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Received — 22 July 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: Trump's America can't even win a rigged game (22 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
22 July 2026 at 10:58


Today's links


A vintage world map. The US has been obscured by a roiling black cloud from which squirm many questing tentacles. A large area around the US has been discolored.

Trump's America can't even win a rigged game (permalink)

Here's a sentence that stopped me in my tracks last week: "The statement that 'the cemeteries are full of indispensable people' is just as true of nations, and in particular the US":

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/16/55382/

The writer is John Quiggin, writing about the fact that, under Trump, the world has raced through a series of seismic shifts in how it organizes itself, rushing to fill an America-shaped void in its dealings.

This is a subject that's very much on my mind. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor and then flipped the table over because he resented having to pretend to play at all. The "international rules-based order" that gave America oversight and control over the world's militaries, finances, trade, and communications was always a better deal for America than it was for the rest of the world.

The long persistence of this system doesn't mean that other countries liked it. The reason the American century endured for as long as it did was that the toll that America extracted from the world was always lower than the cost of making a new system. Just as people stay on Facebook because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, the nations of the world let America control their systems because they feared the cost and difficulty of building a new system more than they resented letting America dictate and tax every part of their politics and economies.

That's where Trump comes in. The price of doing business with