News

Thursday 2026-08-20

06:00 AM

Marion County, Kansas Has Racked Up $4 Million In Settlements Since It Raided A Local Paper’s Office [Techdirt]

Sure, the town’s insurance will pay most of this, but it’s probably fair to say most of this small county’s population (11,823 at last count) wasn’t supportive of local law enforcement’s decision to violate as much of the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment as possible in the apparent hopes of making one local business owner happy.

The backstory is long and convoluted. It involves a local business owner who wanted a liquor license (but had been cited/arrested from drunk driving), her estranged spouse (who shared some documents with Marion County Record reporters), a local attorney who just wasn’t up to the job, a police chief who was far too friendly with the business owner, and a bunch of other law enforcement agencies that pitched in with the constitutional violations just because. And all of that is on top of then-police chief Cody’s animus towards the paper, due to its reporting on his past misconduct.

Here’s a summation of the events leading up to the raid.

There’s Kari Newell, a local business person who was seeking a liquor license for a new business when her previous drunk-driving record became public. There’s County Attorney Joel Ensey, who claimed to have no knowledge of the raid until public records showed he actually knew plenty about it beforehand. There’s the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which also disavowed all knowledge, until it became clear it had knowledge as well, at which point it began publicly condemning Chief Cody and his department. There’s the mayor who didn’t like his deputy mayor and seemed to be all too willing to indulge the police chief. There’s the judge who signed off on the search warrants without reading them and then tried to distance herself from actions — a judge who apparently had some drunk driving problems of her own. There are the communications Chief Cody made to Kari Newell, informing her he was going to raid the newspaper to shut down its coverage of her and, presumably, any further investigation into his law enforcement past. In the middle of all of this, there’s some bullshit computer crime charges, which were invoked despite the newspaper accessing driver record data legally through a third party.

Following the raids — that’s right, raids — multiple lawsuits were filed. Not only did the Marion County PD (under the leadership of Gideon Cody, whose past misconduct was being examined by the local paper) talk a local court into blessing its raid of the newspaper’s office, it also raided the home of the paper’s owner, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, who died less than 48 hours after the raid.

Pretty much every lawsuit filed by the victims of these raids has paid out. Last November, the county agreed to pay $3 million to three of the affected journalists and one of the town’s city council members, who was also subjected to an illegal raid by local officers.

That large settlement followed a $235,000 settlement the town agreed to pay to Marion County reporter Deb Gruver, whose computer was seized along with her personal cell phone by local law enforcement officers.

That brings the total to $3,235,000 (at minimum!). The latest settlement — one that will be paid to another of the paper’s reporters — now means county residents will be asked to contribute to a tab that has now surpassed the $4 million mark:

Phyllis Zorn, the reporter whose acts of journalism served as an excuse for the August 2023 police raid of the Marion County Record, will get $850,000 from the city of Marion to settle her federal lawsuit over the raid.

This is the sort of thing that should make all good Americans yank on their imaginary suspenders and get their rural lawyer shtick on. We should — as a unified drawl — make it clear that we, as the collective “small town lawyer,” think this is some disturbing bullshit. And we should fervently argue in favor of large settlements, even if we know this just means our fellow Americans will be asked to give a little more the next time the budget’s on the agenda.

While I do think its sucks that the public has to pay the price for government malfeasance, things like this encourage more people to vote with their wallets. That doesn’t mean funneling money into some PAC. That means protecting your earnings by expelling the people who were on board with these blatant violations of constitutional rights. And Marion County residents aren’t done paying for the perverse acts of prosecutors, law enforcement, and the mayor who had the cops’ back all the way through this debacle:

Zorn previously received $600,000 from the county, which settled various lawsuits over the raid for a collective $3 million last fall. The city has not yet settled lawsuits filed by newspaper publisher Eric Meyer and former city Councilwoman Ruth Herbel. Former reporter Deb Gruver settled with the city in 2024 for $235,000.

The county government is making things right. That it’s doing this with other people’s money doesn’t mean the settlements are meaningless. We, the people, should simply rejoice in our magnanimous nature. Even though we’re getting fucked, we can at least take heart in the fact that we were invited to the climax.

French Constitutional Council Blocks Under-15 Social Media Ban, In A Ruling That Should Concern Every Other EU Country [Techdirt]

Even as the wider EU was grinding through a long, drawn-out process to figure out which regulatory levers to pull on kids’ safety online, France decided to YOLO it earlier this summer by jumping at the chance to ban all social media for kids under 15. This kind of thing has become popular with out of touch adults in the grips of an ongoing moral panic, since Australia led the way after gambling companies pushed the ban as an alternative to banning gambling ads. Australia’s ban isn’t doing very well, with the majority of kids figuring out how to work around it, and those being left out being the most marginalized and in need of community.

And yet, countries around the globe have all suddenly decided — some based on reading Jonathan Haidt’s badly reasoned book — that they must do this too.

France was the first in the EU, with President Emmanuel Macron gleefully treating France’s willingness to rush in with little thought or understanding as a selling point:

“France is leading the way in Europe in protecting our children and our teenagers,” Macron said. “We will keep on going.”

He wanted the ban to be implemented in mere months, just as kids returned to school.

But that’s all run into a bit of a stumbling block known as the French Constitutional Council, which has said the ban is an unconstitutional attack on kids’ rights to free expression and communication. The Council also flagged a second problem: you can’t enforce an under-15 ban without making every user, adults included, prove their age. The law demanded exactly that, without defining a single condition, limit, or technical standard for how that verification would work.

A court in France on Friday shot down a bill seeking to ban access to social media for under-15s from September — a major blow to President Emmanuel Macron that raises fundamental questions about efforts to protect kids on the internet.

The Constitutional Council, which reviews the constitutionality of French legislation, said the restrictions in the bill disproportionately infringe on minors’ right to freedom of expression and communication.

Reading through the Google translation of the actual ruling, it’s pretty short and to the point. Similar to how the First Amendment requires any restriction on speech to be narrowly tailored to a specific government interest, here the Council says the ban is way too broad and not based on any specific, narrowly defined harm, though it admits that the aims of protecting children are certainly legitimate:

Furthermore, while the established prohibition does not apply to online encyclopedias, educational or scientific directories, or platforms for developing and sharing free software or open-source educational digital projects, the exceptions provided for in the contested provisions remain limited. In particular, these exemptions do not cover collaborative services for sharing leisure, information, or mutual aid content, online communication applications, or online games with strong collaborative and social features, nor do they cover online social networks which, while not inherently educational, are created in connection with educational activities.

Thus, the prohibition established is likely to apply to online communication services whose risks to the health and safety of minors, relating in particular to their content or mode of operation, are not established.

In short, the law goes way too far in issuing a blanket ban of all children, no matter what the circumstances. If you have a legitimate, well-defined problem, come up with a narrowly tailored solution. The French government rushed this one through with little concern for things like that.

It also leaves little room for parents to decide for their own kids what’s appropriate:

… neither the contested provisions nor any other provision sets out the conditions under which the holders of parental authority or the legal representative of the minor, duly informed of the potential risks and safeguards presented by the services concerned, may, in the child’s best interests and in the exercise of their duties under the law, decide to lift the prohibition, limit its scope or authorise access to certain services.

Thus, the prohibition established does not give rise to any particular assessment of the risk to the minor, taking into account in particular his age, his degree of maturity, his family situation as well as the nature of the service concerned.

Also, the age verification attack on privacy is important to recognize:

By prohibiting access for any minor under fifteen years of age to certain online services, the contested provisions imply, in themselves, that any person, even an adult, must prove their age before accessing them.

The Council further notes that the law makes no real effort to figure out how one might implement age verification in a manner that protects the privacy rights of adults.

Of course, having hitched his own legacy to this thing, there’s no way Macron lets it go quietly:

In a statement late Friday, the French presidential office said the government would not be giving up on the bill. It has set a new target date for spring 2027, which coincides with when Macron will leave office.

The statement said Macron “has instructed the Prime Minister to work, as quickly as possible, on a legally sound draft that takes into account” the court’s decision. The ruling hinted at what would make the age restriction align with fundamental rights: giving parents more flexibility.

Politico also spoke to Peter Craddock, a Brussels-based attorney who works on social media regulation, who notes that any other EU country attempting a similar blanket ban is likely to run into exactly the same wall:

“The reasoning is actually equally relevant internationally, throughout the EU, because this fundamental freedom is not specific to France,” he said.

Which is a useful reminder that the freedom of expression problem here isn’t a quirk of French constitutional law. It’s baked into the whole approach — and no amount of “but it’s for the children” framing makes it go away. That’s even more true of the problems with age verification requiring the scanning of everyone’s ID, which is an even touchier subject in large parts of the EU than elsewhere.

Really, though, the bigger, more important message here should be to slow down. What’s incredible is that for all of the political and media class whining that social media is some rogue experiment on our children, none of them seem to consider that abruptly trying to block all social media from kids is just as much an experiment, and one that might have equally damaging effects.

Why not wait and see how the Australian ban actually works in practice? The early results are a mess. I get that Macron and other politicians want headlines and a legacy to point at, but it would be nice if they actually followed what the research shows and looked at how the early experiments of these bans have worked out.

So what France produced here was a total rush job that sacrificed the expression rights of every teenager in the country, the ability of parents to make their own judgment calls regarding their own kids’ access to information and — as a cherry on top — the privacy of every adult who would now need to prove their age at the door to the internet. Thankfully, the Constitutional Council caught all three.

Daily Deal: memoryOS Expert Plan [Techdirt]

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05:00 AM

Madagascar [dperkins]

It takes a long time to get to Madagascar and equally long to get around once you're there. The plane flight takes forever and the local roads are shockingly rough. Betsy and Dex and I went for a three-week trip to see what we could see. We went, in order, to the southwest, the southeast, the west, and the east.

Isalo National Park and Anja Nature Reserve are in the dry southern highlands. Local ranchers raise zebu (indecine cattle) for food, and zebu is a staple of Malagasy cuisine (along with rice and beans), but up in the mountains there is other wildlife to be seen. The pachy podium (bottle tree) has an exotic look, and animals we saw include the ring-tailed lemur, brown lemur, Verreaux's sifaka (white sifaka), magpie robins, and a variety of chameleons.

After several days in the highlands we drove east to Ranomafana National Park. Jungle lighting isn't ideal for amateur photography, but we got to see a lot over two night walks and also two day hikes, such as the blue-legged chameleon, O'Shaughnessy chameleon, elephant eared chameleon, nose-horned chameleon, brown mouse lemur, woolly lemur, golden bamboo lemur, Milne-Edwards' sifaka, black and white ruffed lemur (which looked like Dex with his wild beard and hair), red-fronted brown lemur, ring-tailed mongoose (which is not actually a mongoose), common bush brown butterfly, eyed ringlet butterfly, paradise flycatcher, pitta-like ground roller, red-tailed vanga, white-headed vanga, and a ridiculously well-camouflaged leaf-tail gecko.

After that, we drove to Antsirabe one day, Antananarivo the next, and took a day trip to King Andrianampoinimerina's summer palace in Ambohimanga before flying west to Morondava.

National Route 8 is a national highway, or so it says on the map, but if you were to drive north from Morondava, not long after passing Avenue of the Baobabs and Baobab Forest the road turns into a dusty jeep track. Then, just for extra adventure, there are two river crossings (the Tsiribihina River and the Manambolo River). Of course there are no bridges. Instead, the locals have fabricated ferries by strapping planks and metal bars across a couple of boats. When you get to the ferry, you get out of your car and watch your driver drive onto the platform, wondering if this car will join several others than have fallen off the ferry and into the muddy river bottom below. Most of the time, nothing so disastrous happens, so you get on the ferry, as we did, and continue on til evening. Right in the middle of the day we had lunch at the Mad Zebu, said (by some) to be the best restaurant in Madagascar. Certainly I was impressed with the food.

