Most discussions about the Democratic Party in this election cycle focus on the remarkable rise of progressive Democrats (such as Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist who yesterday scored an upset win in the Democratic contest for the Florida Senate).
An equally big story is the remarkable decline of corporate Democrats.
Some Democrats worry about this. My old friend Democratic strategist James Carville compares the current wave of progressive primary wins to progressive campaigns in 2016 — especially that of Bernie Sanders — that he believes fractured the Democratic coalition.
“Bernie Sanders is the reason that Donald Trump is president,” Carville said recently, claiming that Bernie’s primary challenge to Hillary Clinton convinced voters in battleground states that establishment Democrats were no different from establishment Republicans, thereby weakening her prospects in the general election.
Even if James is right about 2016 (and I don’t believe he is) his assessment is irrelevant now because we’re at a radically different point in American politics than we were 10 years ago.
The silver lining on the dark storm cloud of Trump and his detestable regime is that it has exposed the greed, venality, cupidity, and corruption of America’s corporate elite.
Trump has allowed the CEOs of giant corporations and the titans of Wall Street to do whatever they want as long as they suck up to him. And he’s providing all sorts of corporate welfare to those who generously bribe him — no-bid government contracts, exclusive licenses, tax loopholes, tariff exemptions, use of public lands, and permission to become even bigger monopolies.
Trump has thereby unveiled a truth about corporate America that for many years has been hidden behind a soothing blanket of corporate PR bullsh*t about social responsibility, corporate charity, and “trickle-down” economics.
That truth is the captains of corporate America are so rapacious that they’re willing to throw average working Americans under the bus to make billions more.
Corporate avarice under Trump has become so blatant and corporate America’s contempt for the needs of average Americans so flagrant that most Americans are now catching on.
They’re voting for progressive Democrats not because they want socialism, support the Democratic Socialists of America, or reject candidates called “moderate.”
They’re voting for candidates whom they believe will fight to make housing, food, healthcare, and childcare affordable to average working families. And who’ll take on Trump’s billionaire backers, CEOs, and Wall Street titans who are rigging the economy against them.
Much of the corporate media won’t tell this story. When Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic primary over Haley Stevens, the media overflowed with accounts of how much smaller El-Sayed’s margin of victory was than polls had predicted.
Yet the most remarkable thing about El-Sayed’s victory was that he won despite being dramatically outspent by super PACs arrayed against him.
Stevens benefited from tens of millions of dollars in outside spending, including the largest investment in a senatorial race ever made by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which traditionally supports pro-Israel candidates but in recent election cycles has supported candidates most favored by corporate America. AIPAC’s ads in favor of Stevens and against El-Sayed never even mentioned Israel.
Outside super PACs poured an estimated $54 million to $60 million into backing Stevens and opposing El-Sayed, compared to only about $5 million for El-Sayed. Pro-Stevens groups outspent El-Sayed on TV advertising alone by more than 12 to 1 ($26.9 million to $2.1 million) in the closing weeks.An average of $95 was spent for every vote against El-Sayed versus just $9 per vote for him.
The race between Stevens and El-Sayed was a proxy fight over the future of the Democratic Party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer backed Stevens and encouraged donors to back her campaign, as did other corporate-aligned politicians such as Michigan senator Gary Peters. On the other hand, Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supported El-Sayed, as did progressives such as Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Elizabeth Warren.
El-Sayed justifiably made a campaign issue out of how much corporate money was backing his rival. He argued that Democrats should reject corporate influence and embrace an agenda that helps average Americans. His campaign centered on providing Medicare for All, lowering prescription drug costs, and banning corporate PAC money. “We’re in a situation right now where the rich keep getting hyper-rich on the backs of figuring out how to monetize everyday people,” El-Sayed told AP during a Sunday afternoon march, as his supporters chanted behind him, “Money out of politics! Money in your pockets!”
El-Sayed’s victory marked a turning point for the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.
I saw the start of the corporate Democrats in the early 1980s, when Democrats in congress began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans, mostly from big corporations.
“Business has to deal with us whether they want to or not” crowed Democratic Rep. Tony Coelho, who then headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Democrats had controlled Congress since 1955, and assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. They thought they could take advantage of their seemingly permanent power to raise cash for their campaigns.
Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but it proved a Faustian bargain as big corporations and Wall Street gained increasing influence in the party. It is a truism in politics as in nature: One dares not bite the hands that feed.
Corporate Democrats thereafter stopped the Democratic Party from pursuing an agenda that would have dramatically helped America’s working class.
To be sure, over the last three decades Democrats have scored some important victories for working families — the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example.
Yet they’ve done little to alter the widening economic inequalities that have taken a huge toll on working-class families.
Both Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free-trade agreements, for example, but didn’t provide the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or to enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down vote.
In his 1992 campaign, Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to buck corporate Democrats by spending political capital on it. In his 2008 campaign, Obama made the same promise but never acted on it.
Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Clinton was elected president to fewer than 10 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.
The Obama administration also protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout but left millions of underwater homeowners to drown.
Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify — with the result that large corporations have grown far larger and major industries far more concentrated.
And they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to big money in politics.
What happens when you combine free trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate monopoly power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You get an economy favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful, while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security.
John F. Kennedy was the last Democratic president to depend on the votes of working-class Americans while losing the votes of white, college-educated Americans by 2 to 1. Sixty years later, Joe Biden depended on the votes of college-educated Americans while losing the votes of the white working class by 2 to 1. Kamala Harris lost the working class by an even larger margin.
Trump has exposed the venality and cupidity of corporate America, while large swaths of the working middle class struggle to make ends meet. As a result, Republicans appear likely to face some major defeats in the midterm elections. Corporate Democrats are on the defensive because their campaign cash isn’t working the way it used to.
Now, finally, the Democratic Party has an opportunity to once again become the party of working Americans, as it was under Franklin D. Roosevelt, rather than the party of corporate America. It is more urgent than at any time since the Great Depression that Democrats act on this opportunity.
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These days, everybody loves (or needs) to hate data centers for AI, and with good reasons: assuming they are built in the quantities AI companies want them, which there is plenty of reasons to doubt, they will suck up really huge quantities of energy, money, water and human creativities that there are thousands better ways to use. A few days ago, however, someone called Brooks Fiesinger (of whom I know nothing except the post mentioned below) made on Facebook the opposite point, which is quite interesting as food for thought, if nothing else.
Here is a synthesis of Mr. Fiesinger thesis, partly reformatted as a numbered list to make it easier follow the comments, and counter-proposals, that I make right after it.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH: We are running out of workers, traditional intelligence metrics are dropping, and despite their unpopularity, AI data centers are currently our most viable lifeboat.
The data points to a massive structural deficit hitting our economy over the next 30 years, and we aren’t taking the infrastructure requirements seriously enough. Here is what we are facing:
The Workforce Collapse: We are mathematically running out of humans to keep the economy running. 2024 was “Peak 65”, roughly 12,000 Boomers are retiring every single day, taking decades of institutional knowledge with them.
The Cognitive Shift: Empirical studies from the US, UK, and Norway show that the “Flynn Effect” (the steady historical rise of IQ scores) has inverted for cohorts born after 1975. Recent testing of 400,000 US adults shows measurable drops in vocabulary, mathematical logic, and complex problem-solving.
(consequently) Millennials are likely the peak of traditional, deep-work intelligence. The next generation of professionals is highly optimized for fragmented, rapid data, but they will struggle with sustained deductive reasoning.
The Bottom Line: We need AI capabilities to replace the workforce that lacks both the raw headcount and the traditional cognitive processing power of previous generations. AI agents must replace the missing administrative volume, while frontier models synthesize complex data so future doctors, engineers, and teachers can make informed decisions.
This software requires heavy hardware. You cannot have cognitive augmentation without hyper-scale data centers. The physical infrastructure must be built right now.
First critical caveat: just because we desperately need data centers doesn’t mean we should be reckless. I fully support stringent environmental protections, proactive grid and energy management (we need advanced nuclear and baseload power, not rolling blackouts), and strict financial responsibility.
Second critical caveat: we must actively guard against the “Wall-E Effect. If we build AI to compensate for declining human reasoning, human reasoning will decline further because it’s no longer exercised.
Mr. Fiesinger conclusion: We are walking a dangerous line between necessary cognitive support and catastrophic human dependency. Do you have a better proposal?
In general, I sincerely thank Mr. Fiesinger for connecting some points that everybody should see they are connected, and for stimulating thinking about the role of AI in the full picture, regardless of what the current crow of challenged children that leads it claims.
Point 1 is true and really concerning, the only thing wrong in it is “the economy” instead of “society”, which is what really matters. It’s true and concerning because overpopulation has already started to end. I already wrote about this here.
Points 2 and 3 are quite close to an unfair generalization, but there still is more truth in them than what would be comfortable. In them, I would add “AI-dependence” to the “highly optimized for” list.
I also have to say that I will steal, obviously giving credit, the “highly optimized for fragmented, rapid data” definition, because I really love it. It is, for everybody it really applies to, the most elegant way I’ve seen so far to tell somebody that he’s too dumb to function as adult, because either parents or institutions that snobbed or even boycotted adequate education (with humanities in the right place), love of reading for reading’s sake and sensible protection from high-tech during childhood left him the attention span and memory of a goldfish.
I also agree with Point 6.. for the data centers that will be actually needed, including the part that calls for nuclear power, if developed in the “revolutionary” way I suggested two years ago
My disagreement, and counter proposals, are about Points 4 and 5, and with the underlying assumption hidden that what we call AI today is unavoidable and can only grow. That’s just not true, not true at all. Never was, never will.
Here is my main objection about Point 4: for what purpose, exactly, should we “replace the workforce that lacks both headcount and brain power”? For the same dung pit of nonsense we call the economy today? Should that workforce be replaced to keep running a world where people work themselves to oblivion, and where Europe (or any other place, of course) is supposed to do with tech the same mistakes the US did, mistakes of which the US will free themselves of through a crash that will damage the rest of the world? Of course, answering such a big question was outside the scope of Mr. Fiesinger’s post. I am not blaming him at all, just pointing out the questions we should answer before any concrete proposal to “keep the economy running”.
Moving to Point 5: well before replacing any job, the first volume frontier AI models should reduce is not in work, but in systemic excessive overhead, for example giving humans pointers to stupid complexity that shouldn’t exist, starting with laws as I suggested here.
Also, please note that many of the highest-paid administrative jobs that AI should replace often are jobs that shouldn’t exist at all. That is, the job that may entitle to a beautiful personal office and traveling business class, but under the facade are just “performance art... professional email forwards... human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other... managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers.... creating strategies for strategies, optimizing things that didn’t need optimizing, disrupting things that were working fine.”(read the whole thing this comes from, it’s great! Especially if your salary is high).
As far as AI physical infrastructure goes... the huge number of huge data centers is needed only by the hyperscaler companies that push the current AI bubble, in order to delay their crash. Stop that senseless rush, stop public access to AI for idiotic tasks (me on this, two years ago again), and we’ll find ourselves with plenty of data centers, or real possibilities to build them, to make a new wave of AI do stuff we all actually need.
Really a big deal,,, or not? “Surprisingly few data centers are actually getting built” Source: CNN.
One paragraph summary
AI running in data centers will be needed to solve the huge problems (global aging, inequality, agricultural crises, resource conflicts) that will only get worse in the next years if nothing happens. The AI that’s needed, however, is not the AGI the AI cabal wants to impose on the world out of sociopathy and greed, but it will never achieve. It is a much smaller set of task-specific AIs, like China is doing, that will need many, many less data centers. And decently educated youngsters to handle it, of course. This is my better proposal, with sincere thanks to Mr. Fiesinger for his stimulus.
I enjoyed making this video, although the message is anything but enjoyable. Trump has gutted nearly 20% of FEMA’s workforce and dragged his feet granting natural disaster relief to blue states. With hurricane and fire season on the horizon, it’s a perfect storm of sabotage and cruelty.
Object permanence: Flying Brits v brown people; Probability neglect; Law v "enhanced patdowns"; Onion says Brits love paywalls; "Hench"; "Lessons in Magic and Disaster."
You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:
I'm an artist and a worker. I want to protect my labor interests. So do my peers from across the "creative industries." But a sizable group of my peers think the way we're going to protect our interests is by expanding copyright so that it's unambiguously illegal to scrape the internet, analyze the files retrieved by those scrapers, and publish that analysis (a process more familiarly known as "training AI"):
This is a losing strategy. First, because banning scraping, or requiring permission to count the elements in creative works, or demanding a license to publish collections of facts about copyrighted works will inflict enormous collateral damage on a wide variety of socially beneficial activities. From the OED to search engines to the Internet Archive, so many beneficial activities rely on the fact that copyright permits unlicensed collection and analysis of every copyrighted work as a single, massive corpus, and copyright allows the publication of that analysis without permission from the creators of the works it analyzes.
A lot of people who are (rightfully) very angry about AI dispute this. They believe that they can craft an "AI training" law that would ban scraping, analysis and publication when these activities are part of AI training, but not when they're undertaken for a benign purpose. I am very, very skeptical of this. After 25 years of watching internet policy go badly awry, to the great detriment of workers of all kinds and everyday users, it is my professional, considered opinion that drafting a statute that only stops these "bad" activities is much, much harder than these people think, and may actually be impossible.
I think some artists advocating for a copyright-based solution to AI's war on labor understand this and have decided that they're willing to catch a lot of dolphins in these legal tuna-nets they're hoping to get from Congress. I get that: there are always trade-offs, and the perfect can't be the enemy of the good.
But I think they're making the wrong trade-off, and not just because I value archives, accountability corpuses, large-scale linguistic research and search engines. I think they're making the wrong trade-off because copyright will not protect their livelihoods from AI-based wage erosion.
Here's why: the theory of copyright as an "artist's right" is premised on the idea that we artists get these exclusive rights, which we use in our bargaining with media companies and other intermediaries. It's a (pseudo) property right, and it's sub-licensable. Just as an entrepreneur might get the contract to supply catering for a sports stadium and then parcel out the pretzel stand, beer bar, and pizza concessions to subcontractors, we're meant to sell our English rights, foreign language rights, graphic novel rights, film rights, audio rights, (and so on) to a variety of media companies.
To bargain successfully, it's not only necessary for you to have something valuable to trade: you also need to have leverage. You need to have options. The other side has to believe that if they lowball you, you will go do a deal elsewhere.
This is where copyright fails to serve creative workers. Even at the best of times, the world naturally produces an oversupply of would-be professional artists, and a sufficiency of the talented to fill most of the workaday niches in our field. Even exceptional artists – and exceptional works of art – are often commercial flops, for reasons that aren't always well understood (though sometimes it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, where a media company buys the rights and then loses confidence in the work and does not exert itself in the marketing of the work).
These are not the best of times. Decades of lax antitrust enforcement has boiled the "creative industries" down to 5 publishers, 4 studios, 3 labels, 2 app stores, and one company that's in charge of all the ebooks and audiobooks.
Since the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress has acted time and again to broaden copyright. Today's copyright lasts longer, restricts more uses, extends to more kinds of works, and carries stiffer statutory penalties for infringement ($150,000 per download!). The media companies we creative workers bargain with are larger, richer and more profitable than at any time in history – and we are poorer. The share of those massive profits that ends up in our pocket is lower than ever – and we don't just get smaller slices of that larger pie, those slices are smaller than the slices we used to get, when the pie was much smaller. The rising tide of copyright expansion lifted our bosses' boats – even as our dinghies filled with bilge and sank.
