News

Friday 2026-02-06

09:00 PM

Voluntary stories [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

The narrative we run in our head is a choice.

It might or might not be based on objective reality and verified history. Doesn’t matter, it’s still a choice.

There are millions of ways we can remind ourselves about the events of our lives and the systems we live in. But in this moment (and the next) we’ll choose just one or two to rehearse and allow it to alter our decisions, outlook and interactions.

So the key question is simple:

Is it helping?

It’s clear that the story is a choice. You can change it. Not all at once, not easily, but of course, we change our focus. This takes effort, and it’s worthwhile.

And since we can change it, it’s a tool. If it’s not helping, we can change it.

200 years ago, Jeremy Bentham wrote a pamphlet on how we use words to tell ourselves stories. It’s archaic and dense, so few read it any longer. I asked Claude to give us a summary.

springs-of-actionDownload
      

Pluralistic: Luxury Kafka (06 Feb 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links


A suburban house; on the law stand a couple, their backs to it, looking appreciatively upon it. On the lawn is a lawn-flag reading 'Chinga la migra' in ornate script, surrounded by butterflies and flowers. The flag is limned in red spokes.

Luxury Kafka (permalink)

Having been through the US immigration process (I got my first work visa more than 25 years ago and became a citizen in 2022), it's obvious to me that Americans have no idea how weird and tortuous their immigration system is:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/52177745821/

As of a couple years ago, Americans' ignorance of their own immigration system was merely frustrating, as I encountered both squishy liberals and xenophobic conservatives talking about undocumented immigrants and insisting that they should "just follow the rules." But today, as murderous ICE squads patrol our streets kidnapping people and sending them to concentration camps where they are beaten to death or deported to offshore slave labor prisons, the issue has gone from frustrating to terrifying and enraging.

Let's be clear: I played the US immigration game on the easiest level. I am relatively affluent – rich enough to afford fancy immigration lawyers with offices on four continents – and I am a native English speaker. This made the immigration system ten thousand times (at a minimum) easier for me than it is for most US immigrants.

There are lots of Americans (who don't know anything about their own immigration system) who advocate for a "points-based" system that favors rich people and professionals, but America already has this system, because dealing with the immigration process costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and without a lawyer, it is essentially unnavigable. Same goes for Trump's "Golden Visa" for rich people – anyone who can afford to pay for one of these is already spending five- or six-figure sums with a white shoe immigration firm.

I'm not quite like those people, though. The typical path to US work visas and eventual immigration is through a corporate employer, who pays the law firm on your behalf (and also ties your residency to your employment, making it risky and expensive to quit your job). I found my own immigration lawyers through a friend's husband who worked in a fancy investment bank, and it quickly became apparent that immigration firms assume that their clients have extensive administrative support who can drop everything to produce mountains of obscure documents on demand.

There were lots of times over the years when I had to remind my lawyers that I was paying them, not my employer, and that I didn't have an administrative assistant, so when they gave me 48 hours' notice to assemble 300 pages of documentation (this happened several times!), it meant that I had to drop everything (that is, the activities that let me pay their gigantic invoices) to fulfill their requests.

When you deal with US immigration authorities, everything is elevated to the highest possible stakes. Every step of every process – work visa, green card, citizenship – comes with forms that you sign, on penalty of perjury, attesting that you have made no mistakes or omissions. A single error constitutes a potential falsification of your paperwork, and can result in deportation – losing your job, your house, your kid's schooling, everything.

This means that, at every stage, you have to be as comprehensive as possible. This is a photo of my second O-1 ("Alien of Extraordinary Ability") visa application. It's 800 pages long:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2242342898/

The next one was 1200 pages long.

Like I say, I became a citizen in 2022 (for some reason, my wife got her citizenship in 2021, even though we applied jointly). At that point, I thought I was done with the process. But then my kid applied to university and was told that she should sign up for FERPA, which is the federal student loan and grant process; she got pretty good grades and there was a chance she could get a couple grand knocked off her tuition. Seemed like a good idea to me.

So we filled in the FERPA paperwork, and partway through, it asks if you are a naturalized citizen, and, if you are, it asks you to upload a copy of your certificate of citizenship. My wife and I both have certificates, but the kid doesn't – she was naturalized along with my wife in 2021, and while my wife's certificate was sufficient to get our daughter a passport, it doesn't actually have the kid's name on it.

I checked in with our lawyers and was told that the kid couldn't get her certificate of citizenship until she turned 18, which she did last Tuesday. My calendar reminded me that it was time to fill in her N-600, the form for applying for a certificate of citizenship.

So yesterday, I sat down at the computer, cleared a couple hours, and went to work. I am used to gnarly bureaucratic questions on this kind of paperwork, and I confess I get a small thrill of victory whenever I can bring up an obscure document demanded by the form. For example: I was able to pull up the number of the passport our daughter used to enter the country in 2015, along with the flight number and date. I was able to pull up all three of the numbers that the US immigration service assigned to both my wife and me.

And then, about two hours into this process, I got to this section of the form: "U.S. citizen mother or father's physical presence." This section requires me to list every border crossing I made into the USA from the day I was born until the date I became a citizen. That includes, for example, the time when I was two years old and my parents took me to Fort Lauderdale to visit my retired grandparents. This question comes after a screen where you attest that you will not make any omissions or errors, and that any such omission or error will be treated as an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, with the most severe penalties imaginable.

I tried to call the US immigration service's info line. It is now staffed exclusively by an AI chatbot (thanks, Elon). I tried a dozen times to get the chatbot to put me on the phone with a human who could confirm what I should do about visits to the US that I took more than 50 years ago, when I was two years old. But the chatbot would only offer to text me a link to the online form, which has no guidance on this subject.

Then I tried the online chat, which is also answered by a chatbot. This chatbot only allows you to ask questions that are less than 80 characters long. Eventually, I managed to piece together a complete conversation with the chatbot that conveyed my question, and it gave me a link to the same online form.

But there is an option to escalate the online chat from a bot to a human. So I tried that, and, after repeatedly being prompted to provide my full name and address (home address and mailing address), date of birth, phone number – and disconnected for not typing all this quickly enough – the human eventually pasted in boilerplate telling me to consult an immigration attorney and terminated the chat before I could reply.

Just to be clear here: this is immigration on the easiest setting. I am an affluent native English speaker with access to immigration counsel at a fancy firm.

Imagine instead that you are not as lucky as I am. Imagine that your parents brought you to the USA 60 years ago, and that you've been a citizen for more than half a century, but you're being told that you should carry your certificate of citizenship if you don't want to be shot in the face or kidnapped to a slave labor camp. Your parents – long dead – never got you that certificate, so you create an online ID with the immigration service and try to complete form N-600. Do you know the date and flight number for the plane you flew to America on when you were three? Do you know your passport number from back then? Do you have all three of each of your dead parents' numeric immigration identifiers? Can you recover the dates of every border crossing your parents made into the USA from the day they were born until the day they became citizens?

Anyone who says that "immigrants should just follow the rules" has missed the fact that the rules are impossible to follow. I get to do luxury Kafka, the business class version of US immigration Kafka, where you get to board first and nibble from a dish of warm nuts while everyone else shuffles past you, and I've given up on getting my daughter's certificate of citizenship. The alternative – omitting a single American vacation between 1971 and 2022 – could constitute an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, after all.

This was terrible a couple years ago, when the immigration system still had human operators you could reach by sitting on hold for several hours. Today, thanks to a single billionaire's gleeful cruelty, the system is literally unnavigable, "staffed" by a chatbot that can't answer basic questions. A timely reminder that the only jobs AI can do are the jobs that no one gives a shit about:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

It's also a timely reminder of the awesome destructive power of a single billionaire. This week, I took a Southwest flight to visit my daughter at college for her 18th birthday, and of course, SWA now charges for bags and seats. Multiple passengers complained bitterly and loudly about this as they boarded (despite the fact that the plane was only half full, many people were given middle seats and banned from moving to empty rows). One woman plaintively called out, "Why does everything get worse all the time?" (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of someone saying that within my earshot):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

Southwest sucks today because of just one guy: Paul Singer, the billionaire owner of Elliott Investment Management, who bought a stake in SWA and used it to force the board to end open seating and free bag-check, then sold off his stake and disappeared into the sunset, millions richer, leaving behind a pile of shit where a beloved airline once flew:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2024/10/24/southwest-airlines-bends-to-activist-investor-restructures-board/

One guy, Elon Musk, took the immigration system from "frustrating and inefficient" to "totally impossible." That same guy is an avowed white nationalist – and illegal US immigrant who did cheat the immigration system – who sadistically celebrates the unlimited cruelty the immigration system heaps on other immigrants:

https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118277/documents/HHRG-119-JU13-20250520-SD003.pdf

Again: I've got it easy. The people they want to put in concentration camps are doing something a million times harder than anything I've had to do to become a US citizen. People sometimes joke about how Americans couldn't pass the US citizenship test, with its questions about the tortured syntax of the 10th Amendment and the different branches of government. But the US citizenship test is the easy part. That test sits at the center of a bureaucratic maze that no American could find their way through.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago UK nurses want to supply clean blades and cutting advice to self-harmers https://web.archive.org/web/20060206205108/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2025748,00.html

#20yrsago PC built into whisky bottle https://web.archive.org/web/20060210043104/https://metku.net/index.html?sect=view&n=1&path=mods/whiskypc/index_eng

#15yrsago Startups of London’s “Silicon Roundabout” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/06/tech-startup-internet-entrepreneurs

#15yrsago Antifeatures: deliberate, expensive product features that no customer wants https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-at-the-free-technology-academy

#15yrsago Steampunk Etch-a-Sketch https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/erbnf/a_steampunk_etchasketch_we_made_for_a_friend_this/

#10yrsago There’s a secret “black site” in New York where terrorism suspects are tortured for years at a time https://web.archive.org/web/20160205143012/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/05/mahdi-hashi-metropolitan-correctional-center-manhattan-guantanamo-pretrial-solitary-confinement/

#10yrsago Error 53: Apple remotely bricks phones to punish customers for getting independent repairs https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

#10yrsago Toronto City Council defies mayor, demands open, neutral municipal broadband https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/02/toronto-city-council-sides-with-crtc-in-rejecting-mayor-torys-support-of-bell-appeal/

#5yrsago Amazon's brutal warehouse "megacycle" https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

#5yrsago AT&T customer complains…via WSJ ad https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#go-aaron-go

#1yrago MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1023 words today, 23683 total)

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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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"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

08:00 PM

Anna’s Archive Loses .PM Domain, Adds Greenland (.GL) Backup [TorrentFreak]

greenlandAnna’s Archive has faced a barrage of domain takedowns in recent weeks, after Spotify and several major record labels filed a high-profile lawsuit.

The music industry giants filed the case after the shadow library planned to release hundreds of terabytes of scraped Spotify data, including full tracks.

While Anna’s Archive has since taken its initial Spotify metadata release offline, the legal pressure hasn’t been lifted. On the contrary, the preliminary injunction issued by the New York court, targeting domain registries, registrars, and other intermediaries, has proven to be quite effective.

The .org domain was the first to fall, followed by the .se and .in variants. However, not all intermediaries were eager to comply with the U.S. injunction. As we reported last week, AFNIC, the French registry responsible for the .pm domain, made clear that U.S. court orders carry no direct legal weight in France.

Enforcing the injunction would require the music companies to petition a French court; as far as we know, that hasn’t happened yet. Instead, the jurisdictional barrier appears to have been sidestepped entirely through a different route.

.PM Domain Goes Next

Earlier this week, Anna’s Archive’s .pm domain became unreachable. WHOIS records confirm that the domain now has a “blocked” status, with a hold flag preventing it from resolving.

AFNIC, the French registry responsible for the .pm extension, previously told TorrentFreak that U.S. court orders carry no direct legal weight in France. This makes it unlikely that the registry itself took action.

.PM domain

pmwhois

Instead, the suspension may have been issued on the registrar level by the Dutch company Hosting Concepts B.V., also known as Openprovider. Thus far, neither Openprovider nor AFNIC has responded to our requests for comment.

International Pressure & U.S. Injunctions

It is clear that there is no shortage of U.S. court orders targeting Anna’s Archive. In addition to the preliminary injunction in the Spotify case, library catalog company OCLC won a default judgment and permanent injunction against the shadow library last month in the WorldCat scraping lawsuit. That order also includes provisions that could be used to target intermediaries.

As highlighted earlier, however, not all domain registries and registrars fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. Because of this, rightsholders and anti-piracy groups in other countries have added their own pressure.

In the Netherlands, anti-piracy group BREIN repeatedly urged the local domain registrar Openprovider to take down the .se and .pm domains in January. Openprovider informed BREIN that it had forwarded the request for closure to its customer.

BREIN doesn’t know for certain whether its pressure led directly to the .pm domain going offline, nor is it certain that Openprovider is the party that pulled the plug. However, the result is the same.

“In any case, the result counts. It’s good that the sites are offline. These shadow libraries are very harmful to authors,” BREIN director Bastiaan van Ramshorst informed TorrentFreak.

Regardless of who took action, the .pm domain is now out of rotation. That left Anna’s Archive down to a single working domain earlier this week, but that didn’t last very long.

Greenland Backup

According to domain records, Anna’s Archive registered annas-archive.gl earlier this week. This new domain uses Njalla’s nameservers and is registered through Immaterialism Limited, a familiar setup from the site’s working .LI domain.

.GL domain

GL new

The choice of a Greenland-based domain is notable. With ongoing tensions between Greenland and the United States, the .gl registry may not be eager to subject itself to U.S. court jurisdiction. Whether that assumption holds remains to be seen.

Previously, The Pirate Bay also moved to a .GL domain briefly. However, the Greenlandic telecoms company that manages the registry decided to suspend it soon after, over alleged illegal use.

For now, Anna’s Archive continues its game of domain whack-a-mole, staying one step ahead of the takedowns for the moment. At the same time, it is expected that rightsholders will do everything in their power to maintain pressure.

