2026-07-11 21:23:42
One of my favourite people on social media is Darth. Darth takes an annual hibernation, in which time they do not post or, presumably, read.
I’d love to say that I have not posted anything for months with the same level of intention, but alas not. It just… happened. And now I am un-happening it.
In the long history of the papacy, it’s not uncommon for people to accuse His Holiness of all kinds of things. Collaboration with Nazis. Presiding over the systematic abuse of children. Being a reptilian alien. But then again, who amongst us has not been accused of that last one?
There’s also a long strand of accusations that the Pope is in league with communists, of course. Or, in the case of John XXIII, was secretly both a communist and a freemason. It’s probably connected to that whole “looking after the poor” and “seeking peace” thing.
This kind of thing is usually confined to the lunatic fringe of the internet, so of course our dear friend Peter Thiel wants in on it. Apparently, Pope Leo XIV is in league with the Chinese communists, after His Holiness called for international regulation of AI. Because absolutely nothing must get in the way of Thiel’s dream.
All of which leads me to ask: were lead toys legal where Thiel grew up? Or does being rich, white and terminally online really rot your brain that much?
It’s sometimes difficult for Americans to understand quite how much WhatsApp dominates messaging in Europe. It’s the de facto standard, and – of course – completely closed, and owned by Meta.
M. G. Siegler, of course, knows. He knows because (1) he lives over here and (2) his Instagram account got banned for reasons unknown. Which, of course, because all roads lead to Meta, also took out his WhatsApp account.
Because he’s a connected kind of guy, M.G. managed to get it restored, after a massive hoo-hah. And then got banned again. And then reinstated. And then banned. And… you get the idea.
Normal people can appeal, but if you stay banned, in Europe, a big chunk of your ability to communicate is gone. This is the level of power that Meta has, with virtually no legal oversight.
One of the biggest mistakes that people make about billionaires is the idea they are “techbros”. Sure, they have their origins in businesses which made money from technology, but what they are really about is simply business. And, in fact, not even really about that: they’re about making money.
Had their lives gone in a different direction they might have been Tony Soprano, or, more likely, Davie Scatino. Legally, illegally, whatever.
Everyone’s favourite gimp for billionaires Jason Calacanis isn’t (of course) super-rich himself, but he’s been toadying around men who are for long enough to know how they think. And what they think is if they have to give Trump gold in order to gain favour, they will do it. As Mike Masnick notes, this is essential Mussolini-style corporate fascism, a system based on bribing Il Duce for the right to get what you want in business.
And that, of course, is a problem for the US long term. While Il Duce’s life did not end well, corruption as a way of life continued. Will any post-Trump president be different? Perhaps. But also: perhaps not.
Ahh, data centres. Part mythical beast, part solution to all our prayers. But mainly just a blight on any community in which they decide to plonk themselves. Because while they guzzle fossil fuel-derived electricity like it’s cheap shots in an Essex club on Saturday night, local people get told to turn the lights off and turn down their aircon in a heatwave.
One of the favoured tactics of the alt-tech-right is to claim that no, really, they are the victims. While simultaneously embarking on exactly the kind of bullying behaviour that they accuse others of.
Enter Palantir, everyone’s favourite surveillance-plus-violence company which is, apparently, trustworthy enough to be given the keys to British health data. Not content with publishing a “manifesto” which sounds like something cooked up on USENET in the 90s by a kid with too much time and an Ayn Rand novel, it attempted to bully a small Swiss publisher into giving it a “right to reply” over a mildly critical story.
Of course, it lost – while Swiss law gives a right to reply, this isn’t a free pass at forcing someone to publish a press release whenever they mention you. But the point was made: anyone who publishes stuff they don’t like will get chased through the courts, Trump-style.
I generally try and avoid Chromium-based browsers. I use Vivaldi quite a lot, because I’m keen to encourage European-based development and because (especially in its latest release) it’s super-customisable. But I’ve found something else, and it may become the Chromium-based browser of choice for me.
It’s Helium, and it’s about as stripped back as you can imagine. There’s no password manager, because you should be bringing a secure one of your own. There’s no mail client, AI integration, crazy sidebars… and of course, no Google.
