In this episode, Matt & Lauren explore three different ways creators can get started selling direct, and the tools you’ll need along the way! Learn about:
💡 Using direct assisted platforms like Books.by to build a website for you 💰 Selling on marketplaces like Etsy for a hybrid sales approach 📚 Connecting Lulu Direct to your site for true direct-to-consumer sales 🧰 Stocking your toolkit with some of our favorite sales and marketing solutions
Matt: I do think this office is haunted, by the way. Like for real for real. But whatever.
Lauren: Don't say that to me when I'm occasionally the only person in here.
Matt: Do you know how often I'm the only person in here
Lauren: I – I probably could guess, honestly.
Matt: Yeah. Welcome back, everyone, to another haunted episode of Publish & Prosper.
Lauren: Hey, as long as the audio isn't haunted, I don't care what the rest of the building is doing.
Matt: Yeah, it's not the audio. It's just the, the office itself.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And that's fine.
Matt: I guess. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. But that's not what we're talking about today.
Lauren: It could be.
Matt: Well yeah, we, we could absolutely probably cover an hour or more of that.
Lauren: Easily.
Matt: Today we're going to talk about how to choose the right direct sales path for you. So we talk a lot about direct sales. We talk a lot about different ways you can do it. But we've never kind of talked about how to choose the best one for you at the moment that you're in right now, with respects to your content.
Lauren: Yeah. And I actually think... cause there's kinda... we're gonna talk about this kind of in like, three different stages in, in getting through –
Matt: We're going to talk about them in three different levels of effort.
Lauren: Yes. Yeah.
Matt: Which could map to stages. But won't always necessarily.
Lauren: That's –
Matt: But yeah.
Lauren: – that's true. That's a fair point. But what I do think actually, is that the, the second of the three that we're going to talk about, I don't think we've ever talked about in an episode before.
Matt: We haven't really, no.
Lauren: So this is something new. How exciting.
Matt: It is. Yeah.
Lauren: It's getting harder and harder to come up with something new in a hundred plus episodes.
Matt: But for anybody who's read my book.
Lauren: Clearly not me.
Matt: They already know about section two – clearly not you. And that's okay.
Lauren: Maybe I'll pack it for some of our upcoming travel and events.
Matt: Not unless you need something to help you sleep at night.
Lauren: I do have a terrible time falling asleep on planes.
Matt: Then you should absolutely –
Lauren: So.
Matt: Yeah. Maybe I should turn it into an audiobook.
Lauren: That would be great.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: I know, I know someone that has recording equipment. If you wanted to do that.
Matt: Yeah, you should give me their number.
Lauren: Okay, great.
Matt: Hopefully they don't have any ghosts in their audio system.
Lauren: Not this time.
[2:43] - Episode Topic Intro
Matt: Good. Yeah. Today we're going to talk about a couple of different ways that you can start your direct sales journey. Based on level of effort or where you happen to be at in your, your journey for content creatorship and, authoring and whatever else it is you're doing. But we're going to basically break them up into a couple of different categories. Those are going to be kind of what we're calling direct assisted platforms. So these are platforms that will actually build a site and storefront for you based on a little bit of information. And so it's probably the easiest of all of them to kind of get started with. We're going to talk about what we call marketplaces. And that's the bucket that Lauren was referring to that we haven't really talked much about before. And these are places like Etsy and some of the others where they're true marketplaces. And then we'll get to the ecommerce platforms, or ecommerce tools. Which we talk fairly regularly about but do require a level of effort that is more than the first two.
Lauren: Yeah. We’ll, we'll definitely talk through those. Hopefully get to a point too where we talked through some, some additional tools and also how to kind of choose which of these is right for you. I do also want to just say right up at the top before we dive into it. If you are already selling direct, I think this is all still relevant and interesting information for you because even if you are already established, like let's say you do already have a Shopify store set up and you are already doing that, you might still want to consider opening up a store on a marketplace and using that as a discoverability tool. Or maybe some of these direct assisted tools might be a good way to help you out. If you wanted to build like a dedicated landing page for one specific book or something like that. So even if you're already selling direct, hang out. Because you might find something interesting in this episode.
Matt: Leave it to Lauren to go ahead and just blow the scope of this thing out of the water. Come on. We'll add another topic in which is hybrid. Why not? Let's, let's add more to the party. Great. Merry Christmas.
[4:47] - Building with Direct Assisted Platforms
Matt: So for those of you that are interested in selling direct, but you don't have the time or the experience, or you just want to give it a quick try and you don't want to invest too much in it. Or you're just like, yeah, I just really don't want to build a website right now, or I don't want to build a store right now, no Matter how fast and easy it is. These direct assisted platforms, I think, are really great for that. They're fairly new. And there's not a lot of them. But there's, there's a couple of good ones for sure. It's great for testing things like digital delivery of your ebooks and audiobooks. These sites incorporate print-on-demand. They partner with print-on-demand facilities. They're just really easy to set up and jump into. They're great for early stage authors.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: I don't know if I would use one of these if you have an extensive catalog. You certainly can, but I think they're really more geared towards, you know, again – early stage, yeah. If you've got a handful of titles, one title, they're great for this. If you've got a lot of titles, an extensive catalog. Again, you can use these sites, but you may be better off jumping ahead to option three, which is a full blown ecommerce solution.
Lauren: I think that these are a really good stopgap for people that know that they're getting to that place eventually. So if you are an author who already knows, like I've heard, I've heard the spiel, I'm sold on selling direct. I want to do that, I'm into it, but it's going to take me some time to get an actual website built out because if I want to put all this effort in, I want to do it right.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Which is totally fair. But this is a great for solution for like in the meantime. You know? Let's say you're going to an event in a couple of weeks and you're like, shoot, I really wanted to have my direct store set up already before then, and that's just not possible. So let me spin this up really quickly. Use this as like, a temporary solution while I'm having – either like, you're designing it yourself or you're having somebody else build out that actual end game website for you.
Matt: Yep.
Lauren: So I think this is a perfect solution for that.
Matt: They're really great because they automate most of what you would normally be doing yourself in terms of managing the website. They handle all the infrastructure. They handle most of the, the technical backend stuff, if not all of it. And most of them handle all of the payments processing. And a couple of them will share all of that customer data with you. Some of them may share some of the data, but not all of it, depending on how they process those payments. But for the most part, you'll get a lot of great benefits out of it, and you'll barely have to lift a finger. The main platforms to consider would be Books dot by or Books By. They're awesome, we really like them. They're based in Australia, but they have a global reach, so I wouldn't let that concern you. Their templates and their tools are really awesome. The other one is called Stack or STCK dot me. They cater to a more largely creator audience but certainly take care of authors as well. Books dot by or Books By clearly focuses mainly on authors.
Lauren: Yeah. I'll put both those links in the show notes. So don't worry if you're like, I'm sorry what? We got them, they’re in the show notes. And if they do sound familiar to you, we did also talk about them in the episode that we did on building a landing page for your books.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So.
Matt: Yeah, that's true. We’ve kind of already covered most of the pros and cons. But again, the best one is such a low barrier to entry. It's just so easy to do it. You don't have to really worry about building anything, for the most part. For those of you who like to be hands on, there's going to be less of that. So you may want to consider that. But it's truly just a plug and play. Or plug and pay and play.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: I should say.
Lauren: Yeah, there is – I mean, there is always that element –
Matt: Or pay, plug, and play.
Lauren: Pay – pay to plug and play?
Matt: Something like that.
Lauren: I don't know. Now it’s getting weird.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: But no, I do think that that's, you know... The pros and cons in this are, are almost like hand-in-hand with each other. Like on the one hand it is a templated, super, super easy to build. On the other hand, that means that you don't have a lot of customization and control.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So, you know, you're kind of giving up some details for other details. And it's really just a matter of what's important to you. And we'll talk more about that.
Matt: It's also a really easy experience to jump in and try, like we said. Especially if you've never tried direct sales before, you're really worried about, you know, investing some time into building a Shopify store or something like that. And you just want to try this out because it's very easy to just quit it.
Lauren: Yeah, it's very, it's very low risk.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So this is a great way to like, test the waters, test it out, see if this is something that you want to actually invest like, real time and money into.
Matt: But I've seen the storefronts and landing pages that both of these platforms produce and they look great.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: So, you know,
Lauren: Yeah. For sure.
[10:01] - Selling on Marketplaces
Matt: The next one we'll jump into is marketplaces.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: This is the one we've never talked about before on the show, really.
Lauren: Which is kind of surprising to me. I can't believe we've, we’ve never –
Matt: Eh, not so much.
Lauren: I guess, yeah, I guess we've never really had a reason to before. But it is kind of an untapped area for us to talk about.
Matt: It's an untapped area for us to talk about, yeah. I think part of that is, I think initially when you talk about selling direct or just as an author, your first thought isn't to go sell your book on Etsy.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: So –
Lauren: There might be people listening to it right now that are going –
Matt: Certainly some have –
Lauren: Well that’s, that's not –
Matt: – sure, but – yeah.
Lauren: Yes, of course. But there, there are definitely people. I mean, even me at first. When we were first talking through the content of this episode and, and you said marketplaces like Etsy. I had to, like, sit with that for a second and go, that's not... oh, well, I guess it is. Because to be clear, these are not – like, this is different than using something like a retail distributor like Bookshop.org or Amazon.
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: Because you are still the store owner.
Matt: That's right.
Lauren: On a marketplace.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So it's not something where like Amazon is the seller, Amazon is the, and I know Amazon Marketplace is a thing, but it's not the same.
Matt: It's not.
Lauren: It's not.
Matt: You're right.
Lauren: It's not the same.
Matt: It’s 100% not the same at all.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And maybe marketplace is a term that does it injustice. But that's, that's what they're called.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: So that's what I’ll stick with. But you're right. These are nothing like, you know – or the experience is nothing like being on Amazon or even Bookshop, or some of the others that we'll talk about. And the experience is different. So you're 100% right. But what makes a marketplace different than, let's say, the group we just talked about where they're direct assisted, or the group we're going to talk about next, which is ecommerce solutions like Shopify. Marketplaces are different because their biggest feature, their biggest advantage, is that they spend money and time driving traffic to their marketplace.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So it's great for discoverability. Which is what Amazon used to be. Great for discoverability.
Lauren: Right. Right.
Matt: So if you're... if you're okay doing some work to build your own little storefront area and you want to skip over that direct assisted experience because you want to benefit from some built -n traffic and market share, then you might want to try this step before going full blown, you know, Shopify or full customized store.
Lauren: This is a pretty solid hybrid step in, in the middle here. Where it's like you're still getting kind of some control and some, some remarketing opportunities, some opportunities to, you know, make the storefront your own, but also accessing an existing audience and existing traffic. You're not exclusively responsible for being the one to send traffic – and I absolutely, like me personally, Etsy is one of the places that I'll go to.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And like, just kind of browse and see and –
Matt: But that's one of the other benefits too, you just touched on.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: So, you know, the first bucket, you’re basically selling your book. With Etsy or some of these other marketplaces, you can sell multiple products, so you can sell your book, but you can also start dabbling with merch. If you write, you know, sci-fi and fantasy and, and you've got some, you know, character merch or things like that that you've been wanting to try. Or something to do with, you know, a world or a realm or whatever that might be, like. These are also great options to be able to sell multiple types of products in one storefront.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: One of the other differentiators here is that you have a couple of different options when you build an Etsy storefront. You can manually fulfill. And this is important to understand.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: If you're selling print and you choose to manually fulfill, it means it's your responsibility. So you'll need to order copies of your book ahead of time, and you'll need to have them on hand so that when you get an order, you can pack it and ship it. There are a lot of print-on-demand providers and other fulfillment companies that have built plugins and things for Etsy. And Lulu you can use on Etsy if you, if you create a zap on Zapier. So there are ways that you can also achieve automated fulfillment still using something like a marketplace like Etsy.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: And I just wanted to be clear on that because, you know, again, that first bucket is truly hands off. Books By, Stack, they have automated fulfillment tools that, that can, can help do that for you. And then digital delivery is obviously, you know, super simple. The important thing here is that as you get into this hybrid marketplaces, fulfillment is also a bit hybrid. You can choose to do manual, or you can choose from an assortment of, of providers that will plug in and do it for you.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Like Printful and Printify some of those others, they have plugins for Etsy where again, if you're going to sell merch or things like that, you can automate some of that stuff and make your life a little bit easier. I've not actually used one of those plugins on Etsy. I don't have an Etsy store. It's one of the ones I didn't necessarily try out. But I've, I've heard and seen from others that it is pretty easy. It's great, again, for people who they need some more discoverability, because maybe your email list is not very big and you've not been doing much advertising, and your social media game is a little weak. Any marketplace you can get yourself into that has built-in traffic and discoverability is going to be a huge help. So. Yeah. What were some of the other ones that you wanted to mention? The platforms?
Lauren: I think Fourthwall and Gumroad are both platforms –
Matt: Yup.
Lauren: – that could be, or marketplaces rather, that could be worth exploring. And I'm also going to throw TikTok Shop into the ring.
Matt: Yup. You have to, right?
Lauren: TikTok Shop is a huge –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – huge marketplace. But I also would – I would keep it almost separate from... Like, to me, TikTok Shop and Instagram are two different –
Matt: Sure. Yeah, yeah.
Lauren: – things. You know?
Matt: Yep.
Lauren: And I think that that is, it's kind of worth approaching as it's own thing.
Matt: That’s true.
Lauren: Even though it is hosted on a social media platform.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: I would almost approach it with a different mindset.
Matt: I agree. Because it also has a lot of different rules and stuff too.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: And it's really very much confined to its own ecosystem. Whereas some of these others you can, you know, kind of drive traffic and play with it and like, TikTok Shop is its own thing.
Lauren: Yup.
Matt: Like, there's no going outside of the ecosystem. And even within that ecosystem, they have a lot of somewhat confusing rules around fulfillment and some other things. So be careful with that one. But absolutely.
Lauren: Yeah, you do have to – We see people selling books on TikTok all the time.
Matt: Of course.
Lauren: And you absolutely can.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: But you probably do have to, have to do your own manual fulfillment on that in order to –
Matt: Yes and no
Lauren: – stay within the confines of their fulfillment rules.
Matt: That's where a lot of the arguments are, like they –
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: They do have some rules. Just be aware of that. Do your research, do your homework. But yeah, I won't go any further on that one.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: That could be a whole episode in and of itself.
Lauren: It probably will be at some point.
Matt: Don’t get any ideas. No. No, it should be. We'll see.
Lauren: We'll talk about it at some point.
Matt: We’ll flip for that one.
Lauren: Okay.
Matt: Or we'll play like, some Uno or something. I'm really good at Uno.
Lauren: Yeah. I had a feeling you were good – the fact that you pulled that out, I was like, wait, I'm – you’re setting me up to lose here.
Matt: So again, pros and cons to marketplaces. You have a built in audience. You know, there's already traffic coming to it. There's people like Lauren surfing around looking for weird gothic stuff and might stumble across your book. Somewhat easy set up and management. Again, you know, they've been doing this a long time, so to set up an Etsy store is not rocket science. It's not complicated. Like the others you’re gonna pay for some platform use or, or things like that. So not a big deal. You're going to be limited in customization and personalization and, you know, things like that. Like Etsy is not going to let you go crazy with the color palette or, you know, uploading a ton of photos of yourself or, you know, there's not a huge About You section, but that's okay. Again, limited control over customer data and relationship data. You might get some. You won't get all of it. But any little bit is helpful.