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

03:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 術 [Kanji of the Day]

術

✍11

小5

art, technique, skill, means, trick, resources, magic

ジュツ

すべ

技術   (ぎじゅつ)   —   technology
手術   (しゅじゅつ)   —   surgery
美術館   (びじゅつかん)   —   art museum
芸術   (げいじゅつ)   —   art
美術   (びじゅつ)   —   art
戦術   (せんじゅつ)   —   tactics
科学技術   (かがくぎじゅつ)   —   science and technology
錬金術師   (れんきんじゅつし)   —   alchemist
術後   (じゅつご)   —   postoperative
技術者   (ぎじゅつしゃ)   —   engineer

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 泊 [Kanji of the Day]

泊

✍8

中学

overnight stay, put up at, ride at anchor

ハク

と.まる　と.める

宿泊   (しゅくはく)   —   accommodation
泊まり   (とまり)   —   overnight stay
宿泊所   (しゅくはくじょ)   —   lodgings
宿泊客   (しゅくはくきゃく)   —   guest spending the night (i.e., at a hotel)
泊まる   (とまる)   —   to stay at (e.g., hotel)
宿泊先   (しゅくはくさき)   —   lodging host
寝泊まり   (ねとまり)   —   staying the night
宿泊者   (しゅくはくしゃ)   —   lodger
一泊   (いっぱく)   —   one night
泊り   (とまり)   —   overnight stay

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

On the Importance of "Hello" and "Thanks" [Let's Encrypt]

The ISRG team at FOSDEM 2026

In a recent conversation with a Let’s Encrypt subscriber, we asked them to guess how many people work at ISRG, the nonprofit behind Let’s Encrypt (and Prossimo and Divvi Up). Their guess was about 100; they’d overestimated by 72.5 people. We’re a pretty small team, and we get a lot done, but most of that work is entirely remote, distributed, and automated. 

That is a big part of what makes FOSDEM special. For the last few years, we’ve had a stand at this annual conference in Belgium, where a few folks from our team have the opportunity to speak directly with thousands of conference-goers. We continue to learn so much from these conversations! 

That’s where the “Hello” part of this blog post comes in. At this year’s FOSDEM, we met so many Let’s Encrypt subscribers, and each of them has a unique relationship to Let’s Encrypt. We were pleasantly surprised by how many people told us they were using IP-address certificates, a new option we just made generally available in December. We had a lot of conversations about our plans to shorten certificate lifetimes. There were a few folks who asked about S/MIME (still no plans to do that). We invited people to continue to stay in touch by signing up for our newsletter. 

The most meaningful part of FOSDEM is being able to say “thank you”. Our goal in starting Let’s Encrypt was to improve security and privacy for people using the internet, but that could not be achieved without the now millions of folks who decided to get a certificate. Our impact is predicated on this symbiotic exchange. While we were only able to directly express our gratitude to a few thousand people at FOSDEM, it was a reminder of how important the community is.

Discover Patagonia with OsmAnd Web Explore [OsmAnd Blog]

In classic adventure stories, traveling through remote regions meant you had to rely on maps, luck, and intuition. Patagonia — famously portrayed in "In Search of the Castaways" — was once a place of uncertainty and long, unpredictable routes. Today, exploring Patagonia can look very different with OsmAnd Web Explore. Modern tools make it easy to discover key places, explore what’s nearby, and plan routes across one of the world’s most spectacular regions.

Patagonia

Photo by Rafael Pazini on Unsplash

February is a great time to explore Patagonia — it’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere, with long daylight hours and easier access to remote areas. A quick online search for “Patagonia must-sees” almost always brings up one name: Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina — a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1981.

So why not make it the starting point of our journey?

Open OsmAnd Web and tap the Search icon on the map. You can search not only by place name, but also by exact coordinates — a handy option when you know the location but not the name. For this example, enter the coordinates -50.000000, -73.000000. The map instantly centers on this point and places a pin in the heart of Patagonia, near Lago Argentino and the glaciers that give the park its name.

Selecting the location opens the context panel, where you can review the position, copy the coordinates, and use quick actions to keep planning.

Web Search

Explore Nearby and Start Navigation​

With the map centered on the Los Glaciares area, tap Explore. OsmAnd instantly highlights interesting places around you, turning the surrounding landscape into a collection of discoverable spots — viewpoints, lakes, glaciers, mountain ranges, and protected areas.

Web Explore

Each place comes with useful information: a name, category, short description, and often photos. To narrow things down, you can use filters to show only what matters to you — for example, Nature & Outdoors. This makes it easy to move from a broad view of the region to a focused list of places worth adding to your journey. By the way, if you prefer exploring on the go, OsmAnd also offers a similar Explore feature in the mobile app (Android only) — see the step-by-step guide here.

Web Explore

Among the many results, one destination stands out almost immediately: Torres del Paine National Park — this time across the border, in Chile. It’s one of Patagonia’s most iconic national parks, and a natural next step for our route.

Selecting Torres del Paine opens the POI context menu, where you can save the park to your Favorites, share a direct link to it, or jump straight into route planning and navigation.

Web Explore

Choose Navigation, and the selected park becomes your destination point. For the starting point, set Los Glaciares National Park. If you want to shape the journey more precisely, you can add intermediate points along the way — useful when you want the route to pass through specific locations, border crossings, or scenic stops.

Next, select the routing profile that fits your plans. OsmAnd recalculates the route instantly, drawing a clear path between these two landmark destinations and showing distance, estimated travel time, and elevation profile.

Web Explore

What once would have required multiple maps and guesswork now becomes a clear, flexible plan — ready to adapt as your adventure unfolds.

One Route, Multiple Ways to Travel​

Patagonia isn’t just about long roads and mountain passes. In Chilean Patagonia, travel often includes water as well — fjords, channels, and scenic ferry routes that cut through dramatic landscapes. One of the most famous examples is the Navimag ferry, which connects Puerto Montt and Puerto Natales, offering a multi-day journey through Chile’s southern fjords.

When a journey includes different types of terrain and transport, planning everything as a single route can be a challenge. This is where OsmAnd Web Plan Route really shines. In the route planner, you can build one continuous track and change the routing profile for individual segments. Drive between towns, switch to a boat profile for ferry crossings, then return to a pedestrian or driving profile for the next part of the journey — all within the same route.

Using the Change profile option, you decide whether a new profile applies only to the next segments or recalculates the entire route. This makes it easy to adapt your plan as the landscape changes, without starting over.

Web Plan Route

So, while classic adventures have already been written and have earned their place in history, your own Patagonia story is still ahead of you. With OsmAnd Web Explore and Plan Route, you can turn curiosity into a clear plan: find the places that inspire you, see what’s nearby, and build a route that matches the terrain and the way you travel.

We appreciate your interest in us and thank you for taking the time to read this article. Join us on social media to keep up to date with the latest news and share your experiences. Your opinion is important to us.

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02:00 PM

NIH Boss Jay Bhattacharya Breaks With RFK Jr. On Vaccines [Techdirt]

Echo chambers are generally bad. Any group making important decisions should have a certain level of diversity of thought to avoid groupthink. But I would argue that there are some stances that are so fundamental that it’s good when everyone is on the same page about them. Vaccines, for instance. It would be just the best if everyone in the agencies that manage American health, all the way up to the top, believed in the power and benefit of vaccines. Sadly, that isn’t the case.

RFK Jr. has fired many people for not agreeing with his stance that vaccines make people autistic, kill them, are bad because too many undesirables poison the gene pool, or whatever other crap he’s spewing these days. He fired Susan Monarez after only weeks on the job, reportedly for not agreeing to rubber stamp changes to vaccine schedules he wanted to make. He fired literally everyone on the CDC’s ACIP panel, the group that advises the CDC on those very same changes to vaccine schedules. There’s probably been more, as well.

We’ll have to see if NIH boss Jay Bhattacharya just started the countdown to his own termination, now that he has publicly broken with Kennedy on vaccines. In a Senate Committee hearing, Bhattacharya was grilled by Bernie Sanders.

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, 58, faced the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday. There, ranking member Bernie Sanders asked him point-blank, “Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?”

After trying to hedge and say he did not believe the measles vaccine causes autism, he finally admitted, “I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism.”

Asked specifically about what his approach would be to the current measles outbreak in America, Bhattacharya was even more forceful.

Unlike his boss, Bhattacharya was vocally pro-vaccine during Tuesday’s hearing. Discussing the measles outbreak in the United States, he said, “I am absolutely convinced that the measles epidemic that we are seeing currently is best solved by parents vaccinating their children for measles.”

Reluctantly stated or not, those are sane comments that are completely at odds with Kennedy. Now, so there is no misunderstanding, Bhattacharya is still terrible. He made his name railing against COVID-19 policies and vaccine schedules. He’s also engaged in some politically targeted attacks on elite universities when it comes to grant money and the like.

But on this, he’s right. And that potentially puts his job at risk. RFK Jr. doesn’t like dissenting opinions. He tends to avoid them through firings. On the other hand, I don’t know if he can afford more chaos at HHS and its child agencies.

But when it comes to placing bets, betting against RFK Jr.’s ego is rarely a winner.

12:00 PM

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: C’est La Vile Content [Techdirt]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

Play along with Ctrl-Alt-Speech’s 2026 Bingo Card!

10:00 AM

08:00 AM

How “Bitcoin Jesus” Avoided Prison, Thanks To One Of The “Friends Of Trump” [Techdirt]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Days into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “Please Donald Trump, I need your help,” he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. “I am an American. … Help me come home.” 

The speaker, 46-year-old Roger Ver, was in fact no longer a U.S. citizen. Nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus” for his early evangelism for digital currency, Ver had renounced his citizenship more than a decade earlier. At the time of his video, Ver was under criminal indictment for millions in tax evasion and living on the Spanish island of Mallorca. His top-flight legal defense team had failed around half a dozen times to persuade the Justice Department to back down. The U.S., considering him a fugitive, was seeking his extradition from Spain, and he was likely looking at prison.

Once, prosecutors hoped to make Ver a marquee example amid concerns about widespread cryptocurrency tax evasion. They had spent eight painstaking years working the case. Just nine months after his direct-to-camera appeal, however, Ver and Trump’s new Justice Department leadership cut a remarkable deal to end his prosecution. Ver wouldn’t have to plead guilty or spend a day in prison. Instead, the government accepted a payout of $49.9 million — roughly the size of the tax bill prosecutors said he dodged in the first place — and allowed him to walk away.

Ver was able to pull off this coup by taking advantage of a new dynamic inside of Trump’s Department of Justice. A cottage industry of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants with close ties to Trump has sprung up to help people and companies seek leniency, often by arguing they had been victims of political persecution by the Biden administration. In his first year, Trump issued pardons or clemency to dozens of people who were convicted of various forms of white-collar crime, including major donors and political allies. Investigations have been halted. Cases have been dropped. 

Within the Justice Department, a select club of Trump’s former personal attorneys have easy access to the top appointees, some of whom also previously represented Trump. It has become a dark joke among career prosecutors to refer to these lawyers as the “Friends of Trump.”

The Ver episode, reported in detail here for the first time, reveals the extent to which white-collar criminal enforcement has eroded under the Trump administration. The account is based on interviews with current and former Justice Department officials, case records and conversations with people familiar with his case.

The Trump administration has particularly upended the way tax law violators are handled. Late last year, the administration essentially dissolved the team dedicated to criminal tax enforcement, dividing responsibility among a number of other offices and divisions. Tax prosecutions fell by more than a quarter, and more than a third of the 80 experienced prosecutors working on criminal tax cases have quit. 

But even amid this turmoil, Ver’s case stands out. After Ver added several of these new power brokers to his team — most importantly, former Trump attorney Chris Kise — Trump appointees commandeered the case from career prosecutors. One newly installed Justice Department leader who had previously represented Trump’s family questioned his new subordinates on whether tax evasion should be a criminal offense. Ver’s team wielded unusual control over the final deal, down to dictating that the agreement would not include the word “fraud.” 

It remains the only tax prosecution the administration has killed outright.

Ver did not reply to an extensive list of questions from ProPublica. In court filings and dealings with the Justice Department, Ver had always denied dodging his tax bill intentionally — a key distinction between a criminal and civil tax violation — and claimed to have relied on the advice of accountants and tax attorneys.

“Roger Ver took full responsibility for his gross financial misconduct to the tune of $50 million because this Department of Justice did not shy away from exposing those who cheat the system. The notion that any defendant can buy their way out of accountability under this administration is not founded in reality,” said Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokesperson.

In response to a list of detailed questions, the White House referred ProPublica to the Justice Department.“I know of no cases like this,” said Scott Schumacher, a former tax prosecutor and the director of the graduate program in taxation at the University of Washington. It is nearly unheard of for the department to abandon an indicted criminal case years in the making. “They’re basically saying you can buy your way out of a tax evasion prosecution.”

Roger Ver is not a longtime ally of Trump’s or a MAGA loyalist. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, a day he once called “the happiest day of my entire life.” In the early days of bitcoin, he controlled about 1% of the world’s supply. 

Ver is clean-cut and fit — he has a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. In his early 20s, while he was a libertarian activist in California, Ver was sentenced to 10 months in prison for illegally selling explosives on eBay. He’s often characterized that first brush with the law as political persecution by the state. After his release, he left the U.S. for Japan.

Ver became a fixture in the 2010s on the budding cryptocurrency conference circuit, where he got a kick out of needling government authority and arguing that crypto was the building block of a libertarian utopia. At a 2017 blockchain conference in Aspen, Colorado, Ver announced he had raised $100 million and was seeking a location to create a new “non-country” without any central government. For years, Ver has recommended other wealthy people consider citizenship in the small Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, which has no individual income tax.

“Bitcoin completely undermines the power of every single government on the entire planet to control the money supply, to tax people’s income to control them in any way,” he told a gathering of anarcho-capitalists in Acapulco, Mexico, in 2016. “It makes it so incredibly easy for people to hide their income or evade taxes.” More than one friend, he said with a smirk, had asked him how to do so: They “say, ‘Roger, I need your help. How do I use bitcoins to avoid paying taxes on it?’”

Renouncing U.S. citizenship isn’t a magic get-out-of-tax-free technique. Since 2008, the U.S. has required expatriates with assets above $2 million pay a steep “exit tax” on the appreciation of all their property.

In 2024, the Justice Department indicted Ver in one of the largest-ever cryptocurrency tax fraud cases. The government accused Ver of lying to the IRS twice. After Ver renounced his citizenship in 2014, he claimed to the IRS that he personally did not own any bitcoin. He would later admit in his deal with the government to owning at least 130,664 bitcoin worth approximately $73.7 million at the time. Then in 2017, the government alleged, Ver tried to conceal the transfer of roughly $240 million in bitcoin from U.S. companies to his personal accounts. In all, the government said he had evaded nearly $50 million in taxes. 

Ver’s defense was that his failure to pay taxes arose from a lack of clarity as to how tax law treated emerging cryptocurrency, good-faith accounting errors and reliance on his advisors’ advice. He claimed it was difficult to distinguish between his personal assets and his companies’ holdings and pinpoint what the bitcoin was actually worth.

The Biden administration’s Justice Department dismissed this legal argument. Prosecutors had troves of emails that they said showed Ver misleading his own attorneys and tax preparers about the extent of his bitcoin holdings. (Ver’s team accused the government of taking his statements out of context.) The asset tracing in the case was “rock solid,” according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. A jury, prosecutors maintained, was unlikely to buy Ver’s defense that he made a good-faith error.

By the time of Trump’s election, Ver had been arrested in Spain and was fighting extradition. He was also the new owner of a sleek $70 million yacht that some law enforcement officials worried he might use to escape on the high seas.