The next two days we visited Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park. The tsingy is a karstic rock formation where the limestone has vertical lines and sharp points at the top. There are two tsingy formations in this park and some others farther north in the country. We went on a canoe ride and hike (Petit Tsingy) our first day, and then a longer hike (Grand Tsingy) our second day. The focus here was geology, because Dex is a geologist, but biology was there for the viewing, too: the pachy podium, juba tree, strangle fig, black-winged stilt, knob-billed duck, dimorphic egret, Manavi long-fingered bat, green pigeon, forest rock thrush, paradise flycatcher, Madagascar coucal, crested coua, Malagasy giant chameleon (furcifer oustaleti), green gecko, antlion, and (because it's Madagascar) Decken's sifaka (white sifaka) and a red-tailed sportive lemur. The lemur is nocturnal, and we spotted it sitting sleepily in a tree nook, hoping we'd quickly leave. Which we did, because the Grand Tsingy was waiting, and along with checking out the limestone, we got to squeeze through cracks and crawl under things and climb up ladders and all sorts of strenuous activities. It's a beautiful area.

The road south was somehow worse than the road north. One aggravating factor is that somebody shot our car while we were driving along. That was a first for all of us. Fortunately, the bullet hit the driver's door and not the driver's window. At the time we didn't know what it was... We heard the noise and thought maybe the car is breaking (which happens a lot on that road) or a rock bounced off something (which happens a lot on that road), but some minutes later when we stopped for lunch, the bullet-shaped dent in the side panel was plain to see. Apparently that stretch of the road used to be even worse, the locals said, before they opened a new army base nearby. Anyway, after lunch at a fine French restaurant and another ferry ride, we continued south, and not long after the Baobab Forest the car broke down (which happens a lot on that road). Our driver had all the parts in the back, so he jacked it up, replaced the left-front bearing, lowered it down, and we hit the road an hour later, passed Avenue of the Baobabs just after sunset, and returned to Morondava for the evening. That was National Route 8.

For the last leg of the trip, we flew to Antananarivo and drove east to Andasibe. The rain forest was similar to Ranomafana, but it's farther north, so you get to see different wildlife. We encountered the Goldman's mouse lemur, woolly lemur, brown lemur, diademed sifaka (golden sifaka), indri indri, elephant eared chameleon, and various birds. The indri indri sing in harmony several times each day. Going out to see wildlife is always a dice roll; even with experience guides (which we had), there are no guarantees for what you'll see on any given day. But overall, with multiple days and nights in multiple jungles, we got to see our fair share of the wildlife. A lot of these animals are only endemic to Madagascar (as the guides like to mention), so if you want to see them in the wild, take a trip down here someday.

Don’t steal the revelation [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Teaching and learning aren’t always aligned.

Sometimes organized teaching is defensive. “Here, take all this down in your notes, it will be on the test.” This gives the teacher deniability, but might not create the conditions for the student to actually learn.

The alternative is to seek the “aha.” This is the autodidact moment, the opportunity to teach ourselves.

Most online courses and videos simply tell you the answer. Easier to get clicks that way. But the best learning is almost always autodidactic.

When the teacher creates the conditions for learning, the student does the work.

This requires trust. Trust in the process and trust in the destination.

And it requires tension. The tension of it might not work and the incentive to put in the work.

Great teachers set it up, and great students find the aha.

More Than Just a Human Printer! [The Status Kuo]

Photo of Natalie Harp (not Ivanka!) courtesy of AFP/Getty

Sen. Jon Ossoff mentioned a name most Americans had never heard, and the White House and right-wing media freaked out. It seems he’d touched a nerve.

Ossoff’s words should have barely registered. At a campaign rally in Atlanta on Sunday, the Georgia Democrat criticized Trump’s handling of the war with Iran, telling the crowd the president “sleeps through his meetings, he golfs and trades stocks.” Ossoff continued: “He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

He was referring to Natalie Harp, aka the “Human Printer” and Ivanka clone who is nearly always at Trump’s side these days. In response, the White House communications team launched vulgar and personal attacks on Ossoff while rallying to Harp’s defense. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung tweeted,

“Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat.”

Super mature.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle called Ossoff a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama,” adding, “Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says.” He separately called Harp “one of the most loyal and hardest working aides on President Trump’s team.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, apparently having gotten the same memo, used identical language, calling her “one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides on President Trump’s team.”

Later on Monday, Trump was asked by a CNN reporter about Ossoff’s comment. Trump did not address the Harp question directly, instead mocking Ossoff. “You mean Pee-wee Herman? Pee-wee Herman look-alike?” Trump replied. A White House-run social media account then attacked the reporter in personal terms, invoking her children, apparently for daring to bring up the subject.

Right-wing media soon followed suit with its condemnations. Radio host Hugh Hewitt said Ossoff should apologize to Harp, calling him “a ridiculous caricature of a senator” and “a mean-spirited jerk who traffics in slander.” Fellow radio host Larry O’Connor argued the comment amounted to “an attack on a young woman who works in the White House,” writing that Ossoff was “using her as collateral damage in a feeble attempt to go viral.”

So what gives? Why are the White House and right-wing media so sensitive about Harp, and why are they circling the wagons over what felt like a minor jab?

To understand this, let’s take a closer look at who Harp is, what her role has been in Trump’s circle—particularly as his information funnel and as someone with access to his social media—and why everyone from the Secret Service to Harp’s brother is concerned about her close relationship with the president.

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“That young, beautiful woman”

Harp first entered Trump’s orbit in 2019 the way many around Trump do: via Fox News. She was on the network talking about the federal “right-to-try” experimental-drug access law that Trump signed in May 2018, and she credited it with giving her access to the experimental treatment she claims saved her life after she developed bone cancer. Trump first spoke publicly about her on Fox & Friends that June, calling her “that young, beautiful woman.”

Shortly thereafter, at the 2019 Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference, Trump called Harp onstage, praising her glowingly. “She lit up the television screen like very few people I’ve ever seen do it,” Trump said. Footage from the pro-Trump documentary “Art of the Surge” shows him introducing Harp at that same conference and connecting her being alive to his policies. “They were preparing her for death... and because of ‘right to try,’ she’s now living, and I think doing phenomenally well.”

Harp responded, playing up the connection. “I had cancer and he saved my life, signed that bill, and ever since he found out, he stayed in touch with me. Made sure I was OK.” She credited Trump and spoke of his supposed sacrifices, saying, “He gave up his quality of life so we could live and work and fight with dignity—because he believes in survival of the fighters, not the fittest.”

“The Art of the Surge,” filmed at Mar-a-Lago, also contains footage of Harp explaining her political awakening under Trump. “Politics was never something I liked,” she said. “But when I was sick, I started watching the Republican debates. He was my first exposure to politics, and I loved it. Like, this guy, he gets it.” (This is probably misleading; if her brother’s account described later is accurate, she also fangirled over George W. Bush.)

At the 2020 Republican National Convention, Harp doubled down on the “Trump saved my life” narrative, declaring to attendees, “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did. And without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.” She added, “I wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for you.”

But this narrative conveniently twists the timeline and the facts. As The Washington Post reported, Harp described receiving the treatment in online posts roughly two months before Trump even signed the Right to Try law on May 30, 2018. These include a March 27 tweet—nine weeks before the signing—stating, “President Trump is setting records in speeding up the drug approval process. The chemo I’m on now wasn’t approved 5 years ago” (emphasis added).

Significantly, the drug Harp described receiving was already FDA-approved; Harp says it was prescribed “off-label,” meaning for a use beyond its approval. Right to Try applies only to drugs that have not yet received FDA approval, meaning the law would not have covered her treatment.

Rising through the ranks

Trump invited Harp onto the advisory board of his 2020 campaign following that obsequious RNC speech. This led, as these things often do, to a job as an anchor at One America News Network from 2020 to 2022. There, Harp dutifully repeated his false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen. She joined Trump’s staff in 2022.

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Trump’s former White House physician, told Fox News Digital in December 2024 that Harp “keeps everybody in a really good mood, and most importantly, she keeps the president in a really good mood.” White House spokesman Kush Desai told the Independent: “No president has cultivated as much loyalty among their staffers and administration officials as President Trump; this is a testament to his commitment to our country and its people. Natalie Harp is a beloved White House Official, and the Fake News Media will never understand what it’s like to be as trusted and admired as her.”

Per The New York Times, Harp works out of the Oval Office, holds a standing seat on Marine One and texts with world leaders on Trump’s behalf. (Yikes.) She holds the dual title of special assistant to the president and executive assistant to the president, and she draws a taxpayer-funded salary of $150,000. In some ways, as the Times reported, she’s filling a familiar role for Trump. During his years as a Manhattan real estate developer, female secretaries sat outside his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, ready to assist at a moment’s notice. Trump referred to them as “the girls.”

“Very unhealthy” relationship

Harp has an estranged brother, Preston Harp, who has spoken publicly about their relationship. He said he and his sister were homeschooled together by an “extremely conservative” mother and that he learned of his sister’s role with Trump through a 2023 news article rather than from her directly. Surprise!

He described Harp’s relationship with Trump as “very unhealthy,” saying, “She’s just like his fan club.”

In a separate interview, Preston Harp offered another insight: “I think that she does see Trump as a kind of father figure because he embodies the doctrine of American exceptionalism.”

In a CNN interview this Tuesday, he offered yet another notable account of his sister’s behavior. “I’d say since she was, like, 16, she’s had an obsession with, um, gosh, how do I explain this? Um, she’s written letters to other presidents, let me put it that way,” referring, he said, to George W. Bush.

In Trump, it appears she found a receptive audience.

A “human binky”

New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, authors of “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” described Harp as central to the daily operation of Trump’s White House. “She is in almost every single—I mean, really I’m not kidding—almost every single meeting,” Haberman said in a recent interview.

Speaking to Democracy Now! on Aug. 18, Haberman elaborated. “Natalie Harp is essentially a body person, for lack of a better way of putting it, but she is—I described her as something like a human binky a couple of days ago, and that really is what she is.” She added that Trump has described Harp to staff as someone who loves him “as much as his wife and children,” telling aides, “You’ll all go off and make money. You know, she’s never going to leave me.”

Swan described Harp’s role in similar terms. “She’s just totally devoted to him. In Oval Office meetings she sits on the chair at the side of the room with her laptop open.” In a July interview with Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, Swan said the Secret Service was “alarmed” by personal letters Harp left for Trump during the 2024 campaign, expressing concern about someone “that close” to the president writing him such notes—at least one of which was left “in some of his private spaces.” Swan called the letters “letters of absolute devotion,” citing lines including “You are all that matters to me,” “I don’t ever want to let you down,” and “I want to bring you joy.” Swan said he found no evidence Trump wrote letters back to Harp.

Haberman and Swan first reported the letters nearly two years ago in a November 2024 Times article, which found their authenticity “confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them.” In addition to the saccharine lines above, Harp reportedly thanked Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.” In another letter, she told him she wanted to get back to “that synergy” the two once had, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing,” writing that she wanted “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”

A separate letter, described in the Times’ reporting on Tuesday, apologized for an incident during a round of golf: “I also am sorry if I was an embarrassment walking the course in Scotland.” Harp wrote that she wanted “things to always be right between us,” adding that she had “been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time).” She signed the letter, “With all my heart, Natalie.”

Haberman has also said Harp’s presence around Trump predates his current term, describing her running “on foot” behind his golf cart during the run-up to the 2024 campaign. “She became ever-present,” Haberman said. “She would join him on the golf course when he was golfing, you know, in the interregnum period even before the campaign, literally sometimes running on foot behind his golf cart.”

Yesterday, CNN reported that during a 2023 visit to a New York City courthouse, staffers told Harp there was no room for her in the motorcade.

A screaming match in the lobby ensued, with Harp insisting that Trump had personally asked her to attend the court appearance, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Denied a seat but determined not to be left behind, Harp jumped into an SUV trunk, according to the two sources and confirmed by a photo obtained by CNN.

You know, normal stuff.

The human printer and shitposter

A resurfaced 2024 clip from “The Art of the Surge” also circulated this week. It showed Harp taking dictation from Trump in real time as he reacted to then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s Democratic National Convention speech. In the clip, Harp sits beside Trump with a laptop open, typing his remarks as he delivers them, before he tells her, “Get that out right away.”

The moment illustrates how Harp was one of a small number of people with access to Trump’s Truth Social account. A Wall Street Journal analysis published in May found that Harp brings Trump “stacks of printed-out draft social-media posts for his approval.” She became known as “the human printer” during the 2024 campaign, as the Times reported at the time, because she carried a portable printer to quickly get positive news to Trump.