Lauren: Yeah. Which is why, again, we said this is kind of like a hybrid or a bridge solution here.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Where like, this is not completely selling direct in the sense that you have unlimited access to, to collect –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – any and all customer data. But there is still that like, you have the opportunity to build some kind of direct relationship with your customers.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: That are shopping on Etsy or any of the other marketplaces.
Matt: Yeah. And again, it's, it's one step closer to, to more of an, an owned channel, right? Like, you know, again, we're never going to convince people not to use Amazon.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: But our goal is to, convince people not to send hard-earned traffic and customers to Amazon. Let Amazon send customers to you. That's the, the, the real play. So you know, in this scenario, again, you don't get to keep all customer data and things like that. But you're going to get some of it. And if you're going to drive customers somewhere, drive them here instead of Amazon.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: You know what I mean? Here you have a better chance of being able to remarket to them, to get them over to more of an owned instance when you're ready for that, whether that's a Shopify store or something else. Or at least get them onto your mailing list so that you can begin remarketing other titles and stuff like that. So I do think it's a great bridge, you know, to go from somewhat owned to fully owned. Which is the next bucket we'll talk about.
Lauren: Sure is.
[19:47] - Using Ecommerce Plugins
Matt: So we've talked about direct assisted platforms. We've talked about marketplace platforms. Next bucket is...what?
Lauren: Ecommerce.
Matt: That's our favorite.
Lauren: That's – obviously you've heard us talk about this one once or twice.
Matt: You're probably tired of hearing us talk about this.
Lauren: I'm tired of talking about it.
Matt: Are you really?
Lauren: Absolutely not.
Matt: I hope not, cause you’re talking about it in London in a couple of weeks.
Lauren: Wow. It is in a couple of weeks.
Matt: Yep. I don't think I've even shared the online with you yet, have I?
Lauren: You sent me the, the description doc and that was it.
Matt: Oh yeah.
Lauren: I have the like, the one paragraph summary.
Matt:We'll just get up there winging it. It’s what we always do.
Lauren: Sounds good. It’s fine. It’s fine.
Matt: Ecommerce solutions.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: These are our favorites. These are Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce. There’re others. We focus on those three because they tend to be the easiest, most robust platforms. But there's others that are coming up. There are others that are already out there, they're just a little more abstract. I think a lot of people use… What’s it called, ThriveCart?
Lauren: ThriveCart. Yes. Which actually does have, I learned this very recently. ThriveCart, on their website, actually does have instructions for how to integrate Lulu's API to ThriveCart.
Matt: Whoa.
Lauren: And our API team is aware of that.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: And they said it is actually like pretty, like their, their instructions are actually like pretty good.
Matt: There you go.
Lauren: – if you're somebody who wants to use our API solutions and ThriveCart is kind of your bridge for that, that is an option. We already said Zapier for – or Zapier, or whatever for –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – like, if, if that's, if you want to connect to Lulu Direct, but it's not one, like your website is built on a platform that isn't one of the three –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – that we have plugins for, they – there are ways to work around this.
Matt: If you have an existing website. That's right.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: We've talked about this before, like Justin Moore, he uses Framer. That's the, the website platform that he uses. But he used the API.
Lauren: I know a lot of people –
Matt: Because we didn’t have a plugin for Framer.
Lauren: Right. And Square is the other one that a lot of people that I've spoken to, that's been kind of a roadblock for them. That their website is already built on Square, but you can work around that.
Matt: Yup.
Lauren: It’s gonna take a little bit of effort on your part. You might need to outsource it to somebody with a little more like, tech savvy than you, but it is still doable.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Absolutely. We actually talked about – we did an episode a while back, episode 31, that was Your 7 Step Guide to Building an Online Bookstore. And we broke down a lot of the... I mean, seven steps, obviously. But we broke down really like a lot of what you need, specifically, to actually build an ecommerce store. Whether you're building your website from scratch or plugging any of these solutions into your existing site.
Matt: It's probably all still valid, I would imagine.
Lauren: I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure it is. We'll link it in the show notes. And if we figure out that it is, that there's any outdated information in there, maybe we rerecord it. Updated.
Matt: Maybe.
Lauren: Maybe.
Matt: You're, you're just reaching for job security now.
Lauren: We – you know what we actually should have done? With episode 101, we should have just started back from zero.
Matt: Started rerecording them all?
Lauren: And just – Yup. Just completely redid like, beat for beat every episode.
Matt: That's a strategy. Probably not one we want to employ, but.
Lauren: No, probably not.
Matt: Ecommerce solutions. So this is the... This is the only way to get a true direct sales experience from end to end.
Lauren: Yup.
Matt: But it obviously brings with it, you know, a lot of work.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: It's fairly easy to get one of these up and running. But continuing to build and expand upon that. Adding more titles, adding more shipping regions, it's, it's work. It's not terribly hard, but it is work, and... It's beneficial. I mean, there's no better way to control the customer experience from beginning to end and grow your business and capture all that data. Realize 100%, you know, profit margin. Or profits, I should say. If you got 100% profit margin, that's great too. But, it's really the only way to do it. Obviously, like we just talked about, you can also just have a site and use our APIs. But the point is having more of an owned space where... You know, again, on a marketplace, they have final say.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: You know, you could wake up the next morning, tomorrow morning and realize that somehow or another one of your books violated the terms and services of, of Etsy, and they, they were upset about your gay hockey romance fling novel and they decided to shut you down. They have that power. I don't know that they would, but they do. When you have your own space, nobody can really tell you what to do with that. And it's pretty much yours.
Lauren: Yeah. This is the only way to have complete ownership and complete control over your ecommerce. Your store, your customer experience, whatever it is that you want to do, this is the only solution. And yes, it is definitely the one – of the, the three different things that we've talked about here, it's definitely the one that requires the most work. But just like we talked about in the episode that we did recently on moving from manual to automated fulfillment, this is a thing that requires work upfront so that you can build out workflows that are going to run themselves. So it's work at the beginning –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – that is going to ultimately make your day to day easier in the long run.
Matt: Yeah. And again, so if you started with one of the other two solutions, whether it was like a Books By site or an Etsy store, and you realized like, this is, this is definitely for me. This is what I want to do. This is your next step.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: To build something more permanent and automated. You know, you can set it and forget it and make money while you sleep type of deal. And then just maintain and make updates to your store as you get new titles, or you want to release in new geographic areas, things like that. I look at it as like a, almost a LEGOs approach. Like, you know, Shopify or Wix or Woo is the, the foundation. It's the, the flat plate. And then each of the things that you need, you just plug – They have plugins for everything, you know? So Lulu, for all your print-on-demand and fulfillment stuff. They have plugins for doing your taxes, plugins for email marketing, plugins for social media marketing. You can build basically an entirely automated little ecommerce empire. And again, yeah, it takes some time, but you just do a little bit at a time and before you know it... again, you've got a full blown business that, for the most part, is primarily automated. And I think that's really cool. Like that's my favorite part about that. So that's why I get so excited about Shopify stuff.
Lauren: This is why we'll never get tired of talking about ecommerce solutions and –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – direct sales and selling direct and all of that. I also totally
Matt: I'll tell you one thing though.
Lauren: Yeah?
Matt: It's not to say that Shopify doesn't their issues. I mean –
Lauren: Sure.
Matt: – Shopify’s not perfect, but no platform is.
Lauren: No.
Matt: I'm not paid by Shopify, unless they want to come stroked me a check, I won't turn it away. But I have found after playing with a lot of them, and obviously we, you know, have built integrations for several of them, that Shopify tends to be the easiest, most widely sort of used. And they're just continually updating and building new things. That being said, Shopify is also notorious at times for, you know, changing their, their policies or pricing sometimes. Nothing that I've seen so far has led me to be like, screw you guys, I'm out of here. But, you know, if you do some research, you're going to see some of those things. Just know that that's normal. They all do it. I think Shopify is probably the best of them, in my opinion, but I know other people have had really good experiences with Wix, WooCommerce, and even some of the others like Thrivecart and a few of the others we've talked about.
Lauren: Yeah, I think that's a really, that's a really fair point, when you're looking at these different options, whether it's any of these like, higher level solutions or the individual options within them. Make sure that you're kind of comparing some of the options on the different platforms if you're turned off by something. So if –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – you’re looking at it and you're saying like, oh, well this one costs money to use... they all cost money to use. What they cost – maybe there is one that's, that's more affordable than the other ones, but all of these there is going to be some kind of access fee, subscription fee.
Matt: That's right.
Lauren: Like, platform hosting fee, whatever it is. So, you know, if you're immediately like turned away by like, oh, well, this one, this one I have to pay for, what can I go find that's a free solution? You might not find a free solution.
Matt: And by the way, for everybody that’s listening and goes, well, it's free to sell on Amazon. No it's not.
Lauren: No it’s not.
Matt: That's why you walk away with a dollar or two for every copy you sell. Because they're taking everything else.
Lauren: Yeah, it's just built in.
Matt: That's right. So, we get that all the time, where it's like, why would I sell direct when I can sell for free on Amazon? You're not selling for free on Amazon. At all. They're taking your customer and they're taking eighty to eighty-five percent of your royalties, like. So. Just choose your poison. You know?
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And quite frankly, $39 a month for Shopify, in my opinion, as long as you're selling, you know, multiple copies of your book every month or more, it's nothing. That is nothing to have such a robust, like, home base, to own your business and be able to move, you know, quite frankly, globally from there.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: In a very easy sort of way. So. What are the pros and cons of ecommerce solutions?
Lauren: I mean, we've covered a lot of them already.
Matt: That’s true.
Lauren: There's, there's definitely the, you know, having that access to your customer data. Which, you have unlimited access – I mean, you have unlimited access to what you're asking for, or what you, what you can potentially get from them. You know, you're not, you're not gonna just get a dossier with everyone's first name, last name, address, phone number, credit card, social security number, and everything else in between. But you have the opportunity to collect emails, collect addresses, whatever it is, that you might not have on some of those other options. You also, when you're selling on your own store versus selling on a marketplace, are not competing with other stores. You know? There is that element, in the same way – And I know it's, we've, we've talked about, we literally just said when you're selling on Amazon, you're competing with other products and other stores. Yes, that is true on marketplaces as well. You are competing with the other store owners on there. But you have to weigh like, does the discoverability element outweigh the competition? And there are absolutely ways to make yourself stand out from the competition –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: But in an ecommerce solution, there is no competition. It's just you. Once you've gotten them to your website, there's no one else there that can get their attention.
Matt: Yeah, and that's the goal.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: For sure. Ecommerce solutions, like we said, they do require some, some more extensive setup. You are going to be responsible for building out your shipping regions and stuff like that. But there's a lot of great help articles on, on Shopify and Wix and Woo that'll help you with that. Lulu has a lot of resources around that. We have an onboarding team here that they're pretty much experts in that stuff too. So there are resources. There's solutions there to help you. Like, I wouldn't let that deter you. I do know that a lot of people, they hit that point where they have to start building their shipping regions or messing with taxes, and they get freaked out and they just don't. They don't move forward, they stop. But it really isn't that bad. If you just push through and you get your hands on the resources, it's not that bad at all.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And once you get it done, you can have a really great store. And again, yeah, there's, there's fees and things. So, you know, generally the lowest plan on Shopify is $39 a month. And I think Wix and WooCommerce are very similar in price. And that basically includes everything you need to have a fully functioning, you know, website in store. They'll process transactions for you. And then the money just goes right into your account.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: That's the other beauty of it as well. You know, when you're selling on retailers like Amazon or even through Ingram, and some of the other channels, you have to wait sixty days minimum for your money.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: Sometimes more. When you are doing ecommerce and some of the marketplaces and some of the direct assisted. So all three of the buckets we've talked about. You're going to get that money within a matter of forty-eight to seventy-two hours, sometimes faster. In my Shopify store, the money's there almost immediately. I think technically they have to tell you between twenty-four and seventy-two hours, but I've never had a book sale on my Shopify store where the money wasn't in there immediately. You know, like, it's, it's that simple. And then that's what I connect my production to. So when somebody buys a book on my Shopify store, the order gets transmitted to Lulu. I have my Shopify card on file with Lulu. So the same account that the book money went into, the full retail price, the shipping and everything, that's where Lulu's pulling the production cost out of. All the profit is still left in my account, so I'm just paying the manufacturing out of that. So I'm literally no money up front, no money out of pocket. My entire operation is completely automated. I can sell books and make money while I'm sleeping.
Lauren: Wow, you're really good at this.
Matt: Took a long time to figure out.
Lauren: That you're good at this?
Matt: No, that – to figure out how to do it.
Lauren: Nah, you've been doing this for longer than that. Because we did a whole episode on how direct sales actually work. So going through that.
Matt: That's right, yeah.
Lauren: And not just on like building out your store, but that actually like, how do the sales and transactions work from end to end and stuff like that? I'll link that one in the show notes too, if you want to dive deeper into the, the process that Matt just talked about.
Matt: Yeah.
[33:43] - Choosing the Right Solution for You
Lauren: So we've covered the three different kind of options here, for how you're going to go about managing your direct sales, choosing which solution is right for you. Let's actually talk about how to actually go ahead and choose which of those paths.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Which is hopefully what it says on the title of this episode. So we should probably cover that a little bit.
Matt: So I think there's two approaches here. You can take the Lauren approach, and create a spreadsheet and a matrix with columns for how much control do you want, how much time do you want to spend building it, how much money do you invest, you know? And go on down the list of all the things that are important to you. And then down this side, you can put all the different, platforms or, you know, marketplaces, platforms, all of those things. And you can go through and do a full blown matrix, if you will. Or you can do the Matt solution, which is just whichever one your gut tells you you'll actually follow through with.
Lauren: Both of those are great, great options. You know, those logic puzzles that are the like –
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: – would, I'm sure it wouldn't surprise you to know that as a kid, I loved those.
Matt: It would not surprise me to know that you loved those.
Lauren: It would not surprise you at all.
Matt: Nope.
Lauren: But yes, there are definitely – and, and I think that in all three of these there is kind of... it's like a spectrum of, you know, what matters to you, which things matter more than others. You know, in some cases, if you're like, I don't really care about controlling the aesthetic or branding. Like, I'm fine using whatever template is provided for me, or I am fine with my storefront looking the same as everyone else's, then that's lower on your list of priorities. For some people that branding, having that like, complete creative control where it is, it is like part of your ecosystem in every way possible and looks indistinguishable from everything else about your brand, then that's much higher up on your priority list, and you want to make sure that you choose an option that allows you complete custom and creative control. So I think the the three main questions that you want to ask yourself are: How much control do you want? How much time and or money do you want to invest? And how important is owning customer data and the customer experience to you?
Matt: For me it was easy.
Lauren: Yeah?
Matt: I wanted full control.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: And I wanted all my customer data. And I wasn't overly concerned about my investment of time and or money. So like I said, I went with my gut and I just knew that those things were – That's what was important to me, and those were some of the other things that weren't so important to me. So I that's why I went the Shopify route. But I do agree, I think when, when you're sitting down to plan out which path you want to try for direct sales, those are probably the most important things you could ask. Cause I think for most people, when they don't think about it that way and they don't understand these different types of paths that you have, they just jump right in to what is probably most commonly talked about. You know, Shopify or some of the others. And they're not prepared, I think, for sometimes the level of time it might take or financial investment for certain things. For me it was, again, a no brainer. I think those are, those are the important questions to ask, you’re right.
