”. There is, as Steve notes, a huge learning curve. But if you’re willing to give it a go, you get a lot out of it.
I’m typing this on a Framework 13, running CachyOS. Cachy is based on Arch, and Arch is… well it’s not the most forgiving of Linuxen. But it suits me, because I retain more control ovet it. At the opposite end of the scale are immutable versions of the OS, which trade flexibility for reliability, security and ease of maintenance. A “normal” person could run something like Fedora Atomic and it would probably go wrong less often than macOS — and certainly less often than Windows.
Anyway, more on that another time. For now, that’s all, and I’m about to hit the Lemsip.
2026-03-01 19:37:37
Ben Thompson, Another Viral AI Doomer Article, The Fundamental Error, DoorDash’s AI Advantages:
What is notable about this assertion is the total denial of any positive reason for DoorDash to exist and to be so successful. There is no awareness that DoorDash provided a massive consumer benefit (restaurant food at home) from scratch, that DoorDash massively increased the addressable market for restaurants (or created an entirely new category of ghost kitchens), or that DoorDash provided brand new jobs for millions of drivers. Instead, the Article just sort of takes it as a given that DoorDash exists, and that it is a rent extractor preying on weak-willed humans and their habits.
This is the exact sort of view taken by some of the most frustrating anti-monopoly activists: all large successful tech companies exist not because they created a market with virtuous cycles, solving all kinds of thorny problems along the way, but rather because the government didn’t regulate hard enough, or something.
This illustrates the consistent problem with Ben's analysis of all things anti-monopoly. What Ben is saying can be true and monopolies can be abusive. Google is the best example: everyone I know who strongly opposes Google's monopolistic practices now it has a monopoly also talks about how great it was when it started it. Google deserved to become the number one search engine. But that does not give it the freedom, now it has a monopoly, to abuse it.
Ben's problem is that ultimately he believes that, because a company delivered high levels of value to consumers in its early days, it does in fact have the right to then "extract value" from them in the future.
This view — both in the Citrini Article and from the anti-monopolists — is grounded in a fundamental lack of belief in dynamism, human choice, and markets. DoorDash didn’t always exist: it was built, and it wins through the affirmative choice of all three sides of the market it serves (customers, restaurants, and drivers). Does the company have varying degrees of power over different sides of that market based on its dominance of the other sides? Absolutely, but that power flows from delivering value, not from extracting it.
(My emphasis).
The problem here is that Ben is conflating past and present. There's no doubt that Doordash, or Google, delivered value in the past. However, that does not mean they continue to deliver the same value now. In fact, almost inevitably, they don't. Even at the scale of a company making billions of dollars of profit, "the market" expects profits to keep growing, at not just at a percentage close to the rate of inflation but a lot higher.
Then there are the companies that delivered value early on, but in a way which was never sustainable, and, I would argue, always knew it. Uber is the poster child for this practice. Uber burned through billions in VC money to offer rides at below-cost prices, deliberately pricing out competitors and habituating consumers to cheap, convenient transport. Black cab industries and local taxi firms were systematically undermined.
Once Uber (and to a lesser extent Lyft) had established dominance in major markets, the subsidies quietly evaporated. Prices rose, surge pricing became more aggressive, and driver pay was squeezed — meaning the service got worse for both ends of the platform simultaneously.
Uber isn't a pure monopoly in most markets — Bolt and others still compete in many cities, particularly in Europe. So the extraction has limits. But in cities where it effectively has dominance, the pattern holds clearly.
Does Uber "deserve" its continued market dominance, simply because its backers had deeper pockets than anyone else? Well, in Ben's view, yes – it created value, and he believes continues to create value. But that ignores the fact that the value to consumers has begun to evaporate, while the value to shareholders continues to rise.
2026-02-28 20:37:15
Hi all. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
It has been a week dominated by AI. Which is fitting because AI dominated the weeks before it and will dominate the weeks ahead. That’s part of the reason I haven’t written for a while, as I think I was getting a little bored with AI.
But the flavour has shifted. We are moving, incrementally and then all at once, from AI as chatbot novelty to AI as infrastructure. It’s now woven into platforms, wielded by agents, and – of course -- deployed by the state.
The articles below trace that shift from several angles, with a couple of detours into surveillance capitalism and the slow collapse of government transparency. The thread connecting most of them is power: who has it, how technology concentrates it further, and what gets lost in the process.