In Trump, Ver saw a possible way out. After the 2024 election, he was “barking up every tree,” said his friend Brock Pierce, a fellow ultrawealthy crypto investor who tried to gin up sympathy for Ver in Trump’s orbit.

Ver had initially gone the orthodox route of hiring tax attorneys from a prestigious law firm, Steptoe. Like many wealthy people in legal jeopardy, Ver now also launched a media blitz seeking a pardon from the incoming president. “If anybody knows what it’s like to be the victim of lawfare it’s Trump, so I think he’ll be able to see it in this case as well,” Ver said in a December 2024 appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show. On Charlie Kirk’s show, Ver appeared with tape over his mouth with the word “censored” written in red ink. Laura Loomer, the Trump-friendly influencer, began posting that Ver’s prosecution was unfair. Ver paid Trump insider Roger Stone $600,000 to lobby Congress for an end to the tax provision he was accused of violating.

Ver’s pardon campaign fizzled. His public pressure campaign — in which he kept comparing himself to Trump — was not landing, according to Pierce. “You aren’t doing yourself any favors — shut up,” his friend recalled saying. 

One objection in the White House, according to a person who works on pardons, may have been Ver’s flamboyant rejection of his American citizenship. Less than a week after Trump was inaugurated, Elon Musk weighed in, posting on X, “Roger Ver gave up his US citizenship. No pardon for Ver. Membership has its privileges.”

But inside the Justice Department, Ver found an opening. The skeleton key proved to be one of the “Friends of Trump,” a seasoned defense lawyer named Christopher Kise. Kise is a longtime Florida Republican power player who served as the state’s solicitor general and has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned a place in Trump’s inner circle as one of the first experienced criminal defenders willing to represent the president after his 2020 election loss. Kise defended Trump in the Justice Department investigation stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and against charges that Trump mishandled classified documents when leaving the White House.

Kise had worked shoulder-to-shoulder on Trump’s cases with two lawyers who were now leaders in the Trump 2.0 Justice Department: Todd Blanche, who runs day-to-day operations at the department as deputy attorney general, and his associate deputy attorney general, Ketan Bhirud, who oversaw the criminal tax division prosecuting Ver. Kise reportedly helped select Blanche to join Trump’s legal team in the documents case, and he and Bhirud had both worked for Trump’s family as they fought civil fraud charges brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2022. 

On Ver’s legal team, Kise worked the phones, pressing his old colleagues to rethink their prosecution against Ver. 

Kise scored the legal team’s first big victory in years: a meeting with Bhirud that cut out the career attorneys most familiar with the merits of the case.

In that meeting, however, it wasn’t clear that the new Justice Department leadership would be willing to interfere with the trajectory of Ver’s case. While the Trump administration had backed off aggressive enforcement of white-collar crimes writ large, the administration said it was still pursuing most criminal cases that had already been charged.

Bhirud initially expressed skepticism that Ver accidentally underpaid his taxes. It was “hard to believe” that a man going by “Bitcoin Jesus” would have no idea how much bitcoin he owned, Bhirud said, according to a person familiar with the case.

Bhirud and Blanche did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.

The Justice Department stuck to its position that either Ver would plead guilty to a crime, or the case would go to trial.

But Kise would not stop lobbying his former colleagues to reconsider. Blanche and Bhirud had already demanded that career officials justify the case again and again. Over the course of the summer, Kise wore down the Trump appointees’ zeal for pursuing Ver on criminal charges. 

Kise and the law firm of Steptoe did not respond to questions.

“While there were meetings and conversations with DOJ, that is not uncommon. The line attorneys remained engaged throughout the process, and the case was ultimately resolved based on the strength of the evidence,” said Bryan Skarlatos, one of Ver’s tax attorneys and a partner at Kostelanetz.

It was a chaotic moment at the Justice Department, an institution that Trump had incessantly accused of being “weaponized” against him and his supporters. After Trump took office, the department was flooded with requests to reconsider prosecutions, with defendants claiming the Biden administration had singled them out for political persecution, too.

While many cases failed to grab the administration’s attention, Kise got results. Last week, Kise’s client Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian billionaire accused of trying to bribe the former governor of Puerto Rico, received a pardon from Trump.

“Every defense attorney is running the ‘weaponization’ play. This guy gets an audience because of who he is, because his name is Chris Kise,” said a person who recently attended a high-level meeting Kise secured to talk the Justice Department down from prosecuting a client.

As Kise stepped up the pressure, Ver’s case ate up a significant share of Bhirud’s time, despite his job overseeing more than 1,000 Justice Department attorneys, according to people familiar with the matter. Ordinarily, it would be rare for a political appointee to be so involved, especially to the exclusion of career prosecutors who could weigh in on the merits.

Bhirud began to muse to coworkers about whether failure to pay one’s taxes should really be considered a crime. Wasn’t it more of a civil matter? It seemed to a colleague that Bhirud was aware Ver’s advocates could try to elevate the case to the White House.

The government ceded ground and offered to take prison time off the table. Eventually, Ver’s team and Bhirud hit on the deal that would baffle criminal tax experts. They agreed on a deferred prosecution agreement that would allow Ver to avoid criminal charges and prison in exchange for a payout and an agreement not to violate any more laws. The government usually reserves such an agreement for lawbreaking corporations to avoid putting large employers out of business — not for fugitive billionaires.

By the time fall approached, Kise and Bhirud, with Blanche’s blessing, were negotiating Ver’s extraordinary deal line by line. Once more, career prosecutors were cut out from the negotiations.

Ver’s team enjoyed a remarkable ability to dictate terms. They rejected the text of the government’s supposed final offer because it required him to admit to “fraud,” according to a person familiar with the negotiations. In the end, Ver agreed to admit only to a “willful” failure to report and pay taxes on all his bitcoin and turned over the $50 million.

The government arrived at that figure in a roundabout manner. It dropped its claim that Ver had lied on his 2017 tax return. The $50 million figure was based on how much he had evaded in taxes in 2014 alone, plus what the government asserted were interest and penalties. In the end, the deal amounted to the sum he allegedly owed in the first place. He never even had to leave Mallorca to appear in a U.S. court.

Under any previous administration, convincing the leadership of the tax division to drop an indicted criminal case and accept a monetary penalty instead would be a nonstarter. While the Justice Department settles most tax matters civilly through fines, when prosecutors do charge criminal fraud, their conviction rate is over 90%. 

People “always ask you, ‘Can’t I just pay the taxes and it’ll go away?’” said Jack Townsend, a former DOJ tax attorney. “The common answer that everybody gave — until the Trump administration — was that, no, you can’t do that.”

When the Justice Department announced the resolution in October, it touted it as a victory.

“We are pleased that Mr. Ver has taken responsibility for his past misconduct and satisfied his obligations to the American public,” Bhirud said in the Justice Department’s press release announcing the deferred prosecution agreement. “This resolution sends a clear message: whether you deal in dollars or digital assets, you must file accurate tax returns and pay what you owe.”

Inside the Justice Department, the resolution was demoralizing: “He’s admitted he owes money, and we get money, but everything else about it stinks to high heaven,” said a current DOJ official familiar with the case. “We shouldn’t negotiate with people who are fugitives, as if they have power over us.”

Among the wealthy targets of white-collar criminal investigations, the Ver affair sent a different message. Lawyers who specialize in that kind of work told ProPublica that more and more clients are asking which of the “Friends of Trump” they should hire. One prominent criminal tax defense lawyer said he would give his clients a copy of Ver’s agreement and tell them, “These are the guys who got this done.”

The only one of Ver’s many lawyers to sign it was Christopher Kise.

Pluralistic: All laws are local (05 Feb 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links


A pair of broken off statue legs, shod in Roman sandals, atop a cliff. Behind them, we see a futuristic city.

All laws are local (permalink)

About halfway through Thomas Piketty's 2013 barnstorming Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty tosses off a little insight that skewered me on the spot and never let me go: the notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a generation becomes "eternal" in the popular consciousness:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Piketty was referring to "primogeniture," the ancient practice of automatically passing the family fortune onto the eldest son (or, if no son was available, the eldest nephew). Primogeniture did important work by keeping dynastic fortunes intact, rather than dividing them up among all children of some baron or lord or other guillotineable monster.

Primogeniture persisted until the age of colonization, when Europe's "great powers" stole the rest of the world. In that moment, the size of Europe's great fortunes expanded by orders of magnitude. This vast increase in the wealth of Europe's most murderous, remorseless looters made primogeniture obsolete. There was so much blood-soaked money available to the nobility that every son could found a "great house."

After a couple generations' worth of this, the colonies were exhausted. There were no more lands to conquer, which meant that every son could no longer expect to found his own fortune. But for these chinless masters of the universe, a world where every son of every rich man wouldn't get his own dynasty was incomprehensible. To do otherwise was literally unimaginable. It was unnatural.

For Piketty, this explained World War I: the world's chinless inbred monsters embarking upon an orgy of bloodletting to relieve one another of the lands – and peoples – they'd claimed as their property in order to carry on the "eternal" tradition of every son starting his own fortune.

It's a very important idea, and a provocative explanation for one of the 20th Century's defining events. That's why it struck me so hard when I first read it, but the reason it stuck with me for the decade-plus since I encountered that it is a vital observation about the human condition: as a species, we forget so much. Something that was commonplace a generation ago becomes unimaginable today, and vice versa.

Even people who lived through those years forget who they were and what they took for granted in those days. Think, for example, of all those evangelicals who would vote for Satan himself if he promised to hang any woman who obtained an abortion; the same evangelicals who, just a few decades ago, viewed anti-abortionism as a politically suspect form of crypto-papacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Perhaps the reason Piketty's primogeniture-based explanation for WWI struck me so forcefully and durably is that I imbibed a prodigious amount of science fiction as a boy, including the aphorism that "all laws are local, and no law knows how local it is":

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-cosmopolitan-literature-for-the-cosmopolitan-web/

In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams

This notion is much on my mind right now because the world is (to me, at least) unassailably in a state of change, and everything is up for grabs. Europe went from 15 years behind on its climate goals to ten years ahead of schedule after the supply of Russian gas dried up and Europeans found themselves shivering in the dark. The massive leap in EU solar means that the (seemingly) all-powerful fossil fuel lobby has absolutely, comprehensively eaten shit, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

Indeed, this happened so fast that many people (including many Europeans) haven't even noticed that it happened. Back in December, when I was at CCC in Hamburg, I talked to a bunch of European activists, close watchers of the Commission and the Parliament, who were completely convinced that Europe would never spurn the fossil fuel sector – despite the fact that it had already happened.

Indeed, it may be that intimate familiarity with European politics is a liability when things change. Spend enough time observing up close how supine European politicians and their Eurocrats are and you may find yourself so reflexively conditioned to view them as spineless corporate lackeys and thus unable to notice when they finally dig up a vertebra or two.

Smart financiers are familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Change happens. Eternal verities might be fifteen minutes older than you. Pink used to be the color of ferocious masculinity, whereas blue was so girly as to be practically titular:

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

Real talk: I have serious, debilitating chronic pain. One of the reasons I'm so prolific is that the only time I stop noticing how much I hurt is when I'm lost in work (compartmentalization is a hell of a drug, and while it's not always healthy, it has its upsides). Ask anyone with chronic pain and they'll tell you that treating pain eventually becomes your hobby, a bottomless well of esoteric dives into various "modalities" of pain treatment.

Thus it is that I've found myself on one or two psychologists' couches, learning about different mental approaches to living with constant pain. One of the most useful pieces of advice I've gotten was to attend closely to how my pain changes – how it ebbs and flows. The point is that if pain changes, that means that it can change. It feels eternal, but it comes and goes. Maybe someday it will go altogether. And even if it doesn't, it may improve. It probably will, at least for a while.

Things change.

Our current crop of cowardly, weak appeasers – in Congress, in Parliament, in the European Parliament – have, at various times (and very recently), found their spines. The factions within them that militated for the kind of bold action that might meet this moment have, from time to time, won the day. We have lived through total transformations in our politics before, and that means we might live through them again:

https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/the-fragmentation-flywheel

Sure, it's easy and tempting to assume that our leaders will always suck as hard as they suck now. But latent in that assumption is that the leaders who presided over big, incredible transformations were exceptional people. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't, but I'm here to tell you, ten minutes' worth of research into the biographies of the "heroes" of our history will reveal them to have been every bit as capable of monstrousness, cowardice, cruelty and pig-ignorant bigotry as any of today's rotating cast of fascist goons:

https://truthout.org/articles/disrupting-the-myth-of-franklin-d-roosevelt-in-the-age-of-trump-sanders-and-clinton/

The question isn't merely "How do we elect better leaders?" It's "How do we make our leaders follow us?" Today's Democrats are unserious quislings who keep bringing a squirt-gun to a mass-casualty assault-rifle spree-shooting. How do we terrorize these cowards into rising to the moment? If we want Congressional Democrats to form a Nuremburg Caucus and start holding hearings on who they're going to put in the dock when the Trump regime collapses, we're going to have to drive them to it.

And we can! The Democrats who gave us the New Deal weren't braver or more moral than the self-dealing millionaires in Congress today – they were more afraid of their base.

Things change.

Some years ago, I gave a speech at Consumer Reports headquarters in Poughkeepsie, trying to get them to refuse to give a passing grade to any product with DRM, on the grounds that the manufacturer could alter how that device worked at any time in the future, meaning that no matter how well a device worked now, it might turn into a pile of shit at any time in the future:

https://www.soundguys.com/the-sonos-app-death-spiral-132873/

They didn't take me up on this suggestion, obviously. They made the (seemingly) reasonable point that people bought Consumer Reports to find out what to buy, not to be told that they shouldn't buy anything. Every product in many key categories came with DRM, meaning that their recommendation would have had to be "just don't buy any of it."

But today, consumer review sites do sometimes recommend nothing:

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/

And of course, there's some precedent here. Somewhere between the emergence of the evidence for seatbelts and the appearance of seatbelts in most makes and models of cars, there would have been a time when the answer to "which car should I buy?" was "don't buy a car, they're all unsafe at any speed."