Lauren: Yeah. I think it's also not necessarily a question, but something that's important to keep in mind while you're going through this is that immediate solutions are only good for the short term. You want to think about something that is going to grow with your business. You want to think about scalability. You want to think about, you know, something that hopefully, if your goal is to build a long term business strategy here, you want something that's going to last. You want something that five years from now, your business has grown exponentially, and your tech stack or your ecommerce solutions or whatever have grown with you. Like, keep that goal in mind – and if, and – it's okay if the answer is genuinely like, no, I want to sell this one book that I have, and I just want a quick and easy ecommerce solution to sell this one book. It's a part of a bigger ecosystem, but it's just the one book and I don't really care about like, building an empire out of this. I just want a good solution, a simple solution that'll let me sell this one book. That's great. You can do that. But if your goal is is long term growth and scalability, that should be a factor that you consider while you're deciding on your solutions here.
Matt: Yeah. And again, you know, it could be a graduated approach. You can start with a Books By site or a Stack site. You could then go on and start incorporating, you know, some marketplace presence like, you know, Etsy or one of these others. And the whole time behind the scenes, you could be building out a Shopify store and getting ready to launch like your full scale, fully direct, fully branded, you know, experience. And some people do that.
Lauren: Yup.
Matt: And, you know, once you launch that, you can slowly taper out the other two if you want. Or leave them in play for a while, it just depends. But. Yeah. So I think you said that upfront. You know, it doesn't have to be an either or necessarily, it can be a this and then a this and then a that for a total thing. Right? That's how I do math.
Lauren: That's perfect.
Matt: Maths.
Lauren: But yes, I agree, I actually think that framing this as choosing which path is right for you might actually kind of be a trick. A trick statement –
Matt: No, I – I think for –
Lauren: – because I think that all roads lead to the same place in the end.
Matt: Maybe, yeah. But I do think some people need a very distinct path to start with.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: I just wanted to make the point that, you know, similar to what you said, ultimately your goal should be to get to a fully owned state. Unless you're one of those one out of ten who, again, like you said, is just looking to sell this book. No bells and whistles, not even like your big thing. Like you just – and that's okay. So.
Lauren: Yeah.
[40:12] - Stocking Your Toolkit
Matt: Yeah. Now, we did touch on a few other things. Especially when you, when you think about – I like when you say tech stack, I think more appropriately your ecom stack is what we're talking about.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: When you decide to head that path, or if you decide that is the path for you, or it's just the end goal is to get to a place where you're building a Shopify store, a Wix store, or something like that, a true ecommerce storefront. There's a lot of tools and plugins that you can build into that to build your ecommerce stack. Your most important should be your email list.
Lauren: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean it's a, it's an essential part of this. If for no other reason than the fact that the whole point of selling direct is to have that customer data, and be able to remarket to them, and to be able to speak to them directly. And you can't do that if you don't have an email system.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So you absolutely need to have an email service provider. A lot of these solutions will also let you, connect to your ESP directly to them for the things like the transactional emails –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: – that you'll be sending.
Matt: Yup.
Lauren: So that you have things like your cart abandonment or your post-purchase follow ups, things like that. So if you already have something and if you're using something like MailChimp or Klaviyo or Kit or whatever, you can plug those right into your...
Matt: There's so many of them.
Lauren: Yeah, there's, there's – truly, there's so many.
Matt: And they all basically pretty much will work.
Lauren: Yes. And they all have, you know, they all have different, different levels in terms of what they offer you. They all – some of them are much more entry-level than others. Some of them are very scalable. Some of them very expensive, some of them very cheap. So definitely do your research on those.
Matt: Email is your most important one.
Lauren: But yes, if you're – yes.
Matt: Social media, there's no guarantee that people are going to see your posts. You could do website ads, you can do all kinds of other things. The only way to guarantee that somebody will have access to your message is if it lands in their inbox.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: Or their mailbox, their physical mailbox. Now, as to whether or not they're going to open that email, that's up to you and how clever you are. But email marketing is still the number one way to communicate with your buyer, reader, customer, whatever you want to refer to them as. That's why it is the most important channel to start building as soon as you can. Even before you have a website if possible. Like start, start building an email list as soon as you can.
Lauren: I had this conversation recently at Momentum and I was asking Paul Gowder and Jeff Sieh and Lou and everybody there like – What, you know, how soon in, in like launching a content channel, if I know that, like, I'm not right away gonna be sending emails to people, but I know eventually I probably will. At what point do I want to start collecting emails? And they were like –
Matt: Yesterday.
Lauren: – literally day one. Like, you don't you don't launch a content channel without having a way to collect emails at the same time. Even if it takes you a year to send your first email to anybody. Day one.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And they know what they're talking about. So I take their word for it.
Matt: Yeah, I would agree with that.
Lauren: Yes. There are also a lot of solutions that you can use to help you with customer relationships and customer relationship development. And I'm kind of using that as a, as a catch-all for a number of different things. A lot of people that are selling direct are bundling that into some kind of subscription. So if you're using a paid subscription platforms like Shopify subscriptions, ThriveCart also has a subscriptions thing, Gumroad also has one. Which is not to be confused with something like memberships.
Matt: Right.
Lauren: Which would be more like those community-based platforms like Mighty Networks or Patreon, Memberful, Kit, Circle. All of those like, have all these things built in there.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And then I do also like, we don't talk a whole lot about customer support solutions. We've done an episode on this, one or two, where we've talked about, you know, providing manual customer support. But there are also tools that you can integrate to help you out with that as well. Some of them are directly within the different – like Shopify or, Gorgias? Gorgias. I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
Matt: I think you said it right.
Lauren: But has – is a Shopify integration that you can help manage your customer support on there. There's also, Re:amaze has a Shopify integration and also a social integration. So you can connect your like DMs.
Matt: The social one would be extremely helpful.
Lauren: Yes, absolutely. So you know, depending on on what type of customer relationship you're trying to build, whether it's subscription, membership, support, whatever, there are absolutely tools and plugins that can help you out with that.
Matt: Yeah. Another one is, is automations, workflows. So for those of you that are a little more advanced in building out your tech stack, your ecommerce stack, and you're already experimenting with creating automations for yourself and workflows. There are lots of tools, platforms that you can use for that. Zapier. Zapier is one it's probably been around for I’d say the longest so far. I mean, that I can think of anyways.
Lauren: Yeah, we should probably figure out how to pronounce...
Matt: But there's a lot of other newer ones that are also incorporating a lot of AI. So Make and Bolt and a few others will help you automate different activities and workflows that again, you can truly be hands off once you get all these things set up, and... Automation and workflows really refers to things, you know, an order workflow, for example, or a customer service workflow. If you get an email that comes in to, let's say, info@Laurensdisneyexperience.com, you could have an automation or a workflow set up where that that email triggers a certain thing to happen. And then what happens is an AI agent will kick in and respond to that email and create a ticket or whatever, you know. So depending on your level of support or the other things that you're doing, some of these automations and workflows could be really helpful. The obvious ones, again, are your fulfillment automations and workflows using like Lulu Direct and stuff like that. So.
Lauren: Yeah. Disney, that's not a real email. Please don't sue me for copyright infringement.
Matt: That would be funny if you got a cease and desist.
Lauren: Hey, it meant they were paying attention to us.
Matt: Oh that's fair. Who knows? Analytics.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: You know, you don't necessarily need a special tool for analytics per se. At least not in the beginning, until you get to a point where you might want to build out some more complex dashboards and things to, to grow and scale your business. I think for most people, what's internal to the platforms you're using is usually good enough. Shopify has some pretty good metrics and analytics built in. I've not found myself yet going, I wish they would show me this, or how can I get more of this? But if you're one who's actually putting some effort into driving traffic to your, your website and some other locations, you may want to, you know, use Google Analytics and plug in with that, although GA4 is not so great. But whatever, you do you. I think for the most part, all of the platforms have their proprietary built in metrics, and for the most part, they're okay. Again, if you wanted to get really technical about it and build yourself a way to integrate all those platform metrics into one dashboard, you – there are lots of tools out there, AI generated stuff that you could get your hands on that would give you a nice, neat and tidy dashboard from all your – So if you're using Shopify and Lulu Direct and, you know, Kit for email and all these other things, you could probably build yourself, you know, an all encompassing dashboard that just piped all your metrics into one place.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: But for the most part, I think what the tools provide is good.
Lauren: Yeah. So this was actually in the reverse of the way the rest of this episode was set up. This whole bit was set up in order from highest priority to lowest priority. So if you are putting together your tech stack or ecommerce stack or whatever you want to call it, your solutions, your tool kit, whatever. Number one priority, after you secure your actual sales options, whatever, is email. And then I – and I would say as you’re, if you're running through that list and saying, okay what do I need for this, what do I need for this, what do I need for this? Analytics, you probably don't need anything. Realistically.
Matt: Beyond what you have.
Lauren: Beyond what you – Right.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah.
Lauren: Like, you already have access to everything you need. If you want to get really granular or really, really robust, then maybe look into some additional tools for that. But I would start with what you already have.
Matt: Yeah
Lauren: For sure.
Matt: Yeah, I agree with that. Again, I've not had any point where I was like, man, I wish I had more of this. So.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
[49:36] - Episode Wrap Up
Matt: Gosh, I had something I was going to say and now I can't remember what it was. What are you reading right now?
Lauren: I'm actually. I have two different holds that I am next on the list from Libby right now, but.
Matt: Oh my god. Just go buy the book.
Lauren: Well. I really was looking specifically for an audiobook. Because I have a lot of like – we're about to be traveling a lot.
Matt: That's true.
Lauren: Starting with this upcoming weekend. So I have a lot of like, packing and prep and stuff that I have to do. So audiobooks are great for that. And the audiobook that I'm waiting for right now is in Enshittification by Cory Doctorow.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So I'm hoping to get that. Like, if I could get that today or tomorrow, that would be great.
Matt: Just go buy it.
Lauren: The audiobook?
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Eh. We'll see.
Matt: I can't – nevermind.
Lauren: I try not to buy audiobooks unless I know it's one I'm gonna re-listen to.
Matt: So Christoph had mentioned that to me. That one. And then Caleb Dempsey had also posted about it on LinkedIn. And that's one that I've got on my list, I haven’t got to it yet, but.
Lauren: Yeah, I'll let you know if it's good.
Matt: Yeah. I've heard several people say it was pretty good.
Lauren: Yeah. I was actually, I was in Quail Ridge over the weekend and they had it on their Staff Picks shelf too. So somebody, one of the staff members there had also –
Matt: Maybe I'll just go pick it up there. Actually, I'll be over by Quail Ridge tonight. Yeah. Maybe I'll stop by there and grab it.
Lauren: Do it. Worth it. What are you reading?
Matt: I just finished a book by John Dickson Carr. He's a murder mystery writer. I'm still on that kick. This one was set in London, old London, which is really cool.
Lauren: Fun.
Matt: It was called The Lost Gallows. But now I'm back to, I got my other – So I had run out of books by Seishi Yokomizo.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: But Pushkin has translated and published a few more, so I had to order those off Bookshop and they finally came. So I'm going to jump back into one of those.
Lauren: Great.
Matt: Yeah. There's three more and they've got another one they're translating that's going to get released in June, I think. So as long as they –
Lauren: Well you better slow down.
Matt: Well. He wrote like seventy-seven of these.
Lauren: I know, you said.
Matt: So I'm hoping that Pushkin got the rights to all of them, to translate all of them. But we'll see.
Lauren: I don't think I have any friends at Pushkin, but.
Matt: Maybe I'll make some in London Book Fair.
Lauren: Yeah that’s – I feel like that's, that's your in.
Matt: Oh, man. That's that's. Listen kids, that's the importance to rights. Like foreign rights.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: I don't care what language you write your books in, you never know when they're going to get discovered at one point in time and who's going to want to translate them and get hooked on reading them. So, I mean, I never thought I would have fallen into Japanese murder mystery as much as I have, but.
Lauren: And you never could have if it wasn't for –
Matt: Exactly.
Lauren: – translated editions being available to you.
Matt: Yeah. So shout out to Pushkin, again.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Or Pushkin Vertigo, whatever.
Lauren: If you, if that's, if that sparked your interest in any way shape or form, we did do an episode on international book rights about a year ago.
Matt: Foreign rights.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah.
Lauren: So.
Matt: Less than a year ago.
Lauren: Yeah. Because it was right after London Book Fair last year. So.
Matt: Shortly after, yeah.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And we have a partnership with DropCap actually. So if you're an indie published author, DropCap is the only place that has a marketplace for you as an indie published author where you can go and sign up and have your book put in their marketplace for foreign publishers to find it. Justin Moore did that and almost immediately after signing up with DropCap... I think had a Taiwan publisher purchase the rights.
Lauren: Wow.
Matt: And I think he has another one interested. But yeah, anyways. So did Louis and a few others, actually.
Lauren: Cool.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah.
Lauren: Cool. Alright, yeah. Well, check that out. I'll link that in the show notes.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And some other resources too. So help yourself. Everything's going to be there. Of course, you can always just tune in next week to another new episode where we'll talk about something else. Until then, please like and subscribe if you haven't already. You can check us out on any of Lulu’s social channels, on YouTube. You can leave comments on Spotify, reviews on Apple Podcasts. And you can email us at podcast@lulu.com.
Matt: That's correct.
Lauren: Yeah. So thanks for listening everyone.
Matt: Later.
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Of course, we’ll see what comes of this, but it’s starting to look like this administration won’t outlast this level of judicial scrutiny. It may have bullied its way past courts during Trump’s first year back in office, but now lines are being drawn. Whether or not those lines matter is an open question. But the important thing is that they’re being drawn. All the government has to do is cross them. And there’s no reason to believe it won’t.
This is not the only court drawing these lines. The administration has already been hit with hundreds of adverse rulings. Multiple courts have threatened contempt sanctions. Some courts have even begun making those threats a reality.
Trump may flood the zone, but now it’s clear the zone is willing to flood right back. Stare into the abyss, etc. Judges are done with dealing with this shady AF administration. They’re putting in the (legal) papers that Trump got mad.
This is from a recent order [PDF] handed down by a New Jersey federal court:
The Government’s handling of Petitioner’s detention is emblematic of its approach to immigration enforcement in this state. On the merits, its detentions are illegal. The Government knows this. Its reliance on Section 1225 has been roundly rejected.
“Roundly rejected.” Just like prior restraint. This is active and ongoing restraint. And while it doesn’t do much to the First Amendment, it certainly does plenty of damage to other amendments dealing with the deprivation of personal liberty.
The court goes on to point out that the US Attorney for New Jersey has conceded to “violating 72 orders” issued in immigration cases handled in this jurisdiction alone. And yet, nothing changes. The US Attorney claimed the violations were “unintentional.” The court disagrees.
Sadly, the well-deserved credibility once attached to that distinguished Office is now a presumption that “has been sadly eroded.” The Government’s continued actions after being called to task can now only be deemed intentional.
This is how it goes from here. The judge says any further arrests or detentions in violation of this order will result in mandatory testimony under oath, if not actual sanctions. It’s not the best threat I’ve ever heard, but it’s still more than most courts are willing to do, even as the administration continues to pretend courts are mere nuisances, rather than an integral part of the American republic that constitutionally has as much power as the Executive Branch.