If you’re wondering who is scouring the internet looking for wild content Trump will like, look no further than Harp. Per the Journal, Harp provided Trump with proposed posts that “often recycle content from other accounts that Harp or advisers think would appeal to Trump.” Harp then logs into the president’s account, at times outside normal work hours, to post batches of Trump-approved messages. (Trump also posts some content himself.) The Journal found the account had posted at least 8,800 times since the start of Trump’s second term, including one stretch of 55 posts between 10:14 p.m. and 1:12 a.m., and another of nearly 160 posts in under four hours on Dec. 1. It’s unclear if Trump is posting these himself, if Harp is posting them for him, or if it’s some combination of both.

And remember the Obamas-as-apes video? The Journal also reported that, earlier this year, Harp posted that video at Trump’s direction, along with an AI-generated image of Trump as a Christ-like figure. Trump later deleted both posts after bipartisan criticism. At the time, Trump told reporters he had not seen the Obama imagery before approving the post, and a White House official attributed the episode to an editing error.

This kind of “shitposting” from Trump’s account predates his second term. In May 2024, during the campaign, Trump’s Truth Social account reposted a video containing the phrase “Unified Reich.” The Trump campaign deleted the post and said in a statement that it was “reposted by a junior staffer who clearly did not see the word.” The Bulwark reported, citing unnamed sources, that the staffer was Harp, noting that Dan Scavino, the only other aide with that level of access to the account at the time, was not a “junior staffer.”

Harp has reportedly frustrated some White House officials because she typically does not share draft posts with anyone else, including the chief of staff’s office, communications aides or national security officials. She has told colleagues she works for Trump and “only listens to him.” (Even Eva Braun was only Hitler’s personal photographer, not one of his chief propagandists.)

Harp’s access to Trump’s Truth Social account has drawn further scrutiny amid a lawsuit involving preferential access to posts from Trump’s account. The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed suit against Trump over a paid early-access service to his Truth Social posts. Trump Media has offered customers early access to key, possibly market-moving posts for as much as $100,000 a month. The suit also names Harp and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino as defendants, citing their access to Trump’s account.

Catering to her wishes

Harp’s role has drawn renewed attention—as well as the jab from Ossoff—because of what some now humorously call Catergate. Harp was reportedly one of a small handful of aides who hid with Trump aboard a catering truck in order to board a separate aircraft, reportedly after U.S. intelligence flagged a possible Iranian missile attack. Other officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, were left behind on the original vulnerable aircraft. White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller was also reportedly among those left on the decoy plane (sad trombone for Peewee German).

Trump later defended the arrangement. “I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk,” he told reporters. “I think it was at greater risk because that would be the plane I think that they would be more likely to go for.”

The reporting about Harp being on the escape catering truck was behind the Ossoff one-liner that has since produced repeated meltdowns. The day after delivering the speech, pressed by MS NOW’s Jen Psaki on why he had named Harp specifically, Ossoff did not walk back his comment.

“Well, I’ve heard this particular aide referred to as his security blanket,” he said. “And I think we could say that about any number of the senior aides in the White House. They’re not telling him what he needs to hear. They’re telling him what he wants to hear. And the nation is at war, and we cannot afford that. We need a team in the White House. We need folks at the State Department, at the Defense Department, in the United States Congress who take their jobs seriously. Those sailors out on the Lincoln, they do their jobs with excellence and dedication every single day. They didn’t sign up for luxury. They signed up to defend the country. And the president, surrounded by enablers in the West Wing, is playing golf, is trading stock, and is decorating his ballroom. It’s a disgrace.”

DSA-6451-1 firefox-esr - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6451-1

Perseids [xkcd.com]

04:00 AM

ICE Opportunism Expands To Passengers On Domestic Flights [Techdirt]

Things used to be normal. We used to be doing alright here in the United States, limiting ourselves to catching people at the borders or picking up migrants with criminal charges or convictions with detainers at local jails.

Now, it’s just a constant swarm all day, every day. “Worst of the worst” has long been abandoned as a pretense. Under Trump, it’s “anyone of anyone,” so long as they fit the profile: not white from whatever countries Trump claims are “shitholes,” especially if they speak with an accent.

No more targeting. No more plugging holes in the migration dyke with border-focused deterrents. These days, its masked officers storming hardware store parking lots to grab day laborers, hanging around immigration courts to pick off people just trying to follow the naturalization process, leveraging surveillance tech and government data to find people with un-American surnames, and generally terrorizing entire neighborhoods — if not entire cities — just to satiate this administration’s bigoted bloodlust.

Now, we’re doing this, which is yet another thing we’ve never done before because there was never a reason to do it, much less the will or the desire.

The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired U.S. visas as they travel through airports, including spouses of Americans, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with immigration lawyers — a tactic that opens up a vast new pool of people for deportation.

Immigration agents in plain clothes have whisked away targets at check-in counters and arrival gates, with enforcement actions in at least 15 airports in recent weeks. Some of the arrests have occurred quietly, while others have happened as angry fellow passengers filmed the encounters.

The obvious question is “why?” Why do we need to do this? Why are we ambushing people boarding or disembarking from planes over something as menial as an expired visa? Is this going to make America greater or safer? Or is it just going to cement our reputation as a nation of bigots who were just waiting for a white nationalist-leaning blowhard to finally start massaging our repressed id?

Whatever it is, it’s fucking ugly. And it doesn’t look like America. It looks like some “lets round up the Jews” action from Nazi Germany, except that Trump’s “Jews” are people who come from any country that doesn’t have a Caucasian majority.

And it’s even worse than jumping travelers at the gates. In some cases, ICE officers — greatly enabled by new TSA data sharing provisions — are attempting to board planes to arrest people.

On July 25, a Southwest agent prevented ICE from boarding a flight from Dallas to Orlando, according to documents reviewed by the journal. The gate agent reportedly wouldn’t allow officers to board without a judicial warrant signed by a judge.

Following the incident, Southwest said in a statement that it “has longstanding policies in place to ensure appropriate legal documentation is presented by law enforcement personnel before any information about customers is shared.”

The journal also reported that an unnamed airline at a southern airport recently declined to assist ICE in accessing a jet bridge so they could arrest a man traveling with his family.

The DHS has defended its actions. And by “defended,” I mean has issued yet another “we’re right and everyone else is wrong” bit of pissiness.

“This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport,” a spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department said in a statement.

I’m sure another equally bitter statement will greet “Welcome to the Resistance… Southwest Airlines?” activity. While the federal government is free to move about airports, it is not free to board private property (the planes themselves) without the proper paperwork. Good to know Southwest staffers can tell the difference between an “administrative warrant” (which is not a “warrant” in the generally accepted definition of the term) and a real, judicially authorized warrant. When even front line employees are willing to push back, you know the administration has pushed too far.

On the other hand, this is same airline:

In one widely circulated video, Chantal Morales Rojas, a 27-year-old from Ecuador, was detained by plainclothes officers as she boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Denver to Oakland, Calif., on July 20. She had been spending the weekend with the family for whom she had worked as an au pair, according to the family.

When Ms. Morales Rojas scanned her boarding pass, an alarm sounded and the gate agent asked her to wait. Moments later, two plainclothes agents intercepted her in the jetway.

However it all shakes out, it reeks of desperation. The administration can’t keep its arrest numbers up which means immigration agencies are becoming increasingly opportunistic. None of this has anything to do with public safety, crime reduction, or just enforcing the rules. It’s a war on migrants being waged on as many fronts as the DHS can at all times. It’s the government padding its stats while satiating the xenophobes that make up most of its party, as well as its voting base.

It all looks a whole lot like things this country swore it would never do (or never do again). It’s rounding up and caging undesirables who will also be blamed for any or all societal ills. And it’s not that far removed from pursuing escaped slaves who went north in hopes of actually partaking in the American dream.

02:00 AM

New Release: Tails 7.11 [Tor Project blog]

Changes and updates

Update Tor Browser to 15.0.20.

Fixed problems

Fix activation of Persistent Storage on some computers. (#19913)

For more details, read our changelog.

Get Tails 7.11

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your Persistent Storage

Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 7.0 or later to 7.11.
If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails 7.11 on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions.

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 7.11 directly:

Support and feedback

For support and feedback, visit the Support section on the Tails website.

Kanji of the Day: 夢 [Kanji of the Day]

夢

✍13

小5

dream, vision, illusion

ム　ボウ

ゆめ　ゆめ.みる　くら.い

夢中 (むちゅう) — absorbed in
夢見 (ゆめみ) — having a dream
夢見る (ゆめみる) — to dream (of)
悪夢 (あくむ) — nightmare
夢にも (ゆめにも) — in the slightest
無我夢中 (むがむちゅう) — being absorbed in
夢想 (むそう) — dream
夢を見る (ゆめをみる) — to dream (i.e., while asleep)
夢物語 (ゆめものがたり) — account of a dream
夢のまた夢 (ゆめのまたゆめ) — dream within a dream

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 縄 [Kanji of the Day]

縄

✍15

小4

straw rope, cord

ジョウ

なわ　ただ.す

沖縄 (おきなわ) — Okinawa (city, prefecture)
沖縄県 (おきなわけん) — Okinawa Prefecture
縄文 (じょうもん) — straw-rope pattern pressed into earthenware
沖縄戦 (おきなわせん) — Battle of Okinawa (April, 1945)
縄文時代 (じょうもんじだい) — Jomon period (ca. 14000-1000 BCE)
縄跳び (なわとび) — skipping rope
一筋縄 (ひとすじなわ) — rope
縄張り (なわばり) — stretching a rope around
火縄銃 (ひなわじゅう) — matchlock
縄張り争い (なわばりあらそい) — turf war

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Wednesday 2026-08-19

11:00 PM

Libraries Beg Brendan Carr To Back Off Plan To Make U.S. Broadband Shittier, More Expensive [Techdirt]

Back in June, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr announced he’d be reviewing the FCC E-Rate program with an eye on “reforms.” Generally, when Brendan Carr promises “reforms,” usually what he means is either “I’m going to destroy this program,” or “I’m going to illegally make changes to this congressionally-mandated program that ensures telecom giants like AT&T get more money with less accountability.”

E-Rate is a historically bipartisan and uncontroversial program that helps bring affordable broadband to rural libraries, schools, and communities. While it has had some issues with fraud at times (almost always at the hands of private companies), the program generally does a lot of good in bringing affordable internet access into communities neglected by telecom monopolies.

Without it, or under a pared down version, schools and rural schoolkids would be more inclined to have to rely on what regional telecom monopolies deem appropriate, which is usually either over-priced broadband, or nothing at all.

Carr’s June announcement proclaimed he was “taking a look” at the program because he’s worried about kids having too much “screen time”:

“Over the last several years—and especially during COVID—many schools dramatically increased screen time for kids, with many students now swiping for hours every day. Research has now been pouring in that America’s experiment with heightened screen time in schools may be related to the negative educational outcomes we are now seeing in classrooms across the country—from declining academic performance to diminished reading comprehension skills.”

That’s quite the act of misdirection. For one, the FCC doesn’t regulate “screen time,” so you’ve once again got Carr wandering into areas he should have no say in. Which is weird for a guy who has endlessly complained of “government overreach” every single time previous FCCs have tried to bolster broadband telecom consumer protection (see: net neutrality) or prevent harmful media consolidation.

E-Rate was also mandated by Congress. Much like other recent actions (like Carr’s illegal dismantling of media consolidation limits), Carr is pretending he’s only making modest tweaks to existing systems, so he can pretend he’s not openly breaking the law.

Carr’s FCC is also pretending to be seriously fielding comments on his upcoming E-Rate rule changes. Librarian organizations this week filed their input defending E-Rate, correctly noting that Carr’s obsession with “screen time” is a straw man designed to misdirect attention from the potential harm of gutting a useful subsidy program.

From the Education and Libraries Networks Coalition (EdLiNC):

“E-Rate was established by Congress for a specific purpose – to ensure affordable connectivity for schools and libraries, and that mission must remain the focus of this proceeding. For nearly three decades, E-Rate has been successful in connecting students, educators, and library patrons in rural, suburban, and urban communities alike.

Questions about curriculum, instructional practice, or student behavior should not be used to undermine a proven program that helps schools and libraries maintain the networks modern education depends on.“

This sort of stuff doesn’t really get press attention, but it matters all the same.

The E-Rate program spends about $3 billion a year driving affordable broadband into parts of the country left high-and-dry by the regional telecom monopolies Carr refuses to regulate. While there is sometimes fraud in programs like this, the vast majority of the time it’s caused by private companies that Carr, again, refuses to competently regulate and is afraid to stand up to.