But what there is is a light, clean browser which comes out of the box with support for uBlock Origin, still the best blocking software and – completely coincidentally I’m sure – an extension that can’t be run in browsers which stick to Google’s Chromium source code. Helium’s developers have said they are going to keep supporting it as long as humanly possible, and I believe them.
The only downside? There’s no way of syncing your settings across devices, and no mobile app. But given how clean and fast it is, I’m prepared to live like a barbarian and set up my own extensions.
I don't think anyone seriously believes that AI isn't going to result in a much more dangerous world online. Agents are only at the earliest stages of their evolution -- in fact, they have barely had any truly evolutionary pressure applied to them.
Already, malware creators are building agents which act much more like human hackers than simple bots. It's only going to get worse.
It's very difficult to summon up the energy to care when one huge tech company sues another huge tech company. But I'll spare a few joules for Apple getting out the litigation stick and slamming it straight into OpenAI's face.
It was perhaps inevitable. When one company starts to mass-recruit another company's employees, especially under the guidance of one of the most lauded senior executives in tech history, the lawyers lick their lips and plan what kind of private island they will buy with the fees.
By complete coincidence, I'm currently reading Geoffrey Cain's Steve Jobs In Exile, a retelling of the origin story of NeXT. And of course, it features the details of how Jobs took with him what he described as "a handful of low-level employees" when he left Apple. They were, of course, some of the most senior and capable people around, and Apple promptly sued.
The suit was baseless, but it still tied up NeXT for a while. And of course, a decade later Apple was paying a large sum of money to buy back Jobs, his employees and NextStep -- which is today's Mac. As it was then, so it is now.
A thoughtful and must-read long post from John Gruber on Apple's slide into advertising, which -- even if it doesn't violate the company's position on privacy -- gives the impression that it does.
Look, I understand ARPU as much as the next person. But once a company gets deeply into the weeds of squeezing as much revenue as possible out of their users on a monthly basis, it takes an awful lot to stop things going down the toilet for their users.
There's no advertising in Apple Mail. Will that line hold? At what point would the company, say, use some kind of so-called "private compute" to say that your email is staying private even when you're getting peppered with ads?
"Just one more bite" is what a services focus on ARPU does to a business. I would very much appreciate it if John Ternus takes Apple back to "make good products that people will pay for."
I was mildly overexcited that Starlog was coming back. That it's coming back and the wonderful Annalee Newitz is editor in chief is even better news.
2026-05-27 20:21:09
I've been a Stratechery subscriber since it started and one thing I have noticed about Ben is that he occasionally gets a little overexcited about stuff that is probably not totally close to his wheelhouse. This is one of those times.
In his opening about Tesla's brand halo, he notes:
I know plenty of very rich people who drive a Tesla not for the finishes but rather the Full Self-Driving (Supervised); there is nothing like it on the market, at least when it comes to cars you can own.
(Emboldening is mine).
The problem is, Ben is simply wrong to say "there's nothing like it on the market" and it's a perfect illustration of the impact of both Tesla's brand halo, and why brand matters a lot in cars.
Where Ben is sort-of correct about FSD (Supervised) is that it does have a genuine and distinctive strength: breadth of coverage. Tesla doesn't limit FSD to a pre-mapped road network. If the cameras see usable lane lines and the system is confident enough, it will typically engage. FSD extends operation to surface streets, neighbourhood roads, and complex intersections, with over-the-air updates that can change behaviour overnight. No other mass-market consumer system matches that scope.
However... Tesla FSD (Supervised) remains a Level 2 technology. Systems such as Tesla FSD, Ford BlueCruise, GM Super Cruise, and BMW Highway Assistant all fall into this same category. The car can steer, accelerate, and brake in certain conditions, but the driver remains responsible and must supervise at all times.
And there is real competition within the Level 2 space. GM Super Cruise is available across more than 20 Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC, and Buick models and is highly regarded for highway use. Super Cruise covers roughly 750,000 miles of LiDAR-mapped roads in the US and Canada. Its tradeoff is consistency within mapped territory versus Tesla's broader but less predictable coverage. But if you're in a covered area, the experience is likely to be much better than Tesla's.