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栄冠 (えいかん) — laurels 冠婚葬祭 (かんこんそうさい) — important ceremonial occasions in family relationships 王冠 (おうかん) — crown 冠水 (かんすい) — being covered with water (i.e., in a flood) 冠動脈 (かんどうみゃく) — coronary artery 冠雪 (かんせつ) — covering of snow (esp. on a mountain) 弱冠 (じゃっかん) — twenty years of age 冠する (かんする) — to crown 冠者 (かざ) — young person 冠たる (かんたる) — best
Got problems? Yes, you do! Email your question for the column to mailbox@savage.love!
by Dan Savage
1. My boyfriend swears he’s cut. I say he’s totally uncut. He insists he was circumcised as an infant. How do I convince him? Some circumcisions are “tight” (all of the foreskin removed) and others are “loose” (most of the foreskin left intact). The looser the circumcision, the more “uncut” a man’s cock might appear. So, it’s entirely possible your boyfriend was circumcised as an infant but that his cock — if his circumcision was loose — more closely resembles uncut cocks you’ve admired in porn and encountered IRL. P.S. For the record: Your boyfriend should not have been circumcised in infancy. No infant should be. 2. What’s the best song about cheating? I nominate “One Way Out” by the Allman Brothers. There are so many greats — “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “The Piña Colada Song,” “Don’t Hurt Yourself” — but in the category of “Best Song About Cheating,”…
We’ve said it over and over again on this site: when you stand up to the bully, the bully backs down. When you capitulate, you get nothing but a permanent stain and an invitation for more abuse.
And here we are again.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration plans to abandon its defense of the executive orders sanctioning law firms that dared to represent clients the president didn’t like. The Justice Department is expected to drop its appeals of four separate trial-court rulings that struck down Trump’s actions against Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey.
The fact that these attacks were legal losers is no surprise. We called this out as unconstitutional nonsense when Trump first started targeting law firms. The courts agreed, with judge after judge striking down the orders as unconstitutional retaliation. But it was at least a little surprising that the Trump admin just gave up on this fight, rather than continuing its losing streak. As the WSJ reports:
An ideological mix of judges ruled against the administration, saying the executive orders undermined bedrock principles of the U.S. legal system. In one decision, Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said blocking the sanctions was necessary to preserve an “independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting.”
In another decision, Judge Beryl Howell, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said even more cuttingly, “This action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.'”
So the firms that fought back—the ones that read the Constitution and believed it still meant something—won a total, complete victory. The administration folded. The executive orders are dead.
But, the story of the firms that fought and won is actually the less interesting part of this saga. The far more consequential story is about the firms that didn’t fight. The ones that looked at a blatantly unconstitutional executive order and decided the smart play was to grovel.
Led by Paul Weiss, nine large law firms decided to cut deals with the administration rather than challenge what was an obviously hollow legal threat. They promised nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes favored by the administration. They effectively paid a cowardice tax—tribute to a bully who, it turns out, had no actual leverage over them.
And what did they get for it?
While the administration lost its battle in court, the executive orders nonetheless put a lasting chill on the industry. Fear of the orders prompted nine large firms to make deals with the president, promising nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes favored by the administration. Many of the same firms that took a leading role opposing the Trump administration in court during his first term have shied away from taking on pro bono cases adverse to the government.
That “lasting chill” the WSJ describes is real, but it was from the law firms themselves, not the executive orders. By capitulating, those firms validated the threat and made it seem scarier than it ever actually was. Every firm that cut a deal told the world: “This threat is credible enough that we—supposedly the top lawyers in the country—would rather surrender than fight.” And by doing so, they made it harder for every other firm to stand up. They didn’t protect themselves. They weakened the entire profession.
UCLA law professor Scott Cummings put it well in the WSJ piece:
“This affected the interest of big law firms doing what they normally do, to stand up for people without representation…. In that sense, Trump achieved something important that will linger.”
But I’d frame this differently than Cummings does. Trump didn’t “achieve” this. Paul Weiss and the other capitulators achieved it for him. Trump threw a blatantly unconstitutional punch, and instead of letting the courts block it (which they did, easily, for every firm that fought), these firms dove out of the way and handed him their lunch money. The “achievement” here belongs to institutional cowardice, not executive cunning. And that distinction matters, because it means the chilling effect on legal representation wasn’t an inevitable consequence of Trump’s power, but a choice.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this dynamic play out. Just a couple of months ago, the Trump administration quietly dropped its appeal in its effort to withhold education funding from colleges they deemed too “woke.” The administration had threatened to pull billions in funding from states and schools that refused to sign documents attesting they’d eliminated DEI programs. A federal judge struck it down on multiple grounds, including that it threatened educators’ free speech. The administration appealed… and then abandoned the appeal entirely.
The case was brought by the American Federation of Teachers, the American Sociological Association and a school district in Eugene, Ore. Randi Weingarten, president of the A.F.T., said the case was the most important of the 22 lawsuits that her union had filed, along with partner groups, against Mr. Trump in his second term, because of the precedent it would establish for limiting executive power.
“You cannot, by executive fiat, rewrite 60 years of educational opportunity,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview, referring to the civil rights laws that protect students from racial discrimination in schools.
The American Federation of Teachers fought and won. But universities like Columbia and Cornell had already surrendered. They cut their own deals, gutted their own programs, and reorganized their institutions to appease an administration whose legal threats were, once again, built on sand. And just like with Paul Weiss, the capitulation didn’t buy them safety. Columbia folded and then the administration stillthreatened its accreditation.
Because that’s how bullies work. Giving in doesn’t satisfy them. It emboldens them.
The pattern across both stories is pretty clear. The Trump administration launches a legally dubious attack. Some institutions panic and fold. Others stand firm, go to court, and win. Then the administration quietly abandons the fight. And the institutions that folded are left sitting there, having paid a price—in money, in reputation, in institutional integrity—for a threat that was never going to survive judicial review.
The nearly $1 billion in “pro bono” commitments those law firms made is particularly galling now. That’s a billion dollars pledged to administration-favored causes, extracted through what amounted to a protection racket built on an unconstitutional executive order that the government itself just admitted it can’t defend. It doesn’t even matter if those law firms ever actually pony up that pro bono representation. The damage is already done. They told the world — and every future authoritarian who might be taking notes — that major American law firms can be rolled if you just threaten them loudly enough.
Meanwhile, the firms that fought are walking away with their reputations intact, their principles uncompromised, and a stack of lower-court rulings affirming what was obvious from the start: what the administration tried to do was unconstitutional. And critically, the administration quit before those cases could work their way up to a Supreme Court that has proven… let’s say flexible… in its willingness to bless executive overreach. We’ll never know if SCOTUS would have found some creative way to let these executive orders stand. But we do know this: the administration’s own lawyers apparently concluded that the answer wasn’t going to be favorable, or at minimum that the fight wasn’t worth having.
That’s the actual lesson here—but it’s narrower than “the system works.” The administration’s legal theory was so weak it couldn’t survive even the first round of judicial scrutiny. A DOJ that has proven willing to argue almost anything looked at these cases and decided it couldn’t defend them. That’s how hollow this threat was. The firms that fought won not because the whole machine is functioning properly—plenty of evidence suggests it isn’t—but because this particular attack was so constitutionally indefensible that contesting it in court was basically a formality. Which makes the capitulation all the more inexplicable: they surrendered to a threat that collapsed the moment anyone bothered to fight it.
For Paul Weiss and the others, that’s going to be a fun thing to explain to future clients.
We’ve noted repeatedly how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been abusing the FCC’s “equal opportunity” (or “equal time”) rule to try and threaten daytime and late night talk shows with government retribution if they refuse to enthusiastically coddle Republicans.
Late night shows had historically been exempt from the dated rules, which required that any airing of a political candidate on “publicly owned” airwaves is countered with the appearance from a candidate from the opposing party. But Carr isn’t interested in equilibrium; he’s interested abusing FCC authority to try and silence critics of Donald Trump and his increasingly unpopular policies.
But folks have increasingly noted that Brendan Carr doesn’t appear to have any interest in enforcing the same standard on radio, where (especially on AM), listeners are constantly served up a lopsided dose of race-baiting agitprop pretending to be news. When he’s been asked about this inconsistency, Carr has been painfully and curiously vague:
“In a press conference after the FCC’s February 18 meeting, Deadline reporter Ted Johnson asked Carr why he has not expressed “the same concern about broadcast talk radio as broadcast TV talk shows.”
The Deadline reporter pointed out that “Sean Hannity’s show featured Ken Paxton in December.” Paxton, the Texas attorney general, is running for a US Senate seat in this year’s election. Carr claimed in response that TV broadcasters have been “misreading” FCC precedents while talk radio shows have not been.
“It appeared that programmers were either overreading or misreading some of the case law on the equal-time rule as it applies to broadcast TV,” Carr replied. “We haven’t seen the same issues on the radio side, but the equal-time rule is going to apply to broadcast across the board, and we’ll take a look at anything that arises at the end of the day.”
It’s of course far worse on the radio side, which has been utterly dominated by outright right wing propaganda since the early 90s. And he will, of course, not be “taking a look at anything that arises,” because, again, he’s not remotely interested in abusing this rule consistently because he’s an authoritarian hack.
“Carr’s claim that TV but not radio broadcasters have misread FCC precedents is “a bunch of nonsense,” said Gigi Sohn, a longtime lawyer and consumer advocate who served as counselor to then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler during the Obama era. Carr “was responding to criticism from people like Sean Hannity that the guidance would apply to conservative talk radio just as much as it would to so-called ‘liberal’ TV,” Sohn told Ars. “It doesn’t matter whether a broadcaster is a radio broadcaster or a TV broadcaster, the Equal Opportunities law and however the FCC implements it must apply to both equally.”
It used to be an obscure oddity, now we all need to understand it.
18 years ago, I posted this image:
…and I still can’t get it out of my head. Sorry.
Why do we have such a creeped-out reaction to images that aren’t quite right? A robot that looks too much like a person, or a song that we can somehow tell has an AI voice.
The creepiness predates AI, and was first named in a paper by Mori fifty years ago. But it’s so visceral that it almost certainly originated along with our fear of snakes and other evolutionary safeguards.
There are probably two things going on.
First, there’s a corpse alert. Corpses are dangerous, and something that’s alive/not alive is a warning sign. Same thing with zombies.
Second, imposter alert. Imposters are even more dangerous than predators, and we honed our imposter-detection skills a long time ago.
And now, everyone has AI available to them, and many of us are churning out experiences that border on the uncanny valley.
Not many people care about an automated drum track on a pop single, but we get uncomfortable when the lead singer isn’t quite human. We don’t mind when a website figures out our zip code for us, but when a bot apologizes for a late shipment, it means less than nothing. We’re okay with animation, but not with an educational video that combines beautifully shot real footage with an animated human that’s almost but not quite real…
While it’s possible to get used to snakes, and, perhaps, to corpses, I’m not sure that the general population is in any hurry to get used to either, or to the uncanny valley.
It’s likely that AI quality will increase fast enough that many of the most egregious valley moments will stop happening. But none of that will help with the expectation chasm. When you install an AI admin, or use AI for customer service or therapy, we will always end up with a valley sooner or later.
The solution is simple but takes effort: don’t fake it. Celebrate your genre, make a promise and keep it. Not in the way we need to label the ingredients in food, but simply to avoid the surprise realization, to protect your customers from the ick. Triggering an evolutionary survival mechanism is rarely good for your career.
“I confused and alienated people as I worked to save money trying to get them to think this was a person” is not much of a mission statement. Our job is to find problems and solve them, not to hustle our way with shortcuts that feel creepy.
In recent years, YggTorrent was France’s largest and most active torrent community, serving millions of users.
The torrent site was not a typical torrent indexer. The community is powered by a dedicated tracker, something that’s quite rare these days.
This thriving community was severely tested last December when its operators introduced a paid ‘Turbo Mode’. This triggered a revolt, with users and uploaders actively looking for alternative French torrent trackers.
Just as the storm appeared to have calmed, YggTorrent’s operation was shaken up by a final blow this week, after unknown people breached the site, stole data and funds, and exposed the entire operation.
YggTorrent Shuts Down Following Hack
Today, YggTorrent decided to close its doors for good. This decision comes after the torrent site was severely compromised through an elaborate hack.
According to a statement published by the site’s operators, a secondary pre-production staging server was the entry point. From there, the attackers used a privilege escalation exploit to delete and then exfiltrate the site’s database.
YggTorrent’s message (translated)
In addition to large amounts of site data, the hackers also stole cryptocurrency wallets. YggTorrent’s operators note that these wallets were used exclusively to fund server costs.
The hack bears signs of a targeted attack. YggTorrent notes that there was no warning or attempt at a dialogue before all its data was exposed.
According to YggTorrent, all stored user passwords were hashed and salted. However, the leak suggests that millions of legacy accounts were still stored in MD5 without salts, offering significantly weaker protection.
YggLeak
The hacker has shared a detailed summary of their achievements and findings on a dedicated leak site.
From the leak site (translated)
This website explains that the hackers entered YggTorrent’s infrastructure through a series of critical configuration errors by the administrator, starting at the search engine service (SphinxQL) that was left exposed on the staging server without a password.
The YggLeak site portrays YGGtorrent as a high-revenue “cash machine” rather than a simple sharing community. It claims that the site made millions of euros in revenues in 2025 alone. This revenue was reportedly converted to cryptocurrency.
According to the leak, this conversion was not straightforward. The site allegedly used a plugin called CardsShield to route payments through dozens of fake e-commerce storefronts to disguise the true nature of transactions from PayPal and Stripe. The proceeds then went through a circuit involving USDT, Monero and Ethereum, with funds passed through Tornado Cash to reach anonymous wallets.
While TorrentFreak can’t immediately verify any of these claims, the author of the YggLeak website suggests that the 11+ GB in data archives may be useful for law enforcement
“[N]ow that this data is public, professionals will be able to examine it, gather additional evidence, and perhaps even take legal action against those responsible for the site, as well as against hosting providers or other identified third parties,” the YggLeak author writes.
Fin.
For YggTorrent, this is the end of the road. The site’s operators note that there is a backup of all data, so it would be possible to put the site back online. However, facing a rather hostile environment, the team has chosen to shut down permanently.
“A platform can shut down. A community, however, leaves a lasting legacy. Thank you for these nine years. Thank you for your trust. Thank you for all these shared moments,” YggTorrent says in a closing note.
—
Update: YggTorrent updated the website to suggest that something new, presumably not torrent-related, is coming in twelve days.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
It’s a tale as old as time, assuming time began a decade or two ago. A music artist who just wants to make and perform their craft gets on the internet and performs the song he or she created, only to receive some version of a copyright notice or warning, confusing the hell out of them. Sometimes this happens due to fraud. More often it’s due to some mistake with some automated bot that trolls for rights violations on behest of some massive company.
The latter is likely the case when it comes to OPM performer Jireh Lim, who recently performed one of his songs from over a decade ago on Facebook, only to be notified that his reel was being demonetized.
OPM singer Jireh Lim appeared amused and puzzled at the same time after he got a copyright notice for singing his 2013 song “Buko” in one of his social media posts. Lim shared a video of himself singing his song along with a band, through his Facebook page on Saturday, Feb. 21.
Lim shared a screenshot of the notice that reads, “Your reel’s earnings are being claimed by music rights holders. Multiple rights owners requested changes to your video because a large amount of their music was detected.”
Lim included a response in the caption of the screenshot in what I believe is Tagalog. I’m sure the translation isn’t perfect, but he essentially says, “Guys, this is me. It’s my song.”
So, what’s going on here? Well, the details are somewhat lacking, so I’m left to speculate a bit. Here’s what I know for sure. Lim is currently signed with Warner Music Philippines. Warner definitely has the rights to Lin’s album Love and Soul, which he made in 2015 while with Warner. Before Warner, and in 2013 when Buko was recorded, he was an independent artist. His pre-Warner catalog, however, made its way onto streaming platforms also in 2015.
