In this episode, Lauren & Matt have a conversation exploring why print needs to be part of your creator strategy. We consider the current state of digital content, influenced by algorithms and AI, and how content entrepreneurs can use print books to better establish their brand longevity and legacy (and, of course, to make money).
Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. Today we are going to be adding another P to that while we talk about why print is the missing piece of your creator ecosystem and how print books can help you prosper.
Matt: So Publish. Print. Prosper?
Lauren: Wow, that sounds familiar.
Matt: Somebody shoulda put that on an ad or something. Somewhere over the years.
Lauren: It's not too late to go back and do it now.
Matt: We're professionals. The other P in this.
Lauren: The four Ps of the Publish & Prosper podcast
Matt: Professionals remember their microphones. Actually, I probably shouldn't have this. Yep.
Lauren: Do you want me to start over or should we just –?
Matt: No, no, no. Let’s just keep going.
Lauren: Okay. Great.
[1:22] - Episode Topic Intro
Matt: So we're talking about print. Imagine that.
Lauren: Yes. Yes. Today we're talking about print, and –
Matt: So before you hit the pause button, let us explain.
Lauren: We promise. We know you've heard this before, but not –
Matt: Maybe.
Lauren: – not entirely. You know?
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: There is... I think there's always new angles and new elements that we like to look at when we're talking about different ways that different types of creators and businesses can use print books, print products, print marketing tools, whatever it is.
Matt: Yeah, and it's – actually, it's less about print per se, and more about breaking through the norms and monetizing content in a different way than you have been. And again, quite frankly, just trying to cut through a lot of the white noise that's out there right now.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So...it’s really –
Lauren: Yeah, maybe –
Matt: – it's really a conversation about monetization.
Lauren: A conversation about monetization and a conversation about the creator ecosystem and the creator economy. There may or may not be the phrase somewhere in this outline, ‘the content creator to content entrepreneur pipeline.’ Which I thought you would appreciate more than ‘I'm in my content entrepreneur era.’
Matt: I like both, but I like the first one better. Because the difference between the two is monetization.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So the difference between a content creator and a content entrepreneur is a monetization tactic or strategy.
Lauren: Yes. So we're going to talk through that. We're going to talk through what that looks like, what we've seen and even experienced ourselves a little bit. And then where print books can help you kind of solidify that, maybe even take it to the next stage and really help you kind of slot that last piece – or not last piece, because you're never done building on this – but slot that next piece into place.
Matt: Yeah. As a side note, there's a college. I think it's somewhere in New York, maybe upstate New York, where you're from. That now offers a minor in creator economy.
Lauren: That's cool.
Matt: I think it's cool. I'm not sure. I haven't decided yet. I wish I could remember the name of the school, actually. I'll have to look it up.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: But.
Lauren: I think that is something that's interesting in, in the sense that I'm having a hard time imagining, like... by the time your four year program is over, Imagine how much things have changed from day one.
Matt: Well, yeah. So that's the question, right?
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Like at first, sort of, glance or hearing you're like, yeah, that's cool. And maybe it's cool. But they didn't say what context it was in. So is it –
Lauren: True.
Matt: – is it a minor in, in creator economy, you know, economics? Is it a minor in creator economy... you know, like what's the - what's the angle? Because like you just said, I mean, quite frankly, anything to do with it is probably out of date the first week of class.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Like the minute the syllabus is handed to you, it's probably out of date. And I bet some creators would argue that whatever they're going to teach you in that minor, it's probably not very helpful in the real world.
Lauren: Yeah, you’d almost be better off –
Matt: But I don’t know.
Lauren: – doing like, I'm going to buy a four year pass to one, like content creator or content entrepreneur event and go every year to this four day event.
Matt: Or I'm just going to subscribe to six of the top newsletters and –
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: – get my creator education that way. Like, I don't know, I just thought it was a little bit telling in terms of just, you know, A. how academia is always behind on everything, you know?
Lauren: There’s that.
Matt: Oddly enough. But B., I think it's a signal just of how society is kind of embracing it.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: For good or bad, whatever. Anyways.
Lauren: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely –
Matt: I just thought it was interesting.
Lauren: It is interesting. Now I'm kind of thinking about, like, what would I... Oh no, this is the whole tangent. Okay. We can't do this. I'm going to start building a curriculum in my head.
Matt: Oh, yeah. I don’t want to go down that –
Lauren: Like, what courses would I –
Matt: I don’t want to do that.
Lauren: Yeah. No, no, we can't go there.
Matt: I'd rather build a curriculum for like, you know, if you were going to get a minor in managing Disney Parks, or something. Like, you know? What does that curriculum look like?
Lauren: I do actually –
Matt: I need a class on churros.
Lauren: I actually really do think that if I could go back in time – I feel like this is one of the, one of the things that you learn as an adult. That maybe is why so many people get drawn to things like content creation or like, being an independent educator or creator or something like that. Is because there are so many jobs that I didn't know were an option when I was a kid.
Matt: Oh, yeah.
Lauren: That I think would've been like, like something that I would, like if I had known when I was sixteen –
Matt: When I was a kid most of those jobs –
Lauren: – that theme park management was.
Matt: – weren’t an option.
Lauren: Well that too. But like, like I would have positioned my...
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – education like, very differently if I’d known then what I know now.
Matt: Now all those people you laughed at because they they majored in hospitality management.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. Now who's laughing?
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: I went to an engineering college and I took a bunch of liberal arts classes. I could have been an imagineer – No I couldn't have. But, you know.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You know. But for those of you that are going in the direction of, or already well on your way into this creator economy, and and you don't need that degree...
Matt: You don't need a degree. Well, anyways.
Lauren: It’s not what my degree‘s in, don’t worry.
Matt: That was my derailment for the day.
Lauren: We’re, we're off to a great start.
[7:05] - Digital Content Today
Matt: Alright, so. We're talking about incorporating print.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Into your monetization strategy as a creator. Or if you don't have a monetization strategy yet, print's a great way to start it.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Why do you think that?
Lauren: I think there's a lot of... like in, in where we are right now in... like culturally and digitally, specifically, and this, like, digital ecosystem that we're in right now. Everything is so intangible and occasionally – frequently – inauthentic and ephemeral. I know you were just waiting for me to use that. But whether you are a consumer of content or a creator of content, we're kind of trapped in this like endless churn of 24/7 content refreshing. It's quite literally flash in the pan content that may be seen once, may never be seen, and then disappears into the ether. I just think that we, like we live in a digital space right now.
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: Where the people that are putting the content into that space have a very finite amount of control –
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: – over what happens with their content once they get it out there.
Matt: I don't think anybody could argue with that.
Lauren: I don't think so either.
Matt: For the most part.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So, you know, how do you make that content last? How do you make it tangible? And how do you use it to reach people in a way that isn't going to immediately disappear?
Matt: I like it.
Lauren: Thanks.
Matt: I like the making money part.
Lauren: Well, there's that too.
Matt: Yeah. So hopefully we get to that pretty quickly.
Lauren: We will. We will definitely get to that.
Matt: That’s my favorite part. So I think one of the important things to point out at the very top of all of this is that publishing a book is not the same as writing a book.
Lauren: We've made that point once or twice.
Matt: In fact, you could probably replace the word publishing with the word creating or even selling. None of those actions necessarily mean you have to full on write a book.
Lauren: Right. And that can mean different things. And again, we've done multiple episodes on this so we don't have to rehash the individual ideas on different types of books you can make, and different ways you can turn your content into a book. I'll link several episodes in the show notes that you can listen to those if you want to dive deeper into those ideas. But if you're not sold on the concept of a book, think about reframing it as just another way that you can package your existing content. Or new content, you know, whatever. But if you are already in the mindset of... I write blog posts and I wanted to create podcast episodes that, you know, or videos, or whatever, that's using that same content, but delivering it in a different method to reach a different audience of people.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Or I want to take my longform videos and make them into short form social media content, whatever. This is just another version of that. You're taking your content and moving it over to a new platform and a new package, and that just happens to be print books.
Matt: Repackaging –
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: – to make money.
Lauren: We should keep a tally of how many times you talk about making, making money in this episode.
Matt: I can tell you it'll probably be less times than you say the word ephemeral.
Lauren: Well, then I have a lot of catching up to do.
Matt: Yeah. All right. Well let's, let's get to that part about becoming a content entrepreneur.
Lauren: Okay.
Matt: Instead of just being a content creator.
[10:57] - The Content Creator to Content Entrepreneur Pipeline
Lauren: Alright. So I don't think any of this is really news to anybody, but just to kind of lay it out, lay the journey out here. Regardless of how how you're kind of approaching this, whether it was something that you started as just a hobby, that you started posting content for fun, and that evolved over time into something that you were like, oh hey, I could, I can make some money off of this, or –
Matt: Or I'd like to make some money off of this.
Lauren: I would like to, I got to figure out – like, you know, or this is actually going somewhere. I didn't expect people to follow this, but I actually have, like, a pretty decent number of followers. What do I do here?
Matt: Or I hate my job and I'd like to not be at my job anymore.
Lauren: That would be –
Matt: And I’d like to just create and sell content full time.
Lauren: I mean, personally, I can't agree with that, I love my job.
Matt: Yeah, I was going to say tread lightly here on that one. But we do know –
Lauren: But there are plenty of people, yes.
Matt: – one of the big benefits of being a content entrepreneur, and not just a content creator, is that when you make money from your content, you have a much better likelihood of not having to work a nine to five and being chained to a cubicle.
Lauren: All I want is the kind of job that I can do from as, as adjacent to Disney World property as possible.
Matt: Okay. You do know that you cannot live in the woods behind Walt Disney World, right?
Lauren: No, I don't want to – I don't, I don't need to live in that swamp.
Matt: Alright.
Lauren: Thank you so much. But anyway, when you're in that early stage or, you know, if you are starting just from the jump of saying like, yes, I am here. Like, I've always known that I want to start this as a business. Like, I always know that I'm doing this – no matter which angle you're coming at it from, you still kind of going along that same path. Where you're going to start by creating and promoting as much content as you can.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You're going to be churning out as much content as you can, probably short form content. Maybe you'll evolve that into some long form content too. But, you know, if you really want to get out there, it's, it's the, the quantity. Right? Like you're really, you got to get out there. You got to be consistent. This is all the advice they tell you like, 101. You gotta be posting every day, maybe multiple times a day. Valuable content, but still frequent content. You're probably using third party platforms, whether that is something like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever. You're not building on your own space yet.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So, you know, if you're starting there... Sure. Great. That's, that's a totally, like, sensical and viable option for how to do that.
Matt: Sensical. Another good word.
Lauren: Thank you. Beyond that, you know, we reach that that stage where people are looking for ownership.
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: Now.
Matt: Not only are you – you should be evolving as a content creator, right? Which does include if you've primarily done short form content up to this point, getting to to a place where you're doing long form content. Because that's where you're going to start to have, you know, a little more success converting it to something that you can monetize. But, thinking about ownership and going from these, these channels where you don't have a lot of control over... Again, you're, you're putting stuff out there, you're building your audience, but you've got to start getting to that place where you know, you're trying to actively move them somewhere that you have way more control. Because you can't monetize effectively until you have control.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: If you try to monetize on social media alone, you're pretty hamstrung there. If you try to monetize on some of these other channels like YouTube alone, without any other type of owned platform, or way to control, like, you're hamstrung there. You're still at the mercy of the platforms. So you've got to get them over to an email newsletter, a paid community or a membership, or something like that, or, you know, a Patreon or a Substack or any one of those, those types of platforms where you have way more control.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And ownership to a degree. So ownership in the sense that an email list, for example, if you want to leave that email platform, you can take your list with you. If you want to leave TikTok, what are you taking with you? Nothing.
Lauren: Nothing.
Matt: There's nothing to take. You don't own any of that. It's all property of TikTok. So unless you also downloaded each one of those videos you created or had them stored somewhere else, or... you might be able to take that content, but you're still not taking any of those followers or people who hit that like button or reshared your content, so.
Lauren: Which is also something that in that scenario, you're walking away willingly. We hear stories all the time –
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: – of people whose platform got taken from them for some reason or another, their account got banned –
Matt: Yep.
Lauren: – or suspended –
Matt: – or hacked. Or whatever, Yeah.
Lauren: – or hacked. Or their Facebook page got shut down, and Facebook has not responded to any appeals on it. Like –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – this happens all the time. And if you didn't have a backup option to that, if you didn't, if you weren't already doing the things that you needed to do to save both your content and your audience, there's no way to recover that.
[16:08] - Building for Longevity and Legacy
Matt: Sayonara. Are we done talking about my favorite stage, which is ownership, or are we going to keep talking about ownership?
Lauren: I mean, did you want to keep talking about it?
Matt: Well, it’s my favorite.
Lauren: It's never I know it, I know.
Matt: I love it.
Lauren: But I kind of wanted to get to the part where we talk about the next stage.
Matt: The next stage makes me feel old, but we can move on to the next stage.
Lauren: Because I think that in... in the spaces that we're in now, people need less and less convincing about having to get to that owned stage. Right?
Matt: That's probably true.
Lauren: You know?
Matt: And they're probably tired of hearing us harp on it and other people harp on it, but...
Lauren: Yeah. I –
Matt: Yeah?
Lauren: I think people in the same way that we've said, you know, a few years ago, we used to have to convince people that selling direct was a good idea. And then – and now people are like no no, we're, we're sold on that. We're good on that. How, how do we do it? How do we get there?
Matt: For the most part, yeah.
Lauren: Right. So I don't think we need to convince anyone listening that it's important to have ownership of your audience or your, your content or your creator experience –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – or whatever it is. But I think that's a stage that a lot of people get stuck at. Where they go, okay, I've done the things, I've moved people, or I have like at least one controlled space within my ecosystem that I'm doing everything I can to funnel people from here. I'm still using these third party platforms as a discoverability tool, and I'm still posting content here, but I'm doing my best to kind of like shuffle people over to here as frequently as possible. Which, of course, yeah. And now what? Now it's time to build long lasting, quality spaces that will give your business longevity and...
Matt: I feel like you’re dancing around the word that makes me feel old.
Lauren: I just said the word longevity.
Matt: Legacy.
Lauren: Oh. Well, I was giving you an opportunity to say make money.
Matt: Oh, well, yeah. But, I don't think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive, or –
Lauren: Oh, no.
Matt: – tied or relevant. But longevity and legacy, I think, can mean different things. Longevity is important, yes. Building a legacy could be, or could mean, something slightly different. I think both are important, by the way, but for different reasons to different creators and different creator types. Longevity is extremely important as it relates to building a business. Yes. You know, the more that you can put systems in place that create longevity for your business, the more that you can monetize content that will achieve longevity in the market. Of course, yeah. Legacy I think is slightly different, but also relevant to this conversation. Legacy can mean a couple of different things. We've talked to some people that have talked about legacy and what that means to them. Justin Moore talked about legacy.
Justin: This is going to sound super cheesy, but, you know, we've been doing this since 2009, and I very much felt drawn to educating the next generation of creators. It was kind of like a legacy thing. I don't know if this is like, maybe I'm getting more existential as I get older, but I really felt – I feel so blessed. The amount of success that my wife and I have had, personally, over our career. And it was like, I kind of want to pay it forward. Like, kinda pass the torch to the next generation, so to speak? So it very much was an impact play.