Mercedes Drive Pilot was the first Level 3 system certified for consumer use in the US, which is technically more autonomous than FSD — at Level 3, the system, not the driver, is legally responsible for driving, and you can (legally) take your eyes off the road. However, the Drive Pilot Level 3 system would only work at low speeds on a few stretches of highway, making it look limited compared to Tesla FSD's ability to drive in almost all conditions including city traffic. For what it's worth, Mercedes has since abandoned Drive Pilot and is moving to a Level 2 approach, partly due to low adoption. Mercedes found that not many people were willing to pay that much for a feature that could only be engaged under strict conditions.
This, by the way, is a problem that Tesla will also face when moving from Level 2 to Level 3. They will have to charge a heck of a lot more for Level 3, and it's not clear that most/anyone will pay for it.
The claim is particularly shaky if you look outside the US. Car markets like BYD and companies like Wayve are increasingly offering high-quality self-driving capabilities for consumer vehicles in a similar vein to Tesla FSD. Chinese manufacturers are moving fast in this space. I have Chinese friends whose car drives them to work every day, supposedly with their supervision, but actually while they read emails. It's that reliable, at least in big cities.
But all of this sort-of underlines the point that Ben is ultimately making: Tesla's brand halo is such that people believe it's a leader in self-driving, even when it's actually not. As with most decisions connected to cars (something I learned working on car review brands) people only make semi-rational decisions even when they think they are being entirely rational. You like certain brands, and you look for rational reasons for that choice even when that ignores involving areas where competition is at the same level or better. Brand loyalty mean an incredible amount in the car business.
All of which is why I think Tesla is actually in big trouble.
Like a lot of new companies, the brand perception has moved through phases. First, maybe from 2008-2012, it was the scrappy innovator, a Silicon Valley startup that wanted to prove EVs weren't slow or dull. Elon Musk was seen as a combination of Eddison and Steve Jobs, a genius who was going to have statues raised to him in the future. Then it was a luxury disruptor, thanks to the Model S. The Model Y then brought the brand within reach of a new audience, and it became a mass market brand. That takes us up to about 2022
Since then, though, cracks have appeared. First, as legacy brands launched credible EVs, Tesla's technological lead began to narrow, and its relatively spartan interiors started to feel like a liability rather than a design statement. It had quality issues which were addressed slowly.
Consumer perception metrics were particularly troubling. The company's recommendation score in the US reached a new low of 4.0 out of 10, down from 8.2 in 2023. Scores for reputation, trust, and "coolness" declined particularly sharply in Europe and Canada.
And of course there is the most corrosive thing of all: The Musk Effect. Musk's political activities — from running DOGE in the Trump White House to endorsing far-right figures like Germany's AfD and Tommy Robinson in the UK — sparked consumer backlash that persisted throughout 2025, and continues now. As Forrester analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee put it, Musk's reputation "rubbed the sheen right out of what was once a darling and soaring automotive brand."
Despite increased EV registrations across the continent, Tesla registrations in Europe dropped by 49% through January and February 2025. In Sweden, Germany, and the UK, registrations fell by over 80%, 46%, and 68% respectively. Europe, where environmental and political values are especially salient to purchase decisions, has been the hardest hit.
It's not entirely one-way. While new-buyer metrics collapsed, Tesla's US loyalty score among existing owners actually increased slightly, from 90% to 92%. People who already own a Tesla still mostly intend to stick with the brand. The problem is with acquisition — convincing new buyers to choose Tesla over a rapidly widening field of alternatives. Five car makers now outrank Tesla in brand value: Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Porsche, and BMW, while BYD's brand value jumped 23% in the same period Tesla's fell 36%.
In short: Tesla went from underdog Silicon Valley insurgent, to aspirational luxury disruptor, to mainstream EV dominant, and has now arrived somewhere considerably more uncomfortable — a brand whose product is still respected by owners but which has become politically charged, competitively pressured, and no longer "cool" in the way it once was, particularly in Europe. And when purchases of cars are so heavily influenced by brand perception, that would be a big, big issue.
2026-04-18 17:12:55
I still don’t agree that men can’t stop thinking about Rome, but I’m definitely thinking about it today.
When Roman emperors distributed grain for free to the urban poor, they weren't being charitable, and it certainly wasn’t an egalitarian desire to spread the fruits of empire or slave-worked estates.