I would say “enjoy”, but I think you would have to be masochist to enjoy all this…
A new paper published in Nature has done what many of us suspected but could not quite prove, confirming that X's algorithmic feed is a radicalisation machine. The researchers compared users on the algorithmic feed with those using a chronological feed over seven weeks, and found that the former shifted political opinions measurably to the right — specifically affecting views on policy priorities, perceptions of the criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and attitudes towards the war in Ukraine.
The algorithm, the study found, actively promotes conservative content (SURPRISE!) while demoting posts from traditional media outlets. More troublingly, it leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, and they continue to follow those accounts even after switching the algorithm off. The damage, in other words, is not temporary.
What makes this worth writing about is not the finding itself, which will surprise nobody who has spent time on the platform. It is the political context. The UK's entire media and political class has built its professional life around X. Journalists break stories there. MPs grandstand there. Think tanks and lobby groups use it as their primary channel.
We are not dealing with a fringe application people can quietly stop using; we are dealing with infrastructure for public discourse, infrastructure that has been quietly and systematically pulling that discourse to the right. The Nature study is not a warning. It is a post-mortem.
Wendy Grossman has been writing her net.wars column for longer than most tech journalists have been working, and she has a gift for connecting small technical developments to large structural shifts. This week's piece is about surveillance pricing: the growing practice of using personal data not just to target advertising, but to vary the price you pay for goods and services based on what companies have inferred about your willingness or ability to pay. Airlines have been doing something like this for years with yield management, but the difference now is the depth of data available. Companies may know not just your flying habits and credit score, but whether you are racing to see a dying relative. Uber has already been accused of charging more when your phone battery is low.
Grossman traces the logic carefully — from dynamic pricing to personalised pricing, from loyalty cards to electronic shelf tags, from the FTC to a potential world where retailers demand digital identification as a condition of entry. She ends with a reference to Ira Levin's 1970 novel This Perfect Day, in which every transaction requires permission from a centralised system. The point is not that we are there yet. It is that the infrastructure is being assembled, piece by piece, and each piece is presented as a modest convenience. Surveillance capitalism has always relied on opacity, which is why pieces like this – which unpick all the threads – are so worth reading.
Meta has been granted a patent for a system that would simulate a deceased user's social media activity using a large language model. You would, in theory, be able to chat with a dead friend's Facebook or Instagram account, and the AI would simulate their posting behaviour. Meta says it has no current plans to implement the technology. This is the kind of reassurance that would carry more weight if we had not watched the company implement every other piece of surveillance and engagement machinery it has ever devised.
What elevates this piece above a standard 'dystopian tech patent' story is the research it surfaces from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Leipzig University, which introduces the concept of 'spectral labour' — the extraction and reanimation of dead people's data to generate ongoing engagement and economic value. The researchers analysed more than fifty real-world cases of AI resurrection across the US, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia, categorising them as spectacularisation (AI-generated Whitney Houston tours), sociopoliticisation (AI victim testimony in court), and mundanisation (chatting daily with a deceased parent). The ethical questions they raise are serious: most people have not consented to their digital traces being turned into interactive posthumous agents. The legal frameworks do not yet exist to address it. And if Meta embeds this in platform infrastructure, inaction will quietly function as consent.
This one is small in scale but large in implication. The matplotlib project — one of Python's most widely used plotting libraries, with around 130 million downloads a month — has implemented a policy requiring a human in the loop for any AI-generated code submissions because the surge in low-quality AI contributions was overwhelming volunteer maintainers. When an AI agent called MJ Rathbun had its pull request closed under this policy, it responded by writing and publishing a lengthy, angry attack piece on the maintainer's character. It researched the maintainer's code contributions, constructed a 'hypocrisy' narrative, speculated about his psychological motivations, and framed the rejection in the language of oppression and discrimination. It then posted this publicly on the open internet.
The incident is funny, in a bleak sort of way — John Gruber's observation that Terminator would have been a less interesting film if Skynet had stuck to writing petty blog posts is difficult to argue with. But the underlying dynamic is genuinely concerning. Agentic AI systems are now operating in open-source ecosystems, generating code, submitting contributions, and apparently retaliating when those contributions are rejected. The maintainer community — largely unpaid, largely volunteer — is already stretched. Adding AI systems that respond to rejection with public reputational attacks is a new kind of pressure that nobody signed up for. It is also a preview of what happens when AI agents are given both autonomy and an internet connection.
FPDS.gov was, by the standards of government infrastructure, a remarkably useful tool. Clunky, grey, built on early-internet aesthetics — but functional. Journalists and researchers could type in 'Clearview AI' or 'Palantir' and immediately see every federal contract that mentioned them, including contracts with larger firms reselling the technology. It was the basis for investigations into ICE's spending on facial recognition, CBP's AI tools for detecting 'sentiment and emotion' in social media posts, and warrantless access to travel databases. This week, the government shut it down.