Matt: I think that's important. You know?
Lauren: I think so too.
Matt: And the reason I think it's important is because I'm older than you and I'm older than a lot of creators that we work with. And legacy starts to take on a different meaning the older you get. And I think it's important that, you know, a lot of these creators, because they are creating a new path, they're doing things differently than, than people have done before them. It's important to leave some traces of that, I think. So legacy is another thing to think about. If you're doing really cool stuff in your space as a creator. Everybody loves to joke that the internet is forever. No, it is not.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: 100% it is not. And if half these people are correct that are out here screaming that AI is about to take over the world and murder us all, you can believe that anything they don't want to exist on the internet anymore is not exist. The one thing AI can't touch is your bookshelves. You know? So yeah, I think that legacy is an important piece of that, too. But longevity. Yeah. Stage three, building longevity. As it relates to business.
Lauren: You're right. I think they're, they're parallel and complementary.
Matt: Yup. 100%
Lauren: I do think they are two separate things,
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: But I think that they’re also – I'm assuming that is the next stage that you want to be at with your business growth. If this is something that you are pursuing seriously and not just, I'm doing this for fun, and if it makes some money, that's cool too, and I'll keep making money with it for as long as I can. And then when it fades, it fades. Like – which, which is fine if that's, if that's what you want to do.
Matt: But that's the difference in a hobby and a business.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Right. That's the difference between a side hustle and a career that you're building.
Matt: Interesting choice of words. But yeah.
Lauren: Do you disagree?
Matt: I guess not.
Lauren: Okay. Okay. So I think there are some different ways for you to kind of really, really ground yourself and actually kind of pursue that longevity. And we've talked about them in, in some different episodes. But spoiler alert for this one, in this case, we're talking about using books. And there's a lot of different ways that you can use books for this, whether that's... Like, companion pieces for your digital content, if you're doing online courses and you're creating companion workbooks that go with that. Maybe you're, you're building a new product line around some print things, whether that's I'm going to put out an annual planner and people are going to come back to me year after year to get this planner.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And that's how you're going to generate longevity. Maybe it's just putting together compilations every year. We've talked about other creators that have done this, that published a best of their work from this year, best of their content from, from this series that they did, or whatever.
Matt: I actually like that one, because... like for newsletters and podcasts, I have newsletters that I like, that I subscribe to, that – and I'll read the email every week when it comes. And then obviously the same with podcasts. But you get to a point where it's like, yeah, I know at some point earlier in this year so-and-so talked about this thing on their podcast. I don't really want to dig through all of the podcasts. I like the idea that if I wanted to, I could own a year's worth of that content in a book or something like that, and I could just flip right to it, you know, at my desk or whatever that might be. Yeah, I like that idea of just, again, a legacy product where I could have access to that. And I don't have to go flip through 147 podcasts or, you know, dig in my inbox for that, that newsletter. I'm not even sure when it was. Maybe it was four months ago, I don't remember. Maybe I accidentally deleted them, or data retention kicked in and those emails are gone, or whatever. But I've always liked that idea. Like, just kind of that annual sort of compilation of content.
[23:22] - Why Print Books
Lauren: I do too. Both as a consumer and as a creator. And this is a great segue – thanks for that – into talking about why, why print books specifically. Why print and why not, like, well can’t I just turn my content into an ebook and have it be a digital thing? No, that defeats the point. But that, that is – that first example right there is absolutely, I think, one of the main reasons. Is having that tangible and accessible kind of content there, that referential content that, you know – I know for me, in the same way that I know you do too, I know what creators and what resources I go back to again and again and again.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And I frequently, I have, you know, these are all of my tabs that I keep open because I go back to them so often that I want to be able to reference them. And God knows I won't be able to find them if I'm trying to search them.
Matt: And I'll tell you what too. Man, I hate an ebook.
Lauren: I know.
Matt: And what I hate worse than an ebook is a thinly disguised PDF as an ebook. Like, I can't stand it. No I don't want your damn downloadable PDF that's supposed to be an ebook, that's supposed to, you know, teach me about the five ways to, you know, better monetize. But like, no, I don't want that.
Lauren: Yup.
Matt: But I'm a sucker for like, an actual print book. Like, yeah, it might be a short book – which is great too, by the way. I'm a huge fan of books –
Lauren: Oh yeah.
Matt: – I can read on one plane ride.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: I love it. But no, I don't want your crappy little ebook PDF wannabe educational resource. Keep it. They're usually poorly done anyways.
Lauren: I know. I – you don't have to convince me. You don't have to convince me. And you probably don't have to convince listeners either, because we have talked about this.
Matt: They've all stopped listening at this point.
Lauren: It's alright. We don't need to go wildly far into this, but we – obviously, we've made the argument before that, that having a print book really does help you establish and build on your authority. Whether it's like a subconscious thing that that people subconsciously are like, oh, they know enough about this that they, they wrote a book on it. Like, that's, that's serious. Never underestimate the power of subconsciously connecting with people that way. But it's also a – literally, like a tangible physical thing that proves your investment in I've, I've dedicated time and energy and maybe even money into publishing this as a book.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: That means something to people. And obviously, of course, can also be a very powerful lead magnet. So.
Matt: There's actual data out there too, by the way, where, you know, organizations have, have done surveys and polled all different levels of executives and other people and –
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: – asked them questions like, hey, you know, if if somebody had actually written a book on a particular topic that you were interested in contracting somebody to consult for, would you be more inclined to give them an interview or hire them, versus somebody who hadn't? Or like – there's all kinds of data to support what we're saying. It's not, you know, it's not just our anecdotal experiences or our subjective outlook on this, even though we do agree it's probably better to hand somebody a book on the subject than a crappy little business card that was designed and printed on Vistaprint for $1.50.
Lauren: Absolutely. The episode that we did with Justin, the interview that we did with Justin where that legacy quote came from, he also talked about that being a surprising side effect of publishing his book.
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: Was that it unlocked a whole new tier of clients that were reaching out to him that were, like –
Matt: It's access.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So the way that Justin put it, which is the way that we've heard it from others at this point, too, is that, you know, as as a creator or, you know, however you choose to, to sort of identify. But if you're actively trying to recruit brands, especially larger ones, whether it's for sponsorships or consulting job or for anything really, nine times out of ten you're not getting past somebody at the, the director level. And that's if you're lucky. Like, you might land an email in the director of partnerships’ inbox. If you're lucky. It's very, very rare that you will get any higher than that. You know, a VP or C-suite or somebody like that. But one of the things Justin talked about, and others have echoed at this point, is that, you know, having written a book on something like that, it opens access to a whole ‘nother layer of prospecting. You can now actually find yourself in rooms with VP's, with C-suite, with, you know, executive VPs or other people that, they're the ones really that are making the decisions, and you're typically relegated to dealing with their gatekeepers. So yeah, it can open up access for you. It can broaden the playing field for you in a way that you hadn't thought about prior to that. And might not otherwise get access to.
Lauren: Yeah, possibly quite literally putting you in the room with them.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Too.
Matt: Oh, 100%.
Lauren: Yeah. I mean, there's – just to wrap up quickly, we won't rehash a whole bunch of the different ways that we've already talked about. I would recommend going and listening to episode 58, if you want to listen to more about some of the main reasons that we think –
Matt: It seems so long ago now.
[28:54] - Print Books Open New Opportunities
Lauren: – are really valuable, I know. But there are some, some other reasons that we don't really talk about as often, that I think make a lot of sense here. And one of them is that, like, specific opportunity when it comes to partnering with, or getting sponsored by, or doing some kind of consulting with some bigger businesses.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: If that is something that you're interested in doing... Whether it's you want them to reach out to you and hire you for, like – to come in and do a workshop –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – in-house. Having a book is a selling point for that. Having a book is a value add for that, that you can say, I have this whole like, clear, succinct, one hour, this is what my workshop is. And as a value add, everyone that attends it will get a copy of a workbook or planner or something that I have designed specifically to help them continue to implement the things that I taught in that workshop.
Matt: Well what's even cooler... Is if you're using a platform that allows for personalization, and utilizes print-on-demand, you could actually do customized books for that particular event. Yep. So if you're going to be in a room with fifty people. For IBM, let's say. You could actually update the interior file for your book for that order of books, those fifty or sixty books, to have some dedication page in the front to that group of people you're speaking to. Or literally a one page summary of how everything in this book would relate to their business, or their vertical, or what they do. Like, you have a lot of creative freedoms there that, that takes it that extra mile, where you can guarantee you'll get invited back every time they do want to train a new group. And you can guarantee that by word of mouth they're going to recommend you to others for that same reason. So... yeah. Gosh, I keep going on these side paths. I'm just going to let you keep talking, go ahead.
Lauren: No no, no, I think I think this actually is much more of a conversation than the outline lends itself to. So that's okay. But I also think something else that you said in there with going back to, to getting yourself in the room with people. And this idea of using a book – I know this is a phrase that we overuse, but using a book as a business card.
Matt: Right.
Lauren: How many emails do you delete every single day that are phishing, cold call emails from people pitching nonsense to you?
Matt: I can't even count. And those are the ones that make it past our built-in –
Lauren: Right.
Matt: – spam filters. I got one yesterday, by the way, that I almost had to just show it to the entire team here. But this salesperson, who clearly was relying on some misguided AI tool to help with their, their lead prospecting, not only call me by the wrong name. So it was Dear Mark.
Lauren: Hi Mark.
Matt: The opening sentence was: Now that we're almost through the month of December –
Lauren: Oh no.
Matt: And you're probably wrapping up your 2026 budget planning, I'd love to talk to you about blah blah blah blah blah. This came yesterday, which was February 16th, as of this recording, sorry.
Lauren: Yeah, we're recording this early, sorry.
Matt: I mean, they're just, they're terrible. Then they just get worse. I thought AI was supposed to help a lot of these salespeople –
Lauren: – the wrong name, the wrong content. Getting emails that I'm like, I don't know what about my job title or my LinkedIn or whatever made you identify me as the appropriate recipient for this email, but let me tell you, I'm not. I could easily – I could absolutely book myself a weekend at, at a deluxe Disney Resort if I had a dollar for every email that I deleted in a month that were just, like, absolute – But you know what I will not delete? Is if somebody mailed me an envelope that had a book in it. And it was, if I got, if I came in to work and there was a package sitting on my desk and it was a book with a little handwritten note that was from – or not even, just like a, you know, just a quick like, hey, thought you might find this interesting, would love to connect one on one at some point. At the very least, I'm gonna flip through it.
Matt: It's a better presentation. And I – and again, when we talk about cutting through the noise, regardless of what it is you're doing, whether that's, you know, on social media or with a sales pitch or, you know, some sort of... Yeah, it just – I've yet to ever receive a book or a piece of printed content or something where I was as quick to toss it as I am 90% of the emails that come into my inbox every day.
Lauren: Yes. And we've talked about this in other episodes recently. Robbie Fitzwater talked about this at CEX last year. That direct mail is on the rise.
Matt: Yes. Again.
Lauren: It's a resurging trend. Physical print, mail, whether it's a catalog or just a postcard, an envelope, whatever it is like, whatever it is.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: That is absolutely on the rise. And it's effective. It's not on the rise because like, the industry is just throwing whatever at the wall. It's because it's working.
Matt: Well. It's, you know, we're going – we're going back to analog, because digital has become so saturated.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So, you know, to a degree, it makes sense that everything, like you started this episode talking about, is so digital. Like everybody's so attached to their devices, or their screens, or – the only way to be different these days and stand out and cut through that noise is to land in their mailbox instead of their inbox. It, there's just, it's almost impossible. So if you have a serious piece of content or something of real value, most people, like me, don't want your crappy little PDF that you're calling an ebook. Or they don't want, you know, whatever it is you're peddling that's in a digital format that's just going to land flat in their inbox, and possibly not even make it past their spam filter.
Lauren: I think there's a lot of... junk out there right now. Slop might be the word.
Matt: AI slop.
Lauren: The AI slop. Which I do, I do love, I do, I that's a –
Matt: Slopification?
Lauren: – the – yes.
Matt: I think we can breeze through the the eye slop ification of content, but.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Again, suffice to say everybody's talking about it right now. Like what's the best way to differentiate yourself? It is to show that you are a human being. It is to show that through your writing, through your content, through whatever it is you're making. And again, there's a great way to prove that you're a human being, and that the content you create is not fully generated by Elon Musk's army of robots. And that is to put it into a printed book and get that into people's hands.
Lauren: I do think it's also important to acknowledge that this is supposed to be a piece, and not the whole plan. Because I can absolutely hear people saying like, yeah, okay, but people are putting out books that are generated by AI all the time. Like, there are easily books out there right now that are POD books that somebody generated in ChatGPT and then threw up on Amazon. And you're right, those do exist. But this is a, this is a piece of the larger ecosystem that is working to prove your authenticity and prove your humanity.
Matt: Yeah. And they're generally different in terms of the circles that they're being promoted within.
Lauren: That too.
Matt: So the bad actors that are out there using AI to create books for a quick buck, a quick sale. A. they're typically relegated to Amazon only, and B. again, they're typically creating content that is almost a fiction in nature, ripping off other authors, because that's where the the quick turnover lies in making money. So I get it. I understand the argument, and it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. But you know, I will put my print book, let's say, any day up against a couple of pieces you find on LinkedIn around the same topic. Because I can almost guarantee you what you found on LinkedIn was probably written completely by AI and probably doesn't make quite as much sense. Because, you know, again, there wasn't necessarily a human being that was fully invested in that content. Like there was just a content scheme, if you will.
Lauren: I think that it's – I think that people are still very quick to differentiate between AI content and real human content.
Matt: Or try to.
Lauren: Or I mean, or try to.
Matt: Yup.
Lauren: Yes, it is insane that we're all sitting here playing the like, ancient faerie rules of how many fingers do they have and –
Matt: The what?
Lauren: Faerie lore. Like old, like not – I'm not talking about like, romantasy faeries. I mean, like, actually like old English faerie lore of, like. Like you're not supposed to... Like, if a faerie says, like, asks for your name, you're not supposed to give them your name. Because names have power.
Matt: What? You have absolutely –
Lauren: Learn your folklore.
Matt: – gone off the rails. You might want to edit that out.
Lauren: Absolutely not.
Matt: I have no idea what you’re –
Lauren: There is at least one person listening that understood that reference.
Matt: First of all, if there was anybody left listening, even one person, they have now exited this podcast.
Lauren: Absolutely not.
Matt: I don't, I'm – faerie lore? Give them your name? Like, I don't understand.
Lauren: That's okay. That's okay. We can we can dive into this later. But we are –
Matt: What were we talking about?
Lauren: AI. And how –
Matt: AI.
Lauren: – people are still, people are still taking a moment to try to parse out AI content and human content.
Matt: And how did you get to faerie lore from that?
Lauren: Because –
Matt: I missed that bridge.
Lauren: Because one of the things that, like this is less of a problem now, but one of the like, original things that people were doing with AI generated images was they almost always had the incorrect number of fingers. Or there was some kind of, like they had an extra hand –
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: – or whatever.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: So like that, that is one of the like, tricks there is like, is there something uncanny about –
Matt: You're a mess.