Were you seriously interested in reforming these programs, you’d start doing audits of major companies like AT&T, which have a long history of defrauding these and other initiatives. Instead, Carr’s trying to shift the focus to the idea that taxpayers are funding internet access that’s delivering “harmful content” to kids, which, if you’ve tracked Brendan Carr’s censorial extremism, should be a huge red flag.

I suspect there are several motivations here. One being big telecoms like AT&T that want E-rate revamped in a way that financially benefits them. The other being Carr and the right wing extremist mission to extend their censorship and ideological dominance into every aspect of American life, starting with the classroom, where they’re compelled to root out any and all criticism of right wing ideology.

This is how he framed his new plan for E-Rate reforms on a recent appearance on Fox News:

“There are school districts that have read our law as only requiring them to put Internet safety procedures in place on the devices that the school owns. If you bring your own device to a network supported by this program, you don’t necessarily have any filters on where you can go. Kids are ultimately finding pornography, and that’s a problem.”

To be clear, schools already employ filtering systems. Some work, some don’t. The nature of these systems is such that they not only tend to over-filter content, but they’re generally easy to bypass.

Still, it’s not the FCC’s job to determine what content is acceptable, or even to manage kid “screen time” on personally-owned devices. That’s not only an unworkable game of whack-a-mole that would waste a lot of taxpayer money, that’s the precise sort of weird overreach Carr (and Republicans, and “free market” Libertarians) have whined about for as long as I’ve been alive.

But as with so much Republican “policy,” the pretense that they’re protecting kids helps obscure the fact they’re actively hurting them. In this case by making already shaky U.S. broadband even more expensive and spotty in long-neglected rural, minority, and lower-income areas.

Denied UTC—”You Were Never an Employee” [General Union]

When Gary* decided to apply for an unlimited-term contract (UTC), he thought the process would be straightforward.

For several years, he had worked one day a week at the same school. Having reached the qualifying period, he wrote to his manager explaining that he was eligible for unlimited-term conversion and asked that his next contract reflect his new status.

The response came as a complete surprise.

Not only did the school reject his request, it claimed that Gary had never been an employee at all. Instead, it insisted that he had been working as a freelancer. This distinction was crucial. The right to request an unlimited-term contract applies only to employees. If the school’s interpretation were correct, Gary would never have been eligible for UTC protection in the first place.

Gary couldn’t understand how that could be true. Until then, he hadn’t paid much attention to the Japanese version of his contract because he assumed it was simply a translation of the English version. It was only after receiving the school’s response that he noticed something surprising: his English contract described his position as “Instructor,” while the Japanese version referred to him as a freelancer.

The more he thought about it, the less sense the school’s position made. He worked on a fixed schedule, taught on the same day every week, used teaching materials provided by the school, and was expected to follow the school’s rules and teaching guidelines. Everything about the arrangement looked and felt like employment.

Hoping it was simply a misunderstanding, Gary sought clarification. Instead, the school stood by its position, stating that he would not be granted an unlimited-term contract under any circumstances. To make matters worse, it also informed him that his contract would not be renewed for the 2026 academic year.

That’s when Gary contacted General Union. GU examined not only Gary’s right to unlimited-term conversion, but also whether he had been incorrectly classified as a freelancer from the beginning. If Gary was, in fact, an employee under Japanese labour law, he may also have been entitled to rights such as paid annual leave and overtime pay.

General Union has now requested that the school address Gary’s unpaid overtime and paid annual leave entitlements. By doing so, the union is directly challenging the school’s claim that he was a freelancer. The next step will be to seek recognition of Gary’s true employment status and pursue the rights he should have received—including reinstatement under an unlimited-term contract, if appropriate.

Gary’s case also highlights an important lesson for anyone working in Japan. If your employment contract exists in more than one language, don’t assume that each version says exactly the same thing. Small differences in wording can sometimes have significant consequences. If you’re unsure, it’s worth having both versions reviewed before signing – or if questions arise later.

Name has been changed to protect the member’s identity.

Unlimited-term contracts only apply to employees. Not sure whether you’re really a freelancer? Learn how to tell the difference: https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/freedom-risk-and-protection-what-japan-s-freelance-act-really-means-for-tech-workers

Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

The ordinariness of evil: Stop selling AI (bad).
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Dot-crash bumwad; AP v fair use; Nym Wars; What's ctrl-F? Pentagon lost $6.5T in a year; Voter ID is voter suppression; Become unoptimizable.
Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

The ordinariness of evil (permalink)

Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.

It seems weird that they won't stop fretting about this terrible potential – until you realize that every public pronouncement about this terrible potential is also a public boast about its potential, period.

That's very, very important, because all AI really has is potential. Actual, existing AI is useful at the margins, if you're already a skilled practitioner who can discern correct from incorrect outputs, and if you integrate AI judiciously so that it doesn't overwhelm your ability to pay attention to those outputs and apply your discernment to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

In other words, AI is mostly a novelty, a heavily subsidized toy that produces little more than distraction. Where AI does produce value, that value is comparable to a plug-in, a new feature for your word processor or image/sound/video-editing package that might help you do your job somewhat better, or it might not.

That doesn't make AI useless, it just makes it a normal technology: useful for some, useless for others, capable of being abused and likely to waste a lot of time when used unwisely:

https://www.normaltech.ai/

Normal technologies are fine. But normal technologies do not warrant the massive economic and political commitments that have been bestowed upon AI: a trillion dollars in the past year alone, and the world's civil servants fired en masse and replaced with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

The people who have committed our society and its resources to an all-or-nothing bet on AI will tell you that AI is the everything machine, but when pressed, they will confess that AI is about to become the everything machine, for example, once AI starts doing AI research, a thing that AI cannot do:

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-agents-cant-yet-do-open-ended

This is a civilizational act of Magic Underpants Gnomery, and every day that it goes on is a day when more economic, climate and political costs of AI are imposed on all of us. Scientific journals, open source repositories and even science fiction magazines are being overwhelmed by slop, whose perpetrators and apologists insist that soon, AI will realize its potential and the slop will be transformed into gold.

That's why AI bosses are so committed to talking up AI's destructive potential: because destructive potential is nonetheless potential. The moment we stop believing in that potential is the moment that we stop supplying AI companies with bales of cash to shovel into their money-furnaces so that they can afford to sell hundred dollar bills for a dollar each to Elon Musk cultists who want to generate child porn and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs.

AI does have destructive potential. It has the potential to destroy the productive economy when an AI salesman convinces your boss to fire you and replace you with chatbots that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

AI has destructive potential because bosses are trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where none of them can admit that the money they've spent – and the jobs they've destroyed – chasing AI has been wasted, and so other bosses bet even harder:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

AI has destructive potential because the data-center bubble has convinced credulous town officials to throw out environmental and planning review, seize people's home and farms, and carpet the countryside with giant data centers (many of which will never be built):

https://www.404media.co/people-hate-datacenters-survey-finds/

AI has destructive potential because it is consuming scarce water and energy and emitting gigatons of carbon:

https://www.404media.co/even-the-u-s-government-says-ai-requires-massive-amounts-of-water/

This is the destructive potential we need to be hammering at, because this isn't the kind of destructive potential that translates into productive potential that will someday make the AI bet pay off. Quite the opposite: this is all about the potential of AI to destroy the economy and consume your retirement savings:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/congrats-youre-about-to-unwittingly-make-elon-musk-trillionaire-spacex-ipo-index-funds

Just as importantly: we have to stop amplifying tech bosses' chosen narratives about their products' destructive potential, because this helps them raise more money and do more terrible things. Bernie Sanders needs to stop insisting that the US government should own 50% of the money-losingest corporations the world has ever seen and start talking about how they will not get a government bailout when their investment bubble bursts. We need to stop talking about AI "haves" who will enjoy the awesome potential of AI, and AI "have-nots" who will fall behind.

We need to stop talking about "AI safety" and the possibility of "rogue AI" destroying the world. When an AI company's security tool "escapes containment" and hacks someone else's servers, we need to ask the company "Why do you suck so bad at building secure sandboxes for your hacking tools?" rather than "Why are your hacking tools so amazingly powerful?"

Above all, we need to stop talking about AI as exceptional. AI is normal. A normal technology has some uses, but isn't useful for all things and all people. A normal technology isn't inevitable, it's something you decide whether you want to use or not.

Treating AI as unexceptional is the best way to halt the destructive march of AI companies and their impact on jobs, the climate and the economy. But treating AI as unexceptional requires that we stop talking about AI as if it were exceptionally evil. Yes, some people who use AI experience severe mental problems, but that's not because AI is a Lovecraftian horror that destroys your brain and your capacity for rational thought if you use it. It's not a basilisk. AI is like a carny ride that triggers cardiac events in riders who never knew they had a problem because they never experienced those particular g-stresses – it's not something that induces vulnerability, it's something that triggers vulnerability:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

Using AI doesn't make you evil, nor does it risk your sanity – no more than doing any of the other dangerous, compromised, unsustainable things that constitute our daily lives in this fraught moment. The world will be better off when the AI companies are bankrupt and their servers are sold off at ten cents on the dollar – but using those servers to run open models in modest, careful ways won't infect you with their wickedness. They are not stained with communicable sin. They're just computers. They are unexceptional.

One way for a technology to be normal is for it to be produced and marketed by an awful corporation that wants to do terrible things. This isn't to say that "all technologies are dual use, and you have to take the good with the bad." That's the inevitabilist argument of vulgar Thatcherites who insist – as Margaret Thatcher did – that "there is no alternative," and we have to accept their abuse if we want to reap the benefits of the technology.

The normal way to deal with this is to reject vulgar Thatcherism in favor of heroic Gibsonism, thundering William Gibson's rallying cry, "the street finds its own use for things," as we seize the means of technology and use it in the ways that benefit us, while restricting, banning, or blocking the uses that harm us:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin

To treat AI as exceptionally evil is to elevate the mediocrities who run AI companies to super-villain status, a status in which they positively revel. A serial liar like Sam Altman will someday trip over his own dick and end up in a cell for securities fraud – unless we keep exalting his evil to Satanic scale, in which case he might make himself "too big to jail":

https://time.com/article/2026/05/26/sam-altman-ai-job-losses-openAI-/

Altman is a con-man and a stock swindler, not a super-genius. The more we describe his products as possessing a special kind of durable evil that will endure even after his company fails and he is condemned to history's ash-heap, the more we help Altman raise money for his chatbot Ponzi. Normal technology isn't a cursed artifact. That's something you find in a lich-king's tomb. We need to stop helping Altman burnish his reputation as a lich-king and stop treating AI like it's magic.

There's a technical term for the kind of tech criticism that inadvertently helps tech bros sell their swindle: "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for "tak[ing] the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip[ping] them, and start talking about 'risks'":

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

In other words, to commit criti-hype is to repeat the marketing claims of people like Sam Altman and then add, "(and that's bad)" in parentheses at the end. These guys – these terrible, mediocre, boring-ass losers – are bullshit factories, ejecting fountains of nonsense about AI. The right way to criticize them is to point out that they're lying – not to repeat their lies as warnings.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Are We Still Litigating Whether Corporate Profit-Taking Contributed to Inflation? https://www.thesling.org/are-we-still-litigating-whether-corporate-profit-taking-contributed-to-inflation/
Hook and Squeeze https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/hook-and-squeeze

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Dot-com crash toilet paper https://web.archive.org/web/20010822220826/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-6908350.html

#25yrsago Associated Press says a single sentence excerpt is not fair use https://web.archive.org/web/20050717075914/http://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/8/17/202249/240

#15yrsago German Pirate Party poised to win first federal election https://torrentfreak.com/german-pirate-party-on-course-to-election-win-110820/

#15yrsago Understanding the Nym Wars https://epeus.blogspot.com/2011/08/google-plus-must-stop-this-identity.html

#15yrsago Journalism school teaches students pre-digital newspaper production techniques https://journoterrorist.com/2011/08/02/paperball2/

#15yrsago 90 percent of US net users don’t know from crtl-F https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Augmented Reality project https://web.archive.org/web/20110827010512/https://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/08/augmented-reality-science-fiction-writer-becomes-augmented-reality-developer/

#10yrsago Woman sues cops because they destroyed her empty house, thinking a suspect was hiding in it https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/19/woman-sues-after-police-destroy-her-home-during-10-hour-standoff-with-family-dog/

#10yrsago US Army committed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud in one year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG/

#10yrsago Candid Republican operators admit that voter ID laws are about disenfranchisement https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/when-politicians-tell-truth-voting-restrictions

#1yrago Become unoptimizable https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/
Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification
London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2)
https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Victoria: Munro's Books (Oct 20)
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory
Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with
Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves
Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea
Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

Latest books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"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

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 531 (7157 total).