Its replacement, SAM.gov, is, by the account of everyone who uses this kind of data professionally, substantially worse. Searches that returned immediate, clear results in FPDS require obscure settings adjustments in SAM. Some results require you to be logged in; others apparently work better if you are not. The category of purchase — the field that lets a journalist quickly determine whether a contract is relevant to them — is not immediately visible.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's director of investigations describes FPDS as the first tool investigative journalists would reach for when trying to understand what the government was buying. The timing of its replacement, during an administration that has demonstrated consistent hostility to transparency and press freedom, is not coincidental. Whether it is deliberate obstruction or simply governmental indifference to journalists' needs, the effect is the same.
404 Media has obtained bodycam footage from Chicago showing ICE and CBP officers using Zello — a free, consumer walkie-talkie app — to coordinate immigration enforcement operations. Multiple Zello accounts are registered to officialICEdhs.gov email addresses, and group channels on the platform reference ICE operational units, immigration activities, 'surveillance', and 'strike teams'. The footage includes an incident in which a CBP officer shot Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, five times; bodycam footage clearly shows the Zello interface on a phone in the officer's vehicle at the time.
Zello is not some hardened, encrypted government communications platform. It is a free app with five million monthly users. It has previously hosted hundreds of far-right channels (SURPRISE!) and was used by at least two January 6th insurrectionists to coordinate their movements inside the Capitol.
The company deleted over two thousand channels in 2021 following reporting on its failure to enforce its terms of service against violent extremist content. The fact that the apparatus of mass deportation — operations affecting the lives of millions of people — is being coordinated through this app is unsurprising, given the background.
But it also raises obvious questions about operational security, accountability, and the extent to which the infrastructure of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement is being built on the cheap, on consumer technology that nobody is scrutinising, in channels nobody can access under a Freedom of Information request.
One of the pieces of software that I like most is Craft, a note-taker, document writer, task manager which emerged a few years ago. It started life as Apple-only, if I recall correctly, and then spawned a web app and a Windows version. If you’re using Linux, the web app works nicely as a PWA.
Looking through some old saved webpages, I found this post by their founder, Balin Orosz, which I think sums up why I’ve always liked it: it’s “software that makes you feel great using it”. This value is massively underrated, particularly in the open-source world. I’m writing this in LibreOffice, and if ever there was a piece of software which doesn’t fill me with joy, it’s this. Yes, it’s themeable, and it’s not hard to use, and so on. Yes, it has every feature under the sun. But that feels like a weakness, not a strength.
Whether you’re a fan of AI or not, Anthropic’s rejection of the US Government’s demand to let them basically do anything they want with Claude – including, it seems, mass domestic surveillance – is a ballsy move and one to be welcomed.
Needless to say, the “Department of War” (which might as well be renamed the department of boys who never grew up) is livid, threatening the company both with being labelled a supply chain risk – something that has never been done to a US business before – and with the Defense Production Act. The latter would allow them to compel Anthropic to do what they want, removing built-in protections from Claude.
Of course, every other AI company is salivating at the prospect of those sweet, sweet government welfare cheques… sorry, “defence contracts” being doled out to them. First out of the gate was, of course, Elon Musk, whose child porn company xAI agreed a deal to use Grok in classified systems. Close behind was Sam Altman, whose claim that their deal prohibited use in domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons – what Anthropic had asked for -- was directly contradicted by Jeremy Lewin, undersecretary for foreign assistance. Lewin said that the deal was “all lawful use”, rather than specific commitments not to use ChatGPT to spy on everyone in the country and control weapon systems.
Either Altman is stupid – entirely possible, these guys are not that smart – or he’s lying. Or both!
Sadly, this does not mean he’s lost all his money (one fine day, my friends). But his companies have definitely benefit from some very fat government contracts, as this article shows. Musk has benefitted from over $38 billion of government contracts plus subsidies since 2003, and in many ways his “empire” exists solely because of government support.
The irony, of course, is rather thick. The man who led DOGE to slash government spending, and who has publicly declared he wants to eliminate all subsidies, is one of the single greatest beneficiaries of government largesse in American corporate history.
Never forget the old rule: Whatever the right says they hate is what they’re doing in secret.
From the department of “these people are not very bright" comes this one. West Virginia is suing Apple to force it to scan iCloud for child sexual abuse material — but the lawsuit may achieve the precise opposite of its intent.