Things change. Today, every car has a seatbelt, and they'd continue to do so, even if we did away with regulations requiring seatbelts. Driving a car without a seatbelt would be as weird and terrible as using a radium suppository:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction

Things change. The nine-justice Supreme Court isn't an eternal verity. It didn't come down off a mountain on two stone tablets. It's about ten seconds old:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869

Tomorrow, it will be different:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

Our eternals are all ephemerals. The idea that we should tax capital gains at half the rate of wages? It was practically invented yesterday. You know who thought we should tax all income at the same rate? That noted Bolshevik, Ronald fuckin' Reagan:

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/flashback-reagan-raised-capital-gains-taxes-to-the-same-level-as-wage-taxes-for-first-time-444438edf242/

We're living through a time of change. Much of it is calamitous. Some of it wondrous:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

It's so easy to slip into the habit of thinking that nothing will change, that our politicians will never fear us more than they love the money and power they get from catering to the Epstein class. I'm not denying that this is how they view the world today, but there was a time in living memory when it wasn't true. If it changed before, it can change again:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/15/how-the-light-gets-in/#theories-of-change

Things change.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago UK nurses want to supply clean blades and cutting advice to self-harmers https://web.archive.org/web/20060206205108/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2025748,00.html

#20yrsago PC built into whisky bottle https://web.archive.org/web/20060210043104/https://metku.net/index.html?sect=view&n=1&path=mods/whiskypc/index_eng

#15yrsago Startups of London’s “Silicon Roundabout” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/06/tech-startup-internet-entrepreneurs

#15yrsago Antifeatures: deliberate, expensive product features that no customer wants https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-at-the-free-technology-academy

#15yrsago Steampunk Etch-a-Sketch https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/erbnf/a_steampunk_etchasketch_we_made_for_a_friend_this/

#10yrsago There’s a secret “black site” in New York where terrorism suspects are tortured for years at a time https://web.archive.org/web/20160205143012/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/05/mahdi-hashi-metropolitan-correctional-center-manhattan-guantanamo-pretrial-solitary-confinement/

#10yrsago Error 53: Apple remotely bricks phones to punish customers for getting independent repairs https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

#10yrsago Toronto City Council defies mayor, demands open, neutral municipal broadband https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/02/toronto-city-council-sides-with-crtc-in-rejecting-mayor-torys-support-of-bell-appeal/

#5yrsago Amazon's brutal warehouse "megacycle" https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

#5yrsago AT&T customer complains…via WSJ ad https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#go-aaron-go

#1yrago MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1005 words today, 22660 total)

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ICE Collapse: From the Top Down and the Inside Out [The Status Kuo]

There is both a crisis of public perception and a crisis from within at ICE.

Public opinion on the regime’s ICE policies, already damaged by the Minneapolis murders, took another beating yesterday after a series of unforced errors from the White House and GOP leaders.

Meanwhile, a revealing report by Wired, released today, details internal dissent within DHS ranks, based on comments posted to an online forum of roughly 5,000 self-identified current and former ICE and CBP agents.

Taken together, these developments create significant pressure on the agency, even as Congress debates conditions on DHS funding that would rein in some of ICE’s worst abuses and excesses. Lawmakers are also eyeing recent polling confirming a strong negative shift in support for ICE among the American public.

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They keep handing us sound bites

Donald Trump gave an interview on NBC in which, once again, he said some truly astonishing things. One of the most widely viewed and shared clips was his response to the murders in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Trump used the occasion to express perfunctory regret, but he still wound up smearing the victims all over again. He victim-blamed once more, claiming Good and Pretti “were not angels” and that we should “look at the tapes.”

We have, Donald. They were not at fault, they did nothing wrong, and they were still killed by federal agents.

Trump also whined about the optics, saying, “Two people out of tens of thousands, and you get bad publicity.” This confirmed that Trump does not actually care about the lives that were lost in January, but rather only about how the murders and the official response to them played with the public.

JD Vance was no help yesterday either. In an interview with The Daily Mail, a reporter asked Vance—who had amplified false claims that Pretti was an “assassin”—whether he would apologize to Pretti’s family.

“For what?” Vance responded with a characteristic smirk.

Vance then, rather ironically, argued that it is “not smart to prejudge” what happened—even though he had done exactly that with both killings. He further argued it would not be “fair” to Border Patrol agents for him to walk back his claims, without mentioning how unfair this has been to the victims’ reputations and to their grieving families.

Speaker Mike Johnson chimed in with his own head-spinning, unhelpful take on immigration enforcement. “Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant,” he exclaimed to reporters, “to apprehend people who we know are here illegally.”

Imagine having to follow the law, Speaker Johnson.

Pressure builds from within

Wired’s reporting reveals significant internal dissent over DHS policies and practices. Several examples show agents venting their frustration over a host of topics. Here are just a few:

Frustration with working conditions and last-minute assignments: One user nearing retirement wrote about being overwhelmed by stressful deployments with little notice and the loss of weekends and union protections: “I have 2.3 years left for full special category retirement … but don’t know if I’ll make it. Tired of this agency. Employees being abused badly. Mandated TDYs [temporary duty assignments] with less than 24 hours’ notice … No more weekends off, more work than ever before in 18 years.”

Criticism of leadership: Another complained that leadership had “managed to turn a righteous mission into a complete clown show.”

Concerns about integrity in reporting: One user alleged that agents, including EROs (Enforcement and Removal Operations), were actively falsifying reports: “ERO AND CBP AND BP QUIT LYING IN YOUR 213 NARRATIVES … You’re putting false statements down … Whistleblowers!!!!”

Operational missteps and lack of planning: A user criticized operational planning for deployments: “Absolutely zero forethought, and our management just rolled over to let BP take over. HUGE mistake…”

Field tactics: Another criticized reckless pursuits: “How about the genius who thought it was a great idea to film himself during a vehicle pursuit… when ICE literally has a no-pursuit policy?”

Minneapolis surge: One user complained about a mandatory 30-day detail: “Forced deployments are getting out of hand.” Another cited “no pre-planning… databases, cars, equipment, duties—nada.”

Low morale: A user warned that high-profile arrests near schools were demoralizing: “This will absolutely kill any morale we had, if any… pulling over a car at 7:30 in the morning in front of a school for an administrative arrest.”

While we can’t directly extrapolate from these complaints and claim DHS agents are ready to revolt, the complaints themselves were widespread and specific. This underscores significant dissent and growing dissatisfaction within the ranks of DHS.

Democrats coalesce around reforms and guardrails

Congress has just eight days to reach a bipartisan agreement to fund DHS or face another shutdown of that department. Democrats are aligning around key demands in exchange for their votes on funding. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s office released a 10-point framework, coordinated with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer:

  1. Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant; end indiscriminate arrests; improve warrant procedures and standards; require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.

  1. No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.

  1. Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name; require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.

  1. Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds for enforcement near medical facilities, schools, child care facilities, churches, polling places, courts and other sensitive locations.

  1. Stop Racial Profiling – Ban stops, questioning and searches based on presence at certain locations, jobs, spoken language, accent, race or ethnicity.

  1. Uphold Use of Force Standards – Codify reasonable use-of-force policy, expand training and require officer certification; remove officers from the field pending investigations after incidents.

  1. Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve state and local authority to investigate potential crimes and excessive force; require evidence preservation and sharing; require consent of states and localities for large-scale operations outside targeted enforcement.

  1. Build Safeguards into the System – Require immediate access to attorneys in detention; allow states to sue DHS for violations; prohibit limits on member visits to ICE facilities regardless of funding source.

  1. Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Mandate body-worn cameras and establish storage/access rules; prohibit tracking or databases of individuals engaged in First Amendment activities.

  1. No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize uniforms and equipment to align with civil enforcement.Targeted enforcement

Many progressives want additional reasonable conditions, including humane detention standards and strict compliance by the department with court orders. But the sad reality is, most of the above demands are already unlikely to get past the GOP-controlled House or survive a GOP Senate filibuster. Some kind of compromise—or a DHS shutdown that nevertheless still leaves ICE functioning, because it’s maddeningly already funded through 2029—appears inevitable.

Even if they don’t get all or even most of these fundamental reforms in place, they remain popular with voters, including nearly all Democrats and most independents. That means the reforms also remain worth fighting for. And when you boil them down, they are asking little more than for DHS to act like any other law enforcement agency.

Down go Trump’s approval numbers

Polling continues to deteriorate on what was once Trump’s strongest issue: immigration. A new NPR/PBS News Marist Poll shows nearly two-thirds of respondents now saying ICE has gone too far, including 71 percent of independents.

Among Republicans, approval has also weakened, with those expressing strong support dropping and skepticism rising. The number of Republican respondents who believe ICE has gone too far has risen from about 20 percent to 27 points.

More than six in ten respondents believe ICE is reducing public safety, and roughly six in ten disapprove of the agency’s performance. Meanwhile, six in ten Americans view nationwide protests against ICE as legitimate rather than unlawful.

The course ahead

Trump has squandered the public approval that once helped carry him back to the White House in the 2024 election. In its place is an increasingly alarmed electorate, while senior officials continue to deliver outrageous responses and internal DHS morale erodes.

The only action that might “turn the Titanic around,” to borrow JD Vance’s phrase, would be to withdraw ICE from Democratic cities, return CBP to the border, and refocus the entire department on targeted enforcement, as under previous Democratic administrations.

But that would never satisfy the likes of Stephen Miller, who still calls most shots within the White House and views mass deportation as a tool for transformation of our country into a vision of white nationalism.

As a result, the White House—and the American public—is stuck for the foreseeable future with a horrific and brutal mass deportation policy. That will continue to spiral, even while it helps tee up highly consequential electoral losses for the GOP this November.

06:00 AM

DHS Is Hunting Down Trump Critics. The ‘Free Speech’ Warriors Are Mighty Quiet. [Techdirt]

For years, we’ve been subjected to an endless parade of hyperventilating claims about the Biden administration’s supposed “censorship industrial complex.” We were told, over and over again, that the government was weaponizing its power to silence conservative speech. The evidence for this? Some angry emails from White House staffers that Facebook ignored. That was basically it. The Supreme Court looked at it and said there was no standing because there was no evidence of coercion (and even suggested that the plaintiffs had fabricated some of the facts, unsupported by reality).

But now we have actual, documented cases of the federal government using its surveillance apparatus to track down and intimidate Americans for nothing more than criticizing government policy. And wouldn’t you know it, the same people who spent years screaming about censorship are suddenly very quiet.

If any of the following stories had happened under the Biden administration, you’d hear screams from the likes of Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, about the crushing boot of the government trying to silence speech.

But somehow… nothing. Weiss is otherwise occupied—busy stripping CBS News for parts to please King Trump. And the dude bros who invented the “censorship industrial complex” out of their imaginations? Pretty damn quiet about stories like the following.

Taibbi is spending his time trying to play down the Epstein files and claiming Meta blocking ICE apps on direct request from DHS isn’t censorship because he hasn’t seen any evidence that it’s because of the federal government. Dude. Pam Bondi publicly stated she called Meta to have them removed. Shellenberger, who is now somehow a “free speech professor” at Bari Weiss’ collapsing fake university, seems to just be posting non-stop conspiracy theory nonsense from cranks.

Let’s start with the case that should make your blood boil. The Washington Post reports that a 67-year-old retired Philadelphia man — a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the UK — found himself in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security after he committed the apparently unforgivable sin of… sending a polite email to a government lawyer asking for mercy in a deportation case.

Here’s what he wrote to a prosecutor who was trying to deport an Afghani man who feared the Taliban would take his life if sent there. The Philadelphia resident found the prosecutors email and sent the following:

“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life. Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

That’s it. That’s the email that triggered a federal response. Within hours — hours — of sending this email, Google notified him that DHS had issued an administrative subpoena demanding his personal information. Days later, federal agents showed up at his door.

Showed. Up. At. His. Door.

A retired guy sends a respectful email asking the government to be careful with someone’s life, and within the same day, the surveillance apparatus is mobilized against him.

The tool being weaponized here is the administrative subpoena (something we’ve been calling out for well over a decade, under administrations of both parties) which is a particularly insidious instrument because it doesn’t require a judge’s approval. Unlike a judicial subpoena, where investigators have to show a judge enough evidence to justify the search, administrative subpoenas are essentially self-signed permission slips. As TechCrunch explains:

Unlike judicial subpoenas, which are authorized by a judge after seeing enough evidence of a crime to authorize a search or seizure of someone’s things, administrative subpoenas are issued by federal agencies, allowing investigators to seek a wealth of information about individuals from tech and phone companies without a judge’s oversight.

While administrative subpoenas cannot be used to obtain the contents of a person’s emails, online searches, or location data, they can demand information specifically about the user, such as what time a user logs in, from where, using which devices, and revealing the email addresses and other identifiable information about who opened an online account. But because administrative subpoenas are not backed by a judge’s authority or a court’s order, it’s largely up to a company whether to give over any data to the requesting government agency.

The Philadelphia retiree’s case would be alarming enough if it were a one-off. It’s not. Bloomberg has reported on at least five cases where DHS used administrative subpoenas to try to unmask anonymous Instagram accounts that were simply documenting ICE raids in their communities. One account, @montcowatch, was targeted simply for sharing resources about immigrant rights in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The justification? A claim that ICE agents were being “stalked” — for which there was no actual evidence.

The ACLU, which is now representing several of these targeted individuals, isn’t mincing words:

“It doesn’t take that much to make people look over their shoulder, to think twice before they speak again. That’s why these kinds of subpoenas and other actions—the visits—are so pernicious. You don’t have to lock somebody up to make them reticent to make their voice heard. It really doesn’t take much, because the power of the federal government is so overwhelming.”

This is textbook chilling effects on speech.

Remember, it was just a year and a half ago in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court found no First Amendment violation when the Biden administration sent emails to social media platforms—in part because the platforms felt entirely free to say no. The platforms weren’t coerced; they could ignore the requests and did.

Now consider the Philadelphia retiree. He sends one polite email. Within hours, DHS has mobilized to unmask him. Days later, federal agents are at his door. Does that sound like someone who’s free to speak his mind without consequence?

Even if you felt that what the Biden admin did was inappropriate, it didn’t involve federal agents showing up at people’s homes.

That is what actual government suppression of speech looks like. Not mean tweets from press secretaries that platforms ignored, but federal agents showing up at your door because you sent an (perfectly nice) email the government didn’t like.

So we have DHS mobilizing within hours to identify a 67-year-old retiree who sent a polite email. We have agents showing up at citizens’ homes to interrogate them about their protected speech. We have the government trying to unmask anonymous accounts that are documenting law enforcement activities — something that is unambiguously protected under the First Amendment.

Recording police, sharing that recording, and doing so anonymously is legal. It’s protected speech. And the government is using administrative subpoenas to try to identify and intimidate the people doing it.

For years, we heard that government officials sending emails to social media companies — emails the companies ignored — constituted an existential threat to the First Amendment. But when the government actually uses its coercive power to track down, identify, and intimidate citizens for their speech?

Crickets.

This is what a real threat to free speech looks like. Not “jawboning” that platforms can easily refuse, but the full weight of federal surveillance being deployed against anyone who dares to criticize the administration. The chilling effect here is the entire point.

As the ACLU noted, this appears to be “part of a broader strategy to intimidate people who document immigration activity or criticize government actions.”

If you spent the last few years warning about government censorship, this is your moment. This is the actual thing you claimed to be worried about. But, of course, all those who pretended to care about free speech really only meant they cared about their own team’s speech. Watching the government actually suppress critics? No big deal. They probably deserved it.