"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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

04:00 PM

Particle Physics Equipment [xkcd.com]

03:00 PM

Buc-ee’s Billboard Near Beaver’s Mini Mart Vandalized As Corporation Gaslights Mayor [Techdirt]

This Buc-ee’s vs. the Beaver’s Mini-Mart is just not going to go away. While Buc-ee’s has made quite the name for itself as a trademark bully over the past several years, it may have finally run into a combination that is more than the corporation can handle. Between John Oliver’s continued coverage of this lawsuit, in which he is clearly on the side of the mini-mart and in which he is attempting to goad Buc-ee’s into a lawsuit, combined with the community of Beavercreek which isn’t having this shit, the PR is starting to look really bad here.

As a result, the locals in Beavercreek are getting ornery. You can see blurry proof of that in a picture of what vandals apparently did to a Buc-ee’s billboard nearby.

A Buc-ee’s highway advertisement along state Route 4 in Riverside, Ohio, was vandalized amid a controversial lawsuit between the popular chain and a small mini-mart in Beavercreek, Ohio.

My friends in the media can do their half-assed blurring all they want, but someone turned “Buc-ee’s” into “Fuc-ee’s” and then added some otherwise indecipherable graffiti. Now, I’m not here to encourage anyone to participate in vandalism, or break any other law for that matter. But actions like this certainly do give you a sense of just how pissed off the locals are at Buc-ee’s bullying one of its local businesses. This has become a national story and a local one, meaning that the breadth of anger at the company is both intimate and wide-spread.

And I have very little time for the obvious gaslighting that Buc-ee’s is attempting to pull off as a result. Huber Heights is the Ohio town in which Buc-ee’s opened up its first Ohio location and CEO Arch Aplin apparently attempted to enlist the town’s mayor to try to placate the locals.

In a public Facebook post published Aug. 7, Huber Heights Mayor Jeff Gore wrote that there were “two sides to every story” and that he had been in contact with Buc-ee’s CEO Arch Aplin.

Gore wrote that Vik Boparai had filed for the trade name “Beavers Mini Mart” and that the name was in conflict with a federal trademark owned by Buc-ee’s. He said Aplin informed him that Boparai had filed for a federal trademark for “Beavermart,” which “would have given him access to set up Beavermarts all across the country.” Gore noted that the filing was made a “few months after” Buc-ee’s officials announced a location in the Dayton area.

“Mr. Aplin told me directly that Buc-ee’s had no issues with Beavermart using the Beaver logo in Beavercreek. He understood and said that makes sense. What Buc-ee’s did not want was a series of Beavermarts popping up across the state or regionally or eventually nationally that violated their trademark,” the post reads in part.

Two things on this. First, whether two trademarks are in conflict is not for any mayor, nor even one of the trademark holders to determine on their own. That is for the USPTO and the court system to decide, should it get that far. Gore’s commentary here on that is pointless and meaningless.

As for Aplin’s comments about having no issues with the current location’s name or signage, his own fucking lawsuit says otherwise. I’ve embedded the suit below so you can read it for yourself. The complaint specifically calls out the current signage, the cartoon beaver mascot, the current color scheme of its branding, and even the expression of said beaver mascot and states that this is all trademark infringement in its current form. In fact, it asks for relief specifically in the form of an injunction against the mini-mart for continued use of that branding as it currently exists and then asks for a written report from the mini-mart confirming under oath that it has complied.

This is gaslighting. Aplin is lying about what his own lawsuit is demanding. And if there is any one rule in crisis PR above all else, it’s simply: don’t lie. Because that makes the PR even worse as a result, which is exactly what has now happened.

10:00 AM

DSA-6450-1 srt - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6450-1

DSA-6449-1 swift - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6449-1

DSA-6448-1 spip - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6448-1

DSA-6447-1 librabbitmq - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6447-1

09:00 AM

An Update On How I Use AI To Help With Techdirt (It’s Still Not Writing Articles) [Techdirt]

Over in our Insider Chat, someone recently pointed out a tiered “REAL Rating” five-tier scale designed to replace the fairly blunt and misleading question of “did you use AI on that?” with something a bit more nuanced. As someone who believes the discussion about AI could use a lot more nuance, I’m all for the premise. I ran my own usage through their wizard and came out with a “one” — the tier for automation. While this is technically accurate, it also tells you very little about how I actually use AI.

Which is why I thought it made sense to revisit the public discussion regarding my AI usage.

But going through that thought process reminded me that it’s been a little while since I last spoke about how I’m using these tools here, and given that some readers want more transparency, I thought I’d update you on the latest. I’ve written about it at length a few times before, starting in April of 2024, when I described how I used a tool called Lex to help me edit articles. The key was always that I’d write the articles myself, and then I had trained Lex on my own writing style to ask it how it might improve the article. Sometimes it would give good advice that would make me rewrite, and sometimes… it would give bad advice that I would skip or ignore. But all in all it was a useful forcing function.

In June of 2025, I wrote about how I had built a personal task management tool, using a vibe coding tool called Lovable, which I was using to keep track of various tasks, including what I wanted to write about each day. At the beginning of this year, mostly out of curiosity, I explored whether or not you could, with a ton of scaffolding and detailed instructions and effort, get AI tools to write a passable Techdirt article, and concluded no, you absolutely could not. Every attempt was still a weak facsimile of a Techdirt article with iffy language and clichéd phrases.

In the time since then I’ve run that test for myself a few times, and even as the models have improved, in my experience, my initial analysis stands. It cannot write Techdirt-style articles well, and even if I wanted to use it that way, the rewriting, changing, and fact-checking would take way more time than just… writing it myself. So, yes, I continue to write my own articles.

What’s changed in the last couple of years is that I’ve moved away from Lex (which has not received many updates in the past year or so as the team behind it appears to have moved on to other projects), and I ended up building my own editing tool, which is built directly into the task management tool I mentioned last year (which is now self-hosted and entirely within my control). The benefit now is that I can turn any task immediately into a writing project with a single click:

Screenshot showing a checkbox for "Writing project" ticked off, saying "open a writing workspace to draft and edit your article."

That was the task that turned into this article about Judge Andrew Oldham’s bizarrely out of context quote on mail-in ballots. From there I can go into the writing project which has a bunch of useful features. Within each writing project I can add sources, which turn out to be really useful during edits. I can upload PDFs, URLs, or just add text myself (and actually, as I was finishing up this article, I had it build a new feature that will automatically add all the sources I link to in a story, so the editor checks them even if I don’t add them manually, which is another example of realizing a potentially useful feature and having it created on the spot). I can also have the tool go out and research if there are other sources I should add, though I haven’t yet found that to be that useful as compared to just searching myself.

Screenshot showing "sources" tab, showing an uploaded PDF which is "Oldham's ruling" to go with the story I'm writing about Judge Oldham's bonkers opinion.

The tool is specifically trained on my writing, and has a detailed style guide regarding my voice and style, as well as a detailed system prompt of what I am looking for in editorial help vs. what I’m not looking for (e.g., yes, challenge my assumptions and facts, but no do not think you need to rewrite what I’ve written).

After I’ve written the full piece, there’s a button to open up the “AI review” tool (which lets me use any underlying LLM engine I choose, including local ones), which will give me a critical review and make general suggestions about what works and what doesn’t. I do switch up models from time to time to see how they work, but generally will default to either Claude Opus 5 or Sonnet 5. I am also using Gemma 4 locally and am increasingly trying to use that. It’s good on straightforward pieces, but less so once the argument gets more complicated. I’m hopeful that the next generation of local models will be more reliable.

For example here’s part of the initial review of my first draft on the Oldham ruling:

Feedback from the tool:

General feedback

The core reporting move here — going back to Veasey, pulling the full passage, and showing that the sentence Oldham truncates was actually part of an argument *against* voter suppression — is the strongest thing in the piece and it lands. But it takes four paragraphs to get there. Consider tightening the setup (the Oldham bio and the 'we can debate' hedge) so the reader hits the blockquote comparison faster.
The title promises 'judicial telephone,' but the Ho half of that telephone game doesn't show up until the last quarter and gets only two sentences. Either bring Ho in earlier (e.g., establish up front that this is a line being passed around the Fifth Circuit, not a one-judge error) or expand the Ho section with the actual quoted passage from his ruling so readers can see the identical truncation. Right now the payoff for the framing device is thinner than the framing device.
The empirical rebuttal paragraph is the weakest link in an otherwise well-evidenced piece. You link the AMSTAT study but summarize it as 'no noticeable increase in fraud.' This is exactly the place for the quantitative illustration you do so well elsewhere — actual numbers from states that went vote-by-mail, or the raw count of documented mail-ballot fraud cases against the total ballots cast. A hard number here would make the contrast with 'jeopardizes election integrity and democracy itself' devastating rather than merely asserted.
The 'so what?' for actual people is missing. Nine provisions of S.B. 1 were just reinstated, and the plaintiffs included blind and disabled voters whose ballots were rejected — Iglesias, Saltzman, Guerrero-Mata are all named in the opinion. A sentence or two on what the ruling means for those voters (and the standing reasoning that says 'you got rejected once but you've learned better now, so no injury') would ground the abstract complaint about misquotation in real consequences.

The only specific line edits tend to be suggestions on typos or confusing sections, such as here where it suggested a way to clean up and tighten a poorly drafted sentence in my initial draft:

Screenshot showing a suggested of an edit to tighten the sentence, noting that "nonsense appears twice in one sentence which blunts both uses. Tightening also gets the reader to the actual subject - the opening lines of the opinion - a beat faster."

You can also see that “Discuss” button in there, which I will frequently use to debate or discuss certain suggested edits if I think the suggestions miss the mark or are unnecessary. Or I’ll just reject them if I totally disagree.

Usually at that point I’ll do a more thorough rewrite based on my own reread of the article with an eye towards what it called out as problematic. For what it’s worth, this is where the inclusion of original sources is often quite helpful, because the AI will press me on things if its review felt that I’m not being completely fair and honest regarding the source material. Sometimes it calls me out for missing stuff and suggest I dig deeper (it’s not always correct, but often is, and pushes me to reread things even more carefully). Here’s one example, where the AI editor tool told me to go back and review the original documents more closely:

Ho's parenthetical is a bigger scandal than you've noticed
Look at what you quoted and then walked past:

aff'd in relevant part, 830 F.3d 216, 256 (5th Cir. 2016) (en banc) (crediting district court finding that "mail-in ballot fraud is a significant threat")

Oldham truncates a district court sentence. Ho does that and tacks on a parenthetical asserting that the en banc Fifth Circuit blessed a finding that mail-in ballot fraud "is a significant threat." That's a second, worse layer: it launders the claim from "a trial judge said something in passing" up to "an appellate court, sitting en banc, affirmed it." Your whole method is here's the text, here's what the text actually said — so go read 830 F.3d at 256 and say whether the en banc court actually credited any such finding, or whether that parenthetical is Ho's own gloss. If it's the latter, that's your best paragraph and it's currently sitting unwritten inside a blockquote you already have. Either way it needs a sentence, because right now you print Ho's parenthetical and then say only that he "used that same truncated line" — you've shown the reader more than you've told them.

It also catches me when I start rambling, which often happens on a first draft when I’m trying to figure out the best way to nail down a certain point:

The middle repeats itself four times
These four consecutive paragraphs all make the same point:

"So, yes, the lower court said 'mail-in ballots are not secure' but it was very clearly in the context of…"
"Read in context, Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos's original ruling was doing the opposite…"
"Oldham is using it to support voter disenfranchisement by pushing a disproven claim…"
"The argument being made in the original ruling was not that mail-in ballots were inherently prone to fraud…"
By the third one the reader has it. Cut to two: keep the "So, yes, the lower court said…" paragraph (it does the contextual work), then keep the Gonzales Ramos inversion paragraph (it names the judge and states the reversal cleanly), and delete the other two. You lose nothing but repetition, and the argument hits harder for arriving once at full strength.