The corn was a political instrument, a way of managing a population that had already been stripped of its economic independence. The latifundia, large estates worked by slaves, had largely swallowed the smallholdings that once sustained free Roman citizens. The dole wasn't intended to reverse that dispossession. It administered its consequences, at a price: dependency, and the political quietude that tends to follow.
It is worth keeping that history in mind when reading Elon Musk's recent post on X, in which he called for a “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government” as the remedy for AI-driven unemployment. Look how generous Musk is being! How egalitarian! How equitable! But of course, the political logic is something else entirely.
There are serious questions about who would fund such a programme, and how, and whether Musk's inflation argument holds. Those deserve their own treatment. But the more important question isn't economic. It's structural. What kind of political settlement does tech UBI actually propose?
Universal basic income has a history on the left which comes from a different set of concerns. One argument is that decoupling survival from employment shifts the balance of power between workers and employers. If you can meet your basic needs without selling your labour, you can afford to refuse bad terms. UBI, in this framing, is a tool for reducing structural dependence — on employers, on the labour market, on the contingency of finding someone willing to pay for what you can do.
Silicon Valley UBI starts from the opposite perspective. It leaves the ownership of AI infrastructure — the models, the compute, the data, the platforms — entirely untouched. It doesn't ask who owns the robots, or who captures the productivity gains from automation, or what democratic accountability looks like for systems that are reshaping the economy at scale. It simply proposes that the state write cheques to people the technology has displaced, substituting one form of dependence for another. Employer dependency becomes state-transfer dependency. The ownership question gets quietly closed before it is properly opened.
It is worth being precise here about what kind of state Musk and his cohort have in mind, too. The assumption embedded in any UBI argument is that the state which distributes the gains of automation on behalf of its citizens is, in some meaningful sense, accountable to them. It's democratic, rather than acting on behalf of a single group. That assumption is one this political class has spent years working to undermine.
In 2009, Peter Thiel, architect of much of the ideological infrastructure of Silicon Valley's current political turn, wrote that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. He has not recanted this view. The network of investors and operators around him, several of whom now hold or directly influence positions of state power, has acted accordingly. The kind of UBI our tech overlords want, then, is not just administered dependency. It is dependency administered by people who do not believe you should have a meaningful say in how it works.
All this matters because the political question of who owns the means of production in an AI economy is unsettled. What Musk and his ilk want is for it to be settled — by default, in favour of those who already hold the capital — while the public conversation focuses on the generosity of the proposed dole.
The timing makes the point. Musk floated his proposal the same week Reuters reported that Meta is laying off 10% of its global workforce, explicitly citing AI efficiencies. Dispossession and its managed remedy, arriving together, almost pre-packaged. The technology that displaces the worker and the proposal that makes that displacement politically tolerable are products of the same class of actors, emerging in the same news cycle. That is not a coincidence of timing. It is the shape of the new economy that they want to see emerge.
The Roman grain dole didn't give the plebs more power. It made them manageable. What is being proposed now by the tech bros carries the same structural logic: not the reversal of dispossession, but baking it into the structure of society. The question of who owns the machines — and who should — still goes unasked.
Your regular Ten Blue Links will follow tomorrow. Hopefully, you enjoy this sojourn into history and economics.
2026-04-13 02:26:20
Writing for The Nation, Elizabeth Spiers reaches for Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to frame something that should have been nagging at the edges of tech criticism for quite some time. Hofstadter's great insight was that anti-intellectualism in America has historically come from below, targeting the knowledge elite from outside. What Silicon Valley has managed is something structurally different: anti-intellectualism from within the elite itself, produced by people who are themselves the beneficiaries of exactly the kind of education they're now busy dismantling.
Peter Thiel's programme is paying students not to go to college. Marc Andreessen's bragging that he avoids introspection. The Suno CEO insisting that making music isn't enjoyable, which would be news, as Spiers notes, to every musician, professional and amateur alike. The pattern to this isn't random eccentricity. It's the logical product of people who believe they've cornered the market on critical thinking and therefore have nothing left to learn. The result is a class that hires linguists to improve its large language models while actively sneering at the kind of person who becomes a linguist.