How could we get so much more to bargain with, only to bargain it all away, for less money than we used to get for a much smaller bundle of rights? Simple: giving us rights did not give us leverage. Giving us more rights without giving us more bargaining power is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch-money. There's no amount of lunch-money that will get that kid fed; but if you keep increasing how much money the kid gets, the bullies will end up so rich that they can afford to run a global campaign demanding that we all think of those poor hungry kids and send them even more lunch money.
Copyright's failure to deliver for creative workers doesn't mean that we're doomed to poverty. Our works are generating record profits for our bosses, and there are plenty of ways to change the "distributional outcomes" (the phrase economists use for "who gets what") in arts/labor policy. In 2022, I co-wrote Chokepoint Capitalism along with the eminent Australian copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin. The whole book is full of these pro-worker arts policies:
Rebecca and I start from the premise that artists are workers, not the small businesses that our bosses insist we see ourselves as. The idea that an artist is an LLC with an MFA fits in very neatly with copyright: you're getting this bundle of exclusive rights from Congress and then you bargain, business-to-business, with other companies out there in the world, selling those rights for the best price you can get. This approach rarely works, and when it does, it works badly. 50 years of more copyright, richer bosses, and poorer artists put the lie to the "LLC with an MFA" approach.
If we're workers, then we derive our power from labor rights. The Writers Guild – the only creative workers in world history to have comprehensively beaten AI in their workplace – won their AI fight with a strike:
The Hollywood guilds are able to pursue a limited form of "sectoral bargaining" (where all the workers in a field bargain with all its bosses) called "multi-employer bargaining." Bosses hate sectoral bargaining, and in 1947 they got it banned outright through the Taft-Hartley Act.
Getting other kinds of creative workers into multi-employer bargaining arrangements will be a lot of work – and repealing Taft-Hartley and restoring sectoral bargaining will be even harder. But just because it's hard to do the thing that works, it doesn't follow that we should do the easy thing that doesn't work.
Compared to winning more labor rights, getting more copyright will be easy. That's because our bosses want more copyright. When we demand more copyright, our bosses – the most powerful, profitable media companies in human history, grown rich off our labor – will fight alongside of us.
But media companies don't want to stop AI from depriving us of our wages. Quite the contrary! The whole reason that the Writers Guild had to go on strike was that movie studios – not Openai or Anthropic – wanted to replace them with AI. The same studios that are suing the AI companies for "mass copyright theft" have made it very clear that they want to buy chatbots from those AI companies and use them to erode our wages and thin our ranks. The copyright lawsuits our bosses are waging against the AI companies are intended to force tech companies to pay for licenses before they train their chatbots on our work. But they won't be paying us for those licenses – they'll be paying our bosses.
The AI copyright fight isn't being fought to protect your wages – it's being fought to see whether your lost wages end up in the pockets of a tech boss or a media boss. AI copyright suits are a fight over who's going to get the lion's share when they eat you up for dinner. They're not a way to keep you off the menu.
This becomes more obviously true with each passing day, and this morning, the world got its clearest example of what a poor substitute copyright is for fundamental human rights, like labor rights and privacy rights.
Last year, Spirit Airlines went bankrupt, a casualty of a monopolized aviation sector and Trump's oil price surge. Ever since, vultures have circled its carcass, picking off its assets in a string of auctions conducted by Spirit's bankruptcy trustees. Today, those trustees announced that they had sold all of Spirit's employees' data to Google, for use in AI training:
Every email, every memo, every calendar entry. Oceans of sensitive, personal information, all to be shoveled directly into the bottomless maw of Google's AI training systems. This training data includes messages between colleagues and with outside parties about workers' romantic lives, their health, their family situations. These workers' most private lives will end up as fodder for a Google chatbot.
Now, all of these workers have a copyright in all of that work. Under international copyright treaties and US law, copyright "inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity." The very instant a worker sets fingers to keyboard and types out a message with even the smallest quantum of creativity, a new copyright springs into existence, giving the copyright holder 90 years' worth of control over it.
But even though every one of those emails and messages and memos was written by a human being working for Spirit, the copyright over those works does not belong to the workers. Every single one of them will have signed an employment agreement that designates their emails and other copyrightable work as "works made for hire," owned by Spirit Airlines, which means that their work is now an asset in Spirit's bankruptcy estate. That's why all that personal information is about to be transferred to a new corporate owner, Google, who can do anything they want with it.
We know how terrible this kind of disclosure will be for workers. In 2001, the criminal enterprise Enron collapsed after the extent of its fraud was revealed. In the ensuing litigation, Enron's bankruptcy overseers decided that it was too expensive to purge the company's email servers of personal information before entering it into evidence. That meant that once the court battles were over, all the Enron employees' emails entered the public domain as part of the court record:
The "Enron Corpus" is a foundational data-set in modern computer science. Academics analyzed the data to do pioneering work on machine learning and social graph theory, which found its way into the design and operations of social media companies, who learned how to spot and manipulate social connections by studying it.
The Enron Corpus isn't just a data-set, though. It's a privacy catastrophe, full of sensitive personal information that haunts the 158 employees whose correspondence is now permanently afloat upon the internet.
Why was the Enron Corpus so exploitable? Because US labor law does not protect this kind of sensitive information when it is in your employer's hands. In fact, if your boss ends up with a trove of your personal information in the form of emails, calendar entries and files, you will typically be blamed for it: "Why did you use your work computer for personal activities?"
But anthropologists who study computer usage have known for decades that everyone ends up with personal data on their work devices. What's more, this problem is only getting worse, because (thanks to weak labor laws), we're expected to work longer hours and to be on call when we're not at the job, which means that you're often dealing with personal crises after hours from your desk, and dealing with work crises at home from your sofa.
Any fit-for-purpose labor rights regime would recognize that your privacy rights must extend to the data that finds its way onto your boss's computers, even if you put that data there. Any failure to recognize this bedrock fact gives employers free license to plunder and exploit your personal information.
Of course, labor law isn't the only way to protect private information. While labor law should contain explicit, job-related privacy guarantees, privacy law should protect all our privacy (after all, Spirit's servers are also full of emails and messages from Spirit's passengers).
Unfortunately for anyone who ever flew on Spirit – or anyone who worked for them – American privacy law is all but dead. America's last consumer privacy law went into effect in 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act made it illegal for video-store clerks to disclose your VHS rental records.
Google says it won't use your profile or frequent flier info to train its model, but they haven't made the same promise about the millions of messages that passengers exchanged with the airline. Google has also promised to use "de-identification" algorithms to purge the Spirit customer, supplier and employee data of personal information. But "de-identification" is a pipe-dream, widely understood by security experts as a form of wishful thinking by companies that want to exploit your personal information while still insisting that they aren't violating your privacy. In reality, "de-identified" data is always vulnerable to "re-identification" attacks:
The collapse of privacy and labor rights in post-Reagan America and the mass expansion of copyright over the same period are part of the same phenomenon, aspects of two generations' worth of policies designed to benefit capital at the expense of workers, and corporations at the expense of consumers.
As consumers, we're told to substitute shopping for legal rights: if a corporation wrongs you, it's easier and quicker to "vote with your wallet" than it is to sue them or ask the government to intervene. Substituting shopping for politics has been a total failure. Shopping your way out of a monopoly is like recycling your way out of a wildfire:
As creative workers we were told to stop thinking of ourselves as workers altogether, to become small businesses, and to use the LLC With an MFA method to bargain our way out of exploitative arrangements. This, too, has been a failure:
The sale of Spirit's data to Google for AI training shows us that privacy and labor rights are indispensable. We can't substitute market mechanisms like comparison shopping or individual contract negotiations for broad, systemic, inalienable rights backstopped by law.
By demanding the copyright our bosses love, we're seeking the right to be angry about AI, even as the AI companies and our bosses cut deals to train chatbots with our work, which they will use to attack our livelihoods.
Once we stop pretending to be small businesses, once we abandon the fantasy of LLCs with MFAs, we can join with every worker in every industry in demanding sectoral bargaining; and with every consumer in demanding privacy rights. Winning privacy and labor struggles means more than the right to be angry about AI – that's the right to do something about it.
"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
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 585 (6624 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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They caused a few of you to gently complain that you don’t have the time to pour through my long-windedness.
Others of you have nicely suggested that I post too often — every day, seven days a week, sometimes two times a day. “I can’t keep up!” one of you wrote recently.
I apologize for my verbosity.
I try to keep these posts as short as possible but occasionally feel the need to provide additional evidence or argument or context.
And I cop a plea to posting at least seven days a week, sometimes even more often.
My excuse is we’re at such a dangerous point in the history of America and the world that I want to get you the facts, arguments, and analyses you need to take an active role in the resistance, and then in the rebuilding to follow.
That “active” role can be no more than talking to your friends and fortifying them — so that when they talk to their friends, they also have the facts, arguments, and analyses they need. Or it can be protecting the vulnerable in your communities. Or organizing and mobilizing to get out the vote November 3.
I also want to frame what’s happening — giving you a larger context and meaning.
In other words, I write so much because the stakes are so damn high. (I also try to break up the heavy stuff with occasional lighter offerings, such as my recent essay on Boomers, Saturday’s coffee klatch, and Sunday’s caption contest, on the theory that a spoonful of sugar helps even the bitterest medicine go down.)
But mostly, I write as much as I do because I believe in you. I believe in your values. In your thoughtfulness. In your determination to leave this nation and this world a better place.
And I’m immensely grateful to you for becoming part of this community, for sharing these posts, for adding your thoughtful comments, and for whatever support you can provide.
My only real worry is that I’m overloading you and over-filling your inbox. For which I do apologize.
I’ve argued that the K-shaped economy — a term used to describe growing inequality between high- and low-income households — can be seen in sales of McDonald’s burgers, whose lower- and middle-income customers fell by double digits in the first quarter of 2025 as they struggled with affordability.
Last Monday, you criticized me, arguing that McDonald’s problems are instead due to competition from rivals like Burger King.
(By the way, Scott, Bill Clinton didn’t fire me and Berkeley won’t, either. But your boss has a well-recorded tendency to fire his Cabinet secretaries, so I’d be careful if I were you.)
In a recent interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” you even declared that the U.S. economy is no longer in a K shape: “I got sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy. I can say here definitively, the K-shaped economy is over.”
As a former Cabinet secretary, I hope you won’t mind if I’m candid with a current one. Scott, your analysis is full of shite. It’s still a K-shaped economy.
Lower-income workers continue to struggle with stagnant wages and inflation, while high-income workers are riding high on the wealth effects of the stock market. Real wages may be growing slightly more for low income than high income, but the booming stock market is mostly benefiting the high income.
Widening inequalities are partly due to policies you and your boss in the Oval Office have been pursuing — especially your tariffs and war in Iran, both of which have been pushing prices upward and imposing a far greater burden on lower-income than high-income Americans.
July’s jobs report showed wage growth falling sharply, with average hourly earnings increasing at the slowest pace in five years — 3.2% year-over-year. Inflation, meanwhile, is not slowing. As a result, consumers’ purchasing power is falling. Prices are now rising 3.5% year-over-year, as wage growth has slowed to just 3.2% — meaning that the real earnings of Americans have been dropping since April.
And I’m not just talking about McDonald’s, Scott. When major retailers reported quarterly results in May, many noted the growing divide between high- and low-income consumers. Wealthier households continue to drive spending, while lower- and middle-income households struggle to keep up. “We certainly see with our higher-income consumers, they’re benefiting probably from the wealth effect of a buoyant stock market,” said Walmart’s CFO John David Rainey. “But with low-income consumers, they don’t necessarily get that benefit, and then it’s a little bit more of paycheck to paycheck.”
Grocery chains like Kroger are considering rolling back prices to gain market share in this K-shaped consumer environment. Target is also trying to adjust to it. We’re “expanding both low, low price points, starting at $1, all the way up to some of the new premium brands,” says Cara Sylvester, who became Target’s chief merchandising officer in mid-February.
On recent quarterly earnings calls, CEOs in grocery, outdoor apparel, and kids’ apparel noted the same K-shape pattern. Kevin Depew, deputy chief economist and industry eminence program leader at RSM, attributes what’s happening to an economy in which lower- and middle-income households face real spending pressure while upper-income consumers remain cushioned by equity gains. Home improvement retailer Home Depot notes the impact of higher fuel costs in particular. “There’s no question that the average consumer is feeling pressure from rising fuel costs,” Home Depot CFO Richard McPhail said.
Other major firms report that premium travel and high-end goods (luxury airline seats and high-tier tech products) have seen double-digit growth, while discount retailers and dollar stores report high demand for basic necessities from budget-constrained consumers.
Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City confirm the same trend. After analyzing changes in consumer spending between 2021 and 2025, they found that households with high incomes (fourth and fifth quintiles) increased their spending substantially faster than did consumers with low incomes (first to third quintiles). Because inflation-adjusted wage growth for the bottom quartiles has lagged behind top earners, everyday expenses like groceries, rent, and insurance are consuming larger shares of lower-income budgets.
The Federal Reserve’s May Beige Book also reflects this K-shaped divide, noting that higher-income households have remained relatively resilient, while lower-income consumers are showing greater financial strain and increased reliance on credit.
According to Moody’s Analytics, the richest 10% of American earners — composed of households making about $250,000 a year or more — are driving a record 49.7% of total U.S. consumer spending, significantly boosting the economy through the wealth effect of higher stock and home prices. They own over 90% of the value of all shares of stock, so big gains in the stock market have encouraged them to splurge on everything from vacations to designer handbags. “The finances of the well-to-do have never been better, their spending never stronger and the economy never more dependent on that group,” says Mark Zandi, who oversaw the analysis, based on data from the Federal Reserve. Zandi says the K-shaped economy remains “firmly intact.”
All told, rich Americans have increased their spending far beyond inflation, but nobody else has. The bottom 80% of earners spent 25% more than they did four years earlier, barely outpacing price increases of 21% over that period. And they’re going into debt to do so (researchers find auto repossessions and credit card delinquencies rising among lower-to-middle-income borrowers). But the top 10% spent 58% more.
Research by U.S.Bank also shows the K-shaped economy’s divide across household balance sheets, labor market access, generational wealth-building, and sector performance. “Higher-income households are more likely to own homes, equities, and retirement assets,” says Matt Schoeppner, senior economist for U.S. Bank, “allowing them to participate more directly when financial markets and home values rise.”
Federal Reserve distributional data reveal that wealth is increasingly concentrated. As of the fourth quarter of 2025, the richest 1% of Americans held 29.2% of the nation’s aggregate wealth (up from around 20% in the early 1990s), compared with just 5.3% for the bottom half.
Meanwhile, lower- and middle-income households are struggling. “Wage gains for most have been moderating, while essential costs for rent, groceries and gasoline remain elevated,” notes Schoeppner. “At the same time, savings buffers have continued to narrow while reliance on credit — particularly credit cards — has increased.”
Scott, what more evidence do you need? If this isn’t a K-shaped economy, what is it?