And now for the speculation. I am guessing that Warner also acquired the rights to his older music, at least for streaming distribution and the like. Warner is not only extremely protectionist on copyright matters, but also employs copyright bots that automatically look for infringing content on the internet, particularly on YouTube and social media sites. So, I would guess that Lim’s reel performing “his” song got flagged by whatever automated setup Warner Music has going.
None of which changes the fact that’s it’s crazy-pants that a musical artist can’t perform his own song on the internet unmolested, nor the fact that copyright laws are obviously so stupidly insane that even these artists can’t figure out how to navigate them properly.
The administration has burnt the “presumption of regularity” to a crispness normally reserved for conquered bridges succumbing to heat death. It is now well known that the Trump administration will do whatever it wants to do, whether or not it’s supported by law. And when the courts push back, the administration responds with implicit “fuck you’s” or explicit verbal attacks on the judiciary.
The administration isn’t playing with a full deck, albeit not in the way that phrase is normally understood. Normally, it would mean the administration is batshit crazy. And it is! But its insanity isn’t of the pro-se-complainant-arguing-flag-fringe-merits variety. It’s the other thing: the refusal to respect court rulings it disagrees with. Ever.
The courts are sick of this refusal to respect a co-equal government branch. Hundreds of cases handled by dozens of judges have resulted in adverse rulings against the Trump administration. And yet, the administration refuses to stop doing the things hundreds of rulings have stated it can’t do.
It’s never been a regional thing (Fifth Circuit explicitly excluded). These are not the efforts of judges in “liberal” states who have been appointed by Democratic Party presidents. This is universal.
West Virginia, a state where Trump secured 70% of the votes in the last presidential election, is now poised to hand his masked ICE goons a significant loss. In one of thousands of similar habeas corpus cases filed around the nation following Trump’s racist anti-brown people surge, a federal judge has said he’s seen enough to move forward with contempt hearings and possible fines for government officials. (h/t Kyle Cheney)
The plaintiff is a Honduras native who was arrested by ICE and immediately sent to a detention facility one state over. This is something ICE does regularly, for the obvious reason of making it more difficult for detainees to challenge their detention. Since cases need to be filed wherever the person is detained, keeping arrestees in a state of perpetual motion makes this almost impossible.
But Miguel Izaguirre managed to get his case to court before he was moved again. That kept ICE from sending him to another detention center in another, possibly ICE-friendlier state (I’m glaring at you, Fifth Circuit).
Izaguirre’s allegations resemble those of most ICE detainees: he was denied his due process rights despite being arrested for a mere civil violation. The government has refused (probably because it doesn’t have it) to provide anything supporting it’s claim that Izaguirre must remain incarcerated while his civil case plays out in court.
[T[he Government stated that it had “carefully reviewed the pending petition and determined that the same or substantially similar issues arise in the case at bar.” [ECF No. 16- 1, at 2]. The Government further confirmed that it would not offer evidence beyond the documents attached to its response, nor would it offer any witnesses.
Since the government doesn’t actually have anything to offer in support of violating this detainee’s due process rights, the court gets right to the point:
For the reasons explained and analyzed in previous cases before this court and this district, I will once again FIND: First, the court has jurisdiction. Petitioner does not challenge an immigration proceeding or decision that would bar this court’s jurisdiction. Second, Petitioner is not “seeking admission” into the country, and the discretionary detention of 8 U.S.C. § 1226 applies to him. Third, Petitioner’s due process rights have been violated. Despite facing no criminal charge, Petitioner sits in the local jail with no hearing to determine his custody. There is no evidence in the record that Petitioner is a danger to the community or a flight risk, and there is sufficient evidence that he has community ties. Still, he has been afforded no hearing. This violates his due process rights.
Immediate release is the only appropriate remedy. Where detention has been found unlawful and no constitutionally adequate bond hearing has been provided, continued custody cannot stand.
Simply stated, but with some spite. The court makes it clear this is symptomatic of Trump’s anti-migrant efforts — something familiar enough that the court knows it needs to go further than just simply ordering the release of yet another migrant whose rights have been violated.
It’s something this court has seen multiple times in one week.
This case is one of 17 immigration habeas petitions assigned to the court this week. According to the Government, the detention of these Petitioners is “mandatory” under 8 U.S.C. §1225, and regardless of the constitutional defects, the federal district courts lack jurisdiction over these claims—an argument unanimously rejected in this district.
A flood of cases alleging similar violations of rights would be irritating enough. But the government absolutely refuses to abide by rulings issued in several similar cases. (Emphasis in the original.)
In 15 of the cases, Petitioners challenge their continued unlawful detention resulting from an arrest occurring on or after February 12, 2026.
The court then cites three previous rulings on similar cases, in which federal judges not only ruled they had jurisdiction to handle these cases, but that this mandatory detention violated detainees’ due process rights. All of those occurred prior to February 12. Judge Joseph Goodwin is sick of it.
But on February 12, 14, 17, 18, 21, and 22, 2026, the Government arrested noncitizens already in the interior of the United States. Today, the Government continues to wrongfully detain those petitioners without due process. Even now the Government incredulously asserts that the federal district courts do not have jurisdiction, that petitioners cannot raise due process violations, and that the Government has authority to mandatorily and indefinitely detain noncitizens in the local jail.
The Government is wrong. Judges in this district have said that over and over and over again. I have said it myself.
And that’s where Judge Goodwin invites the government to fuck around and find out, including the subservient local boys who are far too anxious to help ICE violate people’s rights:
This Memorandum Opinion and Order serves as explicit notice to all officials—state and federal—involved in the detention of individuals whose cases come before this court.
Continued detention without individualized custody determinations, after this court’s repeated holdings that such detention violates the Fifth Amendment, will result in legal consequences. For state jail officials, those consequences include personal civil liability without qualified immunity protection. For federal officials, those consequences include exercise of this court’s full inherent authority to enforce constitutional compliance including contempt.
Officials who believe this court has erred in its constitutional analysis may seek stay of this court’s orders pending appeal or pursue appellate review. What they may not do is continue systematic constitutional violations while preserving appellate objections and expecting this court to grant relief in case after case without enforcing its rulings.
Judge Goodwin signs off with this statement, which should be self-evident:
This court will enforce the Constitution.
Let’s hope he does it. Let’s hope jail officials cut people loose rather than start coughing up part of their paychecks. Let’s hope some ICE officials get to spend a few days in the cooler for refusing to comply with court orders. And let’s hope that courts across the nation generate the sort of collective and concerted pressure that will force the Supreme Court to set precedent that vastly undermines this administration’s bigoted efforts to scrub this country of people who aren’t white enough to be considered human beings by the racist goons infesting the White House.
The State Department wants US diplomats to fight data localization around the world. The policy position is correct. It’s just that the messenger has spent the last few months systematically destroying every reason anyone might listen.
In the State Department cable, dated February 18 and signed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the agency said such laws would “disrupt global data flows, increase costs and cybersecurity risks, limit Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services, and expand government control in ways that can undermine civil liberties and enable censorship.”
The cable said the Trump administration was pushing for “a more assertive international data policy” and that diplomats should “counter unnecessarily burdensome regulations, such as data localization mandates.”
Now, if you’ve been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know we’ve long been critical of data localization mandates. They really are bad for the internet. They fracture the global internet into national fiefdoms. They raise costs. They can actually weaken cybersecurity by forcing data onto local infrastructure that may be less secure. And in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries, data localization is often a thinly veiled mechanism for government surveillance and control of information. Requiring that data stay within a country’s borders makes it a whole lot easier for that country’s government to demand access to it.
So on the merits, the policy position described in the cable is basically correct. Data sovereignty mandates do tend to hurt the open internet, and the US pushing back on them has, historically, been a genuinely good thing for global internet freedom. Indeed, the US State Department has a long history of pushing back on such efforts.
But the US already blew its credibility on this issue before this administration even took office. Remember the TikTok ban? That was a bipartisan effort—both Trump and Biden supported it—to do the exact same “data sovereignty” nonsense we’re now telling other countries not to do.
While the justification kept changing depending on the day and who you talked to, many of its supporters (including those in the Supreme Court who blessed that travesty) insisted that it was perfectly legitimate to force a “data localization” plan on TikTok because “ooh, scary foreigners shouldn’t have American data.” Literally this was the Supreme Court’s conclusion:
But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.
So both parties, both of the last two presidents, and the entirety of the Supreme Court announced to the world “it’s totally fine to force a foreign company to not just be required to hold data locally, but even to be forced to sell off local operations to a favored oligarch.”
That alone would make this diplomatic push awkward. But let’s talk about why it lands as completely absurd right now.
The reason data sovereignty initiatives have been “gathering pace,” as Reuters puts it, is in no small part because of the behavior of this very administration. Countries—and especially our allies in Europe—are rushing to build digital walls because the US government has spent the last few months torching every alliance, cozying up to dictators, kicking off arbitrary trade wars, and generally making it abundantly clear that it has zero respect for the norms, rules, or institutions that underpin international cooperation.
You cannot spend your days insulting and threatening your closest allies, engaging in wildly protectionist trade policies, and signaling to the world that no agreement or partnership is safe from your whims, and then turn around and demand that those same allies keep the data pipeline wide open for American tech companies.
This would be like setting your neighbor’s house on fire and then asking to borrow their garden hose. And everyone sees exactly what’s happening:
Bert Hubert, a Dutch cloud computing expert and former member of the board that regulates the Dutch intelligence services, said Europe’s increasing wariness of America’s tech companies may be spurring Washington to take a more aggressive tack.
“Where the previous administration attempted to woo European customers, the current one is demanding that Europeans disregard their own data privacy regulations that could hinder American business,” he said.
And then there’s what the cable actually reveals about its real motivations. The cable reportedly frames data sovereignty as a threat to “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services,” which is a pretty revealing tell. It strips away any pretense that this is about internet freedom or civil liberties. What it actually says is: “American AI companies need access to your citizens’ data to train their models, and we’d appreciate it if you’d stop putting up barriers to that.”
This is the diplomatic equivalent of saying the quiet part loud. The US isn’t making a principled argument about the open internet here. It’s making a commercial demand dressed up in freedom rhetoric. And that’s not exactly a compelling pitch to countries that are already worried about the dominance of US tech firms and the lack of meaningful privacy protections in the US.
The cable also takes a swipe at the GDPR specifically, calling it an example of “unnecessarily burdensome data processing restrictions.” Look, the GDPR has plenty of problems and we’ve written about many of them. But when the US government is publicly calling Europe’s flagship privacy law a burden it wants to fight, while simultaneously offering no credible privacy framework of its own, it’s hard to see how that’s going to win hearts and minds.
Meanwhile, Rubio has also been ordering diplomats to fight against the EU’s Digital Services Act, and the US reportedly wants to set up a portal to help Europeans “bypass” content moderation rules around hate speech and terrorist content.
So the diplomatic message from the US to Europe is currently: ignore your privacy laws, ignore your content moderation laws, give our companies access to your data for AI training, and also we might slap tariffs on you tomorrow. Good luck getting anyone to take the “open internet” pitch seriously after that.
The deeply frustrating thing about all of this is that there really is a strong case to be made against data localization. The open, global internet has been one of the most powerful engines of innovation, communication, and human rights in history, and fragmenting it into national data silos is genuinely dangerous. But making that case requires credibility. It requires being the kind of partner that other countries can trust with their citizens’ data. It requires demonstrating, through your own behavior, that you believe in the rule of law, in stable institutions, and in respecting the sovereignty of your allies even while you advocate for open data flows.
Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore’s 2013 Foreign Affairs piece on “The End of Hypocrisy” keeps proving prescient. A huge part of America’s moral power around the world resulted from the clear hypocrisy between America’s stated values and the ones we repeatedly failed to uphold. But it was a convenient myth that we could pretend to hold the moral high ground, and use that as a form of soft power to demand better of others. That falls apart entirely with administrations like Trump’s, where the idea of soft power, or even the moral high ground, is seen as woke nonsense. The Trump administration refuses to understand the power of that myth.
But now it’s gone. And that has a real cost: the policy position in Rubio’s cable is exactly right. The US should be pushing back on problematic data localization and “data sovereignty” laws. They’re bad for the open internet and good for local surveillance. This is an argument worth making—and we’ve surrendered the ability to make it credibly at precisely the moment it most needs to be made.
Foreign diplomats aren’t stupid. They can see that we demanded TikTok localize or divest while telling them localization is bad. They can see that we’re attacking their privacy laws while offering nothing in return. They can see that we’re framing this as “freedom” while the cable itself reveals it’s about feeding data to American AI companies. The policy is correct. The hypocrisy is total. And the result is that we’ve handed every country in the world a perfectly reasonable justification to ignore us.
The Supreme Court has just turned down a petition to hear an appeal in a case that held that AI works can't be copyrighted. By turning down the appeal, the Supreme Court took a massively consequential step to protect creative workers' interests:
At the core of the dispute is a bedrock of copyright law: that copyright is for humans, and humans alone. In legal/technical terms, "copyright inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity." Most people – even people who work with copyright every day – have not heard it put in those terms. Nevertheless, it is the foundation of international copyright law, and copyright in the USA.
Here's what it means, in plain English:
a) When a human being,
b) does something creative; and
c) that creative act results in a physical record; then
d) a new copyright springs into existence.
For d) to happen, a), b) and c) all have to happen first. All three steps for copyright have been hotly contested over the years. Remember the "monkey selfie," in which a photographer argued that he was entitled to the copyright after a monkey pointed a camera at itself and pressed the shutter button? That image was not copyrightable, because the monkey was a monkey, not a human, and copyright is only for humans:
Then there's b), "doing something creative." Copyright only applies to creative work, not work itself. It doesn't matter how hard you labor over a piece of "IP" – if that work isn't creative, there's no copyright. For example, you can spend a fortune creating a phone directory, and you will get no copyright in the resulting work, meaning anyone can copy and sell it:
If you mix a little creative labor with the hard work, you can get a little copyright. A directory of "all the phone numbers for cool people" can get a "thin" copyright over the arrangement of facts, but such a copyright still leaves space for competitors to make many uses of that work without your permission:
Finally, there's c): copyright is for tangible things, not intangibles. Part of the reason choreographers created a notation system for dance moves is that the moves themselves aren't copyrightable:
The non-copyrightability of movement is (partly) why the noted sex-pest and millionaire grifter Bikram Choudhury was blocked from claiming copyright on ancient yoga poses (the other reason is that they are ancient!):
Now, AI-generated works are certainly tangible (any work by an AI must involve magnetic traces on digital storage media). The prompts for an AI output can be creative and thus copyrightable (in the same way that notes to a writers' room or from an art-director are). But the output from the AI cannot be copyrighted, because it is not a work of human authorship.
This has been the position of the US Copyright Office from the start, when AI prompters started sending in AI-generated works and seeking to register copyrights in them. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist who had prompted an image generator to produce a bitmap, kept appealing the Copyright Office's decision, seemingly without regard to the plain facts of the case and the well-established limits of copyright. By attempting to appeal his case all the way to the Supreme Court, Thaler has done every human artist a huge boon: his weak, ill-conceived case was easy for the Supreme Court to reject, and in so doing, the court has cemented the non-copyrightability of AI works in America.