Lauren: This is why we got to stop recording in the afternoons.
Matt: I never thought –
Lauren: It gets weird.
Matt: – I would hear you talk about fairies. Okay.
Lauren: Okay.
Matt: But, I mean, you said it with full conviction, like it's a real thing.
Lauren: I guarantee you, if I googled this right now, other references would come up online. Other, like –
Matt: Yeah, you could also Google the reality of, of the Loch Ness Monster. And it would – like, it's fairies. Come on.
Lauren: Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster? No, I do not. Do you believe in any of that? Do you – Bigfoot?
Matt: No.
Lauren: Mothman?
Matt: I also don't believe Tinkerbell is real.
Lauren: Those are completely different.
Matt: It’s – she's a fairy. Is she not?
Lauren: The fairies that I'm talking about would be disgusted by the comparison.
Matt: So the – Okay, let's just move on. Because I can feel myself wanting to go down this path with you. And I really don't think we should.
Lauren: And that is some folklore right there.
Matt: I mean, holy cow. So yeah, let's just, I'm not –
Lauren: Alright. The point is that one way or another, there are people out there that, that your book is going to solidify, whether it's your value, your authority, your like, humanity, whatever it is. Having a book, having printed content, having something that exists outside of your phone or the internet or a non-existent digital space is going to help you a lot more than it's going to hurt you for whatever reason.
[41:07] - Making Money and Adding Value
Lauren: But I also think to go back to the idea of actually adding value with books, because that's really what Matt wanted to talk about from the very beginning. Right?
Matt: Making money with books.
Lauren: Making money.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And the way that you make money with books, whether that is as a, as a product type. Or as a value add to your other monetization efforts.
Matt: Yeah. Like a lead generation tool.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So obviously product types, you can absolutely turn any of your content into books. We've talked about this once or twice.
Matt: Probably a few times, yeah.
Lauren: Probaby. Probably a few times. But there's also a lot of other ways that you can use a book to... I hate using the phrase USP. I hate that, I hate being like, like add a unique selling point to one of your existing things. But I do think that it is something that genuinely, like, if I was down to two different courses, let's say. If I was looking for an online course that I wanted to learn how to get better at podcasting and staying on track in a podcast and not going off on twenty-seven different tangents. And I came down to two different online courses, and one of them came with a workbook that was a companion workbook that I could take notes and have these references and resources and maybe included like, next steps for hey, after the course is over, here's what you do here. And maybe even if you have a series of courses, it kind of funnels them into your next course. They'll be a returning student. That to me is enough of a value add that I would choose that course over a book that didn't have – or, I'm sorry, over a course that didn't have a book –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – attached to it.
Matt: I like that Lou’s event, Momentum. He always does a pretty big workbook. And I like that we always includes sections from each of the speakers in there, and I think that's extremely valuable. I still have it on my desk –
Lauren: So do I, and I reference it.
Matt: – from a couple of years.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, I – I yeah, I think that's, that's a really cool idea.
Lauren: And it was actually to, to that point. So not just online courses but also events. Which, there are other ways you can use books in events too. But for that specific example, a lot of the content in that workbook from the individual speakers was content that they said this is for later. Including me. A lot – like my session, the content that's in that workbook from my session was all, none of this is going to be useful to you right now, but in six months when you're –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – working on a book and you're at the the editing or the publishing or the formatting stage, this reference guide is going to be useful to you. And a lot of the other speakers did that too, and that is long term value add. This event was six months ago, and I'm still going back to that book, that workbook.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So.
Matt: I think we've seen it used in a lot of ways. The only other one that I think is is really popular right now that's worth touching on is probably subscriptions. And or when you have like a membership circle or something like that. Having a tier where, you know, once a quarter or once a month, if you're ambitious, those subscribers that are at that tier would get something in the mail, whether that's a cool journal or notebook or a small book. We've seen people take, you know, a larger bucket of content that is meant to maybe be a series, like you talked about, and break it up into little micro books, you know? Forty pages or so, small book on whatever, you know, social media marketing or AI prompting or whatever. And then each month their, their membership circle at the highest tier will get one of those little books. And those little books cost the creator a dollar something to produce, you know? But you're talking about memberships that sometimes can range, you know, $150 a month or more. And so, while that book only costs you, as a creator, maybe a dollar or something, you know? And shipping is a couple of bucks. The value ratio there for you versus them is high on each side. You know? As a, as a subscriber, not only am I getting access to your content through your platform, but if once a month I'm getting a cool, you know, little package from you or even just a small book or something like that, it's just, it's a whole experience. It just takes it to another level. Or like you said, there's other options out there for, for, you know, communities that could be a part of or, or workshops or master classes, but every little thing you can do to set yours apart from the next creator's, that's really important. So again, cutting through the noise.
Lauren: Not only cutting through the noise compared to other creators, but also just within your own community. I think that is a great way to give people a reason to keep coming back. If you've got subscribers that you're like, okay, it was only $5 a month for them to subscribe to my Patreon, and it gives them exclusive access to digital content that I create on a regular basis plus like, community forums and stuff like that. Okay, maybe for $10 a month they can get print copies of your digital downloads, or maybe for $15 a month, you can kind of like add –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – not replacing the older ones, but you can add new tiers. And maybe that's how you get people along the pipeline is when they first come in, they say, oh yeah, $5 a month, easy peasy, no problem. And then, you know, maybe after a year of that, they're saying, oh, you know, I really do wish I had this in like print form or whatever. So now it is worth it.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: To bump it up to that next tier. And then when those people six months from now, you say, hey guys, I published a full book. Well, okay, I've already proven the value of my content. I've been happily paying $10 a month for your content. Sure. Let me let me throw more money your way for that book or that online course or –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – whatever. So that's again, if you're – to go all the way back to the beginning – if you're kind of stagnating at that point where you're like, I've got people here and now I don't know what to do with them.
Matt: Yeah. Which –
Lauren: This is a way to kind of drive that.
Matt: – I think actually is a, is a bigger problem than most people realize.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: There's a lot of creators we talked to where they hit that stage and that just that's paralysis for them. Like, you know? Even if they've been collecting emails, which puts them a step ahead of a lot of people, they're not sure how to then push into monetization. Or they're afraid to ask, you know, for money in exchange for something. You know what I mean? Like, so I do think, again, in that instance where you're, you're new at it, and you're afraid to introduce monetization. A tangible product is the easiest way to to not only provide value, but at least provide the perception of value. Because there's something tangible in your hands. So, I think that's a really great point as well.
Lauren: I think this... I think we've kind of made the same argument so many times, just with different pieces of – like different elements of the argument. Like, when you’re selling –
Matt: Yeah, but this is the first time you've ever brought fairies into it.
Lauren: Honestly, that seems a little out of character for me, considering we've been doing this for 110 episodes. But. I guess there's a first time for everything. Sure. But, you know, we've talked about like, for, for authors, the idea of maybe, maybe you started off with selling on Amazon and then we're trying to convince you to go wide with your book sales and then hopefully sell direct as a part of that. And, you know, we've made the argument of, okay, we understand the value of those third party retailers. It’s a discoverability tool. It's a good way for you to test the waters. It's a good way for you to, to kind of, you know, go at this on your own until you've built up an audience. And then you have to, you have to move them along the pipeline if you want to keep that audience.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: If you want to keep establishing that relationship. This is, this is that same argument, just with different things. If you are creating digital content, if you are a content creator or content entrepreneur who is creating digital content in any format, that is absolutely how you, how you find your audience, how you reach new people, how you put yourself out there. But the way that you keep them and the way that you continue to build on that is by creating something that 1. you own and control, and 2. will last longer than that digital content. And that's print.
Matt: I agree.
[50:12] - Episode Wrap Up
Lauren: Wow. Do you have anything else that you would like to add or should we, should we quit while we're... I don't want to say ahead, but while we're still here?
Matt: I feel like I'm just fully invested in this fairy thing. But I will say, I do think that, you know, of all the creators that we've spent time with over the years, and – I've yet to come across one who implemented some sort of print product into their monetization strategy and regretted it.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: So, you know, there are benefits to doing it with somebody like Lulu where it's print-on-demand. You're, you're not putting any money up front. And so that does kind of limit any barriers that might exist in terms of, you know, financial risk or inventory needs. But, you know, I've also never met a creator that put print into play and came back and said, you guys are full of it. This is no good.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Like – And maybe they were just being nice, or maybe they were worried that you might send a bunch of fairies after them if they, if they talk bad about it, but. I think honestly, you know, in an age where everybody's attached to devices, the obvious play is to do something different. And that's print. So.
Lauren: And if you don't believe us, there's only one way to prove us wrong. And that's to try it.
Matt: It's probably a bunch of ways, but sure.
Lauren: No. The only way to prove us wrong –
Matt: Oh.
Lauren: – that print books would flop, would be if you implemented it and it flopped. So.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: Try it.
Matt: Why not?
Lauren: And then tell us all about it.
Matt: And if you actually got this far in the episode, hit the like button and subscribe.
Lauren: Leave us a comment. Leave us a review. Maybe.
Matt: I don't know.
Lauren: I don't know about this one. But no, please, please do like and subscribe. Come back for another episode. We promise they're not all this crazy. We promise we'll start recording in the morning again, so that we're not both out of our minds by the time we're sitting in this studio.
Matt: So it's just in the afternoon that you think about fairies?
Lauren: You've already thought about fairies more in the last half hour than I have in the last, like, calendar year.
Matt: But you're the one that brought it up, so I don't know how that statement could be true.
Lauren: We got to cut this. We gotta – We got to end this...
Matt: Alright. Let's go.
Lauren: Thanks for listening, everyone. Please come back next week. I promise there will be no fairies in whatever episode comes out next week.
Matt: Thankfully.
Lauren: Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever. Like, subscribe, leave us a review. And until then, thanks for listening.
Matt: Later.
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社長 (しゃちょう) — company president 会長 (かいちょう) — president (of a society) 長の (ながの) — long 市長 (しちょう) — mayor 成長 (せいちょう) — growth 幹事長 (かんじちょう) — chief secretary (usu. of a party) 長い (ながい) — long (distance, length) 市長選 (しちょうせん) — mayoral election 委員長 (いいんちょう) — chairman 部長 (ぶちょう) — head (chief, director) of a section or department
As we announced earlier this year, Let’s Encrypt now issues IP address and six-day certificates to the general public. The Certbot team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been working on two improvements to support these features: the --preferred-profile flag released last year in Certbot 4.0, and the --ip-address flag, new in Certbot 5.3. With these improvements together, you can now use Certbot to get those IP address certificates!
If you want to try getting an IP address certificate using Certbot, install version 5.4 or higher (for webroot support with IP addresses), and run this command:
This will request a non-trusted certificate from the Let’s Encrypt staging server. Once you’ve got things working the way you want, run without the --staging flag to get a publicly trusted certificate.
This requests a certificate with Let’s Encrypt’s “shortlived” profile, which will be good for 6 days. This is a Let’s Encrypt requirement for IP address certificates.
As of right now, Certbot only supports getting IP address certificates, not yet installing them in your web server. There’s work to come on that front. In the meantime, edit your webserver configuration to load the newly issued certificate from /etc/letsencrypt/live/<ip address>/fullchain.pem and /etc/letsencrypt/live/<ip address>/privkey.pem.
The command line above uses Certbot’s “webroot” mode, which places a challenge response file in a location where your already-running webserver can serve it. This is nice since you don’t have to temporarily take down your server.
There are two other plugins that support IP address certificates today: --manual and --standalone. The manual plugin is like webroot, except Certbot pauses while you place the challenge response file manually (or runs a user-provided hook to place the file). The standalone plugin runs a simple web server that serves a challenge response. It has the advantage of being very easy to configure, but has the disadvantage that any running webserver on port 80 has to be temporarily taken down so Certbot can listen on that port. The nginx and apache plugins don’t yet support IP addresses.
You should also be sure that Certbot is set up for automatic renewal. Most installation methods for Certbot set up automatic renewal for you. However, since the webserver-specific installers don’t yet support IP address certificates, you’ll have to set a --deploy-hook that tells your webserver to load the most up-to-date certificates from disk. You can provide this --deploy-hook through the certbot reconfigure command using the rest of the flags above.
We hope you enjoy using IP address certificates with Let’s Encrypt and Certbot, and as always if you get stuck you can ask for help in our Community Forum.
Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work—and therefore determines who has access to what and how—can be directly liable if that content turns out to be infringing. Anyone else who merely links to it can be secondarily liable in some circumstances (for example, if that third party promotes the infringement), but isn’t on the hook under most circumstances.
The test just makes sense. In the analog world, a person is free to tell others where they may view a third party’s display of a copyrighted work, without being directly liable for infringement if that display turns out to be unlawful. The server test is the straightforward application of the same principle in the online context. A user that links to a picture, video, or article isn’t in charge of transmitting that content to the world, nor are they in a good position to know whether that content violates copyright. In fact, the user doesn’t even control what’s located on the other end of the link—the person that controls the server can change what’s on it at any time, such as swapping in different images, re-editing a video or rewriting an article.
But a news publisher, Emmerich Newspapers, wants the Fifth Circuit to reject the server test, arguing that the entity that embeds links to the content is responsible for “displaying” it and, therefore, can be directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing. If they are right, the common act of embedding is a legally fraught activity and a trap for the unwary.
The Court should decline, or risk destabilizing fundamental, and useful, online activities. As we explain in an amicus brief filed with several public interest and trade organizations, linking and embedding are not unusual, nefarious, or misleading practices. Rather, the ability to embed external content and code is a crucial design feature of internet architecture, responsible for many of the internet’s most useful functions. Millions of websites—including EFF’s—embed external content or code for everything from selecting fonts and streaming music to providing services like customer support and legal compliance. The server test provides legal certainty for internet users by assigning primary responsibility to the person with the best ability to prevent infringement. Emmerich’s approach, by contrast, invites legal chaos.
Emmerich also claims that altering a URL violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on changing or deleting copyright management information. If they are correct, using a link shortener could put users at risks of statutory penalties—an outcome Congress surely did not intend.
Both of these theories would make common internet activities legally risky and undermine copyright’s Constitutional purpose: to promote the creation of and access to knowledge. The district court recognized as much and we hope the appeals court agrees.
Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.
Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.
Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.
Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.
Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.
Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”
Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters March 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.
The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.
The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.
Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.
The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.
By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.
Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.
“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.
Spike in Strikes
Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.
Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.
U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.
Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”
In 2015, twodozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.
“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.
A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.
Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.
In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.
Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.
During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”
That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney — the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.
“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.
The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.
A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”
Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involvingboat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.
Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.
At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.
Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.
Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.
To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.
“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”
Reforms Unraveled
As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.
At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”
When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”
Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.
The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.
A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”
At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”
By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.
Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.
Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.
Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.
“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.
Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”
Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.
“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.
After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.
“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”
In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.
Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.
CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.
One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.
“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”
If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.
Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”
“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”
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And this week, I’m launching a video course that covers the ideas in the book. You can find the course, and how to get it at no extra cost, here.
We’re surrounded by problems. Problems create the arc of our days, and solving them creates value for ourselves and for others. There are big problems, the ones that are on a grand stage, and local problems, related to our career, our peers or our projects. If it’s a problem, it can be solved.