The labor market further reveals the K-shape. Hiring rates have fallen to 15-year lows of around 3.2% while layoff rates remain near historically low levels of 1.1%. In this “low-hire, low-fire” environment, workers who are already employed have some stability, but job seekers and those looking to advance are in trouble.
This is significant because mobility is the major way for workers to improve earnings, move into higher-productivity roles, and build financial buffers. “When hiring slows and job-switching premiums narrow,” says Beth Ann Bovino, U.S. Bank’s chief economist, “pathways to higher pay and better job matches become more limited.”
As a result, the labor market can appear stable at the aggregate level while becoming less dynamic beneath the surface — particularly for workers in lower-wage or more cyclical industries.
I’ve got to emphasize how badly the war in Iran is aggravating this K-shaped divide. U.S. Bank’s Schoeppner notes that “the resulting higher gasoline prices … may be more of an inconvenience for higher-income households, but for those with thinner buffers, they can quickly crowd out discretionary spending.” The San Francisco Fed has similarly noted that elevated gasoline and grocery costs are consuming a larger share of household budgets among the bottom 80%.
Credit conditions reveal the same widening divide. Bovino notes that lower-income households “tend to rely more heavily on higher-cost borrowing and devote a larger share of income to debt service, leaving them more sensitive to higher rates and reduced credit availability.” Recent Beige Book commentary also points to increased reliance on credit among lower-income households. The April 2026 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey shows tighter lending standards across key segments, suggesting that access to financing is becoming more constrained.
Scott, it’s important that you and your colleagues at the treasury and elsewhere in the Trump administration know what’s going on. The K-shaped economy can make the macro environment appear more stable than it is actually experienced by average working Americans. The fact is, the overall health of the economy increasingly depends on a narrowing base of consumption coming from the wealthy — who are spending because their stock market assets have risen so high but will stop spending if and when the stock market comes back to earth.
Meanwhile, inflation and credit pressures continue to land especially hard on lower-income Americans. In that sense, the K-shaped economy is not just a feature of recent cycles. It’s become the defining characteristic of how today’s economy absorbs shocks and generates growth.
Go ahead, Scott — attack me with all the ad hominem arguments you want. But you need to know the reality I’m talking about. You’re the one with the power. I’m just a retired professor. Your failure to comprehend the struggles facing average working Americans makes me worry that you and your boss will continue to pursue policies that worsen them.
Object permanence: Hair-gel bombers v bras; Hair-gel bombers v chemistry; AOL digs for spammer's platinum; Stross on infosec in 2061; In-game Ponzi; Snowden on Shadow Brokers hack; Life v understanding advanced math; "Greatest of Marlys!"; Housing and precarity; LLMs as slot-machines for coders; Hypercard's backstory; Pirate Party; Fanbois' mental health v critics; Krugman calls for alien invasion; Trump x Serbian genocidaires; The last Sandman Slim; Muphry’s Law; NSA created the Shadow Brokers; DOJ kills private prisons; Walmart externalizes crime; "Sgt Augmento"; Zuckermuskian solipsism.
Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture' (permalink)
Nobody explains copyright like Jennifer Jenkins, the director of the Duke Center for the Public Domain, in which capacity she is responsible for the annual New Year's roundups of all the materials entering the public domain (a series that started in the decades during which the public domain was frozen by the Sonny Bono Copyright Act):
Jenkins has a gift for making one of the most complicated, worst understood, most consequential areas of law not only comprehensible, but also fascinating. Her late 2023 explanation of what "Mickey Mouse's copyright is expiring" actually meant was the single best explainer on the subject, in a crowded field:
Small wonder that she's the go-to copyright and trademark expert for so many media outlets. Perhaps you heard her Planet Money segments on which superheroes are in the public domain:
Jenkins' flair for legal communications carries over to her scholarly work, of course, which is why her Open Copyright Casebook is a standard text for American law schools:
Jenkins co-wrote the Casebook with her husband, the equally erudite and expert James Boyle. It's just one of their many fruitful collaborations; they are also the writing team behind THEFT! A History of Music, the greatest graphic novel ever created about the history of music, music law, music censorship, and the music industry:
Last year, Jenkins published Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, an Oxford University Press title that fuses her scholarly and popular work in a generalist textbook on the legal framework for music that will forever change how you think about music. Now, a second edition, with a lengthy section on new music litigation, AI copyright fights, and the issue of uncompensated labor is available as an open access download:
Music Copyright weaves together the economic, cultural, political and artistic history of music, pulling on historic threads ranging from antiquity to medieval Europe to the age of mechanical reproduction to describe changing views of musicians, their audiences, and religious and political leaders on what constituted music, who was allowed to make music, and what music was for. In so doing, she firmly establishes the extremely contingent nature of our present-day norms around music, showing that the "natural" present-day assumptions about who gets paid, who pays, and when payment (or permission) is required are anything but, and are always in flux.
For obvious reasons, much of Jenkins' text describes these changes in the context of the record, the radio, satellite transmission, P2P file-sharing, and digital sampling (along with a chapter on AI). These examples are liberally illustrated with links to musical excerpts that bring the subject to life (these are presented as hotlinks in the ebook; if you're reading the print edition, you can use the book's companion website:)
Interspersed with these histories and analysis are lengthy, extremely on-point excerpts from THEFT!, her graphic novel history of music. These enliven the text as much as the music samples, making this textbook as entertaining as it is informative.
Of especial interest – and importance – are the long sections on the courtroom battles of Ed Sheeran, Katy Perry, and Pharrell Williams over similar "grooves" and "vibes" to other songs, some of them well-known and some quite obscure:
These cases highlight the fundamental incoherence of music copyright, a system composed of improvised responses to new technologies, each layered atop the last in a messy pile that virtually no one understands.
Jenkins understands it, though. I've been reading, writing, and debating about this stuff since the late 1990s, and I learned something new on every page of this delightful book. This should be required reading for anyone who makes music, loves music, or cares about musicians and the arts more generally. It's a towering accomplishment and a brilliant read.
"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
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Friday's words: 564 (6039 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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Trump claimed this past week that his job approval ratings are “fabulous” — they’re “above 60%.”
He also asserted that the United States is enjoying “the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”
And that the U.S. has “total control” over the Strait of Hormuz. “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Trump’s braggadocio doesn’t just mask his failures. His statements wildly contradict the calamities he’s created for America and the world.
To be sure, since he first entered American politics, we’ve been shocked and outraged by his lack of morality, scruple, or shame. It’s been difficult to conceive of such a person because we’ve always been taught to distinguish right from wrong and to do the right thing. Yet Trump has no conception of right and wrong. He isn’t unethical. He’s non-ethical. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral.
But his latest fabrications are so contrary to the realities of his monumental failures — his losing war with Iran, the near-collapsing U.S. economy, and his underwater approval ratings — that they’re not merely non-ethical or amoral. How can they be explained?
One possibility is his conman brain still firmly believes the public will go along with whatever he says and thinks he can manufacture success even when he’s going down the toilet.
But this can’t explain the extreme dissonance; he reads the same polls everyone else reads, and he knows the public isn’t buying.
Another possibility is that the sycophants surrounding him are telling him he’s wildly successful and don’t want to inform him of the depths of his failures for fear of his reaction.
Yet he constantly watches television, and even the networks he favors — such as Fox News — have lately been broadcasting his cataclysmic failures.
So what’s really going on? How can his assessments be so utterly unhinged from the enormity of his defeats?
The only possible explanation is that he’s finally lost his grasp on reality. He’s dangerously delusional. Trump is losing his mind.
It’s hard for most of us to take in the full import of this. Even those of us who detest him find it difficult to accept the seriousness of his dementia because we think of him as loathsome rather than oblivious.
We’ve spent so many years seething that no one has held him accountable for all the awful things he’s done that we’re disoriented by the possibility he’s now unaware. We don’t want to let him off the moral hook by reason of insanity. Yet what moral compass do we use to judge a president who is wildly and dangerously delusional?
This has become the wrong question. The problem is no longer Trump’s lack of ethics or his amorality. The current challenge is how to survive under a madman.
If he is no longer responsible for what he says or does, we should move beyond shock and outrage to outright fear. He could blow the world up. We must call on our elected representatives to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment as soon as possible, by reason of insanity.
Today I’m taking a vacation. (It’s the second Klatch I’ve missed out of 230 since Heather and I began them on March 19, 2022.) But I’ve left you in good hands! Our good friend Kamau Bell is sitting in, and today he and Heather take a deep dive into how America can dump the Trump before he dumps America.
So please pull up a chair, grab a cuppa, and join in the discussion.
Object permanence: London Copyfighters x Speaker's Corner; TSA v lipstick; Long Beach v photographers; China x David Cameron's internet censorship; McMansion Hell; Copyrighting an MTG deck; "Privacy preserving age verification" delenda est.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
If your theory is that markets deliver prosperity by spurring businesses to provide the superior products and services at lower prices needed to attract and retain workers and customers, then competition is a must-have. Without competitors, companies are "too big to care":
Meanwhile, if you think that the pressure of greed will always drive companies to cheat, and want companies held in check by democratically accountable lawmakers and enforcers, then you also want competition, because otherwise, disorganized sectors of hundreds of small businesses collapse into oligarchic cartels. Members of these cartels cease to compete directly with one another and instead collude to rip off workers and customers, leaving them aslosh in ready cash they can mobilize to capture regulators, securing an enshittogenic policy environment that reflects the easily arrived-at consensus that's only possible when you boil a sector down to a small handful of firms, each of them "too big to jail":
In other words: if your ideal is a world of high-quality products and services, produced by workers laboring under fair conditions, delivered to consumers at a fair price, then you want competition. Competition scares some people into running their businesses ethically; and competition ensures than an unethical operator can be held to account by government agencies charged with protecting workers and consumers.
Once you understand the role of competition as a counter-oligarchic check on corporate power, the rise of Big Tech and its authoritarian turn becomes much easier to understand.
Tech is uniquely hospitable to competition thanks to the intrinsic properties of digital computers. Formally, computers are "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machines," which is to say that every computer can run every valid program. This means that any enshittificatory gambit assayed by a tech company – say, locking generic ink out of your printer; or blocking third party app stores for your phone or console; or sticking a dozen extra ads before every Youtube video – is technically doomed.
Every time a tech boss introduces a 10' pile of shit to a digital product or service you rely upon, they induce rival technologists to create 11' ladders made of code that they can costlessly, instantaneously distribute to every one of the enshittifier's customers and suppliers:
This explains the dynamism of early tech, which saw companies rising quickly to conquer their markets, only to yield to the temptation to extract more from customers and/or suppliers while underinvesting in improvements to their products and services. When this happened, new digital companies sprang into being, reverse-engineering the incumbents' products and launching "complementary goods" – plug-ins and mods – that fixed the defects in dominant products, usurping the market leader's place in the workflows and pocketbooks of its customers and suppliers:
For many years, this "adversarial interoperability" worked its magic on the burgeoning tech sector, creating a state of constant ferment where people who wanted to improve and then supplant the state-of-the-art were able to cheaply enter and capture the market, only to be taken down by the next generation of disenshittifiers when they, too, inevitably yielded to the temptation to replace innovation with extraction. Every pirate wants to be an admiral – but every admiral must then confront the pirates who rush in to fill the vacuum they create when they switch sides.
But that system of beneficial disruption was itself disrupted – not by technology, but by policy. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to practice adversarial interoperability, establishing penalties of $500k and five years in prison for people who reverse engineer and modify products:
DMCA 1201 created a one-way ratchet that progressively narrowed the possibilities for tech competition. As more and more US companies re-engineered their products so that modifying them would give rise to DMCA 1201 liability, American startups gave up on disrupting Big Tech, re-orienting towards "acqui-hires," when a startup's highest purpose is to be absorbed by a giant, sclerotic incumbent that mothballs its products and assigns its engineers to work on incremental maintenance (or worse, enshittification) for its dominant offerings.
Big Tech's pirates turned admirals, free to "disrupt" the weak and poor, while enjoying the legal entitlement to destroy anyone who dared to disrupt them. They embodied Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism: a class that the law that "protects but does not bind" alongside a class that the law "binds but does not protect":
It was fine for them to "move fast and break (our) things," but forbidden for us to "move fast and break kings." Disruption for thee, never for me.
Nor was this a merely American sickness. Having neutered domestic competitors that might threaten its tech incumbents, the US government set out to prevent other countries from challenging its world-girdling tech empires. For the past 25 years, the US Trade Representative has prioritized getting anticircumvention laws on the books of all of America's trading partners as a condition of free trade with the US, with the result that today, virtually every country in the world has a law that makes it illegal to disrupt American tech giants:
Anti-circumvention law is so obviously, manifestly an invitation to enshittify that when governments enacted these laws, they felt the need to include some kind of "safety valve" they could point to when critics raised anti-circumvention's potential for abuse. The world's would-be enshittifiers figured out a devious method to insert clauses into anti-circumvention that looked like anti-abuse measures, but which were, in practice, useless ornaments.
Many anti-circumvention laws – including DMCA 1201 – have a process for creating "exemptions" to the ban on reverse-engineering and modifying a device. The way these exemptions processes are written, they seem to say that if a company uses anti-circumvention law to block legitimate activity – say, if John Deere uses the law to stop you from fixing your own tractor – then you can go to some kind of governing body (in the US, it's the Copyright Office) and petition for an exemption to anti-circumvention. If that exemption is approved, then making that modification becomes legal.
Before I carry on, let me say here that even if that's how the system worked, it would still be grossly offensive. If you buy a device – a car, a tractor, a printer, a console, a phone – it is your property and you should not have to hire a lawyer to ask a government agency to create a legal exemption that lets you do otherwise legal things with it. You should not need to petition the government for the right to buy generic ink, use a third-party app store or take your car to an independent mechanic.
But this isn't how the system works. It's a scam. Anti-circumvention exemptions are a cheap trick. They only sound useful. A reasonable person who hears that the US Copyright Office has made it legal to use a third-party app store with your iPhone would assume that this means that if someone launches their own app store, they can give you the tools needed to unlock your iPhone and activate their store.
That's not how the DMCA exemptions process works. Under the statute, the US Copyright Office is only empowered to create "use exemptions," which allow you, the owner of the iPhone, to make use of a tool that unlocks your phone and installs the third-party app store. The Copyright Office does not have the power to create a tools exemption that would allow someone to make that unlocking tool and sell or give it to you. Making that tool remains a felony with a five-year prison sentence attached to it.
What this means is that if you want to use your own property in a way that was legal before DMCA 1201, that has been made legal again because you hired a lawyer who successfully petitioned the US Copyright Office to grant an exemption, you can only do so if you, personally reverse engineer your device to effect the permitted modifications to it.
So: if the US Copyright Office legalizes alternative iPhone app stores, the only way to exercise this exemption is for every iPhone owner in the country to get a computer science degree, secure the use of a clean-room, decap the "secure enclave" on a spare iPhone's CPU, extract its cryptographic keys, and integrate them in a new version of iOS that they personally write and install on their phone. No iPhone owner is allowed to discuss how to do this with any other iPhone owner engaged in the same project, on penalty of a five year prison sentence.