Again, I don’t always follow its suggestions, but it does make me revisit and look at rewriting sections to make them clearer and tighter.

Separately, I have a built in set of “sub-agents” that will check certain things, including suggesting better headlines (this is very hit or miss, but usually at least helps me think of something better than either my initial attempt or its suggestions) and one sub-agent whose whole job is to poke holes in the arguments in the piece (this one is fun, but annoying, as it’s basically trolling myself, but in a way that helps me make the arguments stronger):

Counterpoint
unsupported claim
"Judge Oldham (and his colleague, Judge James Ho) are willing to totally misrepresent things for partisan gain" / "Oldham and Ho, for the sake of partisan gamesmanship, need the claim that mail-in ballots are fraud-prone to be true"
The piece establishes that the citations are misleading and out of context, but 'for partisan gain' / 'partisan gamesmanship' asserts intent and motive, not just effect. Misleading citation chains can also result from sloppy law-clerk drafting, confirmation bias, or reflexive reliance on a prior court's phrasing without rereading the source — none of which requires conscious bad faith. The draft doesn't offer evidence (e.g., a pattern of similar moves by these judges in unrelated cases, other quotes revealing motive) that rises above 'the result serves a partisan outcome.' Suggestion: Either back the intent claim with a broader pattern (the piece gestures at one — Oldham's content-moderation ruling — but doesn't tie it to a citation-misuse pattern specifically) or soften to something like 'whether through motivated reasoning or convenient citation-copying, the effect is the same,' which is still damning but doesn't require proving what's in the judges' heads.

You may notice that the features I appreciate the most here are the ones that in some sense make my life harder, by telling me to work harder, check my sources, and question my arguments. Considering how often we hear about the problem with these tools being how much smoke they blow up the asses of users, it’s certainly possible to set them up to deliberately challenge and provoke you. The parts I find most useful are the parts built to disagree, because it helps make my work stronger by stress testing it before it goes out in the world.

Anyway, once the piece is then written and edited, it’s a two-click process to import the final version into Techdirt’s WordPress system and hand it off to someone else on the team for a human review before it goes into the queue to get posted.

Compared to how I described the process two years ago, the actual writing process hasn’t changed — which is kind of the whole point. The human part (the thing that is central to what I do) doesn’t get automated away. What’s changed is the structure around it. I have total control over the tool now, it’s better trained and designed to help me write better.

There are a few other more experimental features, including one where after I’ve added all my sources to the writing project, I’ll also write a short paragraph (or two or three) about my focus on the article, and the system will ask me some questions based on the sources and how I want to frame the article. This is sometimes useful in testing some of my assumptions before diving into the writing. This has been most helpful when I’m a bit undecided on what the central backbone of a piece really should be. In the past I would just start writing, realize I went down the wrong path, and then start again. Using the “editorial interview” feature has helped me a few times to think deeper about which way I want to take the article before I get to the actual writing.

I also built in a tool to also write a potential outline of the article based on that “interview,” but I’ve only tried to use that a couple times, and neither time did I follow the outline, so I’ll likely just get rid of that feature. Once again, the benefit of having total control over the tool. For all the (reasonable! understandable!) complaints of big tech companies “shoving AI into everything,” with this tool, I decide what goes where, and if something doesn’t work, I can just remove it.

I’ve also built in a bunch of other features that are simply useful for organizing my day and focus. The same tool creates a morning and afternoon briefing based on my tasks, my email, my calendar, and a growing knowledge base about me and my work. It also texts me news stories it finds that might be interesting for Techdirt (based on search criteria I have provided), which I can turn into tasks/writing projects with one response. Just last week I received my Pebble Index 01 ring that I had mentioned last year, and one of the first things I did with it is hack it so that I can speak into it to create tasks. It can also research things and leave the notes in the task tool (and text me back quick facts if I need them).

In short, as I’ve suggested repeatedly, the power of AI tools is in empowering individuals to be able to accomplish what they want to do, rather than replacing humans or doing the fundamental work. Building very personalized tools that I can constantly update and tweak to meet my needs has made me less and less interested in using software that other people built for me. It’s shockingly empowering to look at a feature that doesn’t quite work the way you want, and to be able to just tell your tools “hey, make this work differently” and have it work properly.

As I mentioned up top, using the wizard on that REAL Ratings site, I came out with a score of “one,” noting that I used AI for automation. You could argue that it maybe should be somewhere between one and two, depending on how much you consider the “brainstorming” part of what the editor feature is doing. But I’d argue this is a long way from the assumption many have of “if you use AI you’re using it for slop.”

Either way, I’m still not writing articles with these tools, and I don’t plan to start. The assumption that any use of AI means you’ve handed your brain over to it misses the part I actually find interesting: building your own tools, on your own terms, and telling them what to do rather than the other way around.

06:00 AM

FOIA Documents Show Epstein Files Had Flag List Which Included The Term ‘POTUS’ [Techdirt]

MAGA, the GOP, and the Trump administration don’t really care about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking. The MAGA GOP made a lot of noise during Biden’s single term because they were sure the files would show a Pizzagate’s-worth of Democratic political figures engaged in the ritual abuse of underage girls.

Once Trump was elected in 2024, the furor died down. While the MAGA faithful were willing to take down their own just to put a few Dems’ heads on spikes, they were suddenly less audible once they realized any document dump would take down a few of their own. Even Donald Trump seemed to know this, which is he why he shifted his focus elsewhere.

It took a literal act of Congress to get the Epstein files released, despite Trump and other GOP figures having promised to put this at the top of the MAGA to-do list if they retook the White House. Trump engaged in multiple rounds of spin, hoping to make it look as though demanding the release of the files and refusing to release the files were both the same side of the MAGA coin.

Trump’s DOJ then reluctantly began complying with the law. Millions of records were withheld. Those that were released were riddled with redactions, forcing politicians on the other side of the political divide to demand more releases with fewer redactions. Meanwhile, a handful of leaks and unforced errors revealed the Trump DOJ was doing whatever it could to cover for Trump and anyone else Trump might want to have redacted from rolling Epstein File releases.

FOIA requests are incapable of expediting the full release of the Epstein Files. But they are capable of sniffing out the details of the Trump administration’s attempts to maintain control of the “this was mainly Dems” narrative even as it seeks to satiate the MAGA base that has been demanding access to these files for years.

This report for Bloomberg — written by “FOIA terrorist” Jason Leopold and Harry Wilson — not only details FBI Director Kash Patel and former DOJ deputy director Dan Bongino attempts to spin Trump’s refusal to release documents as demonstrative of his “full transparency” promises.

It also shows the DOJ’s pre-release review of the files had President Trump in mind the entire time. While pretending to be engaging in radical levels of transparency and complying with both the letter and the spirit of law, the DOJ was actually flagging anything that might include Trump for the apparent reason of keeping these files out of the public’s hands.

In addition to the discussions about Ferguson and Hervey, the documents contain other noteworthy details, including a spreadsheet dated March 25, 2025 and titled “DOJ Document Flag List.” The first page, labeled “FLAGGED Items List, per case – per DOJ guidance,” includes a case number associated with the FBI’s 2006 investigation of Epstein by its Miami field office.

[…]

There are 16 entries on the list where the reason for the flag was simply marked “POTUS.” Those items include magazine and newspaper articles, message pads, phone message books and one unidentified record.

The report notes that some of these flagged files have since been released. But others have not and this FOIA release by the DOJ perhaps points to why they have not been. The DOJ could have cleared everything up with an explanation, but of course it didn’t, because why would it.

DOJ referred a request for comment on the “Flag List” to the FBI, which declined to comment.

Assuming every “no comment” is an admission of guilt is as fatuous as assuming everyone who pleads the Fifth is guilty of whatever they’ve been accused of. We won’t be doing that here. But it is strange that agencies that treat every request for comment as an opportunity to engage in attacks on journalists and/or personal attacks on the person making the request would have absolutely nothing to say here. Read into that what you will.

04:00 AM

The Amazon tax [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

It’s not technically a tax. Taxes produce valuable public benefits, like medical research and parks. This is simply legal theft.

Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell merchants and publishers enough search-distorting ads to capture a billion dollars in revenue. Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.

My publisher is terrific, and they’re working hard to introduce people to my new book. Last week, they began buying search ads on Amazon.

At first glance, this is compelling. Someone who isn’t sure what they’re looking for, who is looking for a book or a kitchen appliance, might find one if the right ad showed up at the right time.

But of course, that’s not what yields, or what most of the ads you see on Amazon do.

If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. [Cory wrote about this three years ago, and the scale has already doubled.]

When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place. Businesses continue to buy the ads—not because they’re dumb, but because the system has created a situation with few options. Folklore implies that buying the ads somehow shifts how search responds in the long run, even after the ads stop running, but there’s little data to confirm this.

Traditional ads increase demand. We see something that’s clearly an ad, it might spark desire, and sales go up. But zero-sum search ads aren’t like that–the total sales in the category stay the same, and merchants are merely competing for a share of a static pie. This study argues that an ecommerce site with search ads actually sells fewer items than the same site without ads.

The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“. It costs about a dollar per click. My publisher is paying Amazon a dollar to show you an ad for the book you went to buy in the first place.

Who ends up paying the more than $50 billion a year spent on these ads? It’s not the sellers. Sellers can’t make heartfelt donations for long. It’s you. By making the marketing of products significantly less efficient, Amazon’s theft makes products more expensive or sucks the energy out of the development of new products.

It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks. And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads.

For decades, Amazon created value for consumers by lowering the price of just about everything. And they opened the doors to merchants who didn’t have sufficient distribution. They claimed to be customer-centric, and they were.

I don’t think they can claim this any longer. The ad system they built isn’t illegal, but it’s pretty clear who it’s for.

Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.

ABC Sues The FCC For Massive First Amendment Violations [Techdirt]

After years of feckless capitulation, ABC is clearly developing something vaguely resembling a backbone.

The company has filed a new lawsuit against Brendan Carr and the FCC (pdf), (correctly) claiming that the agency has been engaged in a coordinated campaign of harassment that violates the First Amendment and tramples the company’s free speech rights. The lawsuit asks a federal court to put an end to the harassment campaign the company says poses an “existential threat” to its operations.

“Acting through the Federal Communications Commission, the Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” ABC/Disney wrote in its complaint.

As we’ve explored at length, the Trump FCC has been engaged in multiple overlapping manufactured investigations into the company for a variety of “offenses,” ranging from comedian Jimmy Kimmel making fun of the president’s wife, to the morning talk show The View hosting politicians that Trumpism is clearly worried could erode Republican control of the Senate.

In the latter case, the Carr FCC appears to have colluded with right-wing local broadcast companies to falsely make it appear that a local ABC affiliate violated dated FCC “equal opportunity” rules by hosting Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico last February. Carr used this to try and justify an unprecedented early review of ABC’s eight local affiliate broadcast licenses.

Carr has also engaged in various other phony investigations into ABC, including false claims that the company had violated dated FCC “news distortion” rules simply by reporting on the presidency. Carr and Trump also leveraged additional threats to ABC’s broadcast licenses after the network refused to air a recent Trump speech live.

According to ABC’s complaint, the review of ABC’s broadcast licenses for upsetting the thin-skinned president poses an existential threat to the company either way the wind blows.

“At one extreme, the Commission may intentionally prolong the adjudicative process, miring ABC in years of costly litigation, with the threat of adverse action ever present and with every editorial judgment shadowed by the prospect of provoking the Administration into further retaliation,” ABC’s lawyers wrote.

“At another extreme, the Commission may use the hearing to deny license renewal or immediately revoke the Stations’ licenses, forcing Plaintiffs off the air entirely, as the president has repeatedly demanded,” the complaint said. “In either scenario, the Administration accomplishes its goal of eliminating a perceived media critic.”

Carr has a real dead dog of a case here, which would explain why ABC had been sending signals for weeks that they intend to fight this (as opposed to that time they paid the president a $15 million bribe to settle a baseless lawsuit). In addition to recent filings calling out Carr for manufacturing a fake legal scandal, ABC recently ran ad spots calling on its viewers to file complaints with the FCC.

Carr never really wanted a legal showdown with deep-pocketed Disney over this turd of a case. He was just hoping to make life so costly and annoying for ABC/Disney that the company not only fired Jimmy Kimmel, but thought twice about supporting any journalist, satirist, or comedian who dares challenge the administration.