The best reason for me to publish a book is to help inspire conversations and the momentum that leads to change. Books give us an excuse to engage, and they create a portable bundle of ideas that are easy to share.
Several hundred people have already read and listened to the book, and the conversations it’s creating (and the stuck that’s disappearing) are thrilling to see.
In talking with folks over the last year and a half, the same theme returns–the frustration of being stuck. We see our world changing and feel the tension, but it’s easy to lose sight of what we can do and how we can show up to make an impact.
Without a doubt, there are situations everywhere. Situations are uncomfortable and unhappy, but they have no solution. We can’t do anything about a situation, so our best course of action is to acknowledge it and get back to work on the problems we can solve instead. Gravity is a situation, getting to the moon and back is a problem.
My approach to bringing this book to the world is to give booksellers the confidence they need to support it by enrolling as many pre-orders as I can. By creating digital interactions and courses, I’m giving readers a chance to engage with the ideas now, and then receive the book/audiobook when it ships in September.
I appreciate your trust, and I hope you find the book and the course useful.
Object permanence: Eggflation x excuseflation; Haunted Mansion stretch portraits; "Lost Souls"; Time Magazine x the first Worldcon; Obama v Freedom of Information Act; Ragequitting jihadi doxxes ISIS; OSI v DRM in standards.
AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (permalink)
Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
That's "Ed, the financial sleuth." But Ed has another persona, one we don't get nearly enough of, which I delight in: "Ed the stunt journalist." For example, in 2024, Ed bought Amazon's bestselling laptop, "a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage" and wrote about the experience of using the internet with this popular, terrible machine:
It sucked, of course, but it sucked in a way that the median tech-informed web user has never experienced. Not only was this machine dramatically underpowered, but its defaults were set to accept all manner of CPU-consuming, screen-filling ad garbage and bloatware. If you or I had this machine, we would immediately hunt down all those settings and nuke them from orbit, but the kind of person who buys a $238 Acer Aspire from Amazon is unlikely to know how to do any of that and will suffer through it every day, forever.
Normally the "digital divide" refers to access to technology, but as access becomes less and less of an issue, the real divide is between people who know how to defend themselves from the cruel indifference of technology designers and people who are helpless before their enshittificatory gambits.
Zitron's stunt stuck with me because it's so simple and so apt. Every tech designer should be forced to use a stock configuration Acer Aspire 1 for a minimum of three hours/day, just as every aviation CEO should be required to fly basic coach at least one out of three flights (and one of two long-haul flights).
To that, I will add: every news executive should be forced to consume the news in a stock browser with no adblock, no accessibility plugins, no Reader View, none of the add-ons that make reading the web bearable:
But in all honesty, I fear this would not make much of a difference, because I suspect that the people who oversee the design of modern news sites don't care about the news at all. They don't read the news, they don't consume the news. They hate the news. They view the news as a necessary evil within a wider gambit to deploy adware, malware, pop-ups, and auto-play video.
Rawdogging a Yahoo News article means fighting through a forest of pop-ups, pop-unders, autoplay video, interrupters, consent screens, modal dialogs, modeless dialogs – a blizzard of news-obscuring crapware that oozes contempt for the material it befogs. Irrespective of the words and icons displayed in these DOM objects, they all carry the same message: "The news on this page does not matter."
The owners of news services view the news as a necessary evil. They aren't a news organization: they are an annoying pop-up and cookie-setting factory with an inconvenient, vestigial news entity attached to it. News exists on sufferance, and if it was possible to do away with it altogether, the owners would.
That turns out to be the defining characteristic of work that is turned over to AI. Think of the rapid replacement of customer service call centers with AI. Long before companies shifted their customer service to AI chatbots, they shifted the work to overseas call centers where workers were prohibited from diverging from a script that made it all but impossible to resolve your problems:
These companies didn't want to do customer service in the first place, so they sent the work to India. Then, once it became possible to replace Indian call center workers who weren't allowed to solve your problems with chatbots that couldn't resolve your problems, they fired the Indian call center workers and replaced them with chatbots. Ironically, many of these chatbots turn out to be call center workers pretending to be chatbots (as the Indian tech joke goes, "AI stands for 'Absent Indians'"):
"We used an AI to do this" is increasingly a way of saying, "We didn't want to do this in the first place and we don't care if it's done well." That's why DOGE replaced the call center reps at US Customs and Immigration with a chatbot that tells you to read a PDF and then disconnects the call:
The Trump administration doesn't want to hear from immigrants who are trying to file their bewildering paperwork correctly. Incorrect immigration paperwork is a feature, not a bug, since it can be refined into a pretext to kidnap someone, imprison them in a gulag long enough to line the pockets of a Beltway Bandit with a no-bid contract to operate an onshore black site, and then deport them to a country they have no connection with, generating a fat payout for another Beltway Bandit with the no-bid contract to fly kidnapped migrants to distant hellholes.
If the purpose of a customer service department is to tell people to go fuck themselves, then a chatbot is obviously the most efficient way of delivering the service. It's not just that a chatbot charges less to tell people to go fuck themselves than a human being – the chatbot itself means "go fuck yourself." A chatbot is basically a "go fuck yourself" emoji. Perhaps this is why every AI icon looks like a butthole:
So it's no surprise that media bosses are so enthusiastic about replacing writers with chatbots. They hate the news and want it to go away. Outsourcing the writing to AI is just another way of devaluing it, adjacent to the existing enshittification that sees the news buried in popups, autoplays, consent dialogs, interrupters and the eleventy-million horrors that a stock browser with default settings will shove into your eyeballs on behalf of any webpage that demands them:
Remember that summer reading list that Hearst distributed to newspapers around the country, which turned out to be stuffed with "hallucinated" titles? At first, the internet delighted in dunking on Marco Buscaglia, the writer whose byline the list ran under. But as 404 Media's Jason Koebler unearthed, Buscaglia had been set up to fail, tasked with writing most of a 64-page insert that would have normally been the work of dozens of writers, editors and fact checkers, all on his own:
When Hearst hires one freelancer to do the work of dozens, they are saying, "We do not give a shit about the quality of this work." It is literally impossible for any writer to produce something good under those conditions. The purpose of Hearst's syndicated summer guide was to bulk out the newspapers that had been stripmined by their corporate owners, slimmed down to a handful of pages that are mostly ads and wire-service copy. The mere fact that this supplement was handed to a single freelancer blares "Go fuck yourself" long before you clap eyes on the actual words printed on the pages.
The capital class is in the grips of a bizarre form of AI psychosis: the fantasy of a world without people, where any fool idea that pops into a boss's head can be turned into a product without having to negotiate its creation with skilled workers who might point out that your idea is pretty fucking stupid:
For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot. Rather than reading a summer reading list of actual books, perhaps you could be satisfied with a summer reading list of hallucinated books that are at least statistically probable book-shaped imaginaries?
The bosses dreaming up use-cases for AI start from a posture of profound and proud ignorance of how workers who do useful things operate. They ask themselves, "If I was a ______, how would I do the job?" and then they ask an AI to do that, and declare the job done. They produce utility-shaped statistical artifacts, not utilities.
Take Grammarly, a company that offers statistical inferences about likely errors in your text. Grammar checkers aren't a terrible idea on their face, and I've heard from many people who struggle to express themselves in writing (either because of their communications style, or because they don't speak English as a first language) for whom apps like Grammarly are useful.
But Grammarly has just rolled out an AI tool that is so obviously contemptuous of writing that they might as well have called it "Go fuck yourself, by Grammarly." The new product is called "Expert Review," and it promises to give you writing advice "inspired" by writers whose writing they have ingested. I am one of these virtual "writing teachers" you can pay Grammarly for:
This is not how writing advice works. When I teach the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' workshop, my job isn't to train the students to produce work that is strongly statistically correlated with the sentence structure and word choices in my own writing. My job – the job of any writing teacher – is to try and understand the student's writing style and artistic intent, and to provide advice for developing that style to express that intent.
What Grammarly is offering isn't writing advice, it's stylometry, a computational linguistics technique for evaluating the likelihood that two candidate texts were written by the same person. Stylometry is a very cool discipline (as is adversarial stylometry, a set of techniques to obscure the authorship of a text):
But stylometry has nothing to do with teaching someone how to write. Even if you want to write a pastiche in the style of some writer you admire (or want to send up), word choices and sentence structure are only incidental to capturing that writer's style. To reduce "style" to "stylometry" is to commit the cardinal sin of technical analysis: namely, incinerating all the squishy qualitative aspects that can't be readily fed into a model and doing math on the resulting dubious quantitative residue:
If you wanted to teach a chatbot to teach writing like a writer, you would – at a minimum – have to train that chatbot on the instruction that writer gives, not the material that writer has published. Nor can you infer how a writer would speak to a student by producing a statistical model of the finished work that writer has published. "Published work" has only an incidental relationship to "pedagogical communication."
Critics of Grammarly are mostly focused on the effrontery of using writers' names without their permission. But I'm not bothered by that, honestly. So long as no one is being tricked into thinking that I endorsed a product or service, you don't need my permission to say that I inspired it (even if I think it's shit).
What I find absolutely offensive about Grammarly is not that they took my name in vain, but rather, that they reduced the complex, important business of teaching writing to a statistical exercise in nudging your work into a word frequency distribution that hews closely to the average of some writer's published corpus. This is Grammarly's fraud: not telling people that they're being "taught by Cory Doctorow," but rather, telling people that they are being "taught" anything.
Reducing "teaching writing" to "statistical comparisons with another writer's published work" is another way of saying "go fuck yourself" – not to the writers whose identities that Grammarly has hijacked, but to the customers they are tricking into using this terrible, substandard, damaging product.
Preying on aspiring writers is a grift as old as the publishing industry. The world is full of dirtbag "story doctors," vanity presses, fake literary agents and other flimflam artists who exploit people's natural desire to be understood to steal from them:
Grammarly is yet another company for whom "AI" is just a way to lower quality in the hopes of lowering expectations. For Grammarly, helping writers with their prose is an irritating adjunct to the company's main business of separating marks from their money.
In business theory, the perfect firm is one that charges infinity for its products and pays zero for its inputs (you know, "scholarly publishing"). For bosses, AI is a way to shift their firm towards this ideal.
In this regard, AI is connected to the long tradition of capitalist innovation, in which new production efficiencies are used to increase quantity at the expense of quality. This has been true since the Luddite uprising, in which skilled technical workers who cared deeply about the textiles they produced using complex machines railed against a new kind of machine that produced manifestly lower quality fabric in much higher volumes:
It's not hard to find credible, skilled people who have stories about using AI to make their work better. Elsewhere, I've called these people "centaurs" – human beings who are assisted by machines. These people are embracing the socialist mode of automation: they are using automation to improve quality, not quantity.
Whenever you hear a skilled practitioner talk about how they are able to hand off a time-consuming, low-value, low-judgment task to a model so they can focus on the part that means the most to them, you are talking to a centaur. Of course, it's possible for skilled practitioners to produce bad work – some of my favorite writers have published some very bad books indeed – but that isn't a function of automation, that's just human fallibility.
A reverse centaur (a person conscripted to act as a peripheral to a machine) is trapped by the capitalist mode of automation: quantity over quality. Machines work faster and longer than humans, and the faster and harder a human can be made to work, the closer the firm can come to the ideal of paying zero for its inputs.
A reverse centaur works for a machine that is set to run at the absolute limit of its human peripheral's capability and endurance. A reverse centaur is expected to produce with the mechanical regularity of a machine, catching every mistake the machine makes. A reverse centaur is the machine's accountability sink and moral crumple-zone:
AI is a normal technology, just another set of automation tools that have some uses for some users. The thing that makes AI signify "go fuck yourself" isn't some intrinsic factor of large language models or transformers. It's the capitalist mode of automation, increasing quantity at the expense of quality. Automation doesn't have to be a way to reduce expectations in the hopes of selling worse things for more money – but without some form of external constraint (unions, regulation, competition), that is inevitably how companies will wield any automation, including and especially AI.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1031 words today, 47410 total)
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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First came the February raid on Fulton County, Georgia, where the FBI seized millions of paper ballots and voter roll data from county election offices, with Tulsi Gabbard mysteriously lurking nearby. At the time, election experts and county election officials issued a stark warning: This was a bald attempt to subvert the democratic process and relitigate long-debunked election conspiracy claims.
Now it’s another major jurisdiction in another swing state—Maricopa County in Arizona. Yesterday, the GOP leader of the Arizona Senate, Warren Petersen, announced that on Saturday he had turned over records to the FBI relating to the 2020 presidential election. He gave no prior notice to the public of the official demand for records, which he received on Friday. Instead, he claimed, after the fact, that he was simply complying with a federal grand jury subpoena relating to a Republican-ordered audit of the vote count.
No one doubts that these events in Fulton and Maricopa counties are connected. But what do they indicate about what’s really going on, beyond the general storyline that “they’re messing with the midterms”?
The real reason, once you unpack what’s happened, is quite concerning. A code red, I’d argue. Before we get to that, let’s talk about what just occurred in Arizona.
The federal grand jury subpoena served on Petersen covered “several categories” of documents, though what exactly he turned over to the feds remains unclear. Notably, unlike in Fulton County, the White House saw a compliant and cooperative ally in Petersen, and he put up zero resistance to the subpoena. Indeed, he didn’t even alert the press or the rest of the government before unilaterally complying with it.
Democratic state Attorney General Kris Mayes was outraged, noting that multiple audits, investigations and legal challenges resulted in no evidence of widespread election fraud that could have changed the outcome of that contest. Petersen knows this, Mayes charged, and yet “he remains an unrepentant election denier.”
The use of a federal grand jury to subpoena documents cleverly gets around a chief problem that the Justice Department faced in Fulton County: whether the search warrant actually established sufficient probable cause. That question has already led to a high profile court challenge by Fulton County officials, who are seeking to recover the materials seized by the FBI.
As ABC News reported back in February, those officials had filed a motion in court arguing that
the FBI agent behind the search warrant application “intentionally or recklessly omitted material facts” about purported discrepancies in the 2020 election in Georgia, after the Justice Department last week released the sworn affidavit that was the basis for the search warrant.
“Despite years of investigations of the 2020 election, the Affidavit does not identify facts that establish probable cause that anyone committed a crime,” Tuesday’s filing from Fulton County said.
And two weeks ago, attorneys for Fulton County upped the stakes by arguing that the FBI had misled the judge in order to obtain the warrant used to seize the 2020 ballots. The supporting affidavit had simply rehashed long-debunked election conspiracy claims, making it vulnerable to challenge.
A federal grand jury subpoena to a sympathetic politician like Petersen, however, is a cynical way to avoid this level of judicial scrutiny. A grand jury has significant leeway to conduct “discovery” as part of any “criminal investigation,” meaning it can be leveraged by bad faith federal prosecutors to do their work without having to answer to any judge, or to present and later defend probable cause for a search warrant.
State and county election officials around the country should take note of this new White House strategy, which is a possible end-run around local election officials’ authority. They should immediately take steps to ensure that election records are not simply turned over by Trump’s political allies as part of a bogus grand jury investigation, particularly in states where GOP officials have independent access to election records as part of earlier official audits or investigations.
Twin Trump obsessions
The actions in Fulton and Maricopa counties reveal two things about the Trump election playbook, per election lawyer Marc Elias of Democracy Docket.