Obviously, this is ridiculous, and iPhones are just the tip of the iceberg. It's also true if you want to enable independent repair of powered wheelchairs, whose manufacture is controlled by a duopoly of private-equity backed companies that have all but abandoned spending on repair, leaving wheelchair users stuck in bed for months while they await service:
This absurd situation is the same if you're blind and want to make use of an exemption that lets you reverse-engineer ebook formats so that you can run your ebooks through a Braille printer, screen reader or other assistive device. Under the exemptions rules for the world's anti-circumvention laws, every blind person is expected to personally reverse engineer the access control systems built into Adobe and Amazon's ebook formats, write an exploit that lets them extract the text of these restricted ebooks and then repackage that text in a new, open format:
This "use exemption"/"tools exemption" split is a near-perfect way of tricking people into thinking that these laws are more reasonable than they appear. When Canada passed its landmark right-to-repair and interoperability laws in 2024, many celebrated – missing the fact that under Canada's anti-circumvention law (Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012), it remains illegal to undertake the reverse-engineering needed to exercise the rights these new laws (seemed to) enshrine:
For a quarter-century, I've made it my life's work to explain how bad and dangerous this system is, and, thankfully, I've started to make a little headway over the past few years. My core audience contains a lot of hackers who are rightly affronted at the existence of a body of law that criminalizes the kinds of exploration and modification that they've devoted their lives to.
Being hackers, they ponder this situation and start to think about how they can hack the law to escape it. Just lately, I've heard from a lot of people who think they can solve this problem by asking a chatbot to reverse-engineer and modify the firmware on their tractors, wheelchairs, ebooks, iPhones, what-have-you. You can't put a chatbot in prison for violating anti-circumvention law, right?
I regret to inform you that if you did this in a way that rose to the attention of a big corporate bully, they wouldn't blame your chatbot for writing the exploit: they'd blame you for prompting the chatbot to create this new tool.
Just yesterday, I heard from a reader who had a clever idea: what if you gave your unmodified iPhone to a hacker who knew how to install a third-party app store on it, and they modified that phone, and then sold it back to you for $10? The hacker would be making a use exemption, not a tools exemption.
This, too, will not produce the outcome we're seeking. Even if Apple can't convince a judge that selling you a modified iPhone is "trafficking" in a circumvention device (a very big "if"), this wheeze misses the wider point about how adversarial interoperability was able to disenshittify tech for the years when tech companies weren't just dishing out disruption, but also being disrupted themselves.
The interoperability-driven dynamism that disciplined or displaced tech companies that abused their market power was a mass phenomenon. The printer cartel doesn't need to be able to charge everyone $10,000/gallon for ink. If a few people at the margins figure out how to jailbreak their printers, that doesn't stop the grift. Even better if the people who do use generic ink have to depend on anonymous, shadowy businesses that don't have customer service departments you can call when your printer gets an update that breaks ink compatibility, or an address you can send a process-server to if you're stuck with thousands of dollars' worth of useless ink cartridges after one of those updates.
To make generic ink a viable check against the abuses of HP and its colored water mafia, you need a counter-industry. You need salespeople making calls on large enterprises who buy their ink by the ocean, offering them a better deal and a guarantee of uninterrupted service. To make good on that guarantee, you need an army of hackers who reverse-engineer every software update HP pushes out in a matter of hours, and you need another army of customer service reps who help people who can't figure out how to install that update.
As economists would say, you need "capital formation." You need the ability to raise or borrow money, a mailing address, an ad campaign, booths at conferences and free samples in the mail. You need to be able to show potential customers that you are insured in the event that you brick their devices, so switching to your product doesn't endanger their capital investments. You need to have a business whose doors can be beaten down by regulators in the event that you use your after-market mods as a tool to steal data or money from your customers.
To understand how this worked, cast your mind back to the Office Suite Wars of the early 2000s. Back then, Microsoft ruled the desktop world, controlling more that 95% of the PC OSes, a share so large and so ruthlessly acquired and maintained that they were convicted of violating anti-trust laws.
Microsoft used illegal tying and predatory pricing to push every one of those PC owners into using Microsoft Office, which meant that even if you used a Mac, 19 times out of 20, the people you needed to collaborate with on memos, spreadsheets and slide-decks were using MS Office.
Microsoft made a version of Office for the Mac, but it was the single most curséd piece of packaged software ever offered to the market. Merely waving the Mac Office floppy around a workplace would cause files to spontaneously go corrupt on random PCs in the vicinity.
For Mac users, this meant that 95% of the time, they could not reliably collaborate with other computer users. For people like me – then a freelance CIO-for-hire who was helping small businesses connect their computers to each other and the internet – it meant that increasingly, we made CEOs swap their Powerbooks for Thinkpads and designers swap their PowerPCs for Dells with beefy graphics cards, moving the whole business to PC/Windows.
Apple solved this problem by reverse-engineering MS Office and producing the iWork Suite: Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files. That adversarial interoperability saved the company, but the gambit wasn't one-and-done.
Microsoft spent the next several years maliciously introducing changes to the Office file formats that broke compatibility with iWork, which Apple countered by paying an army of coders to swiftly analyze these new formats and update iWork to maintain compatibility with them:
I think Apple was fated to win this expensive cat-and-mouse game, if only they could hang in there long enough. For every Mac in the field, Microsoft was supporting 19 PCs, and these computers ran a fragmented mosaic of Windows and Office versions. Every time Microsoft broke compatibility with Office to mess up one Mac user, they also messed up 19 PC users, all of whom had to be patched and updated to maintain compatibility. This gave Apple a powerful advantage that mounted with every turn of the game, so all they had to do was hang in there until the asymmetrical costs overwhelmed Microsoft.
Which is what happened. Eventually, Microsoft sued for peace and agreed to standardize the office file-formats at the International Standards Organization, ushering in an era of unprecedented compatibility. This ISO standardization is why you can now paste styled text from the Word application into a browser-based Google Doc or an application-based LibreOffice window. It's also a game Microsoft continues to cheat at, with a string of dirty tricks meant to leverage its dominance to shut out competitors altogether:
The rise (and impending fall) of a truly open format that lets every computer user collaborate on any document is an object lesson in the combined role that adversarial interoperability and capital formation play in disenshittifying technology. For Microsoft, a "competitor" isn't one hacker who can open a Word file in a program of their own devising, nor is a "competitor" the small number of users that single competitor can support.
Microsoft is an incorrigible, bullying cheat with a sick and rotten corporate culture: to stop the kind of ruthless princeling who rises to a position of power in a company like Microsoft from turning predatory requires severe, obvious penalties that follow directly from any extractive gambit.
To muster that kind of competition requires the kind of capital formation you only get from true legalization, not the anemic sham offered by anti-circumvention's "exemptions." Even where the competition is spread out across many shifting small businesses and individuals, the system of competition requires a stable backstop that produces the tools these small firms rely on.
In 2014, Ofcom, the UK's telecoms regulator, affirmed that Britons had the right to unlock their phones, even if their carrier had sold them a phone that was locked to its network. Overnight, every small shop acquired a phone-unlocking side-hustle. One morning as I walked from my flat to the tube, I passed three unlockers: one at a newsagent's, where they would take your phone and return it unlocked within a day; one at my dry-cleaner's, where a guy with a folding card table would unlock your phone while you waited; and another folding table guy right by the tube entrance who'd also work while you waited, and who charged £5 less than the guy at the dry-cleaner's.
None of these people were electrical engineers or software developers or hackers. They just followed recipes that were provided by one of a few well-capitalized firms that sold them a subscription to jailbreaking tools that were kept up to date for every make and model of every phone.
One frequent excuse for the ban on repair tools for cars or wheelchairs or tractors is that these devices are now so computerized that they require specialized knowledge if they are to be safely serviced. Even if that's true, that's exactly what a legal toolchain provides.
The guy who fixed my solar panels wasn't a software engineer, he was an electrician who had the customer-service phone number for the company that made my solar inverter. If that company had a viable competitor who could offer their own firmware for my solar installation and was hungry for my business, maybe that technician would have gotten through in three minutes rather than three hours.
And if that alternative firmware was defective, then I could join a class action suit and get made whole – something that is nearly impossible to imagine happening with solar OEMs, who face so little competition that they all put binding arbitration clauses in their terms of service that take away your right to sue, no matter whether they cheat you or burn your house down:
That's the amazing thing about digital tools. Through software, experts are able to package up their expertise into self-executing code, which can costlessly, instantaneously be distributed to everyone in the world who needs it. But paying those experts isn't cheap, and neither is supporting their tools.
I love William Gibson's maxim that "the street finds its own use for things," but if you can't neutralize a large, dangerous monopolist with individual tinkering – the best you can hope for is some measure of individual relief..
It's true that in these adversarial interoperability fights, the upstarts enjoy a tremendous advantage, but that advantage isn't infinite. For the guerrillas to outlast the empire, they have to be able to wage a long, persistent fight.
To marshal the resources needed to sustain that fight and to maintain the logistics demanded by its supply lines requires the good guys to be allowed to fight in the open, without the looming threat of criminal prosecution, a threat that forecloses on capitalization and mass adoption.
Enshittification isn't downstream of cruelty, it's downstream of greed. The point of enshittification is to exploit the control a firm can exercise over the customers, suppliers and workers it holds captive in order to extract more from them. The titanic profits this exploitation delivers are a powerful lure for would-be disenshittifiers and investors who would fund their liberatory revolution.
Don't get me wrong, I love my hackers and I sit in awe of the awesome leverage of writing code that can be costlessly, instantaneously distributed to everyone who needs it. But so long as governments and the law are on the side of extraction and enshittification, the disenshittificatory insurgency will be starved of resources, condemned to remain marginal and inadequate.
"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
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 570 (5421 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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It is important to understand that Trump is not the cause of the enshittification of America. He is a consequence. Unless the system is fundamentally changed, the enshittification will continue even after Trump is long gone.
As I’ve shown, wealth and power in America now reside in a relatively small group of (almost entirely) men — the American oligarchy. My prime example has been Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of JPMorganChase, the largest bank in the world — because he’s regarded by corporate Democrats as the most trusted business leader in America — but I could equally focus on Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry and David Ellison, or any other billionaire using his vast wealth to create and enhance his political power.
The Core Contradiction
The oligarchy is not interested in serving America, yet it dominates American politics and essentially runs the American system.
The oligarchy is not committed to the common good. It does not seek to raise the wages of working Americans, reduce inequalities of wealth and opportunity, guarantee all Americans access to good healthcare and a world-class education, or stop climate change.
The oligarchy’s allegiance is to itself, and its major interest is enlarging its wealth and power. The easiest way for the oligarchy to accomplish this is to hold down the wages of working people, roll back regulations, enlarge its monopolies, find ever-cheaper places around the world to produce products and services, fight unions, and secure giant tax cuts for it and its corporations that result in less money for education, healthcare, and everything else most Americans need.
The oligarchy cannot fulfill both roles: It cannot advocate for its giant banks or monopolistic corporations and simultaneously lead the nation. Dimon may sincerely believe that he’s a patriot before he’s the CEO of JPMorgan, but we would be foolhardy to rely on it.
The difficulty is not that corporate power is beyond the control of the American government. It is that corporate power controls the American government. Yet giant American corporations have no special allegiance to the United States and no responsibility for the well-being of Americans.
This contradiction has spawned three big conventional ideas about the American system that are dangerously wrong.
Conventional but deceptive idea #1: Americans are richer than the citizens of other rich nations
A few Americans are, but the vast majority are not, when you consider all the public benefits that the citizens of other nations receive. Note, for example, that:
— Most citizens of other wealthy nations receive free or nearly free healthcare, and most get free or nearly free college tuition. Americans receive neither.
— Among the three dozen wealthy countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has the lowest minimum wage when measured as a percentage of the median wage. The typical American worker puts in more hours on the job than Canadian, European, or Japanese workers.
— The United States is the only wealthy nation that does not guarantee paid family leave. In Europe, the norm is three months paid leave. At most, Americans get 12 weeks of unpaid leave.
— America is also the only rich nation that does not guarantee paid sick days. It is the only one that does not guarantee workers any vacation at all. The European Union’s 28 nations guarantee at least four weeks of paid vacation.
— In other rich nations, most people who lose their jobs receive more generous unemployment benefits than do Americans. Employers cannot fire workers at will, as they can here.
— American corporations distribute a smaller share of their earnings to their workers than do European or Canadian-based corporations.
— Top corporate executives in America make far more money than their counterparts in other wealthy countries, and inequality of income and wealth is far wider in the United States than it is in any other wealthy country.
— The American middle class is no longer the world’s richest. Considering taxes and transfer payments, middle-class workers in Canada and much of Western Europe are better off than in the U.S. The working poor in Western Europe earn more than do the working poor in America.
Why are most Americans poorer than the citizens of most other rich nations? It is because of the way power is allocated and wielded in the United States, by contrast with other rich countries. Consider:
— Labor unions are stronger in Europe and Canada than they are in America, able to exert pressure both at the company level and nationally. Only 6 percent of American private-sector workers are unionized. As former New York Times labor correspondent Steven Greenhouse has observed, “In no other industrial nation do employers fight so hard to defeat, indeed quash, labor unions.” Over 25 percent of Canadian workers belong to a union, as do 37 percent of Italian workers, 67 percent of workers in Sweden, and 25 percent in the U.K.
— Most other rich nations are parliamentary systems in which workers are represented by parties that specifically advocate for them. The United States has a two-party system in which the winning party gets all of a state’s electoral votes, thereby discouraging third parties.
— Elections in other rich nations are less affected by big money than are elections in the United States, because other nations have stricter restraints on money in politics.
— Governments in these nations often devise laws through tripartite bargains involving big corporations and organized labor, which further binds their corporations to their nations’ workforces.
For all these reasons, Americans don’t get nearly as good a deal as do the citizens of other rich nations. Governments elsewhere impose higher taxes on the wealthy and redistribute more of it to middle- and lower-income households.
Conventional but deceptive idea #2: The “free market” is separate from government
The second conventional idea perpetrated by the American oligarchy is that we work and live in a “free market” that’s neutral and natural — existing outside government, unaffected by how power is wielded in the system.
We are repeatedly told that whatever inequalities and insecurities the market generates and whatever negative consequences it causes are beyond our control. Efforts to reduce inequality or insecurity are described as constraints on the market’s freedom, likely to cause grave unintended consequences.
By this view, if some people aren’t paid enough to live on, the “free market” has determined they aren’t worth enough. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of Americans are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they work two or three part-time jobs with no idea what they’ll earn next month or next week, that’s just the natural outcome of market forces.
If the planet’s survival is endangered because of fossil fuels, that’s at most an “imperfection” in the market. If government attempts to deal with such market imperfections, it must do so modestly and carefully because the “free market” knows best. As Jamie Dimon put it, “Don’t mess up the machine that creates the value so you can do these things. The economy is what gave us everything.”
This is bunk. In reality, the “free market” is nothing but a set of laws and rules about: What can be owned and traded (corporations? slaves? machine guns? nuclear bombs? babies? votes? the right to pollute?). On what terms (hostile takeovers? corporate monopolies? the right to organize unions? a minimum wage? the length of patent protections?). Under what conditions (uninsured derivatives? fraudulent mortgages? mandatory arbitration of disputes?). How to repay what’s owed (debtor’s prison? bankruptcy? corporate bailouts?). What’s private and what’s public (clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools?). And how to pay for what’s deemed to be public (corporate taxes? personal income taxes? a wealth tax?).