The Full Orwell: DOJ Weaponization Working Group Finally Gets Off The Ground [Techdirt]

I have to admit: the first one-and-a-half paragraphs of this CNN report had me thinking the Trump administration was shedding another pretense and just embracing its inherent shittiness.

Justice Department officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss how to reenergize probes that are considered a top priority for President Donald Trump — reviewing the actions of officials who investigated him, according to a source familiar with the plan.

Almost immediately after Pam Bondi stepped into her role as attorney general last year, she established a “Weaponization Working Group” …

We all know the DOJ is fully weaponized. It’s little more than a fight promoter for Trump’s grudge matches. The DOJ continues to bleed talent as prosecutors and investigators flee the kudzu-esque corruption springing up everywhere in DC.

But naming something exactly what it is — the weaponization of the DOJ to punish Trump’s enemies — wasn’t something I ever expected to see.

I didn’t see it, which fulfills my expectations, I guess. That’s because it isn’t what it says on the tin, even though it’s exactly the thing it says it isn’t. 1984 is apparently the blueprint. It’s called the “Weaponization Working Group,” but it’s supposedly the opposite: a de-weaponization working group. Here’s the second half of the paragraph we ellipsised out of earlier:

…[t]o review law enforcement actions taken under the Biden administration for any examples of what she described as “politicized justice.”

The Ministry of Weaponization has always de-weaponized ministries. Or whatever. The memo that started this whole thing off — delivered the same day Trump returned to office — said it even more clearly:

ENDING THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Administration officials are idiots, but they’re not so stupid they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t actually want to end the weaponization. They just want to make sure all the weapons are pointing in one direction.

Trading in vindication hasn’t exactly worked well so far. Trump’s handpicked replacements for prosecutors that have either quit or been fired are a considerable downgrade from the previous office-holders. They have had their cases tossed and their careers as federal prosecutors come to an end because (1) Trump doesn’t care what the rules for political appointments are and (2) he’s pretty sure he can find other stooges to shove into the DOJ revolving door.

The lack of forward progress likely has Pam Bondi feeling more heat than she’s used to. So the deliberately misnamed working group is going to actually start grouping and working.

The Weaponization Working Group is now expected to start meeting daily with the goal of producing results in the next two months, according to the person familiar with the plan.

Nothing good will come from this. Given the haphazard nature of the DOJ’s vindictive prosecutions efforts, there’s still a chance nothing completely evil will come from this either. It’s been on the back burner for a year. Pam Bondi can’t keep this going on her own. And it’s hell trying to keep people focused on rubbing Don’s tummy when employee attrition is what the DOJ is best known for these days.

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04:00 AM

The Wyden Siren: Senator’s Cryptic CIA Letter Follows A Pattern That’s Never Been Wrong [Techdirt]

If you’ve been paying attention to surveillance and civil liberties issues over the past fifteen years, you’ve likely learned to recognize a particular pattern. Senator Ron Wyden will occasionally send a public letter that essentially says “hey, I can’t tell you what’s happening because it’s classified, but something really bad is going on and you should all be paying attention.”

A decade ago some dubbed this the Wyden Siren. And when the Wyden Siren goes off, history tells us we should listen. Because every single time he’s done this, he’s eventually been proven right.

On Tuesday, Wyden sent a remarkably short letter to CIA Director John Ratcliffe. The entire substantive content is this:

I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. “Deep concerns about CIA activities.” He can’t say what. He can’t say why. But he’s making damn sure there’s a public record that he raised the alarm.

And if he’s done that, it means something very, very, very bad is happening.

If you’re not familiar with the Wyden Siren, let me walk you through the pattern, because it’s been remarkably consistent.

Back in 2011, Wyden and Senator Mark Udall tried to warn the public that the federal government had secretly reinterpreted the PATRIOT Act to mean something entirely different from what the text actually said. They couldn’t reveal the details because they were classified, but Wyden made the situation clear:

We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says.

For a couple years, civil liberties advocates were left guessing what that secret interpretation might be. Then Ed Snowden came along and revealed the NSA’s bulk metadata collection program—the exact thing Wyden had been warning about. Apparently, one of the things that reportedly pushed Snowden to leak was watching then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie to Wyden’s face in a hearing about whether the NSA was collecting data on millions of Americans. Wyden knew the answer. Clapper lied anyway. Snowden had the proof.

In 2015, Wyden was at it again, this time warning about a secret Justice Department legal opinion related to cybersecurity legislation:

I remain very concerned that a secret Justice Department opinion that is of clear relevance to this debate continues to be withheld from the public. This opinion, which interprets common commercial service agreements, is inconsistent with the public’s understanding of the law, and I believe it will be difficult for Congress to have a fully informed debate on cybersecurity legislation if it does not understand how these agreements have been interpreted by the Executive Branch.

In 2017, we wrote about the Wyden Siren going off again when Dan Coats, then Director of National Intelligence, gave an answer about Section 702 surveillance that Wyden pointed out was to a different question than the one he’d actually asked:

That was not my question. Please provide a public response to my question, as asked at the June 7, 2017, hearing.

The pattern repeats. Wyden asks a specific question about surveillance. The intelligence community answers a slightly different question in a way that technically isn’t lying but is designed to mislead. Wyden calls them out. Eventually, the truth comes out, and it’s always worse than people assumed.

It’s not just surveillance, either. Wyden has used this same approach to expose ICE illegally collecting millions of Americans’ financial records through bulk administrative subpoenas—a program that was hastily shut down the moment Wyden’s office started asking questions about it. He’s caught the government gathering push notification data from Apple and Google while forbidding those companies from telling anyone about it. He’s questioned domain seizures, the FBI’s power to look at your browsing history without a warrant, and countless other government activities that were happening in secret.

The track record here is essentially perfect. When Wyden sends a cryptic letter or asks a pointed question suggesting something concerning is happening behind the classification curtain, something concerning is absolutely happening behind the classification curtain.

So what’s happening at the CIA that has Wyden sending a two-sentence letter that amounts to “I legally cannot tell you what’s wrong, but something is very wrong”?

We don’t know yet. That’s the whole point of classification—it keeps the public in the dark about what their government is doing in their name. But Wyden’s letter is the equivalent of a fire alarm. He’s seen something. He can’t say what. But he wants there to be a record that he raised the concern.

Given the current administration’s approach to, well, everything, the possibilities are unfortunately vast. Is it about domestic surveillance? Something about current ODNI Tulsi Gabbard? International operations gone sideways? Some new interpretation of the CIA’s authorities that would make Americans’ hair stand on end if they knew about it? We’re left guessing, just like we were guessing about the PATRIOT Act’s secret interpretation back in 2011.

But here’s what we do know: Ron Wyden has been doing this for at least fifteen years. And every single time, he’s been vindicated. The secret programs were real. The abuses were real. The gap between what the public thought was happening and what was actually happening was real.

The Wyden Siren is blaring. Pay attention.

02:00 AM

Josh Hawley Trots Out Trans Panic Attacks On Netflix To Help Larry Ellison Buy CNN, HBO [Techdirt]

We’ve been talking about how the Trump GOP is launching an all out attack on Netflix’s proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust or corporate power, but because they really want Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison to buy Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. It’s part of their unsubtle plan to acquire what’s left of U.S. media and turn it it to MAGA state television (see: Hungary).

Of course, if you’re a corrupt, Trump-bootheel-licking, GOP lawmaker looking to turn U.S. media (or what’s left of it) into a Trump-friendly agitprop machine, you can’t just openly admit this. So the GOP have had to dress up their attacks on Netflix as some sort of principled stand against media consolidation, “leftist propaganda,” child indoctrination, and “wokeism.” Real pudding-brained cult shit.

Enter ever-the-opportunist Josh Hawley, who “grilled” Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos this week in Senate hearings, leveraging anti-trans hysteria and fear-mongering to pretend Netflix is somehow radically leftist:

“Why is it that so much of Netflix content for children promotes a transgender ideology?” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley asked Sarandos on Tuesday. “Almost half of your content for children—I’m talking about minor children now, I’m not talking about teenagers, minor children—promotes a transgender ideology agenda.”

If you’re a grown adult, you probably realize Netflix’s primary interest is in making money by producing whatever gets people’s attention. That has ranged from military dramas featuring (gasp) homosexuals (something you’ll recall made the Trump Pentagon cry), to hack comedians who like to punch down against trans folks. If Netflix has an ideology, it’s opportunism.

Hawley’s (false) claim that half of Netflix’s children’s programming supports a “trans agenda” was simply made up, and originates in a Heritage Foundation “study” making the rounds in DC designed to demonize Netflix. Allowing, as we noted above, Larry Ellison to swoop in, dominate U.S. media, and do all of the ideological bullshit the GOP is pretending to be worried about. Just like we saw with the Trump GOP’s hijacking of TikTok by weird right wing zealots like Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen.

As I’ve noted previously, ideally you’d block all additional media consolidation, since these megadeals are consistently terrible for labor, consumers, and product quality. But that’s not happening under a Trump administration that has lobotomized all key regulators. So ideally, while not great, Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers is the best of a bunch of bad options, and probably the route Dem lawmakers and activists should be backing.

Such are the strange days we live in.

The GOP and Heritage attack on Netflix serves two functions: it either scuttles the deal so that Larry Ellison can buy Warner Brothers, and/or it forces Netflix to continually debase itself to please Trump if it wants merger approval. Since Netflix isn’t interested in CNN and Warner Brothers’ Discovery channels due to sagging ratings, it’s likely these are spun off and sold to Ellison anyway even if Netflix’s deal succeeds.

Again, look to Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia if you want to see what the Heritage folks and Josh Hawley are keen on building. Our broken, corporate press is already largely incapable of being factually honest (particularly about corporate power or the GOP), and they’re well on the way toward being consolidated into what will ultimately become a 24/7 autocrat ass kissing machine.

You know, to protect the children.

Correction: an earlier version of this article accidentally said it was a Heartland Institute effort, when it’s actually the Heritage Foundation. We regret the error.

Thursday 2026-02-05

11:00 PM

‘Ripping’ Clips for YouTube Reaction Videos can Violate the DMCA, Court Rules [TorrentFreak]

dmaDownloading audio and video from YouTube is generally not allowed, which the video streaming service clearly states in its terms of service.

Despite this explicit restriction, there are numerous ‘stream-ripping’ and “YouTube downloader” tools available on the web that do just that.

These ripping tools can be used to convert YouTube music videos into MP3s for example. This is seen as a major problem by the music industry, which has and is taking legal steps in response.

Specifically, music companies argue that using these stream-ripping tools violates the DMCA, as it circumvents YouTube’s copyright protection technology. This ‘rolling cipher’ can be bypassed relatively easily, but it prevents regular users from downloading videos from YouTube directly.

Creator vs. Creator

The ‘rolling cipher’ accusations are not limited to the music industry. They can also be used in other contexts, including a creator vs. creator battle. This is the case in Cordova v. Huneault, which revolved around the legality of “reaction” and “commentary” channels.

The implications could be significant. Reaction and commentary videos have become a massive part of YouTube’s ecosystem, with countless creators building entire channels around responding to, critiquing, or mocking other people’s content.

Many of these creators rely on downloading clips from other channels, often using third-party tools that bypass YouTube’s protections, to incorporate into their videos. While fair use is often cited as a defense, this case suggests that DMCA circumvention liability comes into play, regardless of whether their final use qualifies as fair.

Without going into the nature of the videos, the lawsuit pits Christopher Cordova (Denver Metro Audits) against Jonathan Huneault (Frauditor Troll Channel). Cordova alleged that Huneault didn’t just use his copyrighted footage without permission, but that he also used “ripping” tools to bypass YouTube’s technical protection to get it.

The defense disagreed with this argument and requested dismissal. They argued that, because the videos are publicly viewable on YouTube, there is no “access control” to speak of. Additionally, the defense pointed out that there is no evidence that ripping tools were used, pointing out that the defendant and many others have used screen recording to copy content.

rippinf

After hearing both sides, U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi denied the motion to dismiss the DMCA circumvention claims, allowing the case to move forward on that claim.

“Mr. Cordova has adequately pled that YouTube applies technological measures, including ‘rolling-cipher technology’ designed to prevent unauthorized downloading, to videos published on its platform that effectively control access to his videos for purposes of § 1201(a).”

“Whether the videos may be viewed by the public is immaterial; the [complaint] refers to technological measures intended to prevent unauthorized downloading,” Judge DeMarchi adds.

From the order

order

Caution: Reaction Channels

While the survival of the §1201 claim may seem like a mere technicality in a case that has yet to be fully litigated, it is rather significant. By accepting that the “rolling cipher” effectively controls access to the downloadable file, the court gives creators who want to sue rivals an option to sue for more than just simple copyright infringement.

For years, reaction creators have operated under the assumption that, if their commentary is fair use, the way they acquired the footage doesn’t matter. However, Judge DeMarchi’s decision suggests otherwise.

Essentially, it means that commentary and reaction channels, which are widespread, face potential liability for DMCA violations if they use ripping tools that bypass YouTube’s protections.

“No Harm, No Foul”?

The legal teams are now sharply divided on what the circumvention claims mean for the case going forward.

In a statement to TorrentFreak, defense lawyer Steven C. Vondran dismisses the circumvention claims as a tactical maneuver that may eventually fall apart, as his client didn’t use a ripping tool. The attorney further argued that, if the “reaction” video of his client is fair use, there is no “injury” or harm.

“If fair use rights apply, and if there is no cognizable injury, then what would be their grounds to have proper standing?” Vondran asked.

“Plaintiff is arguing that Defendant used ripping tools to circumvent YouTube’s content protection technology to obtain video clips,” Vondran told us. “In fact, this was not the case, but it seems anyone can allege this in a lawsuit and be able to go through discovery to see if they can find the use of these tools.”

The defense shifts the focus and counters that the plaintiff has no right to sue in the first place, because there is no harm. Vondran argues that if the final “reaction” video is fair use, then the original creator hasn’t been “injured” just because someone downloaded a clip.

Plaintiff’s attorney Randall S. Newman hit back, telling TorrentFreak that circumventing copy protections under §1201 of the DMCA, is a separate violation that is unaffected by a fair use finding.

“The injury flows from the act of bypassing technological protection measures themselves, not from the outcome of a fair-use defense asserted after the fact,” Newman says, adding that the question of whether a ripping tool was used will be answered during discovery.

While the order of the motion to dismiss is significant, for this case it means little more than that the case can now move ahead to the discovery phase, after which it will be argued on its merits. The allegations that the defendant used ripping tools to download videos will have to be backed up by evidence then.

—

A copy of the order handed down by U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi of the Northern District of California last month is available here (pdf).

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

08:00 PM

Making it whole [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Integrity is the act of being in and of itself, from every angle.

As we see the bait-and-switch of the online networks and monopolists, it’s easy to imagine that nothing with integrity stays that way very long. The systems we support almost always end up trading a straightforward clarity about what they do for a facade that’s easy to fall into and hard to get out of.