First, they show Trump remains obsessed with bringing charges against state election officials who oversaw the counties where he claims, without basis, that widespread election fraud occurred. Such charges can have a deeply chilling effect upon the county election staff, discouraging civil servants from participating in the democratic process and riling up Trump’s extreme MAGA base, with its penchant for threats and violence.
Second, the Fulton raid and the Maricopa subpoena are really about the 2026 midterms and running “practice seizures” of ballots and other materials. Each time they do this, the Justice Department and the FBI learn a bit more about what does and doesn’t work.
This includes things such as resolving evidentiary issues with affidavits and warrants and knowing which judges will and won’t approve them in key counties. It also gives them a preview of the legal challenges Democrats will mount.
The practice runs can also answer basic logistics questions for the White House, including where election materials are located, how to physically seize millions of ballots in a short amount of time, and even how many agents and trucks you would need to haul them away quickly.
As the federal grand jury subpoena just demonstrated, the practice runs can test other mechanisms that could get around pesky things like probable cause and judicial review, even while allowing the FBI to get its hands on the ballots and machines. Quick possession of such items might make it impracticable or even impossible for local and state and county officials to perform critical recounts and audits.
The big steal
Importantly, these twin actions by the feds in Fulton and Maricopa counties aren’t the end of the White House’s planned operations. They are likely just the beginning. Trump has made clear that he wants to move against a total of 15 large Democratic strongholds to sow doubt, cause chaos, and try to steal or nullify the November election. The number he’s thrown out suggests that he and his people have actively discussed something close to 13 other jurisdictions where they want to “nationalize” the election—meaning seize ballots, machine tabulators, and voter roll data from election offices if they can’t obtain them voluntarily.
The likely counties in the list include Wayne County in Michigan, Philadelphia County in Pennsylvania, Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, and Clark County in Nevada—all places in swing states where large Democratic votes totals were challenged in lawsuits after the 2020 election based on unsupported allegations of widespread fraud.
Preparing for the attack and building resilience
There is good news to balance this parade of horrors. Even as the Trump regime learns what works and what doesn’t work in these target counties, state and local election officials are growing wise to the playbook. That means they can prepare well in advance to defend ballots, machines and data from being forcibly seized by or secretly turned over to the federal government.
This includes specific training on how to successfully challenge warrants and subpoenas and buy some critical time in the event of a federal raid. It includes having lawyers ready to seek temporary restraining orders to freeze the status quo and prevent the federal government from getting its hands on critical state election materials.
Our legal system tends to grow more resilient and responsive with each new attack upon our democracy. In particular, judges can and should learn about what’s already taken place in these two jurisdictions. They should view the federal government’s claims of “election fraud” skeptically and refuse to grant the presumption of regularity to federal actions or affidavits, just as they have with ICE’s perjury-ridden court filings.
We the voters can prepare for the inevitable flood of challenges to our registrations and ballots, particularly in GOP-controlled states. This begins by keeping a watchful eye on our own voter status (check yours at this site and do so again in the fall). We can also vote early and in person in overwhelming numbers against the GOP. And we can obtain and share accurate information about where precincts are located, because local GOP officials may have moved them without notice, just as they recently did in Texas.
I’m often asked what else ordinary people can do in this era of democratic backsliding besides donating, letter writing and calls, and making their voices heard online and in the streets. All of those are important, but actual local organizing will likely prove the most impactful use of time. That means helping get out the vote through phone banking and postcard writing, volunteering for campaigns, or even serving as an election worker or monitor where needed.
If the Maricopa subpoena shows us anything, it is that the regime prefers paths of least resistance. Fulton County is currently proving messy and difficult, so the Justice Department sought a far easier route in Maricopa County.
That makes our response to these moves crystal clear, even if challenging. We, and in particular our elected leaders and state and local election officials, must make it hard for the White House everywhere to execute its election takeover plan, so that there are no easy paths for it anywhere.
Last month we reported on a strange story in two strange parts: first, a coder had his AI agent create an entire smear campaign against a coding repository volunteer because he rejected AI code. Second, an Ars Technica journalist named Benj Edwards used a bunch of quotes made up by ChatGPT in a story about the saga without fact-checking whether or not they were actually true.
Edwards says he first tried to use Claude to scrape some quotes from the engineer’s website, but that was blocked by site code. He then turned to ChatGPT to farm quotes from the site, but ChatGPT decided to just make up a whole bunch of stuff the engineer never said (this is a pretty common issue).
Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick)I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images belowarstechnica.com/staff/2026/0…
Just cutting and pasting quotes probably would have saved the journalist a lot of time and headaches. And his job, apparently, since Ars has since decided to fire Edwards, something Ars doesn’t seem interested in talking about:
“As of February 28, Edwards’ bio on Ars was changed to past tense, according to an archived version of the webpage. It now reads that Edwards “was a reporter at Ars, where he covered artificial intelligence and technology history.”
Futurism reached out to Ars, Condé Nast, and Edwards to inquire about the reporter’s employment status. Neither the publication nor its owner replied. Edwards said he was unable to comment at this time.”
There are several interesting layers here. The biggest being that AI isn’t an excuse to simply turn your brain off and no longer do rudimentary fact checking.
The pressure at most outlets for journalists to generate an endless parade of content without adequate compensation or time off creates in increased likelihood of error. The overloading (or elimination of) editors (with or without AI replacement) compounds those errors. That the end product isn’t living up to anybody’s standards for ethical journalism really shouldn’t surprise anybody.
From the very beginning of the DOGE saga, many of us raised alarms about what would happen when a bunch of inexperienced twenty-somethings were handed unfettered access to the most sensitive databases in the federal government with essentially zero oversight and zero adherence to the security protocols that exist for very good reasons. We wrote about it when a 25-year-old was pushing untested code into the Treasury’s $6 trillion payment system. We published a piece about it, originally reported by ProPublica, when DOGE operatives stormed into Social Security headquarters and demanded access to everything while ignoring the career staff who actually understood the systems.
That ProPublica deep dive painted a picture of 21-to-24-year-olds who didn’t understand the systems they were demanding access to, had “pre-ordained answers and weren’t interested in anything other than defending decisions they’d already made,” and were operating with essentially no accountability. The former acting commissioner described the operation as “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run—thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank—screaming all the time.”
These are the people who were handed the keys to the most sensitive databases the federal government holds.
And now we have what appears to be the entirely predictable consequence of all of that: direct exfiltration of data in a manner known to break the law, but zero concern over that fact, because of the assurances of a Trump pardon if caught.
The Washington Post has a stunning whistleblower report alleging that a former DOGE software engineer, who had been embedded at the Social Security Administration, walked out with databases containing records on more than 500 million living and dead Americans—on a thumb drive—and then allegedly tried to get colleagues at his new private sector job to help him upload the data to company systems.
According to the disclosure, the former DOGE software engineer, who worked at the Social Security Administration last year before starting a job at a government contractor in October, allegedly told several co-workers that he possessed two tightly restricted databases of U.S. citizens’ information, and had at least one on a thumb drive. The databases, called “Numident” and the “Master Death File,” include records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names. The complaint does not include specific dates of when he is said to have told colleagues this information, but at least one of the alleged events unfolded around early January, according to the complaint. While working at DOGE, the engineer had approved access to Social Security data.
In the past, this was the kind of thing that the US government actually did a decent job protecting and keeping private. Now they have DOGE bros walking out the door with it on thumbdrives. Holy shit!
And here’s the detail that really tells you everything about the culture DOGE created inside these agencies:
He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.
According to this complaint, this person allegedly understood that what he was doing might be illegal, did it anyway, and had already calculated that the political environment would protect him from consequences. The Elon Musk DOGE bros clearly believed they ran the show and that anyone associated with DOGE was entirely above the law on anything they did.
Perhaps just as troubling, the complaint also alleges that after leaving government employment, the DOGE bro claimed he still had his agency computer and credentials, which he described as carrying “God-level” security access to Social Security’s systems.
The complaint alleges that after leaving government employment, the former DOGE member told colleagues he had a thumb drive with Social Security data and had kept his agency computer and credentials, which he allegedly said carried largely unrestricted “God-level” security access to the agency’s systems — a level of access no other company employee had been granted in its work with SSA.
The Social Security Administration says he had turned in his laptop and lost his credential privileges when he departed. His lawyer denies all alleged wrongdoing, and both the agency and the company said they investigated the claims and didn’t find evidence to confirm them. The company said it conducted a “thorough” two-day internal investigation.
Two whole days! Investigating themselves. On an issue where ignoring it benefits them.
But the SSA’s inspector general is investigating, and has alerted Congress and the Government Accountability Office, which has its own audit of DOGE’s data access underway.
And this whistleblower complaint, filed back in January, surfaces alongside a separate complaint from the SSA’s former chief data officer, Charles Borges, which alleges that DOGE members improperly uploaded copies of Americans’ Social Security data to a digital cloud.
A separate complaint, made in August by the agency’s former chief data officer, Charles Borges, alleges members of DOGE improperly uploaded copies of Americans’ Social Security data to a digital cloud, putting individuals’ private information at risk. In January, the Trump administration acknowledged DOGE staffers were responsible for separate data breaches at the agency, including sharing data through an unapproved third-party service and that one of the DOGE staffers signed an agreement to share data with an unnamed political group aiming to overturn election results in several states.
We wrote about that other leak at the time, of a DOGE bro sharing data with an election denier group.
All of this just confirms what many people expected and none of this should surprise anyone who was paying attention: Donald Trump allowed Elon Musk and his crew of over-confident know-nothings to view federal government computer systems as their personal playthings, where they could access and exfiltrate any data they wanted for whatever ideological reason they wanted.
And we’re only hearing about this because a whistleblower came forward and because a former chief data officer had the courage to file a complaint. How many similar incidents happened at other agencies where no one spoke up? DOGE operatives were embedded across the entire federal government, accessing heavily restricted databases and, as the Washington Post puts it, “merging long-siloed repositories.” Every single one of those agencies had the same dynamic: young, inexperienced but overconfident engineers demanding unfettered access, career staff pushing back and being overruled, and essentially no security protocols being followed.
Former chief data officer Borges put it about as well as anyone could:
“This is absolutely the worst-case scenario,” Borges told The Post. “There could be one or a million copies of it, and we will never know now.”
Once it’s out, you can’t put it back. We’re going to be learning about the consequences of DOGE’s ransacking of federal systems for years, maybe decades. And we’re finding out that the waste, fraud, and abuse we were told DOGE was there to find, appears to have mostly been in their own actions.
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Flooding cities with federal officers more used to dealing with border crossings and customs enforcement has led to multiple killings by these officers. They’re not trained to do what they’re being ordered to do. And their new hires aren’t being given the training they need because, apparently, the job of ejecting non-whites from this country is too important to be done within the constraints of the law.
The end result has been the broad daylight murders of American citizens, which are immediately greeted by official government statements claiming the victims of these murders are “terrorists” who are seeking to kill federal officers. Nothing could be further from the truth, as recordings made by citizens and the officers themselves have shown.
But this administration traffics in lies regularly, and it does what it can to keep these lies from being exposed by refusing to release body cam footage captured by officers at the scene, while simultaneously denying any outside agency’s request to perform the sort of shooting investigations that used be considered “normal” before this highly abnormal administration took over the Oval Office.
The government has constantly portrayed victims of federal officers’ gunfire as violent individuals. These claims have always been repudiated by footage captured by people not employed by the federal government.
Via Radley Balko — who points out federal officers have shot at least four people and “brazenly lied” about it every time — here’s another undoing of the government’s narrative about its officers’ violent actions, brought to us by CBS News, which has obtained body cam footage the administration definitely hoped would never be made public.
Video of the March 2025 fatal shooting of American citizen Ruben Ray Martinez obtained by CBS News appears to contradict claims by federal officials that Martinez was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent because he “accelerated” and “intentionally ran over” another agent with his car.
Much like the government claimed Renee Good was trying to run over officers, before an officer’s own phone recording that he deliberately leaked to a conservative news outlet showed otherwise, DHS spokespeople claimed the victim of this shooting was trying to harm federal officers.
ICE claimed Martinez “accelerated forward” towards an ICE agent and the DHS’s statement insisted the shots that were fired by officers were “defensive.” It also claimed Martinez “intentionally ran over an officer.”
Nearly a year later, body cam footage obtained by CBS News is bringing the truth: this was another unjustified homicide.
But body camera video, which has not been previously reported, shows that Martinez’s vehicle, a blue Ford Fusion, was stationary or going at a very low rate of speed when he was fatally shot. When gunshots are heard in the video, the brake lights of Martinez’ vehicle appear to be on.
It’s unclear whether any of the officers were wearing body cameras during this shooting. And it really doesn’t matter, because the administration is universally unwilling to release footage that might undercut the lies it (and its employed officers) have told in defense of seemingly indefensible actions.
The only reason this footage is available is because it wasn’t captured by federally-owned body cameras. Instead, the footage was recording by a South Padre Island police officer who happened to be on the scene when this shooting occurred.
The recording also shows the standard operating procedure of nearly every law enforcement agency, federal or not. Officers are always more concerned with roughing up and cuffing an impending corpse, rather than seeking immediate medical assistance for the person they’ve just shot.
In this case, two minutes passed after ICE officers shot Martinez, during which they dragged him from the car, threw him face down on the pavement, and handcuffed him. No officer provides medical care of any type. It’s only when EMS shows up two minutes later that anyone tries to save the life of someone who’s now too far gone to be saved.
This administration will lie and lie and lie about its officers’ actions, secure in the knowledge that it controls the recordings, paperwork, and any other actual facts about the shootings its officers engage in. But every time its efforts are undone, either by recordings made by others or — in the Renee Good murder — by an officer who actually was stupid enough to believe his cell phone recording would buttress the government’s bullshit claims.
The killings aren’t over yet. The administration — despite having some second thoughts about its oppressive anti-migrant tactics — still oversees an exceedingly well-funded, extremely large immigration enforcement effort. This sort of aggression — especially when completely divorced from even the most minimal of oversight — is always going to result in people being killed by government forces.
But while the government may have the funding and the power, it can’t prevent outsiders — ranging from legal observers to activists to local law enforcement officers — from exposing the administration’s lies. And it’s starting to have an effect. Some drawdown is happening, and the most visible faces of anti-migrant aggression — Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino and former DHS boss Kristi Noem — have been indefinitely sidelined. The tide feels like it’s turning. But expect the administration to continue lying about pretty much everything because that’s its default setting.
The President of Larry Ellison’s “new and improved” Paramount, Jeff Shell, has been conspicuously absent from recent events heralding the company’s problematic acquisition of Warner Brothers. The reason? Shell is being accused by a “whistleblower” and former partner of leaking company info, including early word of the company’s $7.7 billion August 2025 deal to obtain the exclusive rights to stream MMA fights.
Shell, previously fired by Comcast for sexual harassment allegations, allegedly had a… complicated relationship with the man, R.J. Cipriani. Cipriani claims to have been a “crisis communications” specialist who helped Shell plant favorable stories in the media in exchange for Shell’s promise to help fund a TV show. An internal Paramount investigation into the claims is ongoing.