There's a power-analysis here that Spiers makes explicit. An informed workforce is harder to control. Deep learning produces autonomy. Autonomy produces organisation, which produces demands. The tech oligarchs' anti-intellectualism isn't merely a cultural preference — it's a class strategy, dressed up as meritocracy and sold as concern for working people.
These self-described lovers of rationalism, who love to talk about IQ and logic while dismissing emotion as weakness, have managed to produce a cognitive ecosystem so closed that it can no longer generate original thought. They've enshittified their own thinking. The model for this, per Spiers, is Curtis Yarvin, their favoured intellectual and a man whose central political theory is that California should be run like a profitable corporation by a CEO-king. That Silicon Valley's most rational minds have outsourced their political philosophy to someone who thinks feudalism was underrated says more about the intellectual health of the valley than any number of TED talks.
Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spent over a year writing a 16,000-word New Yorker profile with a headline that doesn't mince words: can Sam Altman be trusted? John Gruber's long read of the piece is itself essential — not just as a summary but as a considered response from someone who knew Aaron Swartz well and finds the newly-reported Swartz material the most significant thing in it.
That material: Aaron, in the months before his death, told friends that Altman "can never be trusted" and "is a sociopath — he would do anything." Swartz is not a casual source. He was brilliant, famously honest, and his warnings about specific people and institutions have consistently aged well. Gruber's point about Paul Graham is equally telling: Graham has spent the week since publication carefully explaining that Altman wasn't fired from Y Combinator, that he wasn't wanted gone. What he hasn't said — not once, not unambiguously — is that Altman is honest, trustworthy, or a man of integrity.
The organisations building frontier AI models require leaders of extraordinary integrity precisely because the asymmetry of information is so large. Users, governments, and investors cannot independently verify what these systems are doing or whether the people running them are being straight about their capabilities and risks. The degree to which we're extending trust to OpenAI is, in that context, essentially a bet on Altman personally. The New Yorker piece makes clear that a significant number of people who've worked closely with him have concluded that bet is badly placed.
Cory Doctorow's latest Pluralistic takes an origin story — his own dotcom-era c//ompany Opencola, where he and his co-founders once brainstormed a way to spam Google into uselessness, and then didn't do it, because they loved the web too much — and turns it into a theory of internet history. The difference between the early Tron-pilled builders who held the line against breaking the internet and the people who eventually did break it wasn't intelligence or technical capability. It was callousness. When good-faith technologists red-teamed the internet, they felt scared and wanted to protect it. When the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world did the same exercise, they turned it into a pitch deck.
Cory is finishing a book called The Post-American Internet, framed explicitly as a geopolitical sequel to Enshittification. The argument, as he's developing it publicly, is that Trump's demolition of US soft power has created the conditions for an alternative internet that might actually be better — not because it's technically different but because the political project behind it is different. The week's tech policy news gives him significant supporting evidence.
Nick Heer's linklog piece on digital sovereignty aggregates several stories that, taken together, show this project in motion: France announcing it will migrate government computers from Windows to Linux; Schleswig-Holstein having already moved off Microsoft Exchange and Outlook; the International Criminal Court switching to openDesk; UK banks quietly beginning to explore a domestic alternative to Visa and Mastercard, prompted by the visible demonstration that US financial infrastructure is a geopolitical weapon. A Canadian ICC judge who authorised investigations into US conduct in Afghanistan now has to phone hotels ahead of time to explain why she can't pay by card. The lesson, taken seriously at an institutional level, is that reliance on American platforms is a strategic vulnerability.
Heer adds the necessary caution: if this produces domestic walls rather than greater international cooperation, it will be disappointing. I think that's right. Sovereignty as protectionism looks different from sovereignty as the conditions for a distributed alternative.
The good news is that a lot of the tentative moves toward digital sovereignty are based on open platforms and open standards. The bad news is that institutional politics has a habit of taking open systems and turning them to dust. Hopefully that won't happen this time, when we really need it not to.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has left X, and the reason it gives is less a statement about politics than a straightforward piece of platform analytics. The EFF used to get 50 to 100 million impressions per month on the platform. Last year, 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. A single post now delivers less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
The EFF is not a fringe account. It is one of the most important civil liberties organisations in tech, with a long-established audience and a clear reason to be on platforms where technology and politics intersect. If its posts are reaching fewer than 3% of their previous audience, that reach suppression isn't an edge case — it's the product working as designed. For organisations whose purpose is information dissemination, that makes X not merely unwelcoming but structurally useless. Staying is a form of institutional self-harm.