As ABC correctly notes in its complaint that the harassment campaign serves as a very unsubtle threat not just to ABC — but to other media companies that platform voices (be they journalists or comedians) critical of the increasingly unpopular president.

“The consequences of the Administration’s campaign against free speech reach well beyond ABC,” the ABC/Disney complaint notes. “If the Administration gets its way, the message to every media company in the country will be unmistakable: tell only the stories the Administration deems favorable, or face the coercive machinery of the federal government. In such a world, the press could in no way be described as free.”

As the president’s health, polling, and political power more quickly start to weaken, you’re beginning to see even traditionally feckless U.S. media giants start to show signs of courage (overseas media giants like the BBC are also starting to stand up for themselves). With any luck, that’s a harbinger of additional opposition to come.

Daily Deal: Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock [Techdirt]

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Data Centers Are Now a Political Albatross [The Status Kuo]

I’m writing today for The Big Picture about an issue that might actually unite a bitterly divided country: Nobody wants a data center in their backyard. Seven in 10 Americans oppose construction in their own area, and the anger crosses partisan lines. Republicans have lost primaries in Utah over data centers, Democrats have flipped utility commission seats in Georgia amid anger over rising utility bills, and voters from California to Wisconsin have imposed bans or restrictions at the ballot box.

This week, AI chip giant Nvidia guaranteed up to $105 billion in lease and power payments for a single new data center campus in Ohio on a site once used to enrich uranium during the Cold War. The announcement came after Ohio activists failed to gather enough signatures to put a proposed ban on large data centers before voters.

Even though data centers are hugely unpopular, Donald Trump has spent the summer as one of the industry’s loudest champions, midterms be damned. Interesting strategy.

Look for my piece later today if you’re a subscriber to The Big Picture. If you’re not, you can sign up for free or become a valued paid supporter of our work here:

https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/subscribe

I’ll be back tomorrow with my regular edition of The Status Kuo.

Jay

03:00 AM

MAGA GOP Keeps Taking Ownership Stakes In Private Companies, Then Warning You The Communists Are Coming [Techdirt]

Words used to mean things. The MAGA GOP strategy lately seems to be pulling a page from the 1980s playbook (a Trump specialty) and declaring anyone they don’t like to be “communist.” The whole thing is laughable. Even if you disagree with some of the policy positions of far left groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (and they do have some wacky, nonsensical things on their platform) they are (1) not even remotely close to communism and (2) have zero chance of actually being put into policy.

But, really, so much of it seems to be projection. Former UBS CEO and regular Fox News contributor Robert Wolf went on that network earlier this week, where the host clearly expected him to trash Mayor Mamdani’s proposals in NYC as communist. Wolf seemed to surprise the host by pointing out that the only real activity that seemed communistic was coming from the Trump White House.

“Let me reverse this a little. If Mayor Mamdani did the following: if he put price controls on products like pharmaceuticals, if he bailed out farmers, if he took private stakes in public companies, if he said to energy companies ‘you’re making too much money,’ if he proposed credit card caps, you would all go apoplectic, as would your viewers. That’s what President Trump’s doing. You could argue he’s the most powerful socialist in the country today.”

When the host finally comes back in, she laughs nervously and says “I’ll have to think about that, Robert,” before quickly changing the subject. Wolf gets in a final: “Well, all those five points I made, he did, the President, so…” The host then immediately… goes back to claiming that Democrats are going to destroy NYC with socialism, without ever addressing a single one of Wolf’s five points about Trump’s actual “socialistic” tendencies.

Meanwhile the left wingers over at [checks notes…] the Cato Institute, are pointing out that the federal government taking ownership stakes in private companies has become “routine”.

Since December, the CHIPS Research and Development (R&D) Office has announced 19 final or proposed company awards totaling up to $3.8 billion. They cover 18 companies because GlobalFoundries has two separate projects. Three agreements are final, while 16 remain letters of intent. All 19 have been publicly tied to equity.

Commerce’s current funding rules state that award recipients may be required to provide equity, warrants, intellectual property licenses, royalties, revenue sharing, or other instruments to generate a government return. The Biden administration, by contrast, used the same CHIPS R&D appropriation through separate competitions to award funds to private companies without taking ownership stakes. That makes the Trump administration’s insistence on equity a policy choice. The CHIPS Act itself authorizes Commerce to make grants, cooperative agreements, and “other transactions” but doesn’t expressly authorize the department to acquire stock.

Last time around, you’ll recall, Trump and MAGA also tried to make out Biden as a far left “communist.” Yet, given the chance he didn’t setup the apparatus for government ownership of private companies. Trump is now using the law passed under Biden’s guidance, which didn’t require ownership stakes, and using it that way. Which one is more of a communist?

We’ve talked a little about this before, with regards to Trump taking an equity stake in Intel and getting a golden share in US Steel. But in any other administration — especially a Democratic one — the business press and Republicans would be up in arms over so much government ownership of private companies.

This is the opposite of free market capitalism. It’s the government picking winners and losers, and then demanding a cut of the winnings for doing it. Even if the bets work out (and Trump keeps hyping up how successful the Intel investment has been), it’s still the sorta thing that is fundamentally against the principles of free markets. Hell, when the Obama administration merely guaranteed a loan to Solyndra — no equity, no ownership, no board seat, just a loan guarantee — it became an albatross Republicans hung around his neck for the better part of a decade.

Here, as Cato notes, Trump is normalizing the US government taking significant ownership stakes in private companies:

A year ago, these deals looked like a scattered series of one-off improvisations. Commerce now announces companies in batches and openly describes a “portfolio approach.” As I argued in a December 2025 essay, the administration has been assembling a pseudo-sovereign wealth fund under executive control, one deal at a time.

The latest six companies are not especially remarkable. What is remarkable is that federal corporate ownership is becoming routine under a Republican administration, while a Republican-controlled Congress is not just letting it happen but may even enshrine the practice in statute.

Republicans warning that communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.

And don’t sleep on the bit buried at the end of that second paragraph: the Republican-controlled Congress is trying to write more of this into the NDAA and hand the Pentagon its own equity portfolio with which to further nationalize and take equity stakes in more companies. A president doing weird one-off deals is one thing. But now we’re having Republicans literally build into the law the machinery of government ownership of private companies.

And they want you to believe the other guys are communists?

Every Republican currently warning that the communists are coming to take over American business might want to consider what they’re actually building here. They’re the ones picking winners and losers. They’re the ones normalizing the federal government taking ownership stakes in private companies. They’re the ones putting into law that this is to be expected.

So then, when Democrats eventually get back in power, it will have been the GOP that handed them the tools for government ownership of companies. It’s difficult to see how the GOP can whine about “communism” while building the fundamental infrastructure to enable the government to nationalize industry.

“Socialism” and “communism” are just bogeymen at this point, words deployed to scare people away from voting for Democrats — because the alternative is running on their actual record, we can all see how that’s going.

Pluralistic: IP can't save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

IP can't save you from AI: Property rights cannot substitute for labor rights and privacy rights.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Flying Brits v brown people; Probability neglect; Law v "enhanced patdowns"; Onion says Brits love paywalls; "Hench"; "Lessons in Magic and Disaster."
Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

IP can't save you from AI (permalink)

You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

I'm an artist and a worker. I want to protect my labor interests. So do my peers from across the "creative industries." But a sizable group of my peers think the way we're going to protect our interests is by expanding copyright so that it's unambiguously illegal to scrape the internet, analyze the files retrieved by those scrapers, and publish that analysis (a process more familiarly known as "training AI"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

This is a losing strategy. First, because banning scraping, or requiring permission to count the elements in creative works, or demanding a license to publish collections of facts about copyrighted works will inflict enormous collateral damage on a wide variety of socially beneficial activities. From the OED to search engines to the Internet Archive, so many beneficial activities rely on the fact that copyright permits unlicensed collection and analysis of every copyrighted work as a single, massive corpus, and copyright allows the publication of that analysis without permission from the creators of the works it analyzes.

A lot of people who are (rightfully) very angry about AI dispute this. They believe that they can craft an "AI training" law that would ban scraping, analysis and publication when these activities are part of AI training, but not when they're undertaken for a benign purpose. I am very, very skeptical of this. After 25 years of watching internet policy go badly awry, to the great detriment of workers of all kinds and everyday users, it is my professional, considered opinion that drafting a statute that only stops these "bad" activities is much, much harder than these people think, and may actually be impossible.

I think some artists advocating for a copyright-based solution to AI's war on labor understand this and have decided that they're willing to catch a lot of dolphins in these legal tuna-nets they're hoping to get from Congress. I get that: there are always trade-offs, and the perfect can't be the enemy of the good.

But I think they're making the wrong trade-off, and not just because I value archives, accountability corpuses, large-scale linguistic research and search engines. I think they're making the wrong trade-off because copyright will not protect their livelihoods from AI-based wage erosion.

Here's why: the theory of copyright as an "artist's right" is premised on the idea that we artists get these exclusive rights, which we use in our bargaining with media companies and other intermediaries. It's a (pseudo) property right, and it's sub-licensable. Just as an entrepreneur might get the contract to supply catering for a sports stadium and then parcel out the pretzel stand, beer bar, and pizza concessions to subcontractors, we're meant to sell our English rights, foreign language rights, graphic novel rights, film rights, audio rights, (and so on) to a variety of media companies.

To bargain successfully, it's not only necessary for you to have something valuable to trade: you also need to have leverage. You need to have options. The other side has to believe that if they lowball you, you will go do a deal elsewhere.

This is where copyright fails to serve creative workers. Even at the best of times, the world naturally produces an oversupply of would-be professional artists, and a sufficiency of the talented to fill most of the workaday niches in our field. Even exceptional artists – and exceptional works of art – are often commercial flops, for reasons that aren't always well understood (though sometimes it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, where a media company buys the rights and then loses confidence in the work and does not exert itself in the marketing of the work).

These are not the best of times. Decades of lax antitrust enforcement has boiled the "creative industries" down to 5 publishers, 4 studios, 3 labels, 2 app stores, and one company that's in charge of all the ebooks and audiobooks.

Since the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress has acted time and again to broaden copyright. Today's copyright lasts longer, restricts more uses, extends to more kinds of works, and carries stiffer statutory penalties for infringement ($150,000 per download!). The media companies we creative workers bargain with are larger, richer and more profitable than at any time in history – and we are poorer. The share of those massive profits that ends up in our pocket is lower than ever – and we don't just get smaller slices of that larger pie, those slices are smaller than the slices we used to get, when the pie was much smaller. The rising tide of copyright expansion lifted our bosses' boats – even as our dinghies filled with bilge and sank.

How could we get so much more to bargain with, only to bargain it all away, for less money than we used to get for a much smaller bundle of rights? Simple: giving us rights did not give us leverage. Giving us more rights without giving us more bargaining power is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch-money. There's no amount of lunch-money that will get that kid fed; but if you keep increasing how much money the kid gets, the bullies will end up so rich that they can afford to run a global campaign demanding that we all think of those poor hungry kids and send them even more lunch money.

Copyright's failure to deliver for creative workers doesn't mean that we're doomed to poverty. Our works are generating record profits for our bosses, and there are plenty of ways to change the "distributional outcomes" (the phrase economists use for "who gets what") in arts/labor policy. In 2022, I co-wrote Chokepoint Capitalism along with the eminent Australian copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin. The whole book is full of these pro-worker arts policies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

Rebecca and I start from the premise that artists are workers, not the small businesses that our bosses insist we see ourselves as. The idea that an artist is an LLC with an MFA fits in very neatly with copyright: you're getting this bundle of exclusive rights from Congress and then you bargain, business-to-business, with other companies out there in the world, selling those rights for the best price you can get. This approach rarely works, and when it does, it works badly. 50 years of more copyright, richer bosses, and poorer artists put the lie to the "LLC with an MFA" approach.

If we're workers, then we derive our power from labor rights. The Writers Guild – the only creative workers in world history to have comprehensively beaten AI in their workplace – won their AI fight with a strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

The Hollywood guilds are able to pursue a limited form of "sectoral bargaining" (where all the workers in a field bargain with all its bosses) called "multi-employer bargaining." Bosses hate sectoral bargaining, and in 1947 they got it banned outright through the Taft-Hartley Act.

Getting other kinds of creative workers into multi-employer bargaining arrangements will be a lot of work – and repealing Taft-Hartley and restoring sectoral bargaining will be even harder. But just because it's hard to do the thing that works, it doesn't follow that we should do the easy thing that doesn't work.