Big businesses usually succumb to short-term compromises that corrupt the mission that built their brand in the first place.

The opportunity, then, is to find a career path that’s a whole. In calculus, the integral takes an infinite number of tiny slices and reassembles them into a coherent result. Each slice is infinitesimal, almost nothing on its own, yet the accumulation produces something real. We don’t need each moment to be grand. We need it to be of the same function. Showing up consistently in small ways that cohere.

In the movies, there’s plenty of stirring music when the hero has to make their choice. But in our lives, there isn’t a single moment. Instead, there are a million of them.

The way we show up will rarely be perfect. But perfect isn’t the point. Countless tiny decisions add up to a whole. It helps to be clear about the purpose of the work we’re here to do.

In the words of Hugh MacLeod, “The market for something to believe in is infinite.”

PS I just finished the first draft of my new book, THE KNOT, which will publish this September from Authors Equity. If you’re interested in pre-ordering the audiobook and being part of a small beta-test community, I’ve built a page explaining how you can join us. I’ll take this link down once the cohort is full.

      

And Now For Something Completely Different! [The Status Kuo]

I would like to share another part of my work and passion and invite you into my world of Broadway theater!

Apart from writing on politics and law, I am also a Broadway musical composer and a producing partner in Sing Out, Louise! Productions. We’re two-time Tony award winning co-producers of Hadestown and The Inheritance, and our newest work is a play called Relentless.

I can barely believe it, but we OPEN Relentless in two days with our world premiere at Syracuse Stage. So exciting! As the name suggests, Relentless is a play about highly driven people. They work and train at a boxing ring in Brooklyn (yes, we box on stage, with a fight coordinator and everything!) The play explores the world where the art of sport and the commerce of sport collide. It’s brilliantly written by Rae Binstock, with significant creative guidance from yours truly! Gripping, heartbreaking, and very often hilarious, Relentless has been a true joy to create and produce.

So here’s how you can take part. Through a special arrangement with the League of Live Stream Theater, we are making a live capture of Relentless available on demand later this month. Most of the world can’t come to see a new play before it (hopefully) makes its way to Broadway. But with Relentless you can! I hope you find the notion intriguing.

For my followers and readers, I’m offering a special, limited-quantity $69 VIP package. Along with the on demand live capture, you’ll receive a unique digital copy of the script of Relentless to keep, annotated by the playwright and me. A true collector’s item! You’ll also receive an invite to a special zoom talk back with me and playwright Rae Binstock about the show. These VIP packages are limited, so grab them now!

Take Me To the VIP Page for Relentless!

In an era where arts and arts funding have come under direct attack, supporting live nonprofit theatre like Syracuse Stage and a production like Relentless is so important. Thank you, and I hope you enjoy Relentless!

Jay

02:00 PM

Are You Selling Books or Selling with Books? [The Business of Printing Books]

Are You Selling Books or Selling with Books?


Publish & Prosper Episode #105
Published February 4, 2026
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Complete List of Channels


Books can be the product or the tool that helps sell the product…and sometimes both. In this episode, Matt & Lauren explore how print-on-demand empowers creators and businesses to use books to build their business, earn revenue, generate leads, and fuel brand growth.

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Complete Episode Transcript

Matt: Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Publish & Prosper.

Lauren: Yes, that is the name of our podcast.

Matt: Yeah. Just for a brief second, I was thinking about renaming it.

Lauren: Sure. Why not?

Matt: That’s the kind of mood I’m in.

Lauren: I... Isn't that kind of mood you’re always in?

Matt: No. Not always.

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: Not always. I do like to change things up. Today, believe it or not, we're talking about something else other than how I like to change things up on the fly. We're going to be talking about the versatility of books, and more specifically, the two main ways books are positioned or used. Either as a product to be sold. Or, which we've seen a lot more of in the last...you know, five years, for sure. Using books as a marketing tool. As a lead magnet, as a business generator. So we're going to talk about the two ways you're either selling books or you're selling with a book.

Lauren: Of course, there is technically the third option of and.

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: So, you know.

Matt: That's true, okay.

Lauren: We are not saying that these are mutually exclusive.

Matt: It’s not an or.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: It can be an and.

Lauren: But there are still kind of differences in how you're going to approach the creation, the product type, the marketing, maybe even the selling of them. Depending on whether or not your, your primary goal is to use this as a, a revenue driver, a product type. Or to use it as a marketing tool, as a lead gen tool, as a way to maybe make some passive revenue as a secondary goal, but more likely to be the thing that, that brings new people into your business or brand.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I like that.


[2:09] - 3 Reasons Businesses Don't Consider Books


Lauren: So a couple of things that we see people talking or we hear people talking about – it did that last time too. Someone just wants to hang out with us, it’s fine.

Matt: It’s a ghost host. There's room for one more.

Lauren: Some of the really common, kind of hesitations or pain points or reasons that we see people saying that, that they don't think that books would be a really viable option for them, whether it's as a product type or as a marketing tool, kind of boils down to like three main things, really.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: Number one, the idea of a book. People hear the word book and they automatically go, well, I'm not a writer. I'm not writing a whole book.

Matt: Right.

Lauren: I'm not, I’m not going to write out this whole book.

Matt: Yeah. The idea or the notion that book means you have to actually write this long form piece of content.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yep. Got it.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Books are expensive. Whether that's to produce them, because you're placing a bulk offset print order, to warehouse them, distribute them. And then, of course, you know, when you're left over with inventory.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: If you don't sell through or use all of the ones that you ordered, you're just eating the cost of that.

Matt: That's correct, right.

Lauren: And then three, notoriously books are slow to market. And we referenced in an episode recently, where you were talking about someone that was going between publishing deals, whether traditional publishing option –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – or self-publishing, and it was a book about AI, and they were being offered a publication date in 2027 for traditional publishing. So if you are, if your brand or your business model or anything like that is something that needs that speed to market and you're concerned that the content that you're putting out there would not get out there fast enough and would be obsolete by the time your books were printed and delivered. Then there's no point.

Matt: I mean, listen, we may be obsolete in 2027.

Lauren: Yeah. So, you know, those are, those are kind of some things that we hear from people a lot, probably the three main ones. And so we figured we would take some time to debunk those a little bit. And then talk about the different ways that we've seen brands, small business owners, large businesses, whoever, using books as a tool to support their brand, whether it is as a revenue tool or as a marketing tool.

Matt: You have the three that you just laid out as kind of like the main pieces of pushback that you get or hear, or arguments against, you know, books for certain things or for certain reasons. I would go so far as to say there's either a fourth or there is an addition to that third one. Which is, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, you know, write a book and, but if, if I publish it traditionally or, you know, for any other number of reasons, it's slow to market. There's also the notion that books in general, especially print books – because we're going to be talking mostly about print anyway, so we should be clear about that – are just outdated.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Right? Like, I've talked to a lot of people that are like, well, well, I'll just, I'll just make that downloadable ebook, i.e. a PDF. Well, newsflash, nobody wants your piece of junk PDF. Nobody wants to give you their email so you can email them a crappy three page PDF that you're calling an ebook. That's not an ebook, by the way. So there is this again, I don't know if it's a fourth one or if it falls in that third category around slow to market, outdated, irrelevant, whatever, whatever. But there is this pushback you get as well that, well, if it's not digital, I don't want it.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Or if it's not digital, it's not going to sell. If it's not digital, nobody's going to give me their email address to – So, I think that should be also noted.

Lauren: That's a very fair point.

[6:05] - Debunking the 3 Reasons Businesses Dismiss Books

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: But. 

Matt: So.

Lauren: Yeah?

Matt: Does this mean I have to write a book? Like I have to be a writer? I have to write a book.

Lauren: Absolutely not.

Matt: It's hard.

Lauren: It is hard.

Matt: It's a lot of work.

Lauren: Between the two of us only one of us in this room has actually written a book. And it's not the person who went to grad school for it.

Matt: Maybe that's the problem.

Lauren: Maybe it is.

Matt: Maybe, maybe you're overthinking it.

Lauren: Maybe. Maybe that is exactly the problem.

Matt: Maybe I under-thought it.

Lauren: I think you gave it just the right amount of thought.

Matt: We'll see.

Lauren: But no, no, you do not have to write a book. There are plenty of different product types that you can create that are, that are books. Whether it is something that you're just taking your existing content and organizing it into a physical print product. Or maybe it is mostly photos, or art, or diagrams or, something like a workbook or a guided journal that is –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – very low or no content. It could also be something that is just like a...you know, like a sampler of your existing work.

Matt: My son is a tattoo artist. He can take fifty of the flash sheets that he's designed and turn those into a book for other tattoo artists to use as –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – you know? Which a lot of them do, by the way. So –

Lauren: Yeah we’ve, we’ve seen those –

Matt: I mean, there's a lot of things –

Lauren: Plenty of, yeah.

Matt: – you’re right, where you don't really have to sit down and write, you know, your opus. Like, you don't have to spend two years on a whole 80,000 word –

Lauren: Right.

Matt: – you know, manifesto, if you will. Yeah, I don't know. I just, I don't, I don't think enough people know that.

Lauren: Yeah, still kind of the, the hesitation that I get from people. Even people that I talk to that are enthusiastic about the idea of publishing a book. Like they’ve heard, you know, people that I've met at conferences or that I've spoken to, other creators that are just like, yeah, I think it would be really valuable for me, for some reason or another, to publish a book with my content. But I'm not much of a writer, so I don't really know if I can. And I always push back on that.

Matt: Yeah, I mean, this is another one. This is a great example. So, Lorenzo Etherington, right? Every year – not every year, but he just puts together a collection of all of his sketches and –

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: – and designs, and he's an amazing artist. Like, this is just stuff that he's doing anyways.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: You know? I mean, he's drawing and sketching and teaching people how to draw and sketch, and then he puts them in these really cool collections. And then, I mean, he sells a ton of them. He always runs a Kickstarter so he doesn't have to come out of pocket for the, you know, any of the work that needs to be done pre-production.

Lauren: He set a record for a Kickstarter at one point.

Matt: His first one.

Lauren: Right? Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. So again, I mean, he didn’t –

Lauren: But, yeah.

Matt: – have to sit down and write, you know, 75,000 word, piece of, of written excellence. He, he took what he already does and put it into a really cool book and makes money off of it. It's a great passive stream of income for him.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. So if you're sitting here and thinking to yourself... Books. Silly idea. I don't know how to write a book. Nobody at my business knows how to write a book. None of us want to write a book. It's not the case. It's not the case. We've done, actually, plenty of other episodes on this. I will link one or two in the show notes about different ideas for turning your content, your existing content, into books. So feel free to go check those out. And that’s, again, can be something that applies to you as a product type or as a marketing tool. Or as a combination of both.

Matt: Yeah. The next one is that books are, you know, too expensive to produce. You got to pay editors, you got to pay designers, you got to pay forMatters, you gotta pay all these things. And then, you know, you've got to order a bunch of copies, and you've got a store ‘em in a warehouse or somewhere. You got to pay somebody to ship them, or you got to pay for the shipping, you got – So there's all these things, this overhead, that's associated with it. And again, spoiler alert, just like the last one: No, you don't have to do all those things. There are better ways to do those things. Cheaper ways to do those things. In many cases, no to low cost ways to do those things. But, outside of that, you don't need warehousing. You don't need inventory control. You don't need to worry about what it may cost you in time or resources to have to recycle, pulp, or destroy unsold copies or returns or things like that. You just utilize print-on-demand.

Lauren: Imagine that. And that also applies to that third main point that we were talking about. That books are slow to market and might become outdated, irrelevant, especially if you're, if your content is something that is time stamped or time sensitive or something that has to be updated regularly, or maybe you're looking for something that you are, you know, you want to make sure that it scales with your business over time. So right now you're only printing ten copies of something. But, you know, you're hoping that by this time next year, you’re printing a thousand copies of it. Or you would have demand for ten versus a thousand copies of it. And when you use print-on-demand, all of those things are, are easily solvable with that.

Matt: Yes. There's two things I would say to that. One, there's all kinds of content that, that won't really become outdated. I mean, these four books sitting here right now are four examples of content that I don't think will ever be outdated. Right? I mean, when you talk about things like how to physically prepare yourself –

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: – to spend, you know, a week at Disney. Like, that's never going to be outdated

Lauren: No.

Matt: Proper stretching techniques. I mean, come on, you're not going to... This is Justin's book on how to, you know, retain sponsorships and, you know, get money from brands to sponsor. Like, the concepts and stuff in here this, this is not going to be – He's not talking about a bunch of tools and digital things that a year from now are gonna be gone, he's talking about concepts and how you communicate with somebody, how you pitch yourself, how you, how you try to line up brand deals and things.

Matt: So. And then, you know. Again, when you talk about a book full of art or, you know, whatever that might be like, there's a lot of stuff that’s not going to get outdated.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: The flip side of that is or the, the other point there is sure. There are books that you might put into print where, a couple of years down the road, there are things that are in the book that are outdated, or the whole book is outdated. But the same could be said for a lot of digital content.

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: Like if, if the concept will fall victim to technology or progress or AI, then that's going to happen regardless of the medium that you use to put the content out there.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: If it's going to be outdated, it's going to be outdated. So again, if you're using-print on-demand, it's not like you're going to be sitting on a warehouse full of books that you could no longer sell. You literally just update the file, and every new book after that has the updated information. The revised edition.

Lauren: Right, which is a great example of like, you know, if you're not updating the entire content, but let's say, you know... Let's say that tomorrow Disney World decides that they're going to go revert from Hollywood Studios back to MGM Studios.

Matt: Boo.

Lauren: I still call it MGM.

Matt: Do you really?

Lauren: Oh my god. We'll fight about this later. But you know, the, the actual like, meat and potatoes of Stephen's book is still unchanging.

Matt: Right.

Lauren: But if he decided, you know, I just want to do a quick, like, go through and update all of the references to Hollywood Studios and change it to MGM.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So that my book seems as like, fresh and up to date as possible. That's a really easy, quick fix. And then can instantly be updated –

Matt: Or how many people who wrote something about social media that when –

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: – Twitter became X, they had to go through and do a control F and just change everything in their –

Lauren: Right.

Matt: – you know, with print-on-demand, you could do a Control F –

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: – you just update the file, boom, you're right back into production. You don't have, you know, 10,000 copies sitting in the warehouse that have to be destroyed.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So.

Lauren: You've got that flexibility. You've got that speed to market. You don't have to worry about the things like warehousing inventory, wasting inventory. You're cutting down on the supply chain with fulfillment options. You're usually sending books directly to the consumer or directly to an event or something like that, you can have books printed and delivered straight to where you want them.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So.

Matt: Great. So.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: All of these myths and misconceptions, we just put them to rest.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: No one's ever going to disagree with us ever again about the idea of using a book as a product type or a marketing tool.