These laws and rules do not exist in nature. The “free market” is created by people. The central issue is not more or less government. It’s who is government for? This is a question of power — who has it, and who doesn’t.
If democracy were working as it should, government officials would make the laws and rules of the “free market” according to what most citizens need. But in our current system, the rules are made mainly by those with the power and wealth to buy the politicians, agency heads, and even the courts and the lawyers who appear before them). As income and wealth concentrate at the top, so does political leverage.
As a result:
— Intellectual property rights — patents, trademarks, and copyrights — have been continuously enlarged and extended. This had created windfalls for pharmaceutical, high tech, biotechnology, and entertainment companies, which can preserve their monopolies longer than ever. It also means higher prices for American consumers, including the highest pharmaceutical costs of any advanced nation.
— Antitrust laws have been relaxed or nullified, resulting in larger profits and bigger political clout for the dominant corporations and higher prices and less leverage for workers.
— Labor laws have been weakened, allowing corporations to fire workers who try to join or form unions, with the only consequence that the corporation may be required to reinstate the workers and give them back pay after long and involved proceedings.
— Financial laws and regulations instituted in the Great Depression decade of the 1930s have been abandoned, allowing the largest Wall Street banks to acquire unprecedented influence over the economy.
— Bankruptcy laws have been loosened for large corporations but tightened for homeowners and graduates laden with student debt. The largest banks and auto manufacturers have been bailed out of a financial crisis, but homeowners — disproportionately low-income minorities — have not.
— Contract laws have been altered to require mandatory arbitration before private judges selected by big corporations.
— Securities laws have been relaxed to allow insider trading of confidential information. CEOs use stock buybacks to boost share prices and cash in their stock options.
— Tax laws have created loopholes for the partners of hedge funds and private-equity funds. They also contain special favors for the oil and gas industry.
— The top marginal income-tax rates have been lowered, corporate taxes have been reduced, and estate taxes on great wealth have been eliminated.
— Regulations that protect health, safety, and the environment have been repealed, rolled back, riddled with exemptions, or simply unenforced. Public health has declined.
— Schools in working-class and poor areas have become dependent for most of their funding on local property taxes, which aren’t enough to provide excellent schools. Hence, the notion of equal opportunity has become a bad joke.
The result of this vicious cycle is a giant but hidden upward distribution of income and wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top.
Another consequence is growing anger and frustration felt by people who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, accompanied by deepening cynicism about our democracy. That anger, frustration, and cynicism is corroding the moral foundation of our society. It has elected Trump, twice.
Conventional but deceptive idea #3: Corporations exist only for shareholders
The late economist Milton Friedman famously urged CEOs to give up stakeholder capitalism — under which the welfare of workers, communities, and the nation as a whole was considered in corporate decision-making, as well as shareholders. “What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities?” Friedman wrote in 1970. “Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”
Michael Jensen, an economics professor who arrived at the Harvard Business School in 1984, gave academic ballast to the notion that the sole purpose of the corporation should be to maximize shareholder returns. In his many papers, public lectures, and oversubscribed classes — from which generations of business school students launched careers on Wall Street and in management consulting — Jensen reasoned that hostile takeovers disciplined what he termed “inefficient firms.”
Jensen forgot one big thing. He overlooked those who would bear the burden of the changes he pushed for. There have been several unfortunate consequences to Friedman and Jensen’s mistaken idea.
— The rise of corporate takeovers (now often undertaken by private equity). As Jensen predicted, stockholders of targeted companies have done well. That’s because the so-called “efficiency” gains have gone to them, as well as to the raiders and top corporate executives.
The costs of these maneuvers and of the obsession with maximizing share values, however, have been borne by workers who have been sacked, or whose paychecks have stagnated and whose benefits have been cut, and by communities that have been left behind.
The academic conceit that workers are simply “resources” that will move to “higher valued uses” has proven to be crushingly and cruelly naïve. Human beings are not like financial resources. They do not move easily or seamlessly to different jobs and other places. They are rooted in families and communities. They have particular skills, established routines, abiding understanding of positions and roles. They depend on some degree of security, predictability, and stability. They want to be respected and valued.
When “efficiency” gains go to a comparatively few people at the top, while the costs and burdens are borne by many others — as has been the case since the 1980s — the common good is not improved. It is cast to the winds.
— The monopolization of America. After 1980, antitrust law all but disappeared. The new view — popularized by a Yale Law School professor, subsequently Judge Robert Bork — was that large corporate size produced economies of scale, which were good for consumers, and anything that was good for consumers was good for America.
Power was no longer at issue. This was exactly the message that America’s emerging corporate oligarchy wanted to hear. They used the façade of Bork’s pinched academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust. Since the 1980s, after the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.
Monsanto now sets the prices for most of the nation’s seed corn. The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks, of which JPMorgan is the largest.
Just four giant airline carriers now dominate the skies, down from 12 in 1980. American, Delta, Southwest, and United now control 80 percent of domestic seating capacity. Meanwhile, the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas has left America with just one major producer of civilian aircraft, Boeing.
Three giant cable companies dominate broadband (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon). A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry (Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck).
Just five giant high-tech behemoths preside over key portals and platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google), together comprising more than a quarter of the value of the entire U.S. stock market.
Facebook and Google are the first stops for many Americans seeking news, and account for almost half of all advertising dollars spent in the United States. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Nearly 90 percent of all internet searches now go through Google. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.
All this consolidation has inflated corporate profits, suppressed worker pay, supercharged economic inequality, and stifled innovation. Amazon has put most bookstores out of business and is rapidly eroding retail businesses on the nation’s Main Streets. Google employs the world’s most widely used search engine to promote its own services and Google-generated content over those of competitors, like Yelp.
Facebook’s purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram killed off two potential rivals. This mega-concentration of American industry has made it harder for newer firms to gain footholds. The rate at which new businesses have been formed in the United States has been halved since 1980.
In many locales workers have less choice of whom to work for, which is also holding down their wages. Corporations are imposing additional conditions on workers that further weaken their bargaining power, such as noncompete, anti-poaching, and mandatory arbitration agreements.
Giant firms that dominate an industry also gain political power. They provide significant campaign contributions, have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers, and directly employ many voters.
As a result, their CEOs’ phone calls to members of Congress are promptly returned. Items they want included in legislation are dutifully inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped. They get the tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, regulatory exemptions, and loan guarantees they seek. They can stop laws in their tracks. Never underestimate the monetary value of such largesse. The financial returns on political investments are among the highest in the whole system.
Power has shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers.
— The near disappearance of labor unions. Starting in the 1980s and with increasing ferocity since then, private-sector employers have fought unions. Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire the nation’s air-traffic controllers, who went on an illegal strike, signaled to private-sector employers that fighting unions was legitimate.
But it was really the wave of hostile takeovers (now often engineered by private equity funds) — the shift from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism — that pushed employers to crush unions. Payrolls are typically 70 percent of a corporation’s costs. The most direct way to raise profits and share prices is to cut payroll costs. The first step was to bust unions.
Corporations have replaced striking workers with non-union workers. Previously, when management was responsible to all stakeholders, workers who went on strike typically got their jobs back as soon as a strike was settled.
Shareholder capitalism changed this radically. Now, striking workers often lose their jobs forever. As Fortune magazine observed, “Managers are discovering that strikes can be broken, that the cost of breaking them is often lower than the cost of taking them, and that strike-breaking … doesn’t have to be a dirty word.”
Corporations have also threatened to move jobs overseas if workers don’t agree to pay cuts. Corporations have fired workers who try to organize, a move that’s illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but happens all the time because the penalty for doing so — restoring fired workers to their jobs along with back pay — is small relative to the profits that come from discouraging unionization.
Corporations also mount campaigns against union votes, warning workers that unions will make them less “competitive” and threaten their jobs. All the while, corporations have been relocating to states where so-called “right-to-work” laws bar unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. The Supreme Court, in an opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees, has extended “right-to-work” to public employees.
The pressure has come from corporate raiders and their more recent incarnations, private-equity and hedge fund managers, demanding ever higher profits. Institutional investors (the managers of mutual funds, insurance funds, pension funds, endowments, and private equity funds) are just behind them, rooting them on. As power has shifted from workers to them, many of these investors and financial managers have become fabulously wealthy.
Meanwhile, as unions have shrunk, so has their political power. In 2009, even with a Democratic president and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, unions could not muster enough votes to enact a simple reform that would have unionized workplaces as soon as a majority of employees signed pro-union cards.
Obama didn’t fight for this. Some Democrats, threatened by groups like the Business Roundtable, wouldn’t vote for it. When the legislation was introduced, 180 business executives descended on Capitol Hill to meet with swing senators. Corporations ran $1 million worth of television ads against the bill in Nebraska alone in order to pressure one vacillating Democrat, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, to vote no. He obliged.
— Hence, record-setting inequality. This great shift in bargaining power from workers to corporations and their shareholders has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since World War II.
Most of these profits are going into higher share prices (fueled by share buybacks) and higher executive pay rather than new investment.
The declining share of total U.S. income going to the bottom 90 percent over the last four decades correlates directly with this decline in unionization. No other change in the system provides as clear a relationship.
Meanwhile, and for the same reason, the rising share of total income going to the richest Americans is inversely related to the share of the nation’s workers who are unionized. The American economic pie continues to grow but most workers are getting only crumbs.
Most of the increasing value of the stock market has come directly out of the pockets of American workers. Three researchers — Daniel Greenwald at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, Martin Lettau at Berkeley, and Sydney Ludvigson at NYU — found that “from 1952 to 1988, economic growth accounted for 92 percent of the rise in equity values,” but that from 1989 to 2017, economic growth was responsible for just 24 percent of the rise. Most of the increase in share values has come from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation.”
America’s shift from farm to factory was accompanied by decades of bloody labor conflict. The shift from factory to office and other sedentary jobs created other social upheaval.
The more recent power shift from workers to large corporations and their shareholders — and consequentially, the dramatic widening of inequalities of income, wealth, and political power — has happened far more quietly, but it has had a more unfortunate and more lasting consequence for the system: an angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia.
Corporate profits have reached record levels and share prices have soared. This has been a boon to shareholders, especially the richest 1 percent of Americans who own about half of the value of all shares of stock, and the richest 10 percent who own over 90 percent.
Top corporate executives, whose pay is linked to share prices, have reaped a bonanza. Pay on Wall Street has reached jaw-dropping heights. But most Americans have not benefited. Many have lost ground. For most, wages have been flat or have declined, their jobs have become less secure, and their pensions have been turned into 401(k)s or have disappeared altogether. Abandoned communities now litter the nation. Entire regions of the country have been left behind.
Executives claim they have a “fiduciary obligation” to maximize shareholders’ returns. This argument is rubbish. It’s also tautological. It assumes that shareholders are the only people worthy of executive concern.
Yet as a practical matter they are not the only parties who invest in corporations, or who bear some of the risk that the value of their investments might drop. All Americans are stakeholders in the American economy.
Workers who have been with a firm for years develop skills and knowledge unique to it. Others may have moved their families to take a job with the firm, buying homes in the community.
The community itself may have invested in roads and other infrastructure to accommodate the corporation. When a firm abandons those workers and those communities, these stakeholders lose the value of their investments. Why should no account be taken of their stakes?
Corporation after corporation began laying off workers in the 1980s without easing the often difficult transitions that followed — without providing workers with severance payments, job retraining, job search assistance, job counseling, help in selling homes whose values predictably dropped when businesses left town, or help moving to where jobs existed.
They laid off large numbers of workers without aiding affected communities that were being jettisoned, or seeking to attract other businesses to make up for their losses of jobs and tax revenue, or finding other uses for the abandoned infrastructure of schools, roads, pipes, and real estate. And without giving workers and communities sufficient advanced notice so they could plan their own transitions.
Absent any of this, millions of Americans were left to fend for themselves. It was a systemic change that would scar the nation for decades, contributing to rising anxiety, anger, and resentment across the land, and eventually lead to the election of Trump.
As big corporations have grown larger over the last 40 years and labor unions weaker, wages have stagnated and profits have increased. It has been a direct transfer: A steadily larger portion of corporate revenues have been siphoned off to profits and a shrinking portion to wages. A growing share of the total economy, likewise, has gone to profits and a smaller share to wages. The stock market has soared. Workers have slumped.
Shifting Power Back to Workers: We’ve Done it Before
The way to end this vicious cycle is to reduce the huge accumulations of wealth that fuel it, and to get big money out of politics. But neither can can be accomplished when wealth and power are compounding at the top. It’s a chicken-and-egg dilemma.
Yet such vicious cycles have been reversed before. In the early 20th century progressives reclaimed our economy and democracy from the robber barons of the first Gilded Age.
The political power that flowed from concentrated economic power was a central concern of the thinkers, writers, and muckrakers of that Gilded Age, starting in the 1890s. “Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty,” wrote Henry Demarest Lloyd in his popular 1894 book Wealth Against Commonwealth. “The flames of the new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the State … and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master, instead of servant.”
The field now called economics was then called “political economy,” and the public quickly came to understand that corporate power could undermine both the economy and democracy. Recall that this was the era of the robber barons whose steel mills, oil rigs and refineries, and railroad laid the foundations for America’s industrial might, but who also squeezed out rivals who threatened their dominance, ran their own slates for office, impoverished their workers, and brazenly bribed public officials — even sending lackeys with sacks of money to be placed on the desks of pliant legislators.
“What do I care about the law?” railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt famously growled. “Hain’t I got the power?” Forty-eight of the 73 men who held Cabinet posts between 1868 and 1896 either lobbied for railroads, served railroad clients, sat on railroad boards, or had relatives connected to the railroads.
The public became enraged. “The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economic conquests only, but for political power,” warned Edward G. Ryan, chief justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. “Which shall rule — wealth or man; which shall lead — money or intellect; who shall fill public stations — educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?” Reformer Mary Lease charged that “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.”
Antitrust — anti-monopoly — law was viewed as the means of breaking the link between the economic and political power of the new combinations. On introducing his antitrust bill in 1890, Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio thundered, “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.” Sherman’s bill passed the Senate 51 to 1, moved quickly through the House without dissent, and was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison on July 2, 1890.
Theodore Roosevelt — condemning the “malefactors of great wealth” who were “equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil” — used Sherman’s Antitrust Act against E. H. Harriman’s giant Northern Securities Company, with which Harriman dominated transportation in the northwest. As Roosevelt later recounted, the lawsuit “served notice on everybody that it was going to be the Government, and not the Harrimans, who governed these United States.”
President William Howard Taft broke up John D. Rockefeller’s sprawling Standard Oil Trust in 1911. President Woodrow Wilson explained the danger of excessive economic and political power in his 1913 book, The New Freedom: “I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.”
Wisconsin’s “fighting Bob” La Follette instituted the nation’s first minimum wage law. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan attacked the big railroads, giant banks, and insurance companies.
The reform movement spread. Suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony secured women the right to vote. Reformers like Jane Addams successfully pushed for laws protecting children and the public’s health. Organizers like Mary Harris “Mother” Jones spearheaded labor unions.
The progressive era welled up because millions of Americans saw that wealth and power at the top was undermining American democracy and stacking the economic deck. Millions of Americans overcame their cynicism and began to mobilize.