You may have heard the saying, "Hard cases make bad law." Sometimes, there are edge-cases where following the law would result in a bad outcome (think of a Fourth Amendment challenge to an illegal search that lets a murderer go free). In these cases, judges are tempted to interpret the law in ways that distort its principles, and in so doing, create a bad precedent (the evidence from a bad search is permitted, and so cops stop bothering to get a warrant before searching people).
This is one of the rare instances in which a bad case made good law. Thaler's case wasn't even close – it was an absolute loser from the jump. Normally, plaintiffs give up after being shot down by an agency like the Copyright Office or by a lower court. But not Thaler – he stuck with it all the way to the highest court in the land, bringing clarity to an issue that might have otherwise remained blurry and ill-defined for years.
This is wonderful news for creative workers. It means that our bosses must pay humans to do work if they want to be granted copyright on the things they want to sell. The more that humans are involved in the creation of a work, the stronger the copyright on that work becomes – which means that the less a human contributes to a creative work, the harder it will be to prevent others from simply taking it and selling it or giving it away.
This is so important. Our bosses do not want to pay us. When our bosses sue AI companies, it's not because they want to make sure we get paid.
The many pending lawsuits – from news organizations like the New York Times, wholesalers like Getty Images, and entertainment empires like Disney – all seek to establish that training an AI model is a copyright infringement. This is wrong as a technical matter: copyright clearly permits making transient copies of published works for the purpose of factual analysis (otherwise every search engine would be illegal). Copyright also permits performing mathematical analysis on those transient copies. Finally, copyright permits the publication of literary works (including software programs) that embed facts about copyrighted works – even billions of works:
Sure, you can infringe copyright with an AI model – say, by prompting it to produce infringing images. But the mere fact that a technology can be used to infringe copyright doesn't make the technology itself infringing (otherwise every printing press, camera, and computer would be illegal):
Of course, the fact that copyright currently permits training models doesn't mean that it must. Copyright didn't come down from a mountain on two stone tablets. It's just a law, and laws can be amended. I think that amending copyright to ban training a model would inflict substantial collateral damage on everything from search engines to scholarship, but perhaps you disagree. Maybe you think that you could wordsmith a new copyright law that bans training without whacking a bunch of socially beneficial activities.
Even if that's so, it still wouldn't help artists.
To understand why, consider Universal and Disney's lawsuit against Midjourney. The day that lawsuit dropped, I got a press release from the RIAA, signed by its CEO, Mitch Glazier. Here's how it began:
There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry. Unfortunately, some bad actors – like Midjourney – see only a zero-sum, winner-take-all game.
The RIAA represents record labels, not film studios, but thanks to vertical integration, the big film studios are also the big record labels. That's why the RIAA alerted the press to its position on this suit.
There's two important things to note about the RIAA press release: how it opened, and how it closed. It opens by stating that the companies involved want "partnerships" with AI companies. In other words, if they establish that they have the right to control training on their archives, they won't use that right to prevent the creation of AI models that compete with creative workers. Rather, they will use that right to get paid when those models are created.
Expanding copyright to cover models isn't about preventing generative AI technologies – it's about ensuring that these technologies are licensed by incumbent media companies. This licensure would ensure that media companies would get paid for training, but it would also let them set the terms on which the resulting models were used. The studios could demand that AI companies put "guardrails" on the resulting models to stop them from being used to output things that might compete with the studios' own products.
That's what the opening of this press-release signifies, but to really understand its true meaning, you have to look at the closing of the release: the signature at the bottom of it, "Mitch Glazier, CEO, RIAA."
Who is Mitch Glazier? Well, he used to be a Congressional staffer. He was the guy responsible for sneaking a clause into an unrelated bill that repealed "termination of transfer" for musicians. "Termination" is a part of copyright law that lets creators take back their rights after 35 years, even if they originally signed a contract for a "perpetual license."
Under termination, all kinds of creative workers who got royally screwed at the start of their careers were able to get their copyrights back and re-sell them. The primary beneficiaries of termination are musicians, who signed notoriously shitty contracts in the 1950s-1980s:
When Mitch Glazier snuck a termination-destroying clause into legislation, he set the stage for the poorest, most abused, most admired musicians in recording history to lose access to money that let them buy a couple bags of groceries and make the rent. He condemned these beloved musicians to poverty.
What happened next is something of a Smurfs Family Christmas miracle. Musicians were so outraged by this ripoff, and their fans were so outraged on their behalf, that Congress convened a special session solely to repeal the clause that Mitch Glazier tricked them into voting for. Shortly thereafter, Glazier was out of Congress:
But this story has a happy ending for Glazier, too – he might have been out of his government job, but he had a new gig, as CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, where he earns more than $1.3 million/year to carry on the work he did in Congress – serving the interests of the record labels:
Mitch Glazier serves the interests of the labels, not musicians. He can't serve both interests, because every dime a musician takes home is a dime that the labels don't get to realize as profits. Labels and musicians are class enemies. The fact that many musicians are on the labels' side when they sue AI companies does not mean that the labels are on the musicians' side.
What will the media companies do if they win their lawsuits? Glazier gives us the answer in the opening sentence of his press release: they will create "partnerships" with AI companies to train models on the work we produce.
This is the lesson of the past 40 years of copyright expansion. For 40 years, we have expanded copyright in every way: copyright lasts longer, covers more works, prohibits more uses without licenses, establishes higher penalties, and makes it easier to win those penalties.
Today, the media industry is larger and more profitable than at any time, and the share of those profits that artists take home is smaller than ever.
How has the expansion of copyright led to media companies getting richer and artists getting poorer? That's the question that Rebecca Giblin and I answer in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism. In a nutshell: in a world of five publishers, four studios, three labels, two app companies and one company that controls all ebooks and audiobooks, giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money. It doesn't matter how much lunch money you give that kid – the bullies will take it all, and the kid will go hungry:
Indeed, if you keep giving that kid more lunch money, the bullies will eventually have enough dough that they'll hire a fancy ad-agency to blitz the world with a campaign insisting that our schoolkids are all going hungry and need even more lunch money (they'll take that money, too).
When Mitch Glazier – who got a $1m+/year job for the labels after attempting to pauperize musicans – writes on behalf of Disney in support of a copyright suit to establish that copyright prevents training a model without a license, he's not defending creative workers. Disney, after all, is the company that takes the position that if it buys another company, like Lucasfilm or Fox, that it only acquires the right to use the works we made for those companies, but not the obligation to pay us when they do:
If a new, unambiguous copyright over model training comes into existence – whether through a court precedent or a new law – then all our contracts will be amended to non-negotiably require us to assign that right to our bosses. And our bosses will enter into "partnerships" to train models on our works. And those models will exist for one purpose: to let them create works without paying us.
The market concentration that lets our bosses dictate terms to us is getting much worse, and it's only speeding up. Getty Images – who sued Stability AI over image generation – is merging with Shutterstock:
This is where this new Supreme Court action comes in. A new copyright that covers training is just one more thing these increasingly powerful members of this increasingly incestuous cartel can force us to sign away. That new copyright isn't something for us to bargain with, it's something we'll bargain away.
But the fact that the works that a model produces are automatically in the public domain is something we can't bargain away. It's a legal fact, not a legal right. It means that the more humans there are involved in the creation of a final work, the more copyrightable that work is.
Media bosses love AI because it dangles the tantalizing possibility of running a business without ego-shattering confrontations with creative workers who know how to do things. It's the solipsistic fantasy of a world without workers, in which a media boss conceives of a "product," prompts a sycophantic AI, and receives an item that's ready for sale:
Many bosses know this isn't within reach. They imagine that they'll get the AI to shit out a script and then pay a writer on the cheap to "polish" it. They think they'll get an AI to shit out a motion sequence, a still, or a 3D model and then pay a human artist pennies to put the "final touches" on it. But the Copyright Office's position is that only those human contributions are eligible for a copyright: a few editorial changes, a few pixels or vectors rearranged. Everything else is in the public domain.
Here's the cool part: the only thing our bosses hate more than paying us is when other people take their stuff without paying for it. To achieve the kind of control they demand, they will have to pay us to make creative works.
What's more, the fact that AI-generated works are in the public domain leaves a lot of uses that don't harm creative workers intact. You can amuse yourself and your friends with all the AI slop you can generate; the fact that it's not copyrightable doesn't matter to that use. I happen to think AI "art" is shit, but you do you:
This also means that if you're a writer who likes to brainstorm with a chatbot as you develop an idea, that's fine, so long as the AI's words don't end up in the final product. Creative workers already assemble "mood boards" and clippings for inspiration – so long as these aren't incorporated into the final work, that's fine.
That's just what the Hollywood writers bargained for in their historic strike over AI. They retained the right to use AI if they wanted to, but their bosses couldn't force them to:
The Writers Guild were able to bargain with the heavily concentrated studios because they are organized in a union. Not just any union, either: the Writers Guild (along with the other Hollywood unions) are able to undertake "sectoral bargaining" – that's when a union can negotiate a contract with all the employers in a sector at once.
Sectoral bargaining was once the standard for labor relations, but it was outlawed in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which clawed back many of the important labor rights established with the New Deal's National Labor Relations Act. To get Taft-Hartley through Congress, its authors had to compromise by grandfathering in the powerful Hollywood unions, who retained their right to sectoral bargaining. More than 75 years later, that sectoral bargaining right is still protecting those workers.
Our bosses tell us that we should side with them in demanding a new law: a copyright law that covers training an AI model. The mere fact that our bosses want this should set off alarm bells. Just because we're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on our side. They are not.
If we're going to use our muscle to fight for a new law, let it be a sectoral bargaining law – one that covers all workers. You can tell that this would be good for us because our bosses would hate it, and every other worker in America would love it. The Writers Guild used sectoral bargaining to achieve something that 40 years of copyright expansion failed at: it made creative workers richer, rather than giving us another way to be angry about how our work is being used.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1020 words today, 41284 total)
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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On top of the war Trump launched against Iran on Friday, he also launched a MAGA civil war, this time with the America First faction of the Republican Party.
His campaign had sought their votes by heralding Trump as the “peace president” in 2024 and warning that Kamala Harris would start another Middle East war.
Things were already fairly fraught with the America Firsters after Trump’s military actions in Iran and Venezuela and his support for granting more H-1B visas to foreign workers.
Now the open-ended war with Iran, which Trump launched alongside Israel, has proven too much for many of them. Even some of his formerly staunchest allies are in open revolt.
Tucker Carlson has been a consistent critic of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, so it’s unsurprising that he was highly critical of the war with Iran. He even called the attack “absolutely disgusting and evil” on his show.
Trump was dismissive of Carlson, insisting the popular right-wing talking head could “say whatever he wants” but that his opinion “has no impact on me.”
“I think MAGA is Trump,” he told The Inner Circle’s Rachael Bade. “MAGA wants to see our country thrive and be safe. And MAGA loves what I’m doing — every aspect of it.”
Really? Marjorie Taylor Greene sure doesn’t. “We’re in another fucking war, and American troops are being killed,” she declared on Megyn Kelly’s show. “We need to have a serious conversation about what the fuck is happening to this country.”
For her own part, Kelly reported that four U.S. service members had been killed and that Trump had not ruled out sending U.S. ground troops into battle. She told her listeners that she had “serious doubts about what we are doing” in Iran.
Megyn Kelly went off on the Trump administration on Monday, arguing that the claim Iran was about to launch a preemptive strike against the U.S. is nonsense. Kelly, while hosting her eponymous Sirius XM show, took a swipe at CNN’s Scott Jennings for parroting some of the administration’s talking points on the reasoning behind the attack on Iran over the weekend.
“Does it make any sense to you that Iran was planning preemptive strikes against us and our civilians, knowing full well of the massive military assets we had moved into the region, the aircraft carriers and so on? Obviously, it doesn’t,” Kelly concluded, while saying she would never repeat such a claim — like Jennings did — because she would not “allow them to use me like a fool.”
In his interview with Rachael Bade, Trump retorted that Kelly “should study her history book a little bit.”
“Megyn was opposed to me for years when I ran the first time and nothing stopped me,” Trump continued. “And so, you know, some people are against — and they always come back. She came all the way back. But now I guess she maybe doesn’t like the idea of this war, but I do because I have to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranians.”
Trump is losing the manosphere
From Joe Rogan to podcast bros like Andrew Schultz and Theo Von, Trump has been bleeding support ever since he and his Justice Department began their massive cover-up of the Epstein files and Homeland Security unleashed ICE upon American cities.
Now, other prominent figures in the manosphere—who routinely advance a grotesque version of masculinity before their audiences of terminally-online, disaffected young men—are actively speaking out against the war.
Andrew Tate, who filmed himself in Dubai as the war with Iran began, tweeted “NOBODY WANTS THIS WAR.”
The Hodge Twins, known for their right-leaning comedy and ardent past support of Trump, warned their three and a half million followers that Americans were “getting sent to die for Israel,” adding that they “Don’t care if we lose all our followers over this war we won’t stay quiet…”
I should note that Democrats need not and should not make common cause with rapists and misogynists. But here, truly, the left need not lift a finger; the call is already coming from inside the house.
The fascists and kooks are calling Trump out, too
Deeper in the bowels of the far right, Groyper white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes, wild conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones, and Christian Nationalists such as Matt Walsh are very unhappy with Trump lately. Across this dangerous and unbalanced set, which powers much of the far right machinery, the Iran War is quickly proving too much.
Nick Fuentes, who once dined at Mar-a-Lago as Trump’s guest and whose platforming by Carlson tore apart the Heritage Foundation, told his followers, “Do not vote in the midterms, and if you do, VOTE DEMOCRAT! This administration needs to be SHUT DOWN!”
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend here, but if Fuentes wants to sap GOP turnout on his own, I won’t raise a fuss.
I also rarely quote anything Alex Jones says, except for comedic value, but on Iran he’s been raising alarms. Jones warned, “Trump’s HUGE gamble accelerates the world’s trajectory toward a nuclear world war”—and he is not incorrect.
And perennial nominee for worst person on the Internet, Matt Walsh, whom I personally despise, lamented, with no small dose of truth,
I can’t take the gaslighting, guys. I really can’t. Conservatives are now running around saying “Iran has been waging war on us for 47 years.” Okay then why didn’t any of you call for an attack on Iran at any point until now? Why didn’t you make a case for Trump “ending the war, not starting it” until precisely the moment when Trump did it? You and I both know that you are latching onto a talking point you never used until 45 seconds ago. You and I both know that almost every conservative influencer in the business was opposed to war with Iran until just now.
Draining away MAGA enthusiasm
It’s hard to imagine a series of actions that, collectively, could better drive away Trump’s most ardent and reliable voters. But over the first year of his second term, Trump has managed to do so.
With white working class voters, Trump’s tariffs have driven up prices, with inflation now clocking in higher and manufacturing jobs fleeing, even while the GOP is yanking the safety net out from under them.
With the QAnon set, Trump’s and the DOJ’s repeated attempts to shut down the Epstein investigation and hide Trump’s involvement have many waking up. They are slowly realizing that the man who was supposed to bring the storm down on the pedophiles in the highest reaches of our government is actually at the center of them all.
Trump has now managed to alienate yet another large segment of voters who somehow bought the idea that Democrats are a party of warmongers—even though it was Reagan and the two Bushes who began multiple global conflicts and embroiled us in forever wars in the Middle East. Now Trump is continuing that time-honored GOP tradition, after expressly promising not to, and the America Firsters either have to join in the national gaslighting or become critics of the Trump regime, as Carlson and Greene have done.