Matt: On the one hand, I think that'd be great. On the other hand, it just sounds boring.

Lauren: I know it sounds like we would have a lot of downtime at conferences and events. Cause we wouldn't have anything to talk about.

Matt: Yeah.

[15:00] - Using Books as a Product

Matt: Well, now that that's out of the way. What do you want to talk about?

Lauren: Maybe the difference between using your book as a product type or as a marketing tool?

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: I suppose.

Matt: I think my favorite is not what you think. I love the concept of books as a product, books as a business. And we see more and more people doing that. And I like it. I like the idea of creating books. A series of books, a bunch of different types of books, whatever that might be. But creating content for sale, that is of value.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Whether that's fiction, entertainment purposes, nonfiction, educational purposes, or somewhere in between that, that medium. I love that. And, you know, what we're seeing now. You know, for better or for worse, there's a lot of really cool use cases where people are incorporating AI and building tools and platforms that generate personalized or customized pieces of content in the form of books. I'm not talking about the AI slop that you're seeing on Amazon, where it's just, oh, you know, how to build a Shopify store. And it's like forty pages that was generated by ChatGPT, the cover is atrocious, like, and that same person has twenty other books that are just like that, insert name of whatever here, how to do this. Like, I'm not talking about like, just pure garbage, but I am talking about, there's a lot of platforms and tools that are being built right now where parents are able to create, customize, and personalize, you know, books for their kids that are really cool examples of that. Or there are memoir platforms now that, that incorporate AI where, you know, it will literally interview your father for you. A couple of questions per week, or a month, and it will craft, you know, the memoir for you and your father so that you have it – like, you know, they're just cool uses of it.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So, I love the idea of books as a product, as a, as a business, whether it's just as a standard traditional fiction author or, you know, as a creator or a business or an entrepreneur or a brand that, you know, really wants to build a business on books. I think that's really cool.

Lauren: As much as those are incredible, and we've seen some really, really creative business solutions and businesses built around books, it's also something that is accessible to people that are just looking for products to add to… Whether it's add to their existing store or their existing brand, or you're looking for a way to monetize your content, not as a lead magnet, not as a marketing tool –

Matt: Right.

Lauren: But you're a photographer and you'd like to offer people a print version of your work. You can do print-on-demand, like print just single prints of photos, or you can do canvases, or whatever. We've all seen like, you know, you can go on Redbubble and there's one image uploaded that you can get in every single format, whether it's… on a card or a postcard or a poster or a laptop sleeve, or whatever it is –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – those are all things. But you could also then take a hundred of your favorite photos and have them printed and bound into a photo book that your customers could purchase copies of that, and have it as a coffee table book instead of your individual prints, or whatever it is. So that might not be something that you're necessarily building your business around the idea of creating and producing books.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But you are adding a book product, as a revenue tool, within your existing brand.

Matt: Yeah, that's a great way to expand, as well. So we've seen a number of brands, you know, that started out online in a certain space, whether that was health and wellness or something like that. And maybe they started off, you know, with digital products, right? Like, hey, fill out this quiz and we'll send you this digital, you know, PDF or whatever that might be of...for your body type, here's how you should exercise. And then they expand into actual full-on printed books that include, you know, all the right things for your body type in terms of nutrition, exercise, all of that stuff. So it's, it’s also a great way to test your content digitally, but then as you prove out your market share, move into, to print and other types of book products. I think that's a really cool thing too.

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. It can also, as we've talked about in other episodes, be a great way for you to create resources for your customers, or create some kind of subconscious brand recognition or brand authority for your customers. So a lot of different reasons. And, there is definitely going to be overlap, as we have said and will continue to say. There's definitely going to be overlap between using your book as a product type and using your book as a marketing tool. But it's going to come down to what your goals are, I think, for – like what your primary goals are.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: If your primary goal with the book that you're creating, or the books that you're creating, is to generate revenue and increase your profit margins, then it’s a product type.

Matt: Yeah, I guess that's a fair definition. I agree.

Lauren: Yeah?

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. The beauty around, again, using print-on-demand fulfillment for these product types is that you get to cut out a lot of that stuff that we talked about initially that people use as barriers to entry. So, you know, when you're using print-on-demand fulfillment. You know, again, from our standpoint, in our platform, the way that we do things. When a book is ordered, we print it from the, the facility that's closest to your buyer and ship it to them. That speeds up transit times and makes shipping a little bit cheaper. It helps with any type of cross-border types of issues. It's also really scalable in that way. Whereas somebody like Stephen, for example, might typically be limited to his sort of distribution area. In the sense that – let's say he was just printing a thousand of these at a time, and then really trying to, to sell them, let's say, from his website, and then ship them himself. It probably costs a pretty penny to ship one of these from Orlando to, let's say, the UK.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: To a family that might be planning a Walt Disney World trip, you know, in the upcoming summer months. But because he's using POD, because it's all print-on-demand, because we have a global network, his customer in the UK buys his book, we print it and ship it in the UK.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: So they're not paying extra shipping and handling. They're not going to deal with customs and cross-border issues. They're not going to have to wait an extra five to eight days transit time. So you cut out a lot of those concerns when, you know, your product is a book and you're selling direct to your, your purchasers, your consumers. You just don’t have to deal with the hurdles that you normally deal with when trying to scale a business globally, basically from your living room. You know what I mean? Which I think is really cool.

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. It's also, in, in the same way that we said, you know, books that are marketing tools can also be, you know, kind of passive revenue drivers or whatever. I think the same is true the other way around. If you're, if you're using your book primarily as a product, you can still use it as a marketing tool if you are selling direct. Because if you're selling it direct, you are collecting your customer data, you're curating that customer experience. You're building a one-on-one relationship with your customers, and you're giving yourself the opportunity to then remarket to them further down the line.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So even if it is primarily a revenue driver, it is also opening up opportunities for you to use it as a marketing tool as well.

Matt: That's true.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah, I like that. Probably one of the biggest benefits of selling direct, actually, is getting that customer data.

Lauren: We've talked a little bit about what kind of different products you can make, what kind of different book products that you can make. I don't think we need to get too, too much further into that at this point. Although this is, this is something that we've said before and will definitely say again, this is a challenge that both of us love to take.

Matt: It's true.

Lauren: If you say I have no idea how I can turn my content into a book, or what kind of book would align with my brand, or support my business, or whatever.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Absolutely love that challenge. We did a whole episode on this– a while back, at this point, I think it was episode number 33 – that I will link in the show notes.

Matt: I just realized –

Lauren: For some ideas on that.

Matt: – I’m a, I’m a really big fan of this size.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: I just like the way that it feels in your hand.

Lauren: I know, it's a great –

Matt: I wish I had done this size.

Lauren: You still could.

Matt: Nah. But maybe the next book I write.

Lauren: Maybe the next one? That little pocket size?

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I know, it is perfect. And these are actually, this is a great example, because both of them very intentionally chose the size and design. Stephen genuinely wanted a pocket guide, he wanted something that wasn't going to take up a lot of room in your suitcase, something you could just toss into your backpack.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: He was very conscientious of the fact that people are usually traveling to Disney. They don't want to bring a lot of extra stuff with them. People might even want to take it into the park with them, I don't know.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So he was very conscientious about that when he chose this. And Anne did the same thing. This is a really cool little, little book that is just designed to kind of inspire creativity and on-the-go out-of-the-box thinking.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And Anne also very much wanted it to be something that you could just toss in your purse or your backpack and kind of have with you all the time. And as cool as a book like Lorenzo's is, this is not something that you could toss in your backpack –

Matt: No.

Lauren: – and carry it around with you for inspiration. Which is not the point. That’s –

Matt: Correct.

Lauren: That's not, that was not his intention with this book.

Matt: I mean, it's, it's so beautifully done. It's clearly intended to be something that is on your desk –

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: – or bookshelf, your coffee table, you know, it is, it's definitely designed differently, I agree.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: But –

Lauren: These were –

Matt: I really like these.

Lauren: These were products that were designed with intent.

[25:39] - Using Books as a Marketing Tool

Lauren: Obviously though, products are, are just one thing that you can use your books for because there's also the, the option of using your book as a marketing tool. And if I'd thought about this in advance and I had realized that you would be pro product type, we could have set this up a little bit more debate style. Because I actually, as much as I like both ideas, I really like the idea of using books as a marketing tool. So.

Matt: I think they're great.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Both ideas, I just – I don't know. I really love all of the, the people right now that are treating books as a product, they’re building businesses off of books. There's a lot of creativity that's happening right now. And just, I think with all the tools that are out there, people are just really finding really cool ways to build businesses out of books. And I love that. But that doesn't mean I don't like books as a marketing tool. I think that’s one of the best uses of books.

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: I think it's a very under-utilized tactic. And I think the people who are doing it right now, that they are differentiating themselves from others in their space.

Lauren: I think that's what I like about it, as a lifelong fan of books and reading and physical print, collecting books and stuff like that, and also as a marketing nerd, as I've gotten older. Seeing people come up with creative ways to use books as marketing tools is really fun for me. I feel like this is a really fun overlap of two of my like, special interests in life. So I think it's cool to see people come up with really creative ways that they can use a book to demonstrate their, their value or their brand expertise or authority. As a way to connect with existing clients sometimes, or to show off what they can do to new clients. Especially in the cases of people that are doing things that are not something that you can just say, oh, here's a link to my blog, go check out what I can do. You know, that's, that's easy.

Matt: Yeah, there's a lot of reasons and ways to, to use it as a marketing tool, as a way to not only support your business or your brand or your efforts, but to grow them as well. I think the growth piece is somewhat under-utilized or under, underrated. But.

Lauren: Well we talked about that, I think Justin's book is a great example of that, actually. And I think we talked about this in the episode that we did on his book launch. And this is also a great example of a book that is both a product type and a marketing tool. Because, yes, this absolutely is a book that he is selling. Like, this is something that he has for sale on his website that he makes money from.

Matt: That can be a standalone product, yes.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But I've also seen him give away so many copies of it because he's using it as a marketing tool. As a way to showcase –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – this is my expertise. This is what I know how to do. This is how, this is how I can help you learn how to do what I do. And if you secured a really great sponsorship deal from this book, imagine what you could do if you signed up for one of my masterminds –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – instead. Or if you came to my event instead.

Matt: That’s right.

Lauren: And like, this is just the tipping point. Like, this is just you getting a taste of what I can do. Come sign up for my online course and really dive in deep and really immerse yourself in all of these different things, and you're going to be a totally different person when that course is over. So. Marketing tool.

Matt: Yeah. And I think that was his main goal with the book as well. And you know, we, we did an interview with Justin. We, we talked about Justin. It was our most liked and –

Lauren: It was.

Matt: – listened to episode of 2025.

Lauren: It was.

Matt: I think, because a lot of the things Justin did with this book and for this book. But I think it is really cool how you can take something like this, which definitively can be just the product itself, but then also turn that into more of a lead magnet. So again, when used properly, this is a great way to drive business back to whatever it is you're doing, and whether that is something like what Justin does, or whether you're...your thing is, maybe you're a fractional CMO, right? Your, your forte is marketing, and you're looking to secure more clients at the Fortune 500 level that could use your help in consulting and – You know, again, what better way to, to grab their attention to say, well, I wrote the book on the subject. Or, you know, instead of handing them a business card, and saying hey, call me one day. Sure, bro, okay. Hand them a book and say, listen, I know that, that your company is going through, you know, X, Y, Z, right now and you're looking to, you know, expand market share here, here, and here. I touched on that in my book. You can – here, why don’t you take a copy and, you know. That's a whole ‘nother level of like, I got you.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Like. I don't know.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: I just think it carries a little more weight. And I think people are really understanding that, and that we're seeing a lot more of this happening. So, I love to see that.

Lauren: Me too, me too. And I think we're going to see a lot more of it. I hope so, otherwise I'm out of a job.

Matt: It's not going anywhere. We're not going to be out of a job. Especially since there's no shortage of people like Justin out there that are really using creative ways to drive more business and more traffic to their content, things that they're doing. So.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Lauren: No, not at all. Especially with POD, because there are some really creative and cool things that you can do with that. One of the things that I think is really cool that we've seen people do is kind of creating custom, or like, very targeted small print runs for special events.

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: Or for VIP clients.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Or even if it's just like a very, like. You know, Justin's got an event coming up in March, and if he wanted to do a special edition of Sponsor Magnet for that event that was the exact same book, but had a special edition cover, or something like that.

Matt: Well or, or even, and I've seen this recently, you know, the very first page, which is typically blank in a book, because you're using POD or using something like, you know, the API connections that we have, something like that, you could customize that first page.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: So that first page would be, you know, completely tailored to attendees of that particular event. Or maybe it's a book club that bought fifty copies of your book. Well because it's print-on-demand, it's very easy for you to do a dedication on that first page to the people in that book club or, you know, whatever it might be. So yeah, the personalization piece of print-on-demand is really blowing up right now. And again, like I talked about earlier, when you introduce tools and productivity flows that include AI, like it really makes that much easier. You know what I mean? Justin could set up a template that would literally allow him to just basically plug in the name of the event, the location. And this first page could be automatically tailored, you know, geographically specific to that event, where it is, the time of the year, you know, whatever, whatever. And there's just so much cool stuff you could do.

Lauren: Yeah. Seasonally, I think, is a great – that's a great one too. I was just thinking, I love... obviously, I love the cover of Stephen's book because if I saw this from a mile away, I'd still be like, whatever that is, I want –

Matt: That’s true.

Lauren: – I want it. I'm also a huge fan of the pink castle, and I'm really sad that it's going away. But, you know, let's say that he wanted to do an edition of this that was for people that are going around Halloween, and are going to Not So Scary. And doesn't want to change a single thing about the content, but reprints a version of this that is a picture of the castle with the spooky Halloween lights on it –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – instead of this version. Exact same thing, but just seasonally that time of year –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – he's selling that version of it. Or selling a version of it with the Christmas lights on Main Street, so that if people are getting it as a holiday gift, they can see like, this is a special, like, Christmas edition of it, or whatever.

Matt: It’s the Pumpkin Spice Latte methodology.

Lauren: It is, it is. But that is something that you can do as –

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: – a little subtle marketing tool. As a little –

Matt: Fairly easily, yeah.

Lauren: – a little extra something with POD.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: I agree, I think that's really – and that's actually a really cool idea. So Stephen, if you're, if you're listening, I think you owe Lauren at the very least a drink the next time she's in Orlando.

Lauren: Well it's okay, because I need to bother him with other questions. So I'll give him that tip for free as a thank you for the other questions that I have for him.

Matt: Now I have to apologize to Stephen, because you're now going to go bug him about stuff. But, yeah.

Lauren: Sorry Stephen.