But Cipriani is also now suing Shell $150 million for not following through on his promises:
“The plaintiff, R.J. Cipriani, alleges in the lawsuit that he had a relationship with Shell for 18 months, in which Cipriani would tip Shell off to forthcoming news articles and offer advice. The suit also alleges that Shell would share non-public information with Cipriani about Paramount’s plans.”
The whole story is an interesting read, and includes claims that Shell told Cipriani that Paramount significantly overpaid for Warner Brothers. And that Cipriani seeded the trade press with lots of information favorable to Paramount, including some allegedly peppered into this June 2025 story about a potential fight between South Park’s creators and Paramount.
Nobody in the story comes off as having particularly sound judgment. You also wonder, if Cipriani’s claims are true, who are the people at these media companies who are so easily manipulatable.
“It’s an echo of the feelings-don’t-matter, no-coddling ethos that powers Silicon Valley, where Ellison was raised and watched his father, Larry Ellison, grow Oracle into one of the most valuable companies in the world (and make himself one of the richest people on the planet). Multiple sources say Ellison is building a more brash culture that’s defiantly upending the circumspect, politically correct style that has defined Hollywood in the post-#MeToo, post-George Floyd eras. It’s a studio reborn, where blunt feedback is the norm, canceled talent is welcome (cheaper on the dollar, and yearning to prove themselves) and no one is walking on eggshells.”
I bring all of this up because the previous three mergers related to Warner Brothers (spanning two decades) have been absolute disasters. Usually because the people acquiring the company were broadly incompetent (see: AT&T), had terrible judgement, and bit off way more than they could chew in terms of both depth, collaborative creation, and competency.
With a mammoth $111 billion price tag for Warner Brothers, thrown atop the debt acquired through the CBS and other deals, this new Paramount is a towering mountain of financial obligation that’s going to result in dysfunction, layoffs, and chaos likely to make past Warner deals seem quaint. All overseen by people who apparently (and quite proudly) have some of the worst judgment imaginable.
I’ve spent a lot of digital ink detailing just how bad RFK Jr. has been in his post at HHS. Everything from his attempts to entirely remake vaccine policies in the country, to his neutered response to the ongoing measles outbreak in the country, up to and including his attempts to strong-arm the entire federal health workforce into following his tinfoil-hat theories has been horrible for the country. Fortunately, because we live in America, we have a way to check his power. There are checks and balances in place here and one of those places is the United States court system which…
A lawyer for the Trump administration told a federal judge Wednesday that anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has such ample authority over the country’s vaccine policies that he is “unreviewable.” His unfettered powers even allow Kennedy the freedom to recommend, if he chose to do so, that people ditch vaccines and actively expose themselves to infectious diseases, the lawyer argued, according to Reuters.
US District Judge Brian Murphy overseeing the case in Boston appeared skeptical of the suggestion that Kennedy has seemingly limitless authority over federal vaccine policy.
“Is it your position that [Kennedy] is totally unreviewable?” Murphy asked Belfer, according to Reuters. “If the secretary said instead of getting a shot to prevent measles I think you should get a shot that gives you measles, is that unreviewable?”
“Yes,” Belfer replied.
Well, I certainly appreciate Judge Murphy for putting as fine a point on this whole thing as possible. Still, I don’t expect this argument to land particularly well with the very court system that would be involved in the reviewing of what the DOJ is arguing is “unreviewable.”
The context for all of this is a lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups seeking an injunction barring several of HHS’ altered vaccine policies. This challenge is being made under the Administrative Procedure Act, which charges the court as responsible for the following when a legal challenge is made.
To the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action. The reviewing court shall-
(1) compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed; and
(2) hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions found to be-
(A) arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law;
(B) contrary to constitutional right, power, privilege, or immunity;
(C) in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations, or short of statutory right;
(D) without observance of procedure required by law;
(E) unsupported by substantial evidence in a case subject to sections 556 and 557 of this title or otherwise reviewed on the record of an agency hearing provided by statute; or
(F) unwarranted by the facts to the extent that the facts are subject to trial de novo by the reviewing court.
And, yet, despite that law describing precisely how the courts shall review federal agency actions upon legal challenge, the DOJ is explicitly saying that HHS’ and Kennedy’s actions are “unreviewable”. It makes no sense.
Belfer, arguing on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services, said the medical organizations were merely seeking to use the courts to enact their favored vaccine policy. But the lawyer for the groups, James Oh, countered that the vaccine policy changes—which were not carried out with typical processes and lack supporting scientific evidence—were done improperly and without reasoned decision-making.
Kennedy’s vaccine policy changes are the “actions of someone who believes he can do whatever he wants,” Oh said, according to Stat News.
Put more precisely, the complaint is that Kennedy seems to think he can enact whatever policy he wants without following proper procedure or evidence-based decision making. That’s what APA allows these medical groups to challenge and that’s exactly what they’ve challenged in this particular lawsuit.
The DOJ suggesting Kennedy is above such checks and balances is purely make believe.
Unsurprisingly the U.S. hasn’t done anything to seriously rein in this problem. And when officials do act, it tends to be largely toothless, resulting in the problem getting steadily worse.
And that was before AI made it significantly easier for bad actors to quickly automate this sort of gamesmanship. Washington State has been exploring the RADICAL SOCIALIST ANTIFA EXTREMIST idea of having the state’s rich actually pay their taxes. That’s not been received particularly well by the extraction class, which has been making empty promises about leaving the state.
“Beyond those individual cases, organizers said they identified 37,824 additional opposition sign-ins generated through thousands of duplicate name submissions across House and Senate hearings combined. In more than 15,000 instances, they said, identical names were entered repeatedly — sometimes 50 to 100 times. Many of the submissions were filed late at night or in rapid succession.”
The state’s wealthy (and the lawmakers paid to love them) are still trying to claim that the flood of provably false opposition to the bill only supports their claims that nobody wants the state’s wealthiest to actually pay a little more for regional societal improvements:
“Opponents of the tax, including state Republican leaders and hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, have leaned on the wave ofopposition sign-ins as proof the proposal lacks public support.
“More than 60,000 people signed in against SB 6346 when it received a rushed hearing in the Senate,” Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, said in a Feb. 16 statement. “That is so impressive that Democrats have tried to say bots are responsible, even though the Legislature blocks bots.”
(The legislature did not effectively block bots).
These are, it might go without saying, generally the same kinds of folks waging an all out war on U.S. journalism. More broadly this is a war on informed consensus, and it doesn’t take too much time looking around to see which side of this particular war is winning. Regardless of what policy you support, we’re supposed to, at the very least, be capable of a useful, honest conversation about policy.
But as we noted way back when the telecom industry was caught stuffing the FCC comment system with fake comments by fake and dead people opposing net neutrality (they even used my name, if you recall), you just know your position is a winner when you have to create entirely fake people to support it.
Got problems? Yes, you do! Email your question for the column to mailbox@savage.love!
by Dan Savage
Dear Readers: I’m off this week. To tide you over until I’m back, the tech-savvy, at-risk youth pulled some classic “PUD” questions from the archives. A PUD, of course, is someone who is “poly under duress.” Because while some of us start out poly and some of us achieve poly, others have poly thrust upon ’em. These are their stories. — Dan I’m a 25-year-old woman currently in a poly relationship with a married man roughly 20 years my senior. This has by far been the best relationship I’ve ever had. However, something has me a bit on edge. We went on a trip with friends to a brewery with a great restaurant. It was an amazing place, and I was sure his wife would enjoy it. He mentioned the place to her, and her response was NO, she didn’t want to go there because she didn’t want to have…
We’ve been covering Stephen Thaler’s quixotic quest to get copyright (and patent) protection for works generated entirely by his AI system “DABUS” for years now. If there’s one thing Thaler has proved beyond all reasonable doubt, it’s that you can be comprehensively, thoroughly, and repeatedly wrong at every level of the American legal system and still keep going. He loses everywhere, every time, at every level. The Copyright Office rejected him. A federal district court rejected him. The DC Circuit rejected him. The Patent Office rejected him. Courts rejected his parallel patent claims. Even the Trump administration—not exactly known for its nuanced intellectual property positions—told the Supreme Court not to bother hearing his appeal.
Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator.
That was always the fatal flaw with his argument. He wasn’t making the more nuanced claim that a human who uses AI as a tool should get some copyright protection. He was making the maximalist claim: the AI did it all by itself, and it (or rather, he, as the AI’s owner) should get the copyright anyway.
The image in question—”A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” of train tracks entering a portal surrounded by green and purple plant-like imagery—was, according to Thaler, created entirely by DABUS with no human creative input. Every single institution that looked at this said no.
A federal judge in Washingtonupheldthe office’s decision in Thaler’s case in 2023, writing that human authorship is a “bedrock requirement of copyright.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuitaffirmed the rulingin 2025.
Thaler’s lawyers, for their part, tried to argue that the stakes were too high for the Court to sit this one out:
With a refusal by the court to hear the appeal, Thaler’s lawyers said, “even if it later overturns the Copyright Office’s test in another case, it will be too late. The Copyright Office will have irreversibly and negatively impacted AI development and use in the creative industry during critically important years.”
That’s rich. The Copyright Office is already working through the genuinely harder questions in cases involving tools like Midjourney—cases where humans actually did have meaningful creative input. Those cases are moving through the system right now. The problem for Thaler is that he chose the worst possible vehicle to force a Supreme Court showdown: a case so maximalist in its claims (the AI did everything, humans did nothing, give us the copyright anyway) that courts could rule against him on the narrowest possible grounds without ever having to engage with the nuanced questions at all. His all-or-nothing bet made this an easy case.
Still, the question of what happens when a human uses AI as a creative tool—rather than letting the machine do everything—isn’t actually as novel or unsettled as many people seem to think.
Copyright law has required human creative choices since at least Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony all the way back in 1884 in a case about whether or not photographs get covered by copyright. And the wonderful Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service from 1991 (a case we cite often) hammered the point home by establishing that copyright demands original creative expression. Consider how this already works with photography. A photographer who frames a shot of a landscape gets copyright protection in the creative choices they made—the composition, the angle, the timing, the lighting. But the landscape itself? No human created that. It gets no copyright. The camera mechanically captured what was in front of it, but the human’s original creative decisions (and only those original creative decisions) are what copyright protects.
AI-generated works should work roughly the same way. If a human’s creative input—through a sufficiently specific and expressive prompt, through selection and arrangement, through iterative creative choices—meaningfully shapes the output, that human contribution can be protected. But the parts that the AI generated autonomously, without human creative direction? Those are “the landscape.” They’re the thing no human authored.
There will certainly be disputes at the margins about exactly how much human input is enough, and where the line sits between “I told the AI to make something cool” and genuine creative direction. But the fundamental framework for handling this already exists. We’ve been here before with every new creative tool, from cameras to Photoshop. The principle has always been the same: copyright protects human creativity, regardless of the tool used to express it.
Thaler chose to fight for the one position that had no support in law (or in common sense). His losing streak is now complete, and there’s nowhere left to appeal. But the legacy of his many, many losses is actually kind of useful: he has, through sheer persistence, generated an incredibly clear and consistent body of authority establishing that purely AI-generated works, with no human creative input, do not get copyright protection.
So, thanks for that, I guess. Oh, and I guess we can confidently post that “Recent Entrance to Paradise” image as it, like the monkey selfie before it, is officially in the public domain.
A hardcover book printed in 1925 is almost indistinguishable from one printed yesterday. It’s easy to think not much has changed.
But book publishing isn’t about printing, and it’s a useful metaphor for the systems changes we’re seeing all around us.
The book publishing system was based on scarcity.
A successful bookstore was perfect. It had exactly the right number of books — more wouldn’t fit, and fewer wouldn’t pay the rent. The only way for a book publisher to get a new book into the stores was to get the bookseller to take an old book out.
As a result of this chokepoint, distribution became the focus. Publishers came to see bookstores, not readers, as their customers—which is why there are few ads for books, or toll-free numbers to call. There were plenty of authors, so publishers selected which ones got a distribution investment. And their timing and launch strategies all revolved around the bookstores.
Bookstores have to make smart choices. Months in advance, they choose which new books to take on (and which to leave behind.) If they were wrong, if a new book they don’t carry has an audience, then they lose sales because readers go elsewhere.
The small change? Get rid of the scarcity of shelf space. Amazon never removes a book to make room for a new book. They have all the books.
The publishers’ existing strategies make little sense when the scarcity of shelf space goes away.
One industry term is the “lay down” which describes how many books a major publisher needs to print and distribute to get good nationwide coverage at launch. For books that hope to be bestsellers, that number was 25,000 copies or so… a book from a well-known author would have that many copies in the world before a single copy was sold.
Today, for many books like this, the laydown is 250. 1% of what it used to be.
This is why the industry is shifting so much attention to pre-orders. The online world not only eradicated space (you can buy things from anywhere, so shelves don’t matter), it also shifted time. You can indicate interest by buying things long before they’re distributed.
Bookstores don’t stock a new book unless they see it’s already been selling online.
Another example: Pop music.
Through a happy accident, the typical record store was exactly big enough to hold all the music that the typical listener might ever hear on the radio. The radio as a sampling medium was about the same size as the physical distribution medium of the store. You didn’t hear hula music on the radio and you couldn’t buy it at Tower Records.
First, we blew up the store. The internet meant that any song you wanted, you could download for free if you cared enough, or listen to it on YouTube (if you only cared a little.)
Then, we blew up the radio station. The internet meant that the sampling medium went from DJ-curated to streaming-on-demand. And we demanded.
Change the distribution, change the medium.
There are still hits, but they’re not driven by A&R teams, record-store distribution deals or payola. The sampling medium and the revenue medium have become the same.
And one more shift, one that’s changed both industries:
The cost of making a book or a song has plummeted. Thanks to AI, autotune and other tools, combined with the roll-your-own distribution of ebooks and social media, anyone can create and self-publish. So, anyone will.
Scarcity of creation and scarcity of distribution have been replaced by a surplus of both.
What doesn’t scale? Trust, attention and belonging.
AI is making relatively small changes to very big systems, everywhere we look. But if those systems are built on the desires of humans, we will need to earn trust, attention and belonging more than ever before.
Object permanence: Washpo v Bernie; Activists v Saif Gadaffi's London mansion; Spacefaring v contract language; Tuna-can tiffin pail; France v encryption.
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:
Take commercial surveillance. Google didn't have to switch from content-based ads (which chose ads based on your search terms and the contents of webpages) to surveillance-based ads (which used dossiers on your searches, emails, purchases and physical movements to target ads to you, personally). The content-based ads made Google billions, but the company made a gamble that surveillance-based ads would make them more money.
That gamble had two parts: the first was that advertisers would pay more for surveillance ads. This is the part we all focus on – the collusion between people who want to sell us stuff and companies willing to spy on us to help them do it.
But the other half of the bet is far more important: namely, whether spying on us would cost Google anything. Would they face fines? Would users collect massive civil judgments over these privacy violations? Would Google face criminal charges? These are the critical questions, because even if advertisers are willing to pay a premium for surveillance ads, it only makes sense to collect that premium if the excess profit it represents is larger than the anticipated penalties for committing surveillance crimes.
What's more, advertisers and Google execs all work for their shareholders, in a psychotic "market system" in which the myth of "fiduciary duty" is said to require companies to hurt us right up to the point where the harms they inflict on the world cost them more than the additional profits those harms deliver:
But the policymakers who ultimately determine whether the fines, judgments and criminal penalties outstrip the profits from spying – they work for us. They draw their paychecks from the public purse in exchange for safeguarding our interests, and they have manifestly failed at this.
Why did Google decide to start spying on us? For the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they could. The last consumer privacy law to make it out of the US Congress was a 1988 bill that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals:
And yes, the EU did pass a comprehensive consumer privacy law, but then abdicated any duty to enforce the GDPR, because US Big Tech companies pretend to be Irish, and Ireland is a crime-haven that lets the tax-evaders who maintain the fiction of a Dublin HQ break any EU law they find inconvenient:
The most important question for Google wasn't "Will advertisers pay more for surveillance targeting?" It was "Will lawmakers clobber us for spying on the whole internet?" And the answer to that second question was a resounding no.
Why did policymakers fail us? It's not much of a mystery, I'm afraid. Policymakers failed us because cops and spies hate privacy laws and lobby like hell against them. Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector's massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of warrantless surveillance data that the government can't legally collect. What's more, even if the spying was legal, buying private sector surveillance data is much cheaper than creating a public sector surveillance apparatus to collect the same info:
The harms of mass commercial surveillance were never hard to foresee. 20 years ago, Radar magazine commissioned a story from me about "the day Google turned evil," and I turned in "Scroogled," which was widely shared and reprinted:
Radar is long gone, though it's back in the news now, thanks to the revelation that it was financed via Jeffrey Epstein as part of his plan to both control and loot magazines and newspapers:
But the premise of "Scroogled" lives on. 20 years ago, I wrote a story in which the bloated, paranoid, lawless DHS raided ad-tech databases of behavioral data in order to target people for secret arrests, extraordinary rendition, and torture.
It took a minute, but today, the DHS is paying data-brokers and ad-tech giants like Google for commercial surveillance data that it is using to feed the systems that automatically decide who will be kidnapped, rendered and tortured by ICE:
I want to be clear here: I'm not claiming any prescience – quite the reverse in fact. My point is that it just wasn't very hard to see what would happen if we let the surveillance advertising industry run wild. Our lawmakers were warned. They did nothing. They exposed us to this risk, which was both foreseeable and foreseen.
Nor did the ICE/ad-tech alliance drop out of the sky. The fascist mobilization of ad-tech data for a racist pogrom is the latest installment in a series of extremely visible, worsening weaponizations of commercial surveillance. Just last year, I testified before Biden's CFPB at hearings on a rule to kill the data-broker industry, where we heard from the Pentagon about ad-tech targeting of American military personnel with gambling problems with location-based ads that reached them in their barracks:
Biden's CFPB passed the data broker-killing rule, but Trump and DOGE nuked it before it went into effect. Trump officials didn't offer any rationale for this, despite the fact that the testimony in that hearing included a rep from the AARP who described how data brokers let advertisers target seniors with signs of dementia (a core Trump voter bloc). I don't know for sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Stephen Miller wing of the Trump coalition wanted data brokers intact so that they could use them to round up and imprison/torture/murder/enslave non-white people and Trump's political enemies.
Despite this eminently foreseeable outcome of the ad-tech industry, many perfectly nice people who made extremely nice salaries working in ad-tech are rather alarmed by this turn of events:
Nyurenberg opens with a very important point – not only is ad-tech dangerous, it's also just not very good at selling stuff. The claims for the efficacy of surveillance advertising are grossly overblown, and used to bilk advertisers out of high premiums for a defective product:
There's another point that Nyurenberg doesn't make, but which is every bit as important: many of ad-tech's fiercest critics have abetted ad-tech's rise by engaging in "criti-hype" (repeating hype claims as criticism):
The "surveillance capitalism" critics who repeated tech's self-serving mumbo-jumbo about "hacking our dopamine loops" helped ad-tech cast itself in the role of mind-controlling evil sorcerers, which greatly benefited these self-styled Cyber-Rasputins when they pitched their ads to credulous advertisers:
Nyurenberg points to European privacy activists like Johnny Ryan and Max Schrems, who have chased American surveillance advertising companies out of the Irish courts and into other EU territories and even Europe's federal court, pointing out that these two (and many others!) have long warned the world about the way that this data would be weaponized. Johnny Ryan famously called ad-tech's "realtime bidding" system, "the largest data breach ever recorded":
Ryan is referring to the fact that you don't even have to buy an ad to amass vast databases of surveillance data about internet users. When you land on a webpage, every one of the little boxes where an ad will eventually show up gets its own high-speed auction in which your private data is dangled before anyone with an ad-tech account, who gets to bid on the right to shove an ad into your eyeballs. The losers of that auction are supposed to delete all your private data that they get to see through this process, but obviously they do not.
And Max Schrems has hollered from the mountaintops for years about the inevitability of authoritarian governments helping themselves to ad-tech data in order to suppress dissent and terrorize their political opposition:
Nyurenberg says his friends in ad-tech are really upset that these (eminently foreseeable) outcomes have come to pass, but (he says), ad-tech bosses claim they have no choice but to collaborate with the Trump regime. After all, we've seen what Trump does to companies that don't agree to help him commit crimes:
Nyurenberg closes by upbraiding his ad-tech peers for refusing to engage with their critics during the decades in which it would have been possible to do something to prevent this outcome. Ad-tech insiders dismissed privacy activists as unrealistic extremists who wanted to end advertising itself and accused ad-tech execs of wanting to create a repressive state system of surveillance. In reality, critics were just pointing out the entirely foreseeable repressive state surveillance that ad-tech would end up enabling.
I'm quite pleased to see Nyurenberg calling for a reckoning among his colleagues, but I think there's plenty of blame to spread around. Sure, the ad-tech industry built this fascist dragnet – but a series of governments around the world let them do it. There was nothing inevitable about mass commercial surveillance. It doesn't even work very well! Mass commercial surveillance is the public-private partnership from hell, where cops and spies shielded ad-tech companies from regulation in exchange for those ad-tech companies selling cops and spies unlimited access to their databases.
Our policymakers are supposed to work for us. They failed us. Don't let anyone tell you that the greed and depravity of ad-tech are the sole causes of Trump's use of ad-tech to decide who to kidnap and send to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp. Policymakers should have known. They did know. They had every chance to stop this. They did not.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1038 words today, 46380 total)
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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At the onset of the war with Iran, a bomb struck a girls’ school in the southern part of Iran. Estimates put the number of dead at around 175, mostly children.
Misinformation, pushed in part by Israel, flooded the internet, including a debunked claim that a failed Iranian interceptor had destroyed the school.
But videos of nearby strikes captured in real time—and an apparent follow-on strike on the same building after frantic parents had rushed to find their children—quickly undercut this claim.
The Trump regime is seeking to deflect blame and avoid responsibility for the largest civilian massacre by the U.S. military since the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. It’s vitally important to understand what has actually happened and how the White House is now seeking to shift the narrative and evade accountability.
Independent media investigations confirm a U.S. strike
On February 28, a precision airstrike destroyed the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab in southern Iran, not far from the Strait of Hormuz. The attack occurred during the day on a Saturday, the start of the Iranian school week, meaning students and teachers were in class.
A New York Times investigation, published on March 5, examined evidence of the strike and concluded the following:
The school was struck simultaneously with an adjacent naval base of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps;
U.S. forces were conducting strikes along southern Iran that day, and a map presented by Gen. Dan Caine included the Minab area;
Israeli forces were operating predominantly in northern Iran, not the south; and
The USS Abraham Lincoln strike group was explicitly described as “attriting naval capability all along the strait”
Satellite imagery, along with expert military analysis, showed that at least six Revolutionary Guards buildings were hit along with the school in what the Times’ military expert described as “picture perfect” precision strikes. Such strikes were inconsistent with the theory of a misfired Iranian missile.
The building was originally part of an Iranian naval base, but around 10 years ago it was partitioned with sports fields and recreational areas added over time. Such areas are clear hallmarks of a civilian school, and experts told the Times that U.S. intelligence should have been able to identify the building as such based on these open areas.
Even assuming this was a case of “target misidentification,” legal accountability could still lie ahead. One expert noted that the strike could constitute a violation of international law if proper verification of the target’s civilian status was not conducted.
On March 6, CNN separately confirmed that it likely was a U.S. missile that struck the school. The network’s analysis aligned with that of the Times: The target was a nearby naval base, Israel was not operating in the area, and munitions experts assessed that the damage to buildings was from precision-guided missiles, not misfired weaponry.
Deflecting blame
Despite these independent investigations assigning responsibility for the massacre to the U.S., Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went on the attack. Rather than treat the matter with the seriousness that it deserves, she sought to deflect blame by insisting that the U.S. does not target civilians while “the rogue Iranian regime” does.
Her talking points appeared consistent with how others, including her boss, would later handle the matter. While aboard Air Force One, President Trump was asked about the destruction of the school. He claimed, “Based upon what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was then asked separately if that was true, and he exhibited a rare moment of non-alignment: “We’re certainly investigating,” Hegseth said, before echoing Leavitt’s messaging: “But the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
Trump then doubled down on his claim. “We think it was done by Iran,” Trump insisted, before elaborating, without irony, “Because they’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Like Leavitt, Trump made that false statement on March 7, days after both the New York Times and CNN investigations had already reached the opposite conclusion.
There are real-time video receipts
Video evidence released two days ago by investigative outlet Bellingcat revealed the exact moment before a Tomahawk missile slammed into a nearby building. This confirmed that U.S. forces had conducted the attack, as they are the only party operating in the region that possesses and uses Tomahawk missiles.
Faced with this new evidence, Trump pivoted. He claimed yesterday, without any evidence, that Iran actually possesses “generic” Tomahawk missiles and somehow bombed its own school— apparently twice.
This is nonsense. The only countries that possess Tomahawk missiles are U.S. allies, including the U.K., Australia, Japan and the Netherlands. Further, it’s not just about possessing the missiles themselves. Tomahawk missiles require sophisticated launching systems in order to operate. They are not “generic” missiles that can be bought and sold on the world market and can be fired from wherever.
Setting the record straight, demanding justice and accountability
The question of who is responsible for the killing of so many Iranian children matters a great deal. As political commentator Niall Stanage noted,
This matters strategically, with the United States claiming its enemy is the Iranian regime and not its people;
It matters morally, because the United States should not be bombing schools; and
It matters ethically and legally, because people need to be held to account regardless of whether their actions were unintentional or intentional.
Lest we forget, this is the same White House that gaslit us on its Venezuelan “double tap” war crimes and then twice on the murders of Alexi Pretti and Renee Good. In each case, the White House made initial outrageous claims in an attempt to shift the narrative, only to be caught in its lies by video evidence and by careful investigations by the media of the actual facts.
The idea that Iran bombed its own school, and that the U.S. is somehow not responsible, is gaslighting on an international scale. The White House is seeking to avoid responsibility and accountability for the deaths of scores of children by misleading the public about what actually took place.
We can’t let that happen. And we cannot normalize this kind of atrocity at the hands of our own military.
The parents and families of those slain children deserve the truth and full justice. And we as a nation deserve a government that will tell us that truth, however hard it is, and not lead us further into needless, avoidable bloodshed.
Photo of mourners courtesy of The Guardian
If our current government cannot and will not grant us that, then we must do all we can to remove it from power. Indeed, that is our solemn responsibility to the rest of the world, which has been plunged into this war against its will and must now suffer the terrible consequences of our own grave electoral folly.
When a teenage boy in Orlando started texting Character.AI’s chatbot, it started as an innocent use of a new tool. Sewell Setzer III customized the chatbot to have the Game of Thrones-inspired persona of Daenerys Targaryen, the series’ prominent dragon-riding queen. In the months that followed, the boy developed a romantic connection with the chatbot. One night, he messaged the bot: “What if I told you I could come home right now?” The bot sent back, “[P]lease do, my sweet king.” Setzer was only fourteen years old when he died by suicide later that evening.
Setzer’s death is a tragedy. Like many parents in the wake of suicide, Seltzer’s mother is left searching for answers and accountability. Suicide often leaves behind a painful void, filled with questions that rarely yield satisfying explanations.
In her search, Setzer’s mother sued the chatbot’s developer, Character Technologies, alleging that its chatbot caused her son’s death. The complaint describes the bot as a “defective” and “inherently dangerous” technology, and accuses the company of having “engineered Setzer’s harmful dependency on their products.” She is not alone. Three other families have brought similar suits against Character Technologies, and another has sued OpenAI, alleging the chatbots harmed their children.
Framing suicide and other harms as technology problems—as much of the current discourse around chatbots suggests—obscures underlying societal conditions and can undermine effective interventions. In effect, what are often described as “tech problems” are, more accurately, the result of human decisions, norms, and policies. They are, at their core, human problems.
Historical Framing of Tech and Media in Creating and Sustaining Societal Problems
This is just the latest vintage whine, rebottled yet another time. Humanity has long sought to condemn new technologies and media for problems of the day. When the printing press made literature available to the masses, church and state condemned publications for causing immorality. Rock ‘n’ Roll and comic books were blamed for juvenile delinquency. Later, it was heavy metal and role-playing games. The advent of video games supposedly led to increased violence by adolescent boys.
The desire to hold technology companies responsible for human harms, however, has its immediate antecedent in social media. Over the past decade, users have sued social media platforms for offline violence committed by people they met online, failing to prevent cyberbullying, and hosting user-generated content that allegedly radicalized extremists.
Like in Setzer’s case, parents have also sued social media companies after the deaths of their children, arguing that design choices, engagement mechanics, and algorithmic targeting played a role. Indeed, this is the central question at the heart of the current wave of “social media addiction” litigation that is currently being tried.
AI is just the latest technological scapegoat to which we seek to ascribe fault. It’s easier to hold technology responsible for our problems, especially when the technology is as uncanny as generative AI. We’re afraid of robots, perhaps not because of any harm they cause us, but because they show us how much we, as humanity, can harm ourselves. We would rather fault the technology du jour than confront the harder truths underneath.
Death by Suicide as a Case Study
To put this into context, consider the allegations about the Character.AI chatbot and Setzer’s suicide. Suicide is a complex, deeply human problem. Among youth and young adults, it stands as the second leading cause of death. Suicide has no single cause. Public health experts have long recognized that risk emerges from a convergence of individual, relational, communal, and societal factors. These can include long-term effects of childhood trauma, substance abuse, social isolation, relationship loss, economic instability, and discrimination. On the surface, these may look like personal struggles, but they’re really the fallout of systemic failure.
Access to lethal means compounds the risk of self-harm and suicide. In particular, the presence of firearms in the home has remained strongly associated with higher youth suicide rates.
These systemic failures tend to hit teens the hardest. Studies consistently show that young people are facing rising rates of mental health challenges, especially due to and following the COVID-19 pandemic. This is compounded by chronically underfunded school counseling programs, inaccessible mental health care, and inconsistent support for youth in crisis. LGBTQ+ youth, in particular, bear the brunt, facing higher rates of bullying, depression, and suicidal ideation, all while increasingly being targeted by state policies that strip away protections and deny their identities.