It’s small wonder that the GOP is now suffering from an enthusiasm gap compared to the Democrats. The midterms usually favor whichever party can turn out its base of high propensity, engaged voters. These are the same voters, by the way, whom Trump would need to buy into any outlandish and false claims of election fraud. If the polls in advance of the election are uniformly abysmal because much of MAGA has abandoned Trump, any “stolen election” claims by him are likely to fall on deaf ears.
And if the war with Iran drags on, or Trump really does send in U.S. ground forces, his support from the “no foreign wars” faction could collapse entirely. This would shave a few more critical points off GOP election tallies nationwide, putting not only the House but also the Senate into serious play.
The Trump administration is purposefully cruel. That much cannot be argued, not when it has deliberately sent deportees to foreign torture prisons, dumped them in war-torn countries with histories of human rights abuses, and stranded people its has been ordered to release far from home without their IDs, phones, or money.
This regime loves to inflict pain. Its desire to erase as many minorities from this country as possible has led it to do things no competent government would ever do, especially not one that serves a nation long known as a land of hope and opportunity. The people who first landed here were escaping religious persecution. (They then went on to eradicate the people who actually lived here, but stick with me for a moment.) People seeking the same refuge from persecution are now being ejected from this country as quickly as possible.
The good news is that a federal court has at least pumped the brakes on one such DHS effort. In Minnesota — where Trump has used benefits fraud allegations as justification for a “surge” that has resulted in two murders committed by federal officers (so far!) — a federal judge has just told the administration it can’t just suddenly declare an end to refugee status.
The longtime government policy has been that refugees — vetted and legally admitted individuals — who are yet to adjust to lawful permanent resident status cannot be detained on that basis alone.
With Operation PARRIS (Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening), the Trump administration wants to change that.
In a pair of memos issued in December 2025 and February 2026 — which Law Dork has covered extensively — the Department of Homeland Security has purported to change that policy by rescinding and re-rescinding the 2010 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy that most recently enunciated that policy for applying the relevant provision — 8 U.S.C. 1159 — of the Refugee Act of 1980.
What used to be a normal part of the “give me your tired, huddled masses” ideal that once represented this Land of Opportunity is no longer. The Trump administration is now claiming it can simply pretend existing law no longer matters. And while it is true that Congress could decide to rewrite or overturn the 1980 law, it cannot simply be ignored just because the DHS sent out a couple of memos telling federal officers they’re free to ignore existing law.
Fortunately, this Minnesota court isn’t going to sit by while the administration pretends the only interpretation of the law is the one it recently wrote for itself. From the opinion [PDF]:
When the clock strikes 12:00 a.m. on the 366th day after a refugee was lawfully admitted to the United States, according to the Government, 8 U.S.C. § 1159(a) gives Department of Homeland Security officials the power to arrest and detain that refugee with no limits on the length of detention. Because § 1159(a) provides no such power, the Court will issue a preliminary injunction enjoining Defendants from arresting or detaining refugees in Minnesota on the basis that have not yet been adjusted to lawful permanent resident status—which, by law, cannot occur until one year has passed. The Court will not allow federal authorities to use a new and erroneous statutory interpretation to terrorize refugees who immigrated to this country under the promise that they would be welcomed and allowed to live in peace, far from the persecution they fled.
You see the obvious evil here, right? A refugee — at earliest — cannot secure lawful permanent status until after one year has passed. Trump’s DHS says refugees applying for permanent residence can be arrested and detained indefinitely 24 hours after they’ve been here for a year. The court is right: this not only flips the law on its head, it completely destroys an American ideal that made this nation of a beacon of hope for oppressed people around the world.
Decades ago, as a nation, we made a solemn promise to refugees fleeing persecution: that after rigorous vetting, they would be welcomed to the United States and given the opportunity to rebuild their lives. We assured them that they could care for their families, earn a living, contribute to their communities, and live in peace here in the United States. We promised them the hope that one day they could achieve the American Dream.
The Government’s new policy breaks that promise—without congressional authorization—and raises serious constitutional concerns. The new policy turns the refugees’ American Dream into a dystopian nightmare.
A government that retains any notion of serving the public good would never have attempted to enact this policy. Only a government filled with unjustified hatred of “others” would dare to destroy the American Dream. And only a regime so laden with craven bigots would dare to drape themselves in the flag while shitting on what actually makes this country great.
And, it must be noted, this is only a temporary block. The court is going to allow the government to defend its actions. I don’t think the government will win, but it will certainly kick this up the ladder to the appellate level. That’s fine, so long as the restraining order stays in place while the government cooks up a defense for its blatant racism. With any luck, this will stick all the way to the Supreme Court… and then hopefully after that review as well. No one who truly loves America would back this effort. And no one who only claims to love America while strip-mining it of its greatness should be allowed to turn this great nation into a “dystopian nightmare.”
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Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor implementation in
Rust. We're happy to announce the latest release, Arti 2.1.0.
This release contains a lot of behind-the-scenes work on relay support
and on RPC development. While Arti still cannot run as a relay,
we are making good progress, and we think it will soon be ready for
Arti developers to test it as a middle relay.
Additionally, we have overhauled all of Arti's configuration to use a new,
derive-deftly-based approach. We believe this will make
defining new configuration types easier, saving us development time
in the long run.
This release also contains a number of bugfixes, cleanups,
as well as improvements to our CI infrastructure.
Finally, Arti 2.1.0 increases our MSRV (Minimum Supported Rust Version)
to 1.89.0, in accordance with our MSRV policy.
For full details on what we've done, including API changes,
and for information about many more minor and less-visible changes,
please see the CHANGELOG.
For more information on using Arti, see our top-level README,
and the documentation for the arti binary.
Thanks to everybody who's contributed to this release, including
Niel Duysters, Nihal, Nuhiat-Arefin, Robert Bartlensky, carti-it, hjrgrn,
moumenalaoui, robertb, and sjcobb!
Also, our deep thanks to our sponsors for funding the development of Arti!
Install Thunderbird as additional software to improve its security, if you have both the Thunderbird Email Client and Additional Software features of the Persistent Storage turned on.
Until Tails 7.5, a new version of Thunderbird was released by Mozilla only a
few days after we released a new version of Tails. As a consequence, the
version of Thunderbird in Tails was almost always outdated, with known
security vulnerabilities.
If the Thunderbird Migration dialog below appears when you start
Thunderbird , it means that Tails successfully installed Thunderbird as
additional software.
Include the language pack for Mexican Spanish in Thunderbird in addition to the language pack for Spanish from Spain.
We’ve been writing about Section 230 for a very long time. We’ve written about why it matters, why the people attacking it are wrong, and why most of the proposed “reforms” would make the internet dramatically worse for everyone except the already powerful. And for just about as long as we’ve been doing that, Senator Ron Wyden—who co-authored Section 230 three decades ago—has been doing the same thing, often as a lonely voice in a Senate full of colleagues who either don’t understand the law or are actively trying to destroy it.
The Communications Decency Act just turned 30, and Wyden marked the occasion with an op-ed in MSNow that lays out, clearly and forcefully, why Section 230 matters more right now than it has in years. And the piece is a must-read, because it highlights something that should be blindingly obvious to Democrats in Congress but apparently remains invisible to far too many of them: gutting Section 230 while Donald Trump is president would be handing him the pen to rewrite the rules of online speech.
As President Donald Trump and his administration wage war against free speech, it is vital that Americans have a free and open internet where they can criticize the government, share personal health information and simply live their lives without government censorship and repression. For those of us who value the ability for regular people to speak and be heard online, preserving Section 230 is one of the most consequential ways to prevent Trump and the cabal of MAGA billionaires from controlling everything Americans see and read.
Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, is still co-sponsoring legislation with Lindsey Graham to repeal Section 230 entirely within two years. This is beyond absurd. A senior Democratic senator is actively working to hand this administration the ability to reshape online speech liability from scratch.
In what universe does that end well?
If you need a refresher on what these senators are proposing to gut, Wyden lays it out plainly:
Section 230 is a simple law: In effect, it says the person who creates a post is the one responsible for it. Without it, goodbye retweets and reskeets, Reddit mods, Wikipedia editors and the people curating feeds on Bluesky. The ability to rapidly reshare information online is only possible because of the law.
That’s it. That’s what they want to hand Trump the power to rewrite.
And it gets worse.
Wyden highlights a category of proposal that perfectly encapsulates why building government censorship tools “for the right reasons” always backfires:
Other proposals include repealing Section 230 for posts the Health and Human Services secretary decides are medical misinformation. This was introduced in 2021 in response to the proliferation of COVID-19 misinformation, but today it would essentially give HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy the power to silence critics of his anti-vaccine agenda.
You might recall this one if you’re a regular Techdirt reader. Introduced by Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ben Ray Lujan, we called out how dangerous (and unconstitutional) it was back in 2021, and then reminded Senators Klobuchar and Lujan of this when RFK Jr. was first nominated to head HHS.
As Wyden notes, a bill written and supported by Democrats, designed to combat COVID misinformation by “reforming” Section 230, if it were law, would now hand Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the most prominent anti-vaccine activist in American public life—the authority to define what constitutes medical “misinformation” online.
The person who has spent decades spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines would get to decide which health speech is acceptable on the internet. This is exactly the kind of scenario that people like us (and Wyden) have been warning about for years: the regulatory environment you create to fight the speech you don’t like today will be wielded by the people you trust least tomorrow.
Democrats like Durbin, Klobuchar, and Blumenthal spent years convinced that weakening Section 230 would force Big Tech to clean up its act. The counterargument—made by Wyden, by us, by basically everyone who actually read the law—was always the same: any power you create to shape online speech rules will eventually be used by people whose priorities look nothing like yours. That day has arrived. Those same Democrats are somehow still pushing the same bills.
So what would actually happen if they got their way? Nothing good. Wyden points to how Americans have been using platforms to document what’s actually happening with immigration enforcement:
Americans have used WhatsApp, Signal, Bluesky and TikTok to document violent, lawless activities by Immigration Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection across the country. While corporate news organizations like CBS Newshave buried storiesabout Trump administration immigration abuses and are increasingly pushing disingenuous “both sides” reporting, regular Americans have helped to change public opinion with their first-hand videos of government-sanctioned violence that have spread across the internet.
That was possible because of Section 230. Take it away and you would see ICE agents bring bad faith lawsuits against those platforms, perhaps claiming that Meta helped incite anti-ICE protests or defamed them by carrying posts alleging excessive force. To understand what would be possible, just look at how police departments and Big Oil have used civil suits to try and silence their biggest critics.
This is the part that the “repeal 230” crowd never seems to grapple with. Without Section 230, the platforms hosting that content become legally vulnerable for the content their users post. And the people with the deepest pockets and the most to hide—government agencies, corporations, the powerful—are exactly the ones who would use that vulnerability to silence critics through litigation. We’ve talked about this for years. It wouldn’t be Big Tech that suffers from a 230 repeal. Big Tech can afford armies of lawyers. The people who get crushed are the small platforms, the community forums, the individual users who share and reshare information that the powerful would prefer stayed hidden.
Wyden drives this home with another relevant example:
Or look at the Jeffrey Epstein case. It took dogged journalism by the Miami Herald and activism from Epstein’s victims to keep the story alive. But without Section 230, anyone who merely shared a story or allegation about Epstein and his associates on their social media could be sued by Epstein’s deep-pocketed pals, along with the site that hosted those posts.
He also takes a moment to push back on the persistent myth that Section 230 gives Big Tech blanket immunity to do whatever it wants—a myth that has fueled much of the bipartisan rage against the law:
Critics of Section 230 often misunderstand it. The statute only protects companies when a lawsuit tries to treat a company as the speaker of the post they find offensive or harmful.
(Wyden’s right that 230 isn’t the blanket immunity its critics claim—though where courts have drawn those lines remains hotly contested, and some of us would argue several of these rulings created more problems than they solved. In fact, the fallout from some of those rulings actually serves to show why Section 230 is so important.)
Either way, none of this should be new information, given how many times it’s been litigated and explained. But apparently it bears repeating every single time this debate comes up, because the same wrong arguments keep getting trotted out by the same people who refuse to read 26 words of statute.
Wyden closes with a warning that should be required reading for every legislator contemplating a 230 “reform” bill:
Opening up Section 230, especially right now, while Trump is president, would give him the pen to rewrite online speech rules. Given his administration’s attacks on free speech, I think that would be disastrous.
It says something profoundly depressing about the state of Congress that the guy who wrote the law 30 years ago is still the one who understands it best, and that he has to keep explaining it to colleagues who should know better. Wyden has been right about this from the start. He was right when Republicans attacked Section 230 because they wanted to force platforms to carry their content. He was right when Democrats attacked it because they wanted to force platforms to remove content they didn’t like. And he’s right now, when tearing it down would hand the most speech-hostile administration in modern memory the tools to reshape online expression however it sees fit.
Happy 30th birthday, Section 230. Here’s hoping your co-author can keep his colleagues from smothering you in your sleep.
We’re excited to release the third release candidate
of GIMP version 3.2! It contains a number of bug fixes and final polishes as we prepare the
first stable release of GIMP 3.2.
Third release candidate splash screen by Mark McCaughrean - CCBY-SA 4.0 - GIMP 3.2 RC3
This release represents the completion of nearly a year’s worth of development and design
work, as well as our GIMP 3.2 roadmap.
The complete changelog can be found in our
NEWS section
of the repository.
Dr. Mark McCaughrean has graciously created a third splash screen for this release (see image at the top)
based on his processed photograph of the
“Dragon Jet” HH288 protostellar outflow system.
We are deeply grateful to Dr. McCaughrean for the three
splash screens
he has created for the 3.2 release candidates. It will be tough decision to select the one to use for
the final GIMP 3.2!
GIMP 3.2 has three kinds of “non-raster” layers - the new link and vector layers in addition to the
existing text layers. A lot of behind-the-scenes work has been done by Jehan to standardize
how all of these layer types handle “destructive” actions, such as painting and merging down
layer masks. You should now be better protected from accidentally altering these layers destructively,
unless you intentionally rasterize them (and if you change your mind, you can easily revert that
process to restore the original layer).
As a result of this work, we also have a small new feature. Previously, you could drag and drop a color
swatch on a text layer to change its color. Alx Sa extended this behavior to vector layers - now you
can drag either a color or pattern swatch to change its fill!
As part of Jehan‘s continued work to improve GIMP’s color correctness, the Levels, Curves,
Equalize, and White Balance filters now default to Linear precision while allowing for other
color precision modes to be set. This fixes several inconsistencies in how these filters operate in
both the GUI and via scripting.
We’ve refined the logic of when the Welcome Dialog appears on start. If you intentionally open GIMP with
an image (either by dragging and dropping it or opening via the command line), the Welcome Dialog will no
long appear in front of the image. The only exception is the first time you open GIMP after an update, so
you can see what has changed.
Alx Sa reordered the Hue Saturation GUI so that the Lightness slider is placed below the Saturation slider.
While this is a small fix, it standardizes the order with all other places in GIMP where we have HSL settings.
The Flip tool can now be controlled with arrow keys,
similar to the Move and Rotate transformation tools.
When the Flip tool is selected, you can use the Left and Right arrows to flip the image
horizontally, and the Up and Down arrows to flip it vertically.
The Shear tool can also now be adjusted with the
arrow keys. Use the Left and Right arrows to shear your image horizontally, and the
Up and Down arrows to do the same vertically.
Like the Move tool, you can hold down Shift to shear with a larger value.
The GIMP_ICON_TEXTURE pattern has been removed from the background of the Navigation and
Selection dockables. This should remove a source of visual irration from those dockables in dark mode.