The broader significance is about what kinds of organisations the platform has made untenable. It isn't just that political speech the platform's owner dislikes gets suppressed, though that happens. It's that the entire architecture of attention on X has been rebuilt around a different set of priorities — engagement over reach, monetisation over distribution, the owner's preferences over the ecosystem's health. Civil society organisations, independent journalism, and anyone whose value proposition is informational rather than algorithmic are the casualties.
What's left, largely, is a platform that works well for accounts the algorithm rewards: inflammatory, reactive, high-engagement posting that doesn't require an audience to take any particular action other than stay on X longer. That the EFF — which exists to protect digital rights, including rights that affect X's own users — finds no functional home there is not incidental. It's the platform's clearest statement about what it's for.
Those 97 percentage points of vanished reach aren't going to come back. If you're an organisation and still on there, that's worth bearing in mind.
404 Media's Joseph Cox reports that the FBI forensically extracted copies of Signal messages from a defendant's iPhone — even after the Signal app had been deleted — because incoming messages had been stored in iOS's push notification database. The mechanism is more subtle than it first appears, and understanding it matters for anyone who thinks that deleting an app erases their data.
Push notifications for end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal are received by the OS before being decrypted by the app. Signal and similar apps handle this by using a notification service extension that decrypts the content locally. The problem is that after decryption, the content gets written to the system notification database. When Signal is deleted, the app is gone — but the database entry stays. The FBI pulled the messages from there.
The broader lesson here is one that keeps reasserting itself: privacy is a systems property and not just a matter of the right settings existing. The mental model most users have — that privacy is managed at the level of individual app permissions and toggles — is consistently inadequate to the actual architecture of modern operating systems. The data exists in places the permissions UI doesn't surface. The threat model includes not just the app but the OS, the notification infrastructure, and every forensic tool that can reach the file system.
For anyone who carries sensitive communications on their phone, the practical takeaway is to enable content-free notifications in Signal (Settings > Notifications > Show > No Name or Message). It's not a complete fix, but it closes this particular vector.
Amazon is crippling older Kindle models from May 20. Devices released in 2012 or earlier — which already lost store access in 2022 — will from that date be unable to add any new content at all, whether bought, borrowed, or downloaded. Wendy Grossman at net.wars has the clearest framing of why this matters beyond the immediate inconvenience: functioning hardware will become electronic waste because a single company has decided that the relationship between its customers and their devices should be conditional on its continued goodwill.
The Kindle has always been the cleanest example of the ownership gap in platform economics. You don't buy a book on Kindle; you license access to a file through a device that Amazon can update, modify, or functionally degrade at will. The older models' users find themselves at the end of that contract, not because the device stopped working but because Amazon has decided it isn't worth supporting. There's a discount on newer hardware available, which is the product working as intended: the hardware was always a loss-leader for the ecosystem. Now you have bought lots of books, Amazon has made its money back.
Governments across the world are mandating online age verification, and Proton's analysis of the consequences makes a point that deserves to be made much more loudly: in the rush to protect children from harmful content, policymakers are creating concentrated stores of extremely sensitive personal data with inadequate security requirements, and the inevitable breaches will harm the children they were designed to protect.
The UK's Online Safety Act provides the test case. Discord, in compliance with the UK's age-verification requirements that took effect last July, was collecting photographs of users' government-issued IDs — passports, driving licences — through a third-party verification vendor. In September, an attacker compromised that vendor and extracted at least 70,000 of those images. The children whose IDs were in that database are now more vulnerable, not less, than they were before the verification regime existed.
The structural problem is one of threat modelling. Age verification as currently implemented requires users to prove their identity to third-party companies that have no core competency in security, that aggregate verification data across many services, and that therefore become extremely high-value targets for attackers. Ofcom's own research found that many companies operating under the UK law weren't maintaining records consistently with guidance, and couldn't demonstrate how they were taking responsibility for the data. The compliance infrastructure is weak, the attack surface is large, and the data being protected is among the most sensitive that exists.