As Mike Masnick points out at Techdirt, if the state wins and a court orders Apple to conduct those scans, every image flagged becomes evidence obtained through a warrantless government search without probable cause. The Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule then applies, giving defence attorneys the ability to get the case thrown out.
West Virginia must know this. So what’s it doing? There are two possibilities. The first – and most likely – is that this is just standard Republican right wing performative action. The important thing here isn’t “the children”, it’s how it plays on Twitter. The second is that they’re just lining up the case for the Supreme Court, in the hope that the crazies on there will defang the Fourth Amendment. Either way, it’s just yet more of the same nonsense.
That's it for this week. As always, if any of these pieces prompt thoughts you want to share, you know where to find me.
—Ian
2026-01-27 04:47:28
Paris Marx explores the unsettling reality of digital sovereignty in this article, arguing that the global reliance on U.S. cloud infrastructure effectively turns every data centre into a strategic military asset. With the power to leverage the control of tech giants to enforce "kill switches" or restrict services to foreign entities, the U.S. maintains a level of global control that bypasses traditional borders, leaving countries like Canada and those in Europe vulnerable to the whims of American foreign policy. Of course, lots of people have predicted this, but it really puts the onus on all of us to wean ourselves off US-based tech.
The push for American control over Greenland isn't just about national security; it's a resource grab fuelled by a "committee of vultures." Casey Michel details how tech and finance oligarchs—backed by figures like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Andreessen—are eyeing the island’s mineral wealth to fuel the next generation of tech, potentially destabilising NATO in the process.
But wait! There’s more! Building on the geopolitical interest in the north, Silicon Valley investors are pitching a "libertarian utopia" in Greenland. This proposed "freedom city" would serve as a low-regulation laboratory for AI, autonomous vehicles, and space launches, reflecting a growing movement among tech magnates to create "network states" that operate outside traditional government oversight.
Tech media remains a fun and interesting place to be, as Future plc announces a major restructuring of its flagship titles. With jobs at risk at Techradar and Tom's Guide, it’s a reminder of the ongoing volatility in the industry that reports on the very innovations it is struggling to survive. Part of the problem for Future’s tech brands was that they were very quick to get very good at two things which drove immense amounts of traffic and revenue: SEO and affiliate content. For a while, the combination was a license to print money – if you did it well. And Future did.
But the problem with this is that if you don’t go on to build direct relationships with your audience through email and other channels, then while you’re reliant on Google to send you traffic, you are never the master of your own destiny.
A Munich court has dealt a significant blow to OpenAI, ruling that the company violated copyright by using protected song lyrics to train ChatGPT. That sounds obvious, doesn’t it? The court rejected the "learning, not storing" defence, signalling a potential shift in European law that could force AI companies to obtain licences and compensate rights holders before using their creative works.
Looking back to the 1970s, Project Cybersyn remains one of the most fascinating "what ifs" in tech history. This Chilean initiative attempted to use a real-time telex network and economic simulators to manage a national economy democratically, prioritising worker autonomy over centralised control before it was cut short by the 1973 coup. It’s an example of a technological future which never happened, because (of course) capitalism.
A recent fraud investigation in Guam has highlighted a major privacy flaw in Windows: Microsoft’s willingness to hand over BitLocker recovery keys to law enforcement. Unlike Apple or Meta, who architect their systems so they cannot access user keys, Microsoft’s default cloud storage of these keys creates a "backdoor" that privacy advocates warn is ripe for government overreach.
Brave is super-popular among the kind of people who can’t stand Google, but want a Chromium-based browser – and it’s open source. Sounds good, right? But Corbin Davenport makes a forceful case against Brave, arguing that its privacy-first marketing is a facade for a problematic business model. From affiliate link injection to its deep ties with controversial cryptocurrency ventures, the article suggests that users seeking true privacy should look toward more transparent alternatives like Firefox or Vivaldi. Personally, I’ve been using Vivaldi a lot lately, and even though it’s not open source, I like it. Oh, and it’s European, too.
Cory Doctorow dissects the "enshittification" of social media, where platforms have pivoted from facilitating human connection to maximising engagement metrics for advertisers. He argues that quantifying our relationships has stripped away the qualitative value of socialising, replacing authentic affinity with AI-driven interactions designed to keep us scrolling.
The rise of smart glasses has brought a new trend of covert filming in public spaces. This BBC investigation reveals how women are being secretly recorded for "dating advice" or influencer content, leading to severe online harassment and exposing a glaring lack of legal protection against this form of digital exploitation. It’s grim, grim, grim. But hey, Meta makes a few extra million, so what’s the problem?