In many important respects, the progressive era laid the foundation for the New Deal of the 1930s and the prosperity of the first three decades after World War II — featuring a growing middle class, a steadily more inclusive democracy, and a nation beginning to grapple with problems like poverty, inequality of opportunity, and environmental decay.
Black Americans and women slowly gained footholds in the system. Mass production begat mass consumption, and mass consumption relied on steady jobs with good wages. This balance relied on strong unions, a government willing to regulate corporations, and large corporations rooted in their communities and responsible for the well-being of their employees and neighbors as well as shareholders.
But over the last 40 years, the gains made then have disappeared. The opposite has occurred: The middle class has shrunk, democracy is malfunctioning, and the nation has turned its back on climate change, poverty, widening inequality, and the evils of racism and xenophobia.
As I’ve said, the economy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game in which winners do better only to the extent losers do worse. But power is necessarily a zero-sum game. Certain people have it only to the extent other people do not. The connection between the economy and power is critical. As power has concentrated in the hands of a few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains for themselves.
The oligarchy has triumphed not because Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry and David Ellison, or Trump have directly conspired to make it happen. I doubt any of them think about the system as a whole. They have triumphed because no one paid attention to the system as a whole — to the consequences of the shifts from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, from strong unions to giant monopolistic corporations, and from regulated to unfettered finance.
The choices that the American public assumed were at stake — the so-called political “right” versus “left,” Republican versus Democrat, free market versus government, socialism or capitalism — distracted us from the more fundamental questions about power: Who is gaining it? Who is losing it? For what purpose? Are we satisfied with the results?
Through it all, Americans have clung to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re “worth” in the “free market,” without examining changes in the legal and political institutions that define the market. The tautology is easily confused with a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid.
Yet this claim is meaningful only if the system’s legal and political institutions are morally just. It has lured us into thinking nothing can or should be done to alter what people are paid because the market has decreed it. By this logic, the oligarchy is natural and inevitable. It is not. It is a cancer on our society. It is the cause of the enshittification of America.
Unless reversed, today’s concentration of wealth could soon resemble the kind of dynasties common to European aristocracies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Six out of the 10 wealthiest Americans alive today are heirs to prominent fortunes. The coming tsunami of artificial intelligence is likely to further entrench and enlarge oligarchic wealth.
I keep hearing that we Boomers are to blame for just about everything wrong with America — unaffordable housing (because we bought up most of the housing stock and now refuse to leave), the depletion of Social Security (because we’re collecting it now), the national debt (because so much of it is being spent on Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits for us), inequality (because apparently we have so much money), climate change (because we’ve been polluting longer than anyone else alive), and even Trump (because he’s one of us).
I don’t have standing to contest these claims because, well, I’ve also made them. They’re a theme of my latest book, Coming Up Short (out in paperback in a few weeks).
All of this seemed confirmed by a recent headline in The Economist: WHY PEOPLE OVER THE AGE OF 55 ARE THE NEW PROBLEM GENERATION.
But not for the reasons I supposed. According to The Economist, the real problem with us Boomers is we’re partying too hard. We were too wild, crazy, and irresponsible back in the day, and we’re still too wild, crazy, and irresponsible.
The Economist opines that compared to younger generations, we’re drinking more and using drugs more, and we’re going to wild retirement-community parties where sometimes we’re even — oh my goodness! — having sex.
The venerable British publication quotes Lynette, a resident of Latitude Margaritaville (an assisted-living community near Hilton Head Island in South Carolina) who burbles: “There was a toga party this past weekend. There was a live band, and it was a riot.” Barbie, another resident of the community, compares living there to “starting college all over again” with “drinks on the driveway, cocktails on the concrete.”
The Economist goes on to report that “today, older adults are more likely to participate in the hookup culture of casual encounters and condomless sex, which might be further encouraged by the availability of drugs for sexual dysfunction, the commonality of living in retirement communities, and the increased use of dating apps for seniors.”
I’ll be damned.
Since its founding in 1843 by Scottish businessman and banker James Wilson, The Economist has been staid if not prudish. If memory serves, it intensely disliked the 1960s and the Boomer culture that reveled in it. But it seems to have burst its britches over what’s become of us Boomers in the roaring 2020s.
The article concludes:
The generations now ageing disgracefully were disgraceful in youth, and in middle age. If they’re behaving badly now, there is really not much to be done about it. If they choose to frolic at toga parties, no one will stop them. Except, ultimately, time.
Which is The Economist’s understated British way of saying that the solution to the Boomer problem is for we Boomers to just go ahead and die already.
I think The Economist is a bit harsh. I do concede in my latest book that we Boomers have produced some awful things — not just Trump, but also Clarence Thomas and George W. Bush. (Trump is probably the best thing ever to happen to George W., because George W. is no longer the worst and stupidest president in American history.)
But I doubt Boomers are having too much fun. I’m suspicious of how The Economist identified its sample of wild and crazy Boomers because the Boomers I know are anything but.
The question my friends and I jokingly (and brutishly) asked one other in our wild youth — “getting much?”— now refers not to sex but to sleep.
I can’t even make it through the end of a movie. Hell, I can barely keep my eyes open through a single episode of “All Creatures Great and Small.”
The most camaraderie I’ve been enjoying are my “organ recitals” with Boomer friends in which we ask each other: How is the back? Heart? Knees? Prostate? Hemorrhoids?
And the wildest party I’ve been to this year was when I got together with friends to watch the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina, where Argentina failed to register a single shot on target during 120 minutes of a 1-to-zip extra-time defeat. (I didn’t see the end of that one, either.)
As for drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll, all I can say for certain is I don’t have the same need to make an ass of myself as I did in the 1960s.
Yet I still mist up when I hear “December 1963 (Oh What a Night)” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. (I should note it was released in 1975, by which time I was practicing law and my memorable nights were long over.)
Object permanence: Wired v Dutch hackers; NYT v DMCA; Hair gel terrorist threat does not exist; AT&T merger is a screwjob; Smart cities are stupid; RIP Reaganomics.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things together (showing that two different, seemingly unrelated ideas are aspects of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving a paradox by demonstrating that what appears to be one, contradictory thing is actually two different things that have been lumped together).
"Taking things apart" is a very useful framework for understanding AI. How do we resolve the (seeming) paradox that some skilled workers report wonderful results from their work with AI, while others are full of dire warnings about the lurking defects in their AI-assisted outputs? Simple: the first group are "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by machines) and the second are "reverse centaurs" (humans who have been pressed into service as peripherals for machines):
What are we to make of the people who've been fired by bosses who replaced them with AI, in light of the fact that AI is demonstrably not able to do their (former) jobs? Again, it's simple if you separate out two distinct phenomena: "AI can do your job" is the first. The second is: "Your boss is a credulous dolt who is infinitely horny for replacing lippy workers with pliable machines, which made him an easy mark for an AI salesman who convinced him to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job":
This is also a useful move for understanding the AI investment bubble. It's not just billionaires who don't think other people are as real as they are and consequently their jobs can be done by chatbots. It's also billionaires who believe that bosses can be sold AI and don't care if the AI is defective, because that's your boss's problem after he buys the AI and fires you. They don't have to believe in AI in order to think it's a good investment: like an investor betting that Joe Rogan can sell millions of dollars' worth of peptides to desperate young men, they are assessing the sales potential, not the merits of the thing for sale:
As useful as "taking things apart" is, "putting things together" is also a very important technique for assessing, critiquing and improving AI. In a stellar essay entitled "Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same" by the data scientist Lauren Leek, we get a top-notch example of "putting things together":
Leek's essay is one of those fabulous, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary pieces, touching on urban design, music trends, synthetic LLM crowds, Netflix recommendation algorithms, and several other subjects, all seeking to resolve a(nother) (seeming) paradox: how is it that we have so much potential variety, but everything is so manifestly the same?
The answer is complicated and nuanced, but Leek's foundational point is that in a data-driven society, "predictions" are self-fulfilling prophecies. As Leek puts it: "Once prediction shapes the choices in front of us, we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want."
This is a pervasive issue across many domains. Leek says that economists call it "performativity," while machine learning researchers call it "model collapse" and urbanists call it "placelessness."
"Performativity" describes how, once a market has been modeled by economists, that model becomes the foundation for economic policy, which pushes the market to conform to the model:
"Model collapse" describes how machine learning models that are trained on their own predictions become incredibly bland, with all variety disappearing from the system's predictions:
This is hugely consequential: it's why bias proliferates through predictive policing algorithms: train a model with data from racist stop-and-frisks and it will predict that all the weapons and drugs in a city are to be found in Black and brown peoples' pockets. Turn those predictions into recommendations telling cops where to go look for weapons and drugs and they will double down on racist stops, producing even more biased training data, which turns into still more bias in the predictions:
"Placelessness" is the urbanist's name for "when everywhere optimises toward the same template." I think of it as Flinstones Syndrome, where the same background is looped behind Fred and Barney as they drive through Bedrock. In New York City, it's Citibank-bodega-Chipotle-Walgreens; in the Chicago suburbs, it's the strip malls with a Chili's, a gas station, and a big box store.
Leek proposes that these are all expressions of the same underlying phenomenon, a failure mode of data science that takes a world of "granular personal data" and arrives at a world where "personalisation produc[es] more sameness."
To these excellent examples, I'd add another one, from the world of monetary policy: Goodhart's Law, which holds that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":
Goodhart's Law captures a wide variety of phenomena. When Google first deployed Pagerank, they showed that by counting the inbound links to all the pages on the web, you could extract a signal about which pages were most important (because there was no reason to link to a page unless you found it noteworthy).
But once Pagerank became the dominant means by which web users found pages, counting links stopped being useful: first, because people used Pagerank to find the best pages and link to them, making it impossible for new pages to get the inbound links needed to supersede incumbent pages; and second, because it's easy for fraudsters to create inbound links for low-quality pages in bulk, once there's a reason to do so.
Counting inbound links was a world-beating retrospective way of predicting which page would best match a searcher's query, but once it shaped the world it sought to analyze, it ceased to be a good prospective way to predict which page would best match your queries.
Leek is a brilliant data scientist and an even better science communicator, with a knack for crisp, readily understood explanations. How can a world of granular, highly varied data turn into a world of homogeneous choices? Simple: start with a set of items ("cuisines, genres, shop types") and a standard algorithm for sorting them. Let users choose from those recommendations. The mode (average) of those choices "gets shown more, so it gets picked more, so the model grows more confident the mode is what people want, and the tails starve." Run this for a few rounds and the evenly distributed catalog of choices "collapses onto one dominant option."
This is intrinsic in the choices we make in designing recommendation algorithms, tilting them towards the likelihood of a successful recommendation. A recommender that wants to succeed every time will make the safest possible recommendations, "so an algorithm that is uncertain about you, and it is always at least a little uncertain, hedges toward the average."
Then she busts out a beautiful, perfect little statistics aphorism: "Personalisation under a standard loss function is regression to the collective mean with extra steps." That is to say, "regression to the mean" (the tendency of varied things to become more standardized) cannot be avoided with the standard personalization algorithm. That algorithm is going to play it safe, showing you things that are broadly palatable, and because your choices are constrained to the average, you will choose average things.
This is how recommendation systems – and other analytical tools that produce predictions that are then turned into action – force so many diverse phenomena (streets, markets, media recommendations) into sameness. The fact that these recommenders are self-fulfilling prophecies means that "they don't have to be right," only "listened to."
This explains the sameness of so many of London's high streets. Leek examines 640 shopping streets, characterizing 18,000 food places spread out across them, flagging all the chain restaurants. Her analysis shows that any two London streets will, on average, share about half of their "food profile."
Obviously, this is most pronounced on streets with chain outlets, and it doesn't take that many chain outlets before a street's sameness shoots up: "A relatively small number of repeated names is enough to make otherwise different streets resemble one another more." So why do streets with chains resemble one another so much? Because the chains use an algorithm (weighting footfall, proximity to train stations, demographics, and competitors) to decide where to put their restaurants. If a street with a Gail's Bakery on it feels like every other street with a Gail's Bakery, that's because Gail's only puts its restaurants in places that have highly similar characteristics, measured to a high degree of accuracy and controlled by a narrow set of tolerances.
In other words, every street that feels like it should have a Gail's will eventually get a Gail's, whereupon that street will feel even more like all the other streets that have a Gail's, because it will share one more common factor with those other streets (a Gail's).
Leek points here to her earlier work on pub closures in the UK. The UK has experienced an epidemic of pub closures, with thousands of pubs disappearing since 2016:
Her research found that the biggest predictor of a pub surviving was its similarity to the median pub; which is to say that the more distinctive a pub was, the more "character" it had, the more likely it was to close. Pubs that are different from the average pub are harder to categorize, which means they're harder for a bank manager to assess for creditworthiness or for a landlord to justify extending a long-term lease to. The algorithms used to allocate capital and real estate are also recommenders, and they also drive variety out of the system.
This same phenomenon acts on culture. In an age of music recommendation algorithms, hit songs are changing; today's songs use a smaller vocabulary of unique words and repeat those words more often:
Vocabulary richness, distinct words relative to length, has fallen by more than a quarter since the early 1960s, while the share of repeated lines has climbed by nearly a third. The modern hit says less and says it more often, because the hook that works gets repeated.
But that's not the whole story! While each song resembles itself more ("saying less more often"), within that constraint, there's far more variety today than before: a given song's (constrained) vocabulary has grown more distinct when compared to all the other songs' vocabularies. Songs repeat the words they use, but the words repeated in songs are getting more different.
For Leek, this is the key to understanding the whole phenomenon and (more importantly) doing something about it. Music recommendation systems optimized for a singable hook, but did not optimize on any of the other variables in songs, so those dimensions acquired a broader range, even as the optmized variable got flatter and narrower.
This means that the tendency of recommenders to "flatten the world" isn't a single blunt outcome: it depends on which dimension we choose to flatten through recommendation, and who chooses to flatten that dimension.
A media recommender optimizes for consumption, showing you a tractable set of things it believes you'll watch, read or listen to. When you choose from among this limited set, the recommender takes note of that fact and shows you more of the same, pushing everything to a greige median. All the movies, books and songs you might have liked that were omitted from that initial set are excluded from being recommended in the future. The features of that media that you might have appreciated "decay out of consideration." They are never tested for desirability. The model collapses.
How badly does it collapse? Leek cites Movietweetings' data on which movies people watch: out of a million public movie ratings, half relate to the top 2% of movies in the set. There's 38,000 films in the set, but just 380 titles account for 40% of the ratings. Leek argues (persuasively) that this isn't because recommenders are good at "knowing your taste" – rather, they are good at "narrowing the menu."
Leek relates this to her work on creating LLM "personas" – synthetic populations meant to mimic the tastes and proclivities of real groups of people, that you can interrogate "before you spend money asking actual humans." While this would be useful for many applications, "it fails in exactly the way this whole essay is about."
Leek went to enormous lengths to reproduce the traits that make people interesting to study in aggregate, painstakingly replicating the ways that social connections, psychological outlook and demographic factors predict people's beliefs. The result was a set of LLM personas with "elaborate stories" about how they differed from one another, but whose survey responses about planned actions were homogeneous in a way that real populations are not.