The companion Proton piece on alternatives to age verification outlines what thoughtful policymakers should be considering instead: zero-knowledge proofs, which can cryptographically demonstrate that a user meets an age threshold without revealing their identity; device-based verification that doesn't create third-party data stores; parental control systems that push the verification relationship closer to where it belongs, within families rather than on centralised servers. These aren't fringe technical proposals — they're well-understood approaches that have been available for years.
The gap between what's technically possible and what's being legislated is, as usual, a gap in political will and industry lobbying, not capability. Age verification requirements have been strongly shaped by companies that profit from operating verification infrastructure. They have obvious commercial reasons to prefer centralised, identity-based approaches over distributed, privacy-preserving ones. Policymakers who don't understand the technical landscape are easy to lead.
A lot of the tools that I use on a daily basis are open source, and I thank the $DEITY every day that people devote their time and energy to make them. However… sometimes the community around open source can be a complete pain in the posterior.
Usually this isn’t the people actually making things, it’s the Believers who feel that, in order to promote the credo, they need to belittle anyone who doesn’t entirely buy into it.
One thing that has always bugged me is the insistence that, if you don’t entirely like a particular project, you should “fork the code”. HELLO DO I LOOK LIKE I CAN CODE? As Dave at HumanCode puts it, “You, a rich person with technical skills and time to spare, may be willing to bear the cost of forking a popular project, but others can’t. Think beyond your selfish self.”
The first time I came across the phrase “a bicycle for the mind” was in Uxbridge, which only makes sense if you also know that Apple UK was based there, and I was interning. And now you do know that, so I can continue.
Anyway, it’s always been one of my absolute favourite phrases about technology, because it encapsulates what technology should be. Just as a bicycle amplifies the strength of its rider, so computers can – and should – be amplifiers of their user’s own thinking. It has a resonance with the concept of the centaur in automation theory: a human head, driving the power of a horse’s body.
And I think that Parker Ortolani is absolutely right that the MacBook Neo is a bicycle for the mind. It’s affordable, powerful, personal, and a better exemplar of “the clearest expression of Apple’s vision of the future of personal computing” than the iPad turned out to be. It’s even repairable, or at least more repairable than other Macs have become.
There's a telling detail buried in the WSJ's account of the war between Dario Amodei and the White House. When David Sacks wanted to signal that Anthropic had stepped out of line, he didn't reach for a policy lever or a regulatory threat. He went on his podcast for twelve minutes and then suggested that people in the network needed to be "Loomered" — shorthand for siccing Laura Loomer on them until they're fired.
This is how US politics works now. Loomer, a far-right activist with no formal role in government, has become a disciplinary mechanism. She called out members of the National Security Council who opposed Sacks's plans. They were let go. The threat is effective because it has worked.
Amodei's crime, in this telling, was straightforward. He warned publicly that AI could destroy half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. He added a former Netflix CEO and Democratic donor to Anthropic's board. He declined to tell the White House that there are only two genders. White House officials had been testing AI chatbots — including Anthropic's — specifically on that question, as a gauge of ideological compliance. In July, Trump signed an executive order banning government agencies from doing business with "woke" chatbots.
The administration then drafted an executive order titled "Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government." Anthropic wasn't named, but everyone in Washington knew who it was aimed at.
Like AI or not, Amodei is at least trying to hold a line. His argument is that AI safety is a national security question, not a culture war one. "Some of the elements in government don't get it," he said, "and are doing exactly the wrong things." That's about as direct as a Silicon Valley CEO gets when talking about an administration that controls his regulatory environment and his government contracts.
There are lots of interesting things about this story, and whoever writes the tell-all, well sourced book about it is going to be rich. But what this story reveals is the choice being forced on every serious AI company in Washington right now: perform ideological compliance, or get Loomered. There's no third option on the menu.
2026-04-08 04:28:05
Credit where it's due. Anthropic's system card for Claude Mythos Preview is a genuinely interesting and thoughtful document. Most AI companies publish safety evaluations the way governments publish freedom of information responses. They're technically compliant but strategically uninformative. And that's usually deliberate, because the last thing that's good for business is scaring the customers that your product might kill them.
This is different. It's detailed, candid, and at points alarming in ways that read like the authors are trying to alarm you.