Matt: Yeah. You know, again, the other thing that really simplifies things when you're using books as a marketing tool, as a lead magnet or something to support your business. Again, POD is scalable. It's very easy to have copies drop-shipped somewhere, you know, place single orders, place bulk orders, whatever you need to do. Whether it's for an event, whether you are at an event and you took down the, the names and addresses of fifteen people, you just go in and upload all fifteen of those and boom, you know, the system will just process and print and ship those orders out as needed. So, it's a way to escape having to have inventory on hand, or carry a hundred books with you. You know, if you run out of books or an event or whatever that might be, print-on-demand is always a great way to continue fulfilling and or simplifying, kind of, some of that internal stuff that you may be dealing with as a business. Our head of sales Emily, also gave a really great idea, which is, you know, when you're practicing very high level account based marketing, sales, right? This is a one to one thing. Like you're, you're chasing a target, or let's say, five targets that are easily, if you land these five clients, that's going to be your whole year. Right? So you're doing very specific and, and tailored activities and things. This isn't just like oh, shoot out a standard email template and hope they – this is like. Her idea is, is you take a piece of let's say content you developed in-house, it’s sales and marketing content. It's in the form of a really nice, you know, whether it's a small book or a magazine-type product. And then because it's print-on-demand, you can tailor that to each individual prospect. So you can put their brand's logo on the front, and maybe their name, and the content on the inside is your sales pitch. It's for your products or services or whatever it is that you happen to be offering, that really goes through and illustrates and shows exactly how that client, or potential client, would benefit from your products or services or whatever that might be. So really, taking the concept of a book as a marketing tool and the technology of print-on-demand, and applying to that some very specific one to one account-based marketing, right? Or if you're selling a ten million dollar piece of real estate, and you've got a couple high level target buyers. Again, create a nice little booklet about the home, all the features. Beautifully done photographs that you're already going to have taken anyways. Right? Because that's what realtors do. And then, you know, customizing them to those targeted buyers. Right? I just think there's some really cool use cases there for very specific one to one marketing slash sales instances. So shout out to Emily for, for that one.

Lauren: Yeah, it's, it’s a great idea and it's a great opportunity. And I think it is something that on the surface that might sound like, oh, that's a lot of work to, to invest in, in just this one particular example. And first of all, sounds like it could be worth it depending on –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – depending on what kind of deal you're trying to secure here. But also, if it is something that you see yourself doing on a semi-regular basis. You know, if you have –

Matt: Templetize, yeah.

Lauren: – five or ten people or brands or whatever that you're going to be trying to work with every year, this is something that can easily be templated. And then you're just customizing the specific details within the template. You're not creating it from scratch every time. So going all the way back to that original point of not all books involve you writing 80,000 words.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: This is a prime example of that.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: This is something where you are just taking templated or modular content that you already have, but instead of putting it into a Google slide presentation and emailing it to them, you're, you're printing it out in a bound book and having it mailed to them.

Matt: And again, this is one of the most ultimate forms of differentiation.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Right?

Matt: There are, you know, tens if not more of thousands of, of other people probably doing what you or your business does. But, you know, how many of them are creating a custom piece of content and getting it into the mailbox of one of their prospective clients, versus you just landing another piece of white noise in their inbox? I'd rather be in the mailbox, not the inbox. So.

Lauren: Which…Robbie talked about this at CEX last year, about direct mail and about how that's kind of making a big comeback. Is like, physical mail being sent directly to customers or potential customers, as opposed to emails that get lost in the inbox.

Matt: I'll tell you right now, there are basically four, three, maybe four industry magazines that, you know, I get the digital versions every month. Which I don't read. The one that I do read, every month, is the one that also comes to the office every month, in print, with my name on it.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: I don't ever remember actually signing up for it. I don't know if I did. But smart and good on them, because that's the one that I actually read through every month.

Lauren: Absolutely.

Matt: And by the way, we actually spend, now, a decent amount of money advertising with them. Not the others.

Lauren: So that worked.

Matt: Yeah.

[40:12] - Multi-Purpose Uses for Print-on-Demand Books

Lauren: So that worked. And this is also, you know, to to circle back to the idea of this is not an either or, it can be an and thing. You can create books that you are using as a lead gen tool, as a marketing tool, that you are giving away in hopes of developing a relationship with a new or existing customer, but then also make them available for sale to the general public.

Matt: Sure.

Lauren: Or in specific circumstances.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So they are something that it doesn't always have to be like, a one time use or –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I'm putting all this work in for, for something that I'm going to get ten copies total printed. There are definitely multiple ways that these can, can be used to support different goals and different efforts within the same product.

Matt: Yeah. You know. And, and lots of other use cases. And we'll, we'll quickly touch on a few others. But you can also apply this to things like client gifts. So if you did land that big deal, there's some really cool ways you can use print-on-demand books, as, as creating a very special personalized gift to that client, creating sample books or look books or catalogs. If you, if you are in, you know, fashion design or the clothing industry or some of these other industries where it's very important to have yearly catalogs and things like that. Again, this, this is all applicable. Lots of businesses use print-on-demand books for things like, internal employee handbooks and guides. We've seen examples of really cool like, yearbooks, right? Really cool tech companies every year they do like a yearbook with all their employees and photos from fun events and, you know, things they rolled out and all that stuff. So there's a lot of internal uses, ways that you can use books and print-on-demand to make an impact.

Lauren: Especially with the idea that you can dropship them to wherever you need them to be.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So if you've got some people in North Carolina and some people in...

Matt: Germany.

Lauren: Germany. You can have the books sent –

Matt: Which we do.

Lauren: Which we do, that’s not a random example. You know, we can have the books sent to everyone, and everyone can get a copy. And we don't have to have a thousand copies of them printed for the hundred people that we're giving copies to.

Matt: And we don't have to sit here and pack and ship them all.

Lauren: Absolutely not. Because I know you'd make me hand write every single one of those mailing labels.

Matt: Can you also imagine filling out the international customs form –

Lauren: No.

Matt: – for every single one that you had to Fedex?

Lauren: No thank you. Absolutely not.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah, there's a lot of really cool ways, I think, that you can use books. Whether it's a marketing tool, a product type, a little bit of both. Something for, for internal resources, or something for strengthening relationships externally, or also both. Maybe both. Maybe it's good to have some internal references, for new hires or existing employees, of previous work the company has done, so that they can easily see what you can do or what you can't do. Having these books on hand that you sent to clients previously, and now you've got a complete line up of here's, here's a reference of every single landscape architecture project that we've done in the time that this company has been in business.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: That's, that's useful on both ends.

Matt: Yeah. I'm sure we could sit here all day and come up with –

Lauren: Surely.

Matt: Shirley?

Lauren: Don’t call me Shirley. But yes, this is, this is something that I think that – We could do this episode once a month and still probably not run out of ideas for...

Matt: Yeah, I mean, idea generation for how to use books and print-on-demand in general. Absolutely.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: But again, I think the important takeaways here are, you know, the two main ways that you do that. Either, you know, again, books as the core product of your business or as a product for sale to generate revenue, or books as a way to generate other revenue, right? Selling books or books for, you know, generating other revenue, so. So I think it's an important distinction. I think that, you know, a lot of people still don't quite understand just how easy it can be. For both instances –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – really, but especially that secondary one. And again, you know, we're marketers first. We work at a publishing company, but our role is as marketers. We know how hard it is to, to cut through that white noise and get somebody's attention. Like, this is the ultimate differentiator. This is way better than handing them a piece of collateral, a business card, sticker, you know, or even sending an email. Like, those things are done every single day. They're done to death. But, you know, again, something that really makes you stand out, in many cases, will be worth the time and the effort, depending on what it is you're trying to accomplish, what your goals are.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah.

[45:18] - Episode Wrap Up

Matt: I’m tired of talking, so we probably need to wrap it up.

Lauren: Okay. That's fair.

Matt: I'm just kidding. But I'm not.

Lauren: No no no, I'm not – I'm done. I'm done. It's all good.

Matt: I'm getting ready to leave for Disney

Lauren: I know.

Matt: I keep looking at this –

Lauren: I know, I realized –

Matt: It's like, it’s like when you're a senior in high school and it's like a week left. I've got senioritis, like I'm just ready to push this microphone out of the way and get up and go.

Lauren: That was my first thought when you said earlier that you were leaving for California tomorrow. I was like, oh my God, I would have scheduled this podcast recording on any other day or time. I was like – Which, like no shade. I would be the same.

Matt: Luckily, I love the topic.

Lauren: So I mean, that helps.

Matt: It does help, yeah.

Lauren: That would be worse, if you were dragging your feet through a topic you hated right now.

Matt: I'm seriously about to say goodbye, but I have one last question.

Lauren: Yes?

Matt: What do your bracelets say today?

Lauren: Oh, so actually, despite the fact that I'm wearing three of them, only two of them have letters on them. One of them says Ruin Everything, and the other one says Cosmic Love.

Matt: Wow, what a juxtaposition.

Lauren: I was really going for colors more than, than vibes today. I was trying to match my outfit.

Matt: Interesting.

Lauren: And I was kind of in a rush this morning, so just kind of reached in and grabbed whichever ones looked like they were the right colors.

Matt: All right.

Lauren: What are you – are you bringing any books with you on the plane?

Matt: I am.

Lauren: What are you reading?

Matt: I just started another one. So I'm still on my Japanese murder mystery kick. I'm actually still in the series by...gosh, I think I'm saying his name wrong, but I don't know. I've not bumped into anybody else that’s read them, so it's hard to, to get clarification, but I believe it's Seishi Yokomizo. He wrote in the forties, fifties, and sixties. But I'm now on the third book in the series. It's called The Village of Eight Graves, and it's really good. The last two I just read were really good as well. But they’re just a lot of fun, yeah.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Japanese murder mysteries, these in particular. But in general, like the few others I've read by other Japanese authors, they're just written differently. And in a way that's really fun, but also very analytical in the way that they solve crimes. You know.

Lauren: Cool.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Well, I'm sure you're excited about that downtime on the plane and, and reading time.

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: And then, you know, once you get to California. So have a great time.

Matt: Thank you.

Lauren: All right. If you have any questions about anything we talked about in this episode, if you want to challenge us to tell you how you could turn your content or your business into some kind of book, whether it's a product or a marketing tool, let us know.

Matt: Yeah, bring it on.

Lauren: Send us an email at podcast@lulu.com. You can comment on YouTube or on Spotify. Leave us a review on Spotify or Apple – Apple Music, Apple Podcasts. Not on Apple Music. Please like and subscribe. Follow us, hang out with us, and join us next week for another new episode.

Matt: That'd be great.

Lauren: Thanks for listening.

Matt: Later.

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Measles Has Now Begun To Infect Immigrant Detention Camps [Techdirt]

It’s darkly funny, in a way, to recall a racist trope that gets trotted out about immigration all the time: immigrants bring disease into the country. That in itself isn’t funny, obviously. The funny part is that it seems like we’re proving the opposite to be true under the Trump administration. As the measles outbreak in America continues to rage, immigration detention camps are starting to feel the effects.

Earlier this week reports indicated the Dilley detention center in Texas was going on a sort of soft lockdown due to confirmed cases of measles among those detained.

“ICE Health Services Corps immediately took steps to quarantine and control further spread and infection, ceasing all movement within the facility and quarantining all individuals suspected of making contact with the infected,” McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin said medical officials were monitoring detainees and taking “appropriate and active steps to prevent further infection.”

“All detainees are being provided with proper medical care,” she added.

We are definitely in “prove it” territory when it comes to this administration and immigration questions. That’s all the more so if the government, as they’ve done via other excuses in the past, limits or restrains entry to these facilities from other lawmakers who want to check DHS’ homework and uses the measles outbreak as the reason for it.

Neha Desai, a lawyer for the California-based National Center of Youth Law, which represents children in U.S. immigration custody, said she hopes the measles infections at Dilley are not used to “unnecessarily” prevent lawmakers and attorneys from inspecting the detention center in the near future, citing broader concerns about the facility.

“In the meantime, we are deeply concerned for the physical and the mental health of every family detained at Dilley,” Desai said. “It is important to remember that no family needs to be detained — this is a choice that the administration is making.”

It’s also worth remembering that the spread of disease is a recurring feature in the concentration camp industry. Deaths from disease as well. And, unlike the trope mentioned above, these are infections immigrants are getting from America, not bringing to her soil.

And it’s not just one detention camp, either. The Florence Detention Center in Arizona is also dealing with measles infections.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports one ICE detainee in the Florence Detention Center in Pinal County tested positive for measles on Jan. 21.

Two more measles cases have recently been confirmed among people who are also in federal custody in the county, according to a spokesperson for the Pinal County Public Health Services District. But the spokesperson did not provide details about which facility the other two infected individuals are in, or whether any of the three cases in the county are linked.

As Desai said in the quote above, this is a choice. Or, rather, a series of choices. It’s a choice made by Trump and his minions to carry out this inhumane, disorganized, haphazard campaign of brutality on illegal immigrants. This could have gone many ways, but Trump chose cruelty on purpose. It’s a choice to put RFK Jr. in charge of America’s health and then watch idly, leaning back with folded arms, as the country experiences the worst measles outbreak in decades over the past 13 months. It’s a choice to not pivot on any of the above.

And it’s a choice to leave South Carolina swinging in the wind as the measles outbreak there will no doubt continue to spread to the rest of the country.

State health officials are reporting 29 new cases of measles in the state since Friday, bringing the total number of cases in South Carolina related to the Upstate outbreak to 876. The South Carolina Department of Public Health (DPH) said there are currently 354 people in quarantine and 22 in isolation. The latest end of quarantine for these cases is Feb. 24.

Those numbers will continue to rise, but they are already breathtaking. 2025 saw a measles infection count nationwide of 2,267. South Carolina has generated nearly 40% of that total in one month in one state. 18 states have already had measles infections within their borders this year. The 2026 totals are going to make 2025 look like peanuts.

And it could potentially be hardest on the human beings who are shoved like sardines into these immigrant detention camps. Diseases like the measles will spread incredibly fast there. And, despite DHS’ claims to the contrary, I just can’t find it in me to believe that this administration is going to put a priority on detainee’s health.

Kanji of the Day: 悪 [Kanji of the Day]

悪

✍11

小3

bad, vice, rascal, false, evil, wrong

アク　オ

わる.い　わる-　あ.し　にく.い　-にく.い　ああ　いずくに　いずくんぞ　にく.む

悪い   (にくい)   —   hateful
悪化   (あっか)   —   deterioration
最悪   (さいあく)   —   worst
悪魔   (あくま)   —   devil
悪口   (あっこう)   —   slander
意地悪   (いじわる)   —   malicious
悪さ   (わるさ)   —   badness
悪質   (あくしつ)   —   malicious
悪影響   (あくえいきょう)   —   bad influence
気持ち悪い   (きもちわるい)   —   unpleasant

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

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