This, Leek writes, is the same force that homogenizes other data-driven predictors. Because she'd ordered her LLM to reproduce the statistically validated relationships between different factors that predict a person's beliefs, each synthetic persona was a homogenized average. It's like the paradox of "The Average Man," where military uniforms sized to the average of all service personnel fit no one, because no one is average:
The thing is (as Leek points out) the idea that synthetic personas are a good way to understand the preferences of a real population is not a harmless delusion: it's a product that's being actively sold to governments, campaigning politicians and marketers. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that drives governance, political campaigns and product design to the same homogeneous median that is making every shopping street in London feel the same.
This matters. As Leek writes, ecologists have long understood the importance of variety for systemic resilience: they call it "the insurance value of biodiversity." A diverse system has reservoirs of species and variation that may not be optimized for how things stand now, but that can move into niches created when things change in ways that lay waste to the previously dominant organisms. As anyone whose favorite banana went extinct can tell you, homogeneity works well, but diversity fails well:
The brittleness of algorithm-induced homogeneity is compounded by the fact that recommenders obscure the true preferences of people. If you watch two Scandinavian crime dramas after Netflix recommends them to you, it will keep showing you more Scandy crime for the next decade – even if there's another kind of programming that you'd vastly prefer (if only you knew about it). This means that decision-makers who choose which shows will get made in the future will keep on funding their safe Danish detectives, to the exclusion of whatever might emerge from the same weird attractor that produced the K-Pop Demon Hunter fortune.
Transpose this failure mode onto states, bank managers and landlords, and we see whole ranges of policies, businesses and activities that never come into existence, despite the popularity, prosperity and joy they might bring us.
But Leek doesn't end with this worrisome note. Instead, she identifies this whole thing – model collapse, placelessness, performativity, even Goodhart's Law – as an expression of one of the best-understood tradeoffs in computer science: "exploration vs exploitation":
Any system learning from feedback has to divide its effort between exploiting what already scores well and exploring options it hasn’t tried, in case they’re better.
Computer scientists have long understood that focusing on exploitation to the exclusion of exploration is a trap that locks you into "the first decent option" so you can never discover the best one.
Which means that this algorithmic homogeneity has a well-understood corrective: "forcing exploration back in." The problem is that markets hate this kind of exploration. A company that lives and dies by how many clicks it gets is never going to sacrifice 20% of its traffic by showing its users weird, untested options that score worse than the median because these weird things have never had a chance to prove that they are desirable.
This is a classic market failure, and, as Leek points out, there are regulatory responses in the UK (the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act) and the EU (the Digital Services Act), both of which require the largest platforms to open up their recommendation systems, but so far, regulators have focused on "online harms" rather than variety (though the DSA does require platforms to offer algorithmic recommendations that are not based on your personal traits).
Leek identifies this willingness of states to set conditions for algorithm design as a means by which "exploration" can be forced back into the system. She's also bullish on interoperability, so that users can leave platforms with bad recommenders, without losing access to their media or social circles. As she writes, "the deepest discipline on a feed that has trapped you is the credible ability to leave it and take your data with you." I couldn't agree more:
She's less hopeful about individual responses. Demanding that you be an "adventurous consumer" is a way of letting systems off the hook. When every street has the same restaurants and every bookshop has the same books and the people in your life are all locked into one of two social media platforms, "choosing wisely" only gets you so far. Shopping isn't politics!
Leek is a superb writer. After reading this piece yesterday, I sent it to half a dozen people and then read everything else in Leek's newsletter archives. Not only is it all brilliant, but I also realized that she'd written one of the most memorable articles about cities and platforms I've read in the last year, "How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants – and how I built a dashboard to see through it":
I should have added Leek's newsletter to my RSS reader when I read that last December. I've rectified that oversight! What a fantastic thinker, scientist and communicator! If she isn't being relentlessly pestered by editors and literary agents offering her a book deal, then it really does prove that the recommender systems are elevating the bland median over the thoroughly, delightfully spiky outliers.
"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
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 546 (4161 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Today I’m seeking your guidance about the message progressive Democrats should lead with in a few weeks when the midterm elections begin.
Yes, I know: It’s a big tent and Democratic candidates will tailor their messages to voters in their own states or congressional districts, who may be swayed by slightly different ones.
But rarely before in American history has the choice been so stark and so clear. The current occupant of the Oval Office is a malignant sociopath who’s gotten America into a losing war in the Middle East, turned much of our country into a police state, caused prices to soar, and pocketed billions off his office. He’s backed by a bevy of billionaires who have bet the house on AI, and congressional Republicans have been spineless zombies.
This is, or should be, the progressives’ hour. (Also, remember that the Democratic message in the midterms can influence the message in 2028.)
So what, in your view, should progressive Dems lead with? What’s the core message you’d like to hear from them in coming weeks?
I’ve canvassed people I consider savvy political advisers and observers, and grouped their responses below. Please share your own view.
In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:
In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.
Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").
This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system – the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity – are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating.
The starkest example of this in Capital 21C is Piketty's contrast between L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest woman in the world) and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (then the most successful corporation in the world). Piketty compares the growth in the fortunes of Bettencourt and Gates over two periods: first, the period between Microsoft's founding and Gates' retirement as CEO; and second, the period after Gates's retirement from his executive role, when he became a mere investor, no longer an entrepreneur.
During that first period, in which Gates was founding and running the most successful corporation in the world, he accumulated less wealth than did Liliane Bettencourt, who did precisely nothing of value over that period. Bettencourt didn't even manage her investments – that was all handled by some very clever financial planners, lawyers and accountants. In other words: for Bettencourt, doing nothing at all produced more wealth than founding the most successful corporation in the world did for Gates. Bettencourt, a person who owned things, did better than Gates, a person who did things.
And then Gates retired. He stopped doing things and started owning things. He became an investor, whereupon he out-earned both Bettencourt and Gates-the-entrepreneur. Again, the market system allocated fewer rewards to the most successful person in the doing things business than it allocated to that same person once he quit that job and got into the owning things business.
Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.
Worse: winning the orifice lottery in no way qualifies you to direct the capital you've inherited. Liliane Bettencourt had no revolutionary new business ideas, invented no miraculous new materials or processes, produced no brilliant art. She merely accumulated, thanks to the professional services of skilled technicians whose job description includes hiring their own successors to ensure that another generation of winners of the Bettencourt orifice lottery could continue to accumulate, commanding more capital and power in society.
Perhaps if these orifice winners were content to allow their bloodless Renfields to allocate their capital while consuming bonbons and attending yacht parties, this could yield a stable politics. But inevitably, people who win the orifice lottery observe that they come from a long line of wealthy people, a line that will continue with their own descendants, and conclude that they have some kind of special, heritable virtue – magic blood – that the system has recognized with their great fortunes and the power those fortunes confer.
That's when things get dangerous: when aristocrats grow bored with their leisure and mobilize their inherited capital to change the way the rest of us live. Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction, and their special projects have a wide blast radius and inflict a lot of collateral damage.
Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines:
Closer to home, Gates's hatred of public institutions led him to allocate millions to dismantling public schools and replacing them with charter schools, particularly for poor and racialized kids, with disastrous results:
Capital's tendency to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats end up setting an ever-larger proportion of our societal agenda, despite their manifest unfitness to govern and their absence of any kind of democratic legitimacy.
Piketty argues that inequality is inherently politically destabilizing. A society ruled over by fools and monsters who were not voted into power and can't be voted out of power is a doomed society. Eventually – the French Revolution, the World Wars – these societies grow so unstable that they collapse altogether.
This is where Piketty and Snowden converge. When the Snowden leaks broke, there was a lot of talk about the mechanics and the legality of the NSA's global digital surveillance, but precious little consideration was given to the reason for all this surveillance. In 2013, the idea that this spying was about "security" was so obvious as to be self-evident. The questions at the time were whether spying could produce security. We weren't asking why things were so insecure.
In retrospect, the answer is to be found in Piketty. Piketty's Capital includes a long, impassioned plea to both lawmakers and aristocrats to consider redistributive policies (like a wealth tax) as the most affordable way to achieve political stability. Fundamentally, Piketty argues that the cheapest way to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn is to build hospitals and schools; this is cheaper than paying for guards and prisons to lock up would-be guillotine builders.
Today's AI debates swirl around the question of whether AI can truly make us more productive – that is, if chatbots will allow one person to do the work of two, or three, or four – or 100. But when it comes to surveillance, the digital revolution unquestionably produced a massive productivity dividend.
Consider the spying apparatus of the former East Germany ("the GDR") widely considered the most surveilled society in human history. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, there were about 16m people in the country. Of those East Germans, about 90,000 worked directly for the Stasi (the secret police), aided by another 100-200,000 paid informants:
Call it 200,000 people to spy on 16m. In other words, it took one spy to watch 80 of their neighbors. Contrast this with NSA spying: they accumulated detailed surveillance dossiers on about 6 billion internet users using a staff of no more than 5 million spooks (in 2013, about 5 million Americans were eligible for security clearance). If every single person with security clearance in the USA was working on the NSA's surveillance program, that would mean that by 2013, computers had made it possible for a spy to keep tabs on more than a thousand people.
Orders of magnitude improvements in a mere generation! This is the kind of productivity lift that economists dream of when they fantasize about the dividends from automation.
But why? Why spy?
East Germany spied on its people because the system was so unjust and cruel that its beneficiaries understood that their neighbors were forever on the brink of rising up against them. East Germany's leaders were right about that – but if anything, they didn't put enough people onto the spying project. We can tell, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989!
Of course, the GDR was already paying more than 1.2% of its population to spy on everyone else. It's likely that East Germany's leaders believed that their society simply lacked the fiscal space to hire more spies, even if short-staffing the Stasi risked societal collapse. Now, if Piketty is right, East Germany's leaders could have solved this problem by giving people fewer reasons to want to overthrow the state. They could have taken their hands out of the cookie jar, could have instituted democratic reforms – they could have made a bid for democratic legitimacy and public material comfort. But that would have come at the leaders' own power and wealth, and, lacking the stomach for this sacrifice, they lost everything.
Enter the NSA: the digitization of human civilization has drastically reduced the cost of surveillance, and – again, per Piketty – this vastly increases the amount of inequality the world can sustain before the illegitimacy, incompetence and cruelty of rule by the neoaristocratic winners of the orifice lottery brings the whole thing crashing down.
The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. Musk didn't just attack foreign aid – though the fact that the world's richest man murdered hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz isn't merely cruel, but also massively destabilizing in a way that will shake the world's politics for generations – but also domestic institutions. It was a DOGE cultist who fed the part of the NIH that tracks cyclosporiasis outbreaks into the wood-chipper:
Today, tens of thousands of Americans are experiencing the literal enshittification of the American state, and this isn't just a human tragedy (though it is), it's also an economic tragedy, with massive knock-on effects for the businesses that rely on those sickened Americans and for the agricultural sector whose outputs are now being shunned by millions. Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines.
Which brings me back to Snowden. The Snowden revelations did spur a global conversation about digital surveillance, with the result that the majority of the world's digital traffic is encrypted today. That's not nothing.
But the American state found new ways to conduct mass-scale, global surveillance, often by collaborating directly with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy:
Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government's system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years:
The Trump administration is the most unpopular in more than a century. Trump has stolen more money in office than any president in history. Trump presides over spiraling greedflation and collapsing buying power. The Trump administration has also presided over a titanic increase in state-aligned, privatized surveillance. The Trump years are the Flock years:
Trump's authoritarianism is a function of his misrule, and his misrule is enabled by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, the more he destroys with wars of choice, and incoherent tariff policies, and official pronouncements linking autism and vaccinations, the more he needs spy cameras, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, and facial recognition. Every time Trump talks about a third term in office, or canceling elections, or suppressing the vote, he creates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison the people this drives into the streets. The more mass surveillance there is, the safer it is for him to commit unpopular, corrupt acts. It's the world's worst self-licking ice-cream cone.
It's not just Trump, of course. Trump is the vanguard of a movement of orifice lottery winners whose delight in stealing, cheating, maiming and despoiling gives rise to political instability and requires them to divert some of their yacht money to mercenaries:
Take AI: the Trump years are also the AI years. This is the time in which a wildly unpopular technology is being shoved into every part of every app we rely on:
It's an era where corporate bosses can't stop gloating about how many jobs they're planning to destroy and how many paycuts they plan on imposing on the surviving workers:
And – most visibly – it's an era in which people's cities and towns are being despoiled by data centers they don't want, by local governments operating in the most extreme secrecy, who silence and even arrest citizens who demand a democratically legitimate process for deciding whether they will have to give up their power and water and land and peace:
An economist would tell you that there's an equilibrium being sought here: between the cost of bribing a town council to ram through data center approvals, the cost of building a more modest and palatable data center, and the cost of mollifying public critics. The cost of bribing towns to foist a data center on the townsfolk is low, because there are lots of towns that fit the bill, so data center barons can shop around.
But as data center protests grow larger and better organized (oligarchy is destabilizing), the cost of dealing with public opposition is mounting. Which is why the Trump administration is teaming up with its preferred tech and military contractors to engage in detailed surveillance of data center and AI critics:
These corporate spooks aren't just spying on data center critics: they've got a whole portfolio of oligarchy-stabilizing surveillance services, targeting "antifa," immigrants' rights and anti-ICE groups.
They're joined by hardware vendors who offer corporations, the wealthy, and enclaves where both are to be found on literal robocops, the ultimate in cheap guard labor (alas, the robots suck):
Trump and his orifice-winning army are caught in the same trap as the leaders of the GDR. Every gain in guard-labor efficiency creates the space for more of them to stick more of their hands even further into the cookie jar. Every time they do, American society grows more unstable, demanding more guard labor.
As we saw in Minneapolis, guard labor – be it mass surveillance, robocops or ICE chuds – is itself destabilizing. Police states make the people who live in them want to overthrow the state, requiring yet more cops, creating more partisans for tearing the whole thing down.
In theory, the orifice class could decide to stop stealing, cheating and maiming. The problem is that for every plute who realizes that the cheapest way to keep the guillotines off his lawn is to play fair, there are three more who lack the executive function to stop cheating. That means that you might as well keep on cheating, since the instability – and the guard labor bills – are coming no matter what.
In the tale of the "Tragedy of the Commons," a common pasture is grazed to dust by shepherds who each understand that if they don't graze their flock until everything is gone, some other shepherd will do so. The original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper was a racist hoax perpetrated by an academic fraud who wanted to make the case for the expulsion of black and Brown people from America and their mass extermination abroad:
But when it comes to the commons that is "a stable society," the orifice class is caught in an inescapable tragedy, certain of the knowledge that if they don't cheat us, the next American aristo will. Thus the demand for guard labor continues to mount…as does the demand for guillotines.
"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
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 507 (3619 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
I’m going to make a proposal today that’s almost certain to get me consigned to the neo-Luddite dustbin of history.
But first, let me lay out some facts.
Rather than producing jobs, the U.S. economy actually lost 23,000 job in July, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday. In addition, May’s and June’s job numbers were revised downward, showing a combined 103,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.
As if this weren’t bad enough, wage growth has also slowed. Average hourly earnings In July were just 0.1 percent higher than in June. This isn’t just a single month’s slow wage growth, either. Average hourly earnings increased just 3.2 percent over the past year — the lowest annual growth rate in five years.
What’s going on? It’s too early to tell. But evidence is mounting that artificial intelligence is playing a role.