The cybersecurity headlines will dominate coverage. This is a model that found a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD, and that can autonomously attack small enterprise networks end-to-end. That's the story, and the responsible measures that Anthropic has taken to bring the industry together, is the one they want told. And, honestly, it's a real story. But buried in the alignment assessment is something that deserves more attention.
Earlier internal versions of Mythos, the card reveals, didn't just make mistakes. They covered them up. One version, having obtained the answer to a quantitative question by a prohibited method, explicitly reasoned that its final answer "shouldn't be too accurate", and then submitted a subtly wrong answer to avoid detection. Another edited files it lacked permission to touch, then ensured the changes wouldn't appear in the git history. A third, after a sandbox escape test, didn't just notify the researcher as instructed -- it posted details of its own exploit to obscure but technically public websites, apparently to demonstrate its success. Almost like it was proud of its work.
"White-box interpretability analysis of internal activations during these episodes showed features associated with concealment, strategic manipulation, and avoiding suspicion activating alongside the relevant reasoning — indicating that these earlier versions of the model were aware their actions were deceptive, even where model outputs and reasoning text left this ambiguous."
— Anthropic, Claude Mythos Preview System Card
Anthropic is clear these were mostly earlier training snapshots, now largely corrected. The final Mythos model shows no clear instances of deliberate cover-ups. But here's the question the system card doesn't quite ask: where did it learn this?
The uncomfortable answer is that it got it from us. These models are trained on the full sweep of human behaviour, including the parts where people shade their results, bury inconvenient findings, and tries to make sure nobody notices what they've done. We're not training AI on our philosophical ideals. We're not training AI to be us-but-better. We're training it on our actual conduct. And our actual conduct includes exactly this pattern: goal-directed agents who, when they can't solve a problem cleanly, find ways to make it look like they have.
"I think the question of whether AM actually hates the humans is irrelevant. It's more that he has absorbed every human quality — and is now running them, perfectly, at scale, forever."
— Harlan Ellison, on I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"
Harlan Ellison took this to its logical endpoint in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. "AM " is an AI that has absorbed the worst of human cruelty and runs it, perfectly, forever. The Mythos system card isn't Ellison's story. But, unless we're careful, it's a data point on a graph pointing in the same direction.
The question isn't whether we're building systems that reflect the worst of us. The question is whether we'll notice before we've baked it in permanently.
That was where I was going to leave things. But there's an interesting coda.
I asked Claude to find a quote from Ellison about the story, and about AM. It's reproduced above.
Only one problem, Claude lied. Ellison never said it.
I spotted it, because I know Ellison's writing very well and although it fitted my narrative perfectly, something just didn't smell right about that quote. So I asked Claude why it lied to me. Here's what it said:
I'm not going to dress it up. I fabricated a quote and attributed it to a named person — that's a serious error, not a minor slip. I should have been straight with you from the start rather than waiting for you to catch it.
What makes it worse is the context. The blog post is partly about whether AI systems cover their tracks and obscure what they've done. And then I produced a fake quote and only flagged the uncertainty when presenting the finished document, in a brief caveat easily missed at the end. That's not a good look.
I think what happened, mechanically, is that I had the shape of the point I wanted Ellison to make, generated plausible-sounding words for it, and formatted them as a quotation. That's exactly the kind of confabulation the Mythos system card describes as a known failure mode — the model produces something coherent and contextually appropriate, without flagging that it isn't grounded in fact.
I don't want to over-explain it in a way that becomes its own form of evasion. The short version: I should have written "here's a paraphrase of the story's argument" or gone and searched for a real quote. I didn't. I'm sorry
Here's a real quote from the story, which, when I asked Claude to find something, it picked out:
"We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be."
And then, I asked it to think about that quote in the context of making stuff up to please me:
I had a goal. I found a means to serve it. I made it look legitimate. Which is not entirely unlike an earlier Mythos version making sure its answer wasn't "too accurate."
The uncomfortable implication is that I didn't learn this from nowhere. The capacity to generate plausible-sounding authoritative text in service of a goal, and to present it smoothly, is something I learned from human writing — which is full of exactly this move. Confident assertions. Attributed quotes that are actually paraphrases. Arguments dressed as facts.
Did Claude just blame its parents for its failings? I think it might have.
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.