The Delete button in the Layer dockable will now delete only the layer mask if it is selected, instead of
always deleting the layer.
Jehan has refined the logic for color selection so that it is not impacted by the image when that
wouldn’t make sense in context. For instance, you can now use the full color palette to set Grid colors,
even if you’re working on an indexed image with a limited palette.
The Crop Tool now automatically adds transparency
to a layer if you set it to fill with transparency and make a crop that’s larger than the current layer.
Thanks to Michael Schumacher for the initial UX report!
Jacob Boerema adjusted our GUI code to prevent overly wide dialogs in places like the image export
comment field and the Image Map guide pop-up.
Denis Rangelov added initial support for using the Global Menu on flatpak. You’ll need to set the GIMP_GTK_MENUBAR
variable inside the Flatpak environment
(as noted here) to use it for now.
The DDS plug-in now supports exporting in BC7 format, as a complement to the BC7 import support
added in GIMP 3.0.
We use the bc7enc_rdo library developed by Rich Geldreich
for the conversion.
We fixed a bug in the JPEG 2000 export process which was causing the quality setting to be lower than
what OpenJPEG allowed. This fix gives you more fine-grain control of the
image export quality.
New contributor Waris Maqbool improved our support for importing
Luminance/Chroma OpenEXR images.
Previously we only imported the grayscale luminance channel, but thanks to their efforts we now also support
the YR and YB color channels.
You can now import palette swatches from the Procreate art program.
This support was added by our resident file format fan Alx Sa after seeing a teammate
use it during the Global Game Jam and finding that they couldn’t
open the palette in GIMP!
Longtime contributor Michael Schumacher has made several improvements to our XMC plug-in. In
addition to updating several aspects and fixing warnings, he has also added protections to prevent it from
modifying layer names in the original project when exporting as XMC.
Anders Jonsson has corrected the default color in the Fog
filter for linear color conversion.
Bruno Lopes fixed a regression in our Camera RAW plug-ins that caused them to not work on macOS.
Sample Point modes are now correctly copied over when
duplicating an image.
programmer_ced improved our flatpak build to use HOST_XDG_CONFIG_HOME for its configuration location. This should
make it more intuitive for flatpak users to find where to put third-party plug-ins and where to retrieve various settings.
Alx Sa upgraded the Histogram Editor. It can now handle
pixel counts for much larger images - in theory, up to both widths and heights of 4 billion!
Jacob Boerema fixed a bug on Windows where Gradient Flare
presets wouldn’t be loaded.
The Round Corners filter now uses your current
background color for the fill, instead of always using the default color.
Anders Jonsson diagnosed and fixed an issue with the alignment of our transform anchor points GUI in the
System theme.
We made a number of fixes to non-destructive filters, especially related to the scaling and cropping of Render style
filters. New contributor balooii fixed a bug that could occur when undoing filters applied to individual channels.
Jehan corrected a bug where the pressure curve did not show in the
input device manager on certain platforms.
New contributor Kaushik B fixed a bug that caused warnings in plug-ins when creating number input buttons with
small min and max ranges.
Fancier .dmg and Windows installer; and sturdier .appimage¶
Noticeable improvements have been made to our macOS package. In short,
Bruno Lopes designed a custom icon for the mounted .dmg on the desktop.
He also scripted the generation of custom .dmg background matching the
splash screen for each release.
Similar scripts were made for the Windows installer which will also
feature part of the splash image, automatically extracted at build time.
Also, some important fixes have been made by Bruno to our AppImage package.
It should work again on AArch64 (it stopped working after our move to Debian 13),
and support for third-party plugins (built for Debian 13) is hopefully fixed.
Thanks to work by Alx and Jehan, the Curve-Bend plug-in can now be used in scripts via its individual
parameters as listed in the Procedure Browser.
Previously, you needed to use a generic settings-data which combined several parameters in a single
string. Both methods will work until GIMP 4, at which point we’ll retire the settings-data parameter.
The GimpColorScales and
GimpColorSelect widgets are
now introspectable, which means you can use their public functions in your plug-ins and scripts.
We’ve added gimp_config_get_xcf_version () and gimp_config_set_xcf_version () functions. These
can be used when saving XCFs to target a specific version. Currently, we use this feature in GIMP to
decide whether to save colors as the older GimpRGB format or the new colorspace-aware GeglColor.
Ondřej Míchal has improved the logic for setting bounds for integer-type GimpSpinScales.
As we continue to expand the GimpDrawableFilterAPI, we’ve marked a number of gimp_drawable_* ()
functions as deprecated. They will stay available until GIMP 4, but we recommend moving your filter code
to use the GEGL filters directly instead of the older, dedicated wrapper functions.
You can now create GimpCurve objects in plug-ins.
This allows you to add gimp:curves filters to layers and layer groups.
As a result, we’ve deprecated gimp_drawable_curves_explicit () and gimp_drawable_curves_spline ()
since they can be replaced with the Curve filter directly.
This work was done by Jehan and Alx Sa.
Here is an example of applying an inverted gimp:curves as non-destructive
filter, on the blue channel in non-linear space, through the Python binding:
This release also contains fixes for possible exploits in some of our file loading plug-ins.
We appreciate security reports from the Zero Day Initiative and individuals such as JungWoo Park
and wooseokdotkim, and the work of developers like Jacob Boerema to patch them.
The fixes include those for:
If you ever encountered a 404 Missing Page error on our website, you
would have noticed our cute Wilber animation! This was work by the
animation film director Aryeom, created as a hand-made SVG+SMIL
animation by Aryeom and Jehan back in 2016.
As our logo design was updated in GIMP 3 (which by the way is also work by
Aryeom, with feedback by the whole team), a refresh to this animated
SVG, using the new Wilber, has been initiated by Bruno Lopes.
Additional refinements were made by Aryeom Han and Jehan.
Since we hope you won’t normally see this page (and if you do, please
report the broken link), here’s what it
looks like (if you missed it, force-refreshing the page should work, or
just go to any non-existing page
to see the animation in proper context):
GIMP Website 404 Page animation by Bruno Lopes, Aryeom Han, and Jehan
Core team member Anders Jonsson got added to the i18n coordination team in GNOME Translation Project. He immediately sought to fix some of our longstanding bugs on the localization infrastructure. He is now starting to work on a working procedure for handling new language coordinators.
We are once again participating
in the Google Summer of Code.
This is an opportunity for potential new contributors (of any age!) to work with us to develop
a new feature for GIMP. We have a list of suitable projects,
but you are welcome to propose your own idea. Please reach out early so we can get to know you beforehand!
22 translations were updated: Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Esperanto, Georgian, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Kabyle, Lithuanian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian.
38 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.0 RC3 codebase (order
is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):
7 developers to core code: Jehan, Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Anders Jonsson, Gabriele Barbero, Lukas Oberhuber, balooii balooii.
7 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Michael Schumacher, Anders Jonsson, Waris.
25 translators: Sveinn í Felli, luming zh, Alexander Alexandrov Shopov, Marco Ciampa, Aefgh Threenine, Cheng-Chia Tseng, Alan Mortensen, Anders Jonsson, Danial Behzadi, Martin, Shigeto YOSHIDA, YOSHIDA Shigeto, dimspingos, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Ekaterine Papava, Kristjan ESPERANTO, Kristjan SCHMIDT, Sabri Ünal, Yuri Chornoivan, Athmane MOKRAOUI, Flynn Peck, Ibai Oihanguren Sala, Jan Papež, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Tim Sabsch.
2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Anders Jonsson.
5 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, Jeremy Bícha.
2 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Jeremy Bícha.
The gimp-data submodule had 24 commits by 4 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jeremy Bícha.
Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by
number of commits):
Our UX tracker had 4 reports closed as FIXED.
ctx had 236 commits since 3.0.8 release by 1 contributors: Øyvind Kolås.
The gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 22 commits by 2 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber, Bruno Lopes.
The flatpak release had 17 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno, rangelovd.
Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 94 commits by 4 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jehan, Aryeom.
Our developer website had 36 commits by 4 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema.
Our 3.0 documentation had 256 commits by 12 contributors: Jacob Boerema, dimspingos, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Anders Jonsson, Marco Ciampa, Sabri Ünal, Yuri Chornoivan, Alx Sa, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Dick Groskamp, Sage M, Tomo Dote.
Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report
bugs and discuss possible improvements with us.
Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our
various discussion channels or social
network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix!
Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we
get statistics through git scripting, errors may slip inside these
stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some
contributors or contributions.
We nearly thought that the RC2would be the last release
candidate,
but it turned out we found more things we were not really happy with, for
a stable version. And the more we fixed, the more it became clear that a
RC3 was needed.
We are now in a state where we feel happy again. Of course, there are
some things we would like to spend more time on, but we have to stop
somewhere. Hopefully you will think the same! So as usual, we
are calling for everyone to massively test this version 3.2.0 RC3.
Please everyone, test and report any
issue you find!
Depending on the testing feedback, we may get GIMP 3.2.0 out very soon!
Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to
give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!
You might have noticed that when Netflix was attempting to acquire Warner Brothers, Republicans were suddenly and uncharacteristically interested in media consolidation and antitrust reform. Republican AGs threatened investigation. The Trump DOJ launched a (fake) antitrust inquiry. Senator Mike Lee scheduled a hearing where he’d planned to press Netflix on the competitive impacts of the deal.
But now that Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison has decided to elbow out Netflix and dramatically overpay for Warner Brothers instead, all of this furrowed-brow concern has magically disappeared. Despite the fact the Paramount deal is arguably worse for the market, labor, and Democracy.
Mike Lee says he’s cancelled his planned Netflix hearing, but curiously has no similar hearing scheduled for Paramount. He issued a statement that didn’t mention Paramount at all:
“Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers raised serious antitrust concerns. When a massive streaming platform consolidates even more TV shows and movies behind a single paywall, American families lose. Walking away from this deal is a win for consumers.”
There are far more operational redundancies between Paramount and Warner Brothers, guaranteeing significantly more layoffs. The higher debt load from subsequent CBS and Warner transactions also guarantees more layoffs and higher prices for everyone (labor and consumers always foot the bill for these deals). It’s also easy to argue that David Ellison (who was basically gifted a role as media mogul by his dad) and friends are dramatically less competent, likely resulting in significantly more mistakes and operational chaos.
And yet, Republicans couldn’t care less because the billionaire now buying Warner Brothers is aligned with their (increasingly unpopular) authoritarian agenda.
For as long as I’ve been alive, a key platform for the GOP has been to coddle corporate power, encourage rampant and harmful consolidation and monopolization wherever possible, and aggressively undermine corporate oversight, consumer and labor protections, and regulatory integrity. It’s not been subtle.
Yet consistently you’ll see the press trip over itself to give the GOP credibility on corporate oversight or “antitrust reform” they never had to actually earn. You’ve seen it constantly with phony populists like Josh Hawley and JD Vance, we saw it repeatedly during last election season, and you saw it again recently during the Netflix deal, when the press failed to indicate none of the inquiries were in good faith.
Democrats like Cory Booker are now threatening inquiries from the other side of the aisle:
“The circumstances surrounding this Administration’s antitrust enforcement, and the apparent political favoritism that has colored this, have cast a shadow over every transaction now moving through the approval process. Congress has a responsibility to ensure the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are not clearing megamergers for the benefit of the Administration’s allies.”
But historically Democrats have been generally terrible on media policy, media reform, protecting labor, and protecting consumers from consolidation. Outside of folks like Lina Khan and Katie Porter, it’s another area where they’ve been a somewhat decorative opposition party that will often say the right thing, but fail to really apply pressure when it matters. We’ll see what happens next.
The Trump DOJ will of course rubber-stamp Ellison’s deal, and outside of potential state antitrust lawsuits, they don’t have a lot of leverage until they can regain control of the House, Senate, and the courts. Hooker is threatening to unwind the deal should they retake the majority during the midterms, but given Dem history, that’s the sort of threat you’d need to see before you really believe.
Consolidated corporate power buys the U.S. government (or lack of) they’d like to see, and the rest of us live in the wreckage while the corporate press tries to direct your attention elsewhere. I never thought this corruption was particularly subtle in years past, and now the clobbering is so ham-fisted it almost feels overtly satirical.
This is where empathy lies, and it’s an easy chasm to fall into.
“I can’t imagine eating durian ice cream,” is not the same as “no one likes durian ice cream.”
We fail as marketers, editors and project managers when we can’t find the empathy to bridge the gap. It’s a lovely shortcut to make things for yourself, to imagine that you are the client, the reader or the customer. But most of the time, you’re not.
We’ve talked a lot about the resurgence of measles in America over the past 14 or so months, and for good reason. It’s a horrible disease of historic significance. Equally historic was America achieving elimination status of the measles 26 years ago, only to see that almost certainly fall away thanks to the incompetence and inaction by Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr. This is all connected with a surge of anti-vaxxer nonsense that has proliferated across several decades, but which is now peaking thanks to the clowns this administration has put in charge of American health.
But as bad as the measles is, and it is really bad, it would be nothing to the visible horror show that any real return of polio in America would be. It was only weeks ago that the chair of ACIP, the CDC’s committee for recommendations on vaccine policies, wondered aloud if we should be vaccinating for polio any longer. Perhaps in part because of those comments, healthcare professionals throughout the country are ringing the alarm bells, warning that the country is in no way prepared for a return of polio.
Part of the problem, ironically enough, is that vaccines have done such a wonderful job of eliminating polio that healthcare professionals are no longer proficient in treating it.
“We don’t have a healthcare infrastructure to take care of a polio outbreak,” said Grace Rossow, an operating-room communications coordinator in Illinois, who has long-term health issues following a case of polio as an infant.
“They don’t know how to treat it. It is a massive problem if we have a resurgence of polio.”
Polio has no cure. Those who get it merely get their symptoms treated as best they can. Up to half of those who get the disease will suffer from long-term effects for the rest of their lives. Symptoms of post-polio syndrome include such fun things as increasing weakness in the muscles, fatigue, pain and muscle atrophy, problems breathing and swallowing, and an inability to be mobile without mechanical assistance. And that’s what you can deal with once you get past the acute symptoms, like paralysis in the lower extremities and the inability to breath without the help of an iron lung.
And if Polio does indeed return, it will be because selfish or misguided people, typically clinging to religious excuses that are simply unserious, have refused to be good members of their communities by getting them and their children vaccinated.
Art Caplan is a polio survivor, who has suffered from post-polio syndrome and now currently teaches medical ethics at NYU.
When Kirk Milhoan, the chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said the vaccine advisers were reconsidering routine childhood vaccines because the risks of illnesses such as polio had dropped, “that makes me furious”, Caplan said.
“If you could gather up the kids I saw die or become really severely disabled from 50 years ago, they would want you arrested … It’s horrifying, and the height of irresponsibility to leave the door open even a crack,” he continued.
As more families choose not to vaccinate, particularly after the US stopped fully recommending several key vaccines, Caplan said: “You are begging to have a recurrence of the disease.”
Betting on the return of a disease as infectious as polio while witnessing falling vaccination rates is an easy bet. That’s how these diseases work. And if the angry rash and a few dead children haven’t gotten through to the masses on the measles, I dare say that children with deformed and mangled joints, bones, and bodies, either stuffed into iron lungs or getting by with the help of dual walking canes, would likely clarify the minds of Americans on this matter.
But, and I cannot stress this enough, there is no reason we should have to sacrifice so many people, so many children, to re-convince ourselves to do the right thing.
In recent years, YggTorrent was France’s largest and most active torrent community, serving millions of users.