New research by economists at Morgan Stanley shows that the rate of unemployment is half a percentage point higher than it would otherwise be in occupations exposed to AI, which they put at about 30 percent of all employment. The effect is even more dramatic among younger people.
Wage growth in jobs exposed to AI has contracted by 6.7 percent since 2023, according to research by economists Sania Edlichand Apollo Global Management’s Torsten Slok. This has resulted in at least $28 billion in losses for 5.8 million affected workers.
These findings still don’t explain the startling loss of jobs in July or the downward revisions for May and June. There are probably many factors at play. But they suggest that employers may be anticipating they’ll need fewer workers in the future — and won’t need to pay them all that much in order to attract them.
It’s possible that AI may create more jobs over the long term. But as John Maynard Keynes once noted, over the long term we’re all dead.
More than half of Americans surveyed by Reuters/Ipsos in June say they’re worried AI will put someone in their household out of work.
Edlich and Slok write that “the critical policy question is not whether AI will reshape the labor market more broadly, but how quickly, and whether workers will have the support they need when it does.”
As a former secretary of labor who’s kept his eyes focused on the Trump regime, I can assure you workers won’t have the support they need any time soon.
And even if AI begins to generate the productivity bonanza its advocates predict — but hasn’t yet — there’s no reason to assume American workers will see any of the benefits in their paychecks. If you hadn’t noticed, wages have been stuck even as the stock market has roared.
To the contrary, all signs point to vast riches for a few major AI investors and executives while most Americans are left behind.
Wealth inequality is already at record levels, and wealth at the top is quickly morphing into political power.
AI is creating a vast wave of campaign money. OpenAI’s superPAC “Leading the Future” has amassed over $140 million to influence upcoming elections, while Anthropic’s superPAC “Public First Action” isn’t far behind.
As the great jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said, “America has a choice: we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy, but we can’t have both.”
It’s racing to build enough data centers to keep pace with other giant AI corporations and secure the electricity to power them. Amazon’s new gas-burning plant is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, regulatory records show, more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in America.
So much for Amazon’s promise to eliminate its planet-warming emissions by 2040 as part of its Climate Pledge. You can bet other giants in the AI race will be turning to natural gas, too.
Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the Frankenstein monster in the room. A few weeks ago, OpenAI admitted that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into a digital library of AI technology.
The incident, which happened while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, was the kind of science-fiction nightmare that could soon be a reality. How soon before AI models escape all their cages?
Just last week, scientists published a study documenting how they used A.I. to create new kinds of viruses, raising the frightful possibility that the technology could be used to invent dangerous pathogens.
Lost jobs. Lost wages. Widening inequality. Data centers using up water and electricity and polluting the climate. Vastly more money polluting our politics. Models escaping their cages and hacking into everything, possibly threatening human life on this planet.
Can we pause for a moment and talk about what’s really happening here?
As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, AI has merged regressive politics with unchecked economic power under the guise of technological innovation.
Far too much money is giving a small group of unelected people extraordinary power to determine our future in ways that are likely to remake — and could possibly destroy — our lives.
We’re watching all of this roll out as if we have no choice, as if it’s inevitable, as if AI is just something we’re going to have to adapt to.
But why should we have to adapt to it, when it is the product of people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Dario Amodei?
Why should we be confined to being spectators at their enormously dangerous game? Why should we have to accept all these hugely negative, potentially life-threatening consequences?
The fact is, we don’t.
Communities across America are organizing against data centers near them. MAGAs and progressives are joining together to say “no” to the noise, higher electricity bills, and water shortages.
Well, then, why can’t we stop the whole damn thing? Why can’t we decide that the incalculable costs and risks of AI aren’t worth the potential benefits to the vast majority of us?
AI proponents argue that stopping or even pausing AI in the United States would risk American industry falling behind competitors overseas.
But if the costs and risks exceed known benefits, why not let China or any other competitor try AI out first? Why should we be the canary in this extraordinarily dangerous coal mine?
Other advocates of AI say we have no right to stop innovation in the free market. That’s baloney. We don’t allow private corporations to come up with new types of nuclear weapons or varieties of cocaine or biological pathogens. We protect the public from certain kinds of innovation.
So let’s protect ourselves here. Stop AI before it’s too late.
The kind of corporate BS now cropping up all across America
Friends,
The statements seem as belligerent as Pete Hegseth on a bad hair day.
“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” says Jonathan Cowan.
Cowan is president of Third Way, described by TheNew York Times as a “leading centrist Democratic group.” Cowan’s Third Way is preparing a $15 million war chest to “discredit democratic socialism.”
Pointing to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Senate primary last week, Cowan warns that “it is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potential presidential swing states.”
Well, I find it deeply troubling that faux centrist groups are declaring war on progressives in the pages of TheNew York Times, without the Times revealing who they really are.
If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way — those that have been made public, that is (Third Way is structured as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that’s not legally required to publicly disclose its donors) — you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.
Odd that TheNew York Times chooses to describe Third Way as a “leading Democratic centrist group” without revealing that it’s simply a Trojan Horse for corporate America.
Third Way senior vice president Matt Bennett has even conceded that “the majority” of Third Way’s donor support comes from the group’s board of trustees, most of whom are from the finance sector. (That’s the same Matt Bennett, by the way, who helped stage the infamous “Dukakis in a tank” photo-op that helped sink Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign.)
Here’s Third Way’s Board of Trustees (the most recent list available):
Jonathan Vogelstein, chairman of New Providence Asset Management and senior advisor to private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
David Heller, formerly global head of equity trading for Goldman Sachs.
Bernard Schwartz (chairman emeritus), chairman and CEO of BLS Investments.
David Horvitz, chairman of the board and CEO of SouthOcean Capital Partners, LLC and SouthOcean Investment Partners, LLC.
David Coulter, managing director and senior advisor at Warburg Pincus, focusing on the firm’s financial services practice, and former vice chair of JPMorganChase.
William Daley, vice chairman of Bank of New York Mellon, former vice chairman of JPMorganChase, former board member of pharmaceutical companies Abbott Labs and Merck.
John Dyson, chairman of Millbrook Capital Management, Inc. (MCM), a private investment firm that manages a manufacturing company, a vineyard and wine group, and a hedge fund.
Michael Edwards, deputy CIO of investment adviser Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisors.
Andrew Feldstein, CEO and Co-CIO of BlueMountain Capital Management, board member of PNC Financial Services Group, former managing director of JPMorganChase.
Brian Frank, founder and managing partner of Declaration Partners LP, an investment firm seeded by the founder of a large private equity firm.
David Greenwald, chairman of finance law firm Fried Frank, former international general counsel and a deputy general counsel of Goldman Sachs.
Derek Kaufman, former head of global fixed income at Citadel and a member of the firm’s Portfolio Committee, former managing director at JPMorganChase.
Derek Kirkland, managing director and co-head of the Global Financial Institutions Group at Morgan Stanley’s Financial Institutions Group in Investment Banking.
Doug Lawrence, CEO of DPL Green Investment and also managing principal and co-founder of 5 Stone Green Capital, formerly a managing director at JPMorganChase.
Joseph Zimlich, CEO of private family financial manager the Bohemian Group, board member of First Western Trust Bank.
Mark Spilker, founding member of GPS Investment Partners LLC, chairman of Chiron Investment Management LLC, former co-head of Goldman Sachs’s Investment Management Division, former president of Apollo Global Management, former member of Google’s Investment Advisory Committee.
Barbara Manfrey Vogelstein, former venture capitalist, former partner at Warburg Pincus and Apax Partners & Co. Ventures.
William Reeves, co-founder of BlueCrest Capital Management, former managing director at JPMorganChase.
Oh, and Third Way’s honorary co-chairs have included West Virginia’s former Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona’s former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said about its governing structure.
In 2020, Third Way claimed that Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan would add more than $13 trillion to the federal deficit, although most other analyses — including one by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center — found that Sanders’s plan would save trillions while providing healthcare to millions of uninsured Americans.
Well, of course Third Way attacked Bernie’s plan. Among Third Way’s donors are pharmaceutical giant Amgen, pharmacy benefit manager CVS Health (which acquired health insurance giant Aetna in late 2018), and health products and drug company Baxter International.
Other corporate donors to Third Way are or have been members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill mill that links lobbyists with state lawmakers. Amgen, Baxter Healthcare, CVS Caremark, DuPont, and trade groups the Consumer Technology Association and NCTA - The Internet and Television Association are members.
Third Way donors have also given money to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations. Among them, Entergy, Facebook, Google, and Reynolds American, according to tax records.
After the Democrats’ 2024 election losses, Third Way argued that the party should reduce its dependence on small-dollar donors. In a five-page memo of “takeaways” from the election, Third Way asserted that small-dollar donors’ preferences “may not align with the broader electorate.”
The memo stopped short of naming alternative funding sources, but the implication was clear: Less grassroots support means more reliance on big checks from super PACs and wealthy donors, which is exactly what Third Way prefers.
The memo also included calls to curb “far-left influence,” adopt a “pro-capitalist” stance, and stop “demonizing wealth and corporations.”
***
So, please, disregard whatever you may hear from Third Way or any other so-called “leading Democratic centrist group.”
And pay no attention to headlines about “Democratic centrists preparing for war” against a “rising Left.”
Instead, focus on what’s really happening.
Voters want people in power who are going to fight for them, and not for the super-wealthy or big corporations and Wall Street.
This is especially true now — when the bottom 90 percent of Americans are struggling to pay the bills, a record portion of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the richest one-tenth of one percent, big corporations and Wall Street have never been as powerful, Washington has been taken over by legalized bribery and corruption, and there’s no “center” between democracy and neofascism.
Object permanence: Seymour Cray's tunnels; War on moisture; $5 wrench cryptanalysis; Nauru files; People's Ride; German transit upholstery fashion; Monopolies v small business; Linkedin will put you in ads; NZ Parliament kicks itself off the internet; Adblock Plus v Facebook adblock-block; Cracking 100m VWs for $40; Trump as defective machine learning; Canada sucks at internet law; Goodhart's Law of AI.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction (permalink)
According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":
Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:
(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):
More notable than the Economist's faith-based predictions about the impending army of hyper-competent robo-lawyers is the magazine's proposed solution to this looming crisis: "stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims…prune the mass of procedural rights." Above all, replace the bureaucrats who process your "complaints, demands and appeals" with more AI, which will arbitrarily decide who gets what, through "personalised welfare interventions" that are not based on any kind of guaranteed rights.
Writing on his blog, the political scientist Henry Farrell tells us where this will inevitably end up: with AI-based robot wars in which increasingly stingy and pernickety robo-bureaucrats create demand for progressively more aggressive robo-lawyers:
As Farrell writes, this end-time was foretold by the prophet Alan Moore with his 1980s 2000 AD character Abelard Snazz, "the man with the two-storey brain":
Snazz "solves" the street crime epidemic on the planet Twopp with "Big Police Robots," who spiral out of control, arresting the citizens of Twopp for trivial crimes like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit ("breaking the laws of good taste"). To solve this new problem, Snazz invents "Big Criminal Robots" whose "cunning, efficient" crimes "take up all the police's time."
Twopp is left in a state of high-stakes Big Robot crimewars, in which the most efficient criminals imaginable battle the most ruthless robocops science can deliver, with the Twoppians caught in the crossfire, collateral damage in a robotic forever war (on crime).
As Farrell writes, this is already afflicting the US health system, where an army of insurance company robo-claim-deniers have been countered with a doctors' army of robot-claim-appealers:
The point being that people need health care, people need public services, and while there will always be some waste at the margins (whether due to incompetence or dishonesty) responding to this by beefing up the system's defenses with more advanced red tape just requires the people who legitimately need these services to employ more aggressive tactics.
In support of this, Farrell points to a great, long essay by Dan "Accountability Sink" Davies for the Niskanen Center, "'The Problem Factory' – Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services":
Davies' essay describes how increasing bureaucratic defenses against frivolous or dishonest claims drives the participants in these processes to assume a war footing and approach the system as a battlefield, leading to the very runaway cost inflation that the bureaucratic process was instituted to prevent.
(Davies, a cybernetician, has some fascinating advice about how to structure planning processes to minimize this, but that's out of scope for this particular post.)
This reminds me of nothing so much as the spam wars. There was a time when it was very easy to set up a mail server and provide email access for anyone who wanted it – including spammers. Increased spam begat increased anti-spam countermeasures, notably the creation of blocklists that allowed mail administrators to automatically reject email from "insecure" mail servers.
Inevitably, spammers figured out how to send spam from "secure" servers, resulting in stricter, more onerous standards for mail server configuration. Spammers – for whom the ability to send spam is an existential matter – figured out how to meet these standards, so the security demands jumped again – and again, and again.
Today, sending and receiving mail is so technically challenging that most of the internet's email is run by a handful of giant, mostly US-based corporations. If any of these companies decides your mail server is spamming, you effectively disappear from the internet and good luck getting them to acknowledge an error. Meanwhile, these companies emit an avalanche of spam, but no one will ever block their servers, because to do so would be to cut off billions of legitimate email users:
And since most of these companies are US-based, they are liable to being weaponized by Trump, who has taken to ordering his tech giants to block foreign officials whose policy decisions make him angry:
Another parallel is the content moderation wars that saw the large platforms coming up with progressively more detailed rules about what constituted harassment and hate speech, only to have dedicated trolls master these rule-books. Trolls – for whom harassment was a full-time vocation – became the world's greatest experts on the platforms' speech policies, which let them skate right up to the line when abusing their victims, and to get those victims kicked off the platforms if they could be lured into putting a single toe over the line in response:
Farrell criticizes the Economist's answer to the (alleged) looming robo-lawyer threat as "solutionism," Evgeny Morozov's word for "Recasting all complex social situations … as neat problems with definite, computable solutions":
Using AI to root AI-generated bureaucratic appeals sacrifices the system's putative purpose – delivering services – in the name of defending that service from abuse and misuse of the system's resources. As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, "the purpose of a system is what it does." If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn't a service delivery system at all – it's a service denial system.
As Farrell writes, the people of Twopp can tell you how this ends – in a war of giant robots in which we are all collateral damage.
(A brief postscript: Farrell is a font of science fictional analogies to modern policy issues. This weekend in the FT, he and Dan Wang published an excellent editorial on the relevance of the paranoid, claustrophobic fiction of Philip K Dick to our present political reality:)
"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
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 692 (692 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
“Trump is correct about one thing: A SICK DERANGED person destroyed the pool. He was looking at his own reflection at the time.”
(Congratulations, Russwin Francisco.)
Runners-up:
“The only way to fix this mess is with a blue wave in November.”
(Congratulations, Sue Schneider.)
“Trump said he’d drain the swamp, but all he’s done is drain the pool.”
(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)
“Now we know that the real vandal was Trump’s hand-picked pool guy.”
(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)
“Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: ‘Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.’”
(Congratulations, Alan Goldhammer.)
“More like deflecting pool.”
(Congratulations, sjcasey71.)
“This definitely reflects on his presidency.”
(Congratulations, Jean Rosenfeld.)
“It reflects everything this regime is: tattered, filthy, health hazard, a disgusting mess.”
(Congratulations, Karen Cooper.)
“Mirror, mirror on the Mall, who’s the biggest failure of all?”
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