Compared to winning more labor rights, getting more copyright will be easy. That's because our bosses want more copyright. When we demand more copyright, our bosses – the most powerful, profitable media companies in human history, grown rich off our labor – will fight alongside of us.

But media companies don't want to stop AI from depriving us of our wages. Quite the contrary! The whole reason that the Writers Guild had to go on strike was that movie studios – not Openai or Anthropic – wanted to replace them with AI. The same studios that are suing the AI companies for "mass copyright theft" have made it very clear that they want to buy chatbots from those AI companies and use them to erode our wages and thin our ranks. The copyright lawsuits our bosses are waging against the AI companies are intended to force tech companies to pay for licenses before they train their chatbots on our work. But they won't be paying us for those licenses – they'll be paying our bosses.

The AI copyright fight isn't being fought to protect your wages – it's being fought to see whether your lost wages end up in the pockets of a tech boss or a media boss. AI copyright suits are a fight over who's going to get the lion's share when they eat you up for dinner. They're not a way to keep you off the menu.

This becomes more obviously true with each passing day, and this morning, the world got its clearest example of what a poor substitute copyright is for fundamental human rights, like labor rights and privacy rights.

Last year, Spirit Airlines went bankrupt, a casualty of a monopolized aviation sector and Trump's oil price surge. Ever since, vultures have circled its carcass, picking off its assets in a string of auctions conducted by Spirit's bankruptcy trustees. Today, those trustees announced that they had sold all of Spirit's employees' data to Google, for use in AI training:

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/google-spirit-airlines-bankruptcy

Every email, every memo, every calendar entry. Oceans of sensitive, personal information, all to be shoveled directly into the bottomless maw of Google's AI training systems. This training data includes messages between colleagues and with outside parties about workers' romantic lives, their health, their family situations. These workers' most private lives will end up as fodder for a Google chatbot.

Now, all of these workers have a copyright in all of that work. Under international copyright treaties and US law, copyright "inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity." The very instant a worker sets fingers to keyboard and types out a message with even the smallest quantum of creativity, a new copyright springs into existence, giving the copyright holder 90 years' worth of control over it.

But even though every one of those emails and messages and memos was written by a human being working for Spirit, the copyright over those works does not belong to the workers. Every single one of them will have signed an employment agreement that designates their emails and other copyrightable work as "works made for hire," owned by Spirit Airlines, which means that their work is now an asset in Spirit's bankruptcy estate. That's why all that personal information is about to be transferred to a new corporate owner, Google, who can do anything they want with it.

We know how terrible this kind of disclosure will be for workers. In 2001, the criminal enterprise Enron collapsed after the extent of its fraud was revealed. In the ensuing litigation, Enron's bankruptcy overseers decided that it was too expensive to purge the company's email servers of personal information before entering it into evidence. That meant that once the court battles were over, all the Enron employees' emails entered the public domain as part of the court record:

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

The "Enron Corpus" is a foundational data-set in modern computer science. Academics analyzed the data to do pioneering work on machine learning and social graph theory, which found its way into the design and operations of social media companies, who learned how to spot and manipulate social connections by studying it.

The Enron Corpus isn't just a data-set, though. It's a privacy catastrophe, full of sensitive personal information that haunts the 158 employees whose correspondence is now permanently afloat upon the internet.

Why was the Enron Corpus so exploitable? Because US labor law does not protect this kind of sensitive information when it is in your employer's hands. In fact, if your boss ends up with a trove of your personal information in the form of emails, calendar entries and files, you will typically be blamed for it: "Why did you use your work computer for personal activities?"

But anthropologists who study computer usage have known for decades that everyone ends up with personal data on their work devices. What's more, this problem is only getting worse, because (thanks to weak labor laws), we're expected to work longer hours and to be on call when we're not at the job, which means that you're often dealing with personal crises after hours from your desk, and dealing with work crises at home from your sofa.

Any fit-for-purpose labor rights regime would recognize that your privacy rights must extend to the data that finds its way onto your boss's computers, even if you put that data there. Any failure to recognize this bedrock fact gives employers free license to plunder and exploit your personal information.

Of course, labor law isn't the only way to protect private information. While labor law should contain explicit, job-related privacy guarantees, privacy law should protect all our privacy (after all, Spirit's servers are also full of emails and messages from Spirit's passengers).

Unfortunately for anyone who ever flew on Spirit – or anyone who worked for them – American privacy law is all but dead. America's last consumer privacy law went into effect in 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act made it illegal for video-store clerks to disclose your VHS rental records.

Google says it won't use your profile or frequent flier info to train its model, but they haven't made the same promise about the millions of messages that passengers exchanged with the airline. Google has also promised to use "de-identification" algorithms to purge the Spirit customer, supplier and employee data of personal information. But "de-identification" is a pipe-dream, widely understood by security experts as a form of wishful thinking by companies that want to exploit your personal information while still insisting that they aren't violating your privacy. In reality, "de-identified" data is always vulnerable to "re-identification" attacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian

The collapse of privacy and labor rights in post-Reagan America and the mass expansion of copyright over the same period are part of the same phenomenon, aspects of two generations' worth of policies designed to benefit capital at the expense of workers, and corporations at the expense of consumers.

As consumers, we're told to substitute shopping for legal rights: if a corporation wrongs you, it's easier and quicker to "vote with your wallet" than it is to sue them or ask the government to intervene. Substituting shopping for politics has been a total failure. Shopping your way out of a monopoly is like recycling your way out of a wildfire:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/#stop-fucking-that-chicken

As creative workers we were told to stop thinking of ourselves as workers altogether, to become small businesses, and to use the LLC With an MFA method to bargain our way out of exploitative arrangements. This, too, has been a failure:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

The sale of Spirit's data to Google for AI training shows us that privacy and labor rights are indispensable. We can't substitute market mechanisms like comparison shopping or individual contract negotiations for broad, systemic, inalienable rights backstopped by law.

By demanding the copyright our bosses love, we're seeking the right to be angry about AI, even as the AI companies and our bosses cut deals to train chatbots with our work, which they will use to attack our livelihoods.

Once we stop pretending to be small businesses, once we abandon the fantasy of LLCs with MFAs, we can join with every worker in every industry in demanding sectoral bargaining; and with every consumer in demanding privacy rights. Winning privacy and labor struggles means more than the right to be angry about AI – that's the right to do something about it.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Nautilus https://nautilus.plotter.cc/
Zoomers don't know what Usenet is https://tchotchke.substack.com/p/zoomers-dont-know-what-usenet-is
When the Shortage is the Strategy https://nooneshappy.com/article/when-the-shortage-is-the-strategy/
Can Canada function without American tech? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwoL6OGk_2Y
Elon Musk made flying even worse so Palantir could profit https://www.theverge.com/transportation/981194/faa-air-traffic-elon-musk-peter-thiel-palantir

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago IP and scientific publishing https://web.archive.org/web/20011001203058/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s345514.htm

#20yrsago British air travelers kick brown “terrorists” off their planes https://web.archive.org/web/20060823104858/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=401419&in_page_id=1770&ico=Homepage&icl=TabModule&icc=NEWS&ct=5

#15yrsago “Probability neglect”: why policy-makers are constitutionally incapable of formulating evidence-based anti-terrorism policy https://web.archive.org/web/20111015040753/https://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/J2011OBHDP_APM,AT,HK_PolicymakersDilemma.pdf

#15yrsago TSA can’t explain why “enhanced patdowns” are legal https://web.archive.org/web/20151203033820/http://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2011/08/18/the-legality-of-the-tsas-enhanced-pat-down-authority/

#15yrsago The Onion: We did a paywall because British people like paying for the Web https://web.archive.org/web/20110911175335/http://www.avclub.com/articles/about-the-onions-new-paid-content-system,60129/

#5yrsago Hench https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#natalie-zina-walschots

#5yrsago Machine learning's crumbling foundations https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#dirty-data

#1yrago Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster" https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/19/revenge-magic/#liminal-spaces

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/
Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification
London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2)
https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Victoria: Munro's Books (Oct 20)
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory
Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with
Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves
Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea
Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

Latest books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"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

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

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“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 585 (6624 total).

"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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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A German Court Drew the Piracy Line at 81.5%, KinoGO Was Blocked with (at least) 82.4% [TorrentFreak]

Since 2021, major German Internet providers have agreed to block the country’s most egregious pirate sites through the Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet, better known as CUII.

The system started as an administrative scheme without judicial oversight. CUII’s own committee issued blocking recommendations, and the Federal Network Agency signed off before providers acted.

This setup changed in mid-2025, when the stakeholders rewrote their code of conduct so that every block now starts with a rightsholder suing one ISP. Once a court confirms the block, the other providers follow.

CUII no longer issues the orders, but it will still communicate the recommendations to all participants. In recent weeks, the clearing body published several new ones based on orders from the Cologne Regional Court, targeting KinoGo and Streamed.

The structural infringement check

The court orders are not available to us, but according to CUII’s paperwork, these targets are classified as structurally copyright infringing websites, making the blocking orders “reasonable and proportionate.”

As is typical in Germany, the requesting rightsholders and the targeted domains are not mentioned. However, based on the brands and data from the independent transparency portal CUIIListe, streamed.pk, streamed.st, and kinogo.ec were all blocked in Germany this month.

CUII’s paperwork does reveal one hard statistic. For each site, a private investigator pulls a random sample of the site’s content, to see how much of it infringes at a 95.5 percent confidence level. This number is used to determine whether the target site is indeed ‘structurally’ infringing.

For example, for Streamed, the investigator put the infringing share somewhere between 96.16 and 100 percent. For KinoGo, meanwhile, between 82.4 and 94.6 percent of the content is pirated.

The 82.4 percent floor is the lowest we have seen so far, below all previous German blocking orders we have seen, including the ones below.

Site	Ruling	Share infringing
KinoGO	Jul 2026	82.4% to 94.6%
LIVETV.SX	Apr 2026	85.28% to 96.72%
SPORTPLUS	Feb 2026	88.8% to 100%
MegaKino	Feb 2024	89.8% to 100%
Kinoger	Nov 2025	91.4% to 99.0%
Anna’s Archive	Sep 2025	91.6% to 94.8%
NSWPedia	Jan 2026	94.4% to 99.8%
s.to	Feb 2021	94.84% to 100%
LibGen	May 2024	96.07% to 98.23%
Streamed	Jul 2026	96.16% to 100%
cine.to	Jun 2022	96.28% to 100%

The 81.5% ‘Line’

In a March 2025 order targeting HDFILME, STREAMCLOUD and FILMPALAST, CUII specifically stated when illegal content clearly outweighs the legal content on a site.

“The illegal content on the websites far outweighs the legal content. This is the case in any event when at least 81.5% of the website’s content is illegal,” the order reads, translated from German.

It is the only CUII order we found that puts a number on it. The figure traces back to the Cologne Regional Court, which set it in a January 2025 default judgment against the download portal NOX, a case the operator never contested. That same judgment triggered NOX’s own block.

In KinoGo’s example, the 82.4 percent floor is getting quite close to the 81.5 percent.

KinoGo

This percentage is not a hard benchmark for the court or for CUII to determine whether a site is blockable. However, one can imagine that it’s not a good look when it drops lower than that, especially when legal content would outweigh their pirated counterparts.

This doesn’t mean that KinoGo is a questionable target. The site has been a thorn in the side of rightsholders for many years. It has more than 50 million monthly visits, mostly from Belarus and Ukraine, which it has historically targeted.

Hiding in Plain Content?

The open question is how much of a site’s library has to be pirated before a block can be issued in Germany, and whether 81.5 percent is considered to be a general benchmark or just a figure tied to that one case.

If there is a fixed percentage, there are some obvious exploits that come to mind. In theory, an operator could pad an archive with public domain films or AI generated filler, pushing the investigator’s interval below the line while the pirated library stays intact.

We asked CUII whether the 81.5 percent can be treated as a fixed benchmark, but it has not responded by the time of publication. We will update this article if they do.

Update: Romsns.com is also blocked. CUII just published the associated recommendation. The Virustotal scan below shows that there are multiple malware warnings for this comain.

—

A copy of the Streamed order can be found here (pdf) and the KinoGo order can be found here (pdf). An archive of all CUII determinations is also available on the clearinghouse’s official website.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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