GreatFaker

Great show at Central Saloon tonight with @daemonchadeau.com's Prelude To A Pistol

Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron seated on stage about to discuss Enshitification

Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron on the same stage! For a conversation about enshitification and the rot economy

New reader this week! I *will* be recommending it to others

Look, I'm just gonna say this and add my voice to the others who are saying the same basic things.

I don't care that Microsoft decided that your Windows 10 laptop shouldn't work anymore. If you can't use it, do not throw it away. Find a Linux nerd. We'll use it. We'll make it work for someone else.

Age of Aquarius - YouTube

New Perturbator album, Age of Aquarius

Thoughts?

We just got a glimpse of how Black towns, businesses, churches, schools, homes, and Black bodies were destroyed and killed

In white Utah at a white college at a white rally a white man killed by another white man resulted in anger at… Black people & institutions.. just like in the past.

I do not want to enable location services. I do not want to create an account. I do not want to sign up for special offers and news about your product. I would like to engage in a simple transaction where I give you money in exchange for a good.

I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer, and the more I learn about both their intentions and actions the more certain I am that they are unrepentant and that their greed will never be sated. I have watched them take the things that made me human — social networking, digital communities, apps, and the other connecting fabric of our digital lives — and turned them into devices of torture, profitable mechanisms of abuse, and find it disgusting how many reporters seem to believe it's their responsibility to thank them and explain why it's good this is happening to their readers.

Sam Altman is a con artist, a liar, and a sleazy carnival barker who would burn our planet to the ground, steal from millions of people and burn billions of dollars in pursuit of power, and I believe the same can be said of people like Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft. Tim Cook is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, slowly allowing the rot to seep into Apple’s products, slowly adding bothersome subscription products and useless AI features to chip away at the user experience. Apple’s app store and its repeated support of exploitative microtransaction-laden mobile games built to create gambling-like addiction in adults and children alike, making it billions of dollars a year. Because Apple’s products are less shitty, it gets a much easier time. Sundar Pichai is the Henry Kissinger of technology — a glossy executive that escapes blame despite having caused harm on a global scale. The destruction of Google Search at the hands of Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan should be written about like a war crime, and those responsible treated as such.

Satya Nadella has aggressively expanded Microsoft’s various monopolies, the most egregious of which is the Microsoft 365 suite — a monopoly over business software that everybody kind of hates that Microsoft prices to undercut the competition, effectively setting the conditions of most business software as either “cheaper than Microsoft” or “slightly better than Microsoft.” Nadella has overseen layoffs of tens of thousands of people in the last three years alone, and despite his bullshit “growth mindset” culture treats his employees and customers as equally disposable. Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul that has overseen the growth and proliferation of some of the single-most abusive and manipulative software in the world. Meta has grown to a market cap of $1.5 trillion dollars by intentionally making the experience on Instagram and Facebook worse, intentionally frustrating and harming billions of people. These are the people in charge. These are the people running the tech industry. These are the people who make decisions that affect billions of people every minute of every day, and their decisionmaking is so flagrantly selfish and abusive that I am regularly astonished by how little criticism they receive.

I have watched Rot Economy stooges like Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg destroy an internet that made me human, and I will never forgive them for what they’ve done to the computer. They peddle digital asbestos. They must be stopped.

www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

Just imagine medicine so powerful it can cure a disease before you even contract it. We can only dream

Folks, you can't report the United States to its manager. There's no superhero coming to save us.

We don't need one giant act of heroism. We need millions of small acts of solidarity. Help one person in your community for nothing in return. Then, do it again. And again.

That's the revolution.

The right to anonymity is powerful, and America is destroying it Age verification was already risky — now it’s downright dangerous.

"In parts of the country, the government would like sites to collect an unprecedented amount of identifying information about their users. In the whole country, the government would like to track down and prosecute those users if they are rude... It doesn’t take a mastermind to see the risks."

the cast of Hackers (1995) posing in a series of adjacent phone booths

Today is the 30th anniversary of Hackers

Who dis new dj at Time Warp

"Harvard can't use race as a factor in admissions, but ICE can use race as a factor in detentions" is a retrenchment essentially to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution. It's vanishingly few steps removed from "Latinos have no rights which the white man is bound to respect."

A History of Mondo 2000 Part 1 Up and Down With the Next Millennium’s First Magazine

"Mondo 2000, it was the media darling magazine of the emerging “cyber culture,” a glorious kaleidoscopic confluence of technology, drugs, pop culture, and bizarre conspiracy theories, put together by a brainy group of psychonauts and counterculture weirdos.. It was required reading

It's always been part of the game that V never has to drink. It's a nice touch

YouTube video by The Librarians Film THE LIBRARIANS | Official Trailer

Can't wait to see this:
youtu.be/Ykll4MWltsQ

Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action Advocates fear such settlements will “financially ruin” the AI industry.

AI advocates have warned that if every author in the class action filed a claim, it would "financially ruin" the entire industry.

"How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It" Cory Doctorow at CloudFest 25
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-...

Truth. Scariest character in the whole series

At the same party! Technically i'm across the street getting ramen now, but still counts

Holy shit, that's a lot of trauma. I hope you're taking it easy

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

MORPHEUS: They're coming for you, Neo. I can guide you, but you must do exactly as I say. Take the elevator to the lobby and go to the CVS across the street. Purchase 5 Steam gift cards at $200 each. Scratch off the protective coating on the back and tell me the fifteen digit redemption codes. Hurry

What's that word for when the state owns the means of production? It's on the tip of my tongue

When Ted Turner asked Carl Sagan if he was a socialist, Sagan gave the answer America keeps failing to learn.

The title page of a signed copy of "A Snake Falls to Earth" by Darcie Little Badger

I got to meet @littlebadger.bsky.social tonight!

What opposition movements need — and what fear-based regimes fear most. The Four Es: A Framework for Building Movements That Survive and Win

Most people think opposition movements rise or fall based on charisma, ideology, or momentum.

But the movements that survive fear-based regimes, and actually win, rely on something else.

://open.substack.com/pub/trygveolson/p/what-opposition-movements-need-and?r=f0clj&utm_medium=ios

A moment from the 1995 film, Hackers. Several people in room, talking: Character 1: "I've got a record. I was Zero Cool." Character 2: "Zero Cool crashed 1,507 systems in one day. Biggest crash in history. Front page New York Times, August 10, 1988."

Happy Zero Cool Day!