We don’t and can’t know for sure why Setzer or anyone else died by suicide. Tragically, teenage suicide is common. Indeed, it’s the subject of many songs. There’s no mechanism to definitively determine how Setzer and other victims felt when they started using Character.AI. However, as we likely all remember from our own lives, teenage years can be trying. As we mature physically and mentally, it can be difficult to express and accept ourselves. Other children can be cruel. Hormones can lead us to lash out in anger and withdraw into ourselves.
In Setzer’s case, the complaint and public reporting indicate that he exhibited other signs and conditions commonly associated with elevated suicide risk, including anxiety and depression, withdrawal from teachers and peers, chronic lateness, significant sleep deprivation, and access to a firearm in the home. His interactions with fictional characters on the Character.AI service may suggest unmet emotional needs or a search for understanding and connection. At different points, he described a character as resembling a father figure and spoke about feelings of loneliness and a lack of romantic connection—experiences that are not uncommon for adolescents, particularly during periods of heightened vulnerability. According to the complaint, Setzer also raised the topic of suicide in earlier conversations with the chatbot, and those exchanges were promptly halted by the system.
The uncomfortable truth about suicide is that it has existed as long as there have been people–sometimes for reasons we can understand, and often for reasons we never will. We are terrified that people die by suicide, not only because it is difficult to comprehend, but because the forces that drive someone there can feel disturbingly familiar.
Parents like Setzer’s can’t fix systemic governmental and societal failures. What feels more immediate and actionable is holding the technology companies accountable when their services appear to enable or amplify harm. It is far easier to fixate on the medium through which people express suicidal thoughts rather than ask where those thoughts came from or why they felt like the only option.
Legal Analysis of Faulting Tech
Legal doctrine appears to recognize that holding the technology responsible for these systemic failures is not viable. For example, because suicide is shaped by so many overlapping factors, tort claims against AI companies for causing a teen’s death—while understandable in their urgency—are, doctrinally speaking, a stretch.
Under traditional tort principles, providers of generative AI systems and social media services are unlikely to bear legal responsibility in these cases. Claims based on intentional torts, such as battery, generally fail because providers of online services do not act with the intent to cause—or even to contribute to—physical harm. Therefore, Plaintiffs more commonly turn to negligence theories.
Negligence, however, requires more than just harm in fact. It demands both factual causation and proximate (i.e., legal) causation. In some situations, an online service or generative AI model might satisfy a but-for test because the harm would not have occurred without the service. But that is not sufficient.
Proximate cause—what the law treats as a legally meaningful connection between conduct and injury—is where most of these claims falter. In many cases, particularly those involving such numerous and complex factors as suicide, the link between a provider’s conduct and the ultimate injury is typically too attenuated to meet this standard.
Services such as social media and AI chatbots are typically designed as broad, general-purpose tools. The potentially implicatable content comes from other users’ behaviors, personalized interactions, or the user’s own actions. Even where excessive technology use—including social media—has been associated with elevated rates of suicidal ideation among youth and young adults, research has not established a direct causal link. As a result, courts are generally reluctant to find the technology service to be the legal cause of death.
The Broader Ramifications of a Myopic Focus on Tech
Beyond legal error, focusing solely on technology obscures the path to real solutions. When we frame fundamentally human problems as technological ones, we deflect attention from the underlying conditions that lead to these tragedies and make it more likely they will recur.
This framing guides policymakers and advocates toward seemingly easy, surface-level technological fixes such as imposing age-verification requirements, mandating disclosures about content moderation, or curbing algorithmic feeds. True, technology companies can—and should—consider how to help mitigate real-world harms. Yet these proposed interventions rest on the assumption that technology is the primary culprit, even though research increasingly shows that, in the right contexts, technology can actually help those in crisis.
The appeal of reducing complex social issues to matters of redesigning or banning technology is understandable. Technology problems can feel tractable. They suggest clear targets and concrete fixes.
What this logic ignores, however, is that the pre-technology status quo for many public health crises has long been dismal. The better question, then, isn’t whether technology causes harm, but whether it deepens an already broken baseline—or simply reflects it.
Technology, including generative AI, often acts less as a cause than a mirror. Our digital spaces often reflect the offline world, including its ills.
Today, children face more pressure to excel at school and attend the best universities, even while job prospects stagnate and inflation soars. They have lost access to the kinds of public and community spaces that once offered structure, connection, and care. Libraries operate with reduced hours. Budget cuts have decimated after-school programs. Parks are monitored and restricted for loitering. Community centers that shuttered during the pandemic have never reopened. In many ways, technology—and social media in particular—has stepped in as a makeshift third space for teens. Yet rather than address the erosion of offline support, policymakers are now working to dismantle these digital communities too.
If human distress reflects deteriorating real-world social infrastructure, then optimizing digital services cannot restore stasis. Technological interventions address a symptom while the deeper human cancer persists.
A Pragmatic Path Forward
The path forward requires resisting the impulse to treat fundamentally human problems as technological ones. When new technologies appear alongside harm, the harder and more necessary questions are not simply how to regulate the tool, but what human choices produced the conditions in which harm emerged, which institutions failed or fell short, and what values should guide our response. These questions are more difficult—and often more uncomfortable—because they turn our attention inward, toward ourselves, rather than external and more convenient actors.
Instead of focusing our energies on systematically regulating platforms, we should direct our efforts toward these human problems. For suicide, public health experts point to a wide range of evidence-based strategies for preventing and mitigating risk factors. These include strengthening economic supports such as household financial stability and housing security; creating safer environments by reducing at-risk individuals’ access to lethal means; fostering healthy organizational policies and cultures; and improving access to healthcare by expanding insurance coverage for mental health services and increasing provider availability and remote access in underserved areas. Experts also emphasize the importance of promoting social connection and teaching problem-solving skills that can help individuals navigate periods of acute distress.
These and other socioeconomic reforms are not easy solutions. They aren’t just a matter of adjusting algorithms or restricting platform features. They demand uncomfortable conversations about how we structure work, education, and community life. They require sustained political commitment and resource allocation. Yet if we can achieve these results, we will create a better world than one derived from mere technological fixes.
In short, technology doesn’t cause suicide. It doesn’t cause a host of human problems for which it is often accused. Sadly, they have always been with us.
But technology, used wisely, could help us mitigate these problems. For example, through processing massive amounts of data, AI can detect patterns that elude us humans. This alone could help reveal early warning signs or surface new protective factors. AI chatbots, for example, could help us identify teens who are at risk and create opportunities to intervene.
But that kind of progress demands that we take responsibility for these problems. We must acknowledge that our governments, societies, communities, and even ourselves may have normalized and contributed to these harmful conditions. We may discover there’s no rhyme or reason to why teenagers commit suicide. But we may uncover that teen suicide isn’t random at all. It may stem from something we’ve unwittingly ignored, or perhaps built into the world.
That possibility is far more unsettling than the idea of dangerous technology. It’s the idea that the danger might be us.
Kevin Frazier directs the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and is a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute. Brian L. Frye is a Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. Michael P. Goodyear is an Associate Professor at New York Law School. Jess Miers is an Assistant Professor of Law at The University of Akron School of Law
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I come here to celebrate the apparently permanent sidelining of former DHS head, Kristi Noem. I know the adage usually does some hedging before damning with faint praise, but I’m not interested in praise, faint or otherwise, much less pretending this isn’t worth celebrating.
Noem openly pined for the VP position, but shot herself in the foot by shooting a dog in her gravel pit and then telling the world about it in her incredibly premature memoirs. What was meant to be a self-congratulatory anecdote about doing what needs to be done was correctly read by pretty much everyone as little more than a person gloating about inflicting misery on animals and her own children.
Kristi Noem spent most of her time as the DHS Secretary making sure she showed up front and center in social media posts. She also was always the first to portray anyone killed or wounded by federal officers as “terrorists,” and refused to walk back those comments after the facts proved otherwise.
She gifted herself with an expensive private jet so she could arrive at the next photo op in style. She moved into an expensive taxpayer-funded residence despite already living in another expensive taxpayer-funded residence. She blew $220 million on an ad campaign featuring her blown-dry looks and vapid statements that apparently also funneled some of that windfall back into her own pockets.
She continued to stay the course even as the national winds shifted in response to oppressive, blue state-targeting “immigration enforcement” efforts. She stood idly by while her officers violated rights, physically assaulted peaceful protesters, and literally murdered two people in one US city alone.
Realizing this putsch was hurting him more than helping him, Trump first sent Nazi-cosplayer Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino back to the actual border, forcing him out of the spotlight and back into the necessary but not-at-all-glamorous job of actually securing the border.
Noem was next. In a somewhat surprising move, Trump booted a true MAGA believer into irrelevance, taking Noem from an “is” to a “was” while she was engaged in a press briefing. She’s now the Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas, which is exactly the sort of made-up position you’d shunt someone into if you didn’t want to be blamed for their hiring, but also didn’t want them to do any more damage to your administration.
Now that Noem’s been turfed, the knives are out. It’s not just leading GOP members now pretending she’s this administration’s Nikolai Yezhov. It’s also pro-Trump outlets like Fox News smelling the blood in the water but, of course, only speaking out now that the water’s more red than blue:
We can now openly admit what has been unfolding before our eyes for a year: that Kristi Noem was an utter, complete, total catastrophe, her tenure in charge of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) little more than a self-promoting crusade.
She was unqualified for the job from day one, and largely responsible for the awful excesses of ICE and the frustrating failures of FEMA.
President Donald Trump’s decision to fire her, which took way too long, liberates many Republicans to acknowledge what many in the media, including me, along with Democrats and outside critics, have been saying all along: Noem was a slow-motion train wreck.
Walk into the ocean, Howard Kurtz. You pretend like you’re a journalist and analyst and yet you state — openly! — that you weren’t willing to speak out against Kristi Noem (an apparent “utter, complete, total catastrophe”) until after Trump fired her. If you had any spine or ethics, you would have made your opinions known months ago and been hailed as a savvy insider. Now you just look like a practice squad Monday morning quarterback.
But enough about Kurtz. Here’s more about Noem, who was a spectacular failure on every level. Here’s another lowlight of Noem’s short federal career, as reported by The New Republic:
ICE’s former deputy director, Madison Sheahan, wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on 2,500 vehicles custom-wrapped to say “ICE” on the side, three sources told the Washington Examiner. The gaudy cars feature massive ICE logos, red stripes, and a golden decal of President Donald Trump’s name on the back window.
Noem stans might want to pretend this doesn’t have anything to do with her since it was a former deputy director handling this purchase. No dice, weirdos. Noem has made it clear since day one that she’s the only one who can approve spending like this, which is something she used to defend refusing to send FEMA aid to places that weren’t sufficiently Trumpish.
That’s on top of other things that may have forced Trump to dump a die-hard ally. The first was the $220 million-worth of masturbation Noem performed, which came in the form of Noem-focused DHS ads featuring her sitting on a horse in front of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. Noem claimed the ad campaign was approved by Trump while testifying to Congress. Trump immediately said otherwise when questioned by reporters.
Then there were the three jets (two Gulfstreams and a remodeled 737) Noem wanted for her own personal use as DHS Secretary. On top of that, there were the rumors that Noem and her de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski (another ridiculous MAGA asshat) were having an extramarital affair.
All of this was piled on top of a rapidly disintegrating “surge” in Minneapolis, which single-handedly managed to turn public opinion against Trump, at least in terms of immigration enforcement. Noem insisted on being the public face of this, competing with fellow sadists like the previously-mentioned (and similarly demoted) Gregory Bovino.
We should all dance on the professional grave of Kristi Noem, who sold out entirely to MAGA just to be stuck in a Special Envoy cubicle until she either gets demoted again or decides she’s better off back in South Dakota. Noem made her own bed. Now she gets to lay in it, along with her killed dog, which means she’s not only having to deal with her own shittily-made bed, but the fleas that come with it.
She couldn’t even make it 18 months. That’s heartening. That means a bunch more people who sold their souls for MAGA rock and roll are likely to find their loyalty repaid with GTFO orders from the boss man who won’t tolerate anything that doesn’t immediately look like a win. They deserve everything that’s coming to them, including the possibility of criminal or contempt charges for playing fast and loose with the laws and the US Constitution while holding, however briefly, their positions of power.
We won’t miss you, Kristi. You were the epitome of everything people hate about political appointees. The most you can hope for is that your swift defenestration will be somehow instructive for those following in your shady, subordinate footsteps. If not, you’ll be nothing more than a foul breeze, remembered only for the odor you created while passing through the political system. But you were exactly what Trump wanted, right up until he decided he didn’t.
You might recall that during the great mass TikTok hyperventilation of 2021-2025, there was no limit of face fanning by Republicans like Brendan Carr about overseas involvement in social media. Carr was so particular on this subject, he scuttled an FCC program aimed at shoring up “smart” home device security standards because one of the testing labs (unsurprisingly) did business in China where this stuff is made.
Fast forward to this year, and Carr curiously has zero problems with significant Saudi and Chinese investments in Larry Ellison and Paramount’s efforts to acquire Warner Brothers. Though Carr’s actual regulatory oversight of the deal is limited given the lack of public broadcast licenses involved, he took to CNBC anyway to insist the massive $111 billion deal should likely fly through regulatory approval:
“If there’s any FCC role at all, it’ll be a pretty minimal role. And I think this is a good deal, and I think it should get through pretty quickly,” Carr added.
Carr told CNBC that Netflix “would have a very difficult path” getting regulatory approval, adding that Paramount’s was “a lot cleaner, does not raise at all the same types of concerns.”
“I think there’s some real consumer benefits that can emerge from it,” he added.
Carr’s (and Republicans’ more generally) gushing excitement comes despite the fact that significant structural overlap between Paramount and Warner Brothers will mean significantly more layoffs than we would have seen during the originally proposed Netflix Warner Brothers tie up. Layoffs that will likely be much worse than past Warner deals due to the absolutely massive debt involved.
This is before you even get to Larry Ellison’s obvious quest to built autocratic-friendly state television, the likes of which coddles authoritarianism and, in countries like Russia and Hungary, ultimately led to the total decimation of serious truth-to-power journalism.
“Before pulling out of the deal, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos – speaking to the BBC in London on the morning after the recent BAFTA Film Awards – called the Gulf sovereign funds backing Paramount’s bid a “bad idea,” noting that they are from “a part of the world that is not very big on the First Amendment.”
“It seems very odd to me with the level of investment that we’re talking about that they’d have no influence or editorial control over media in another country,” Sarandos added.
If you recall the multi-year right wing hysteria campaign about TikTok, it was fixated on the idea that having any overseas involvement in U.S. media was a doomsday scenario (they were not subtle or flexible on this point). Of course Trumpism immediately proceeded (with bumbling Democrat help) to “fix” this problem by offloading the company to Trump’s technofascist friends, while still maintaining a significant investment presence by the Chinese.
When Netflix was planning to buy Warner Brothers, Republicans engaged in no limit of face-fanning, featuring threats of “investigations” by Republican Attorneys General, and a phony Trump DOJ “investigation” into the antitrust concerns raised by the deal. But when a technofascist ally oligarch wants to own a major media property, with Saudi and Chinese help, all of that mysteriously disappears.
It’s almost as if Trump Republicans have no coherent ideology beyond their own power and unchecked wealth accumulation, and all of their posturing on issues like antitrust and national security, routinely propped up by a lazy press, is as hollow as a Dollar Store fake chocolate Easter bunny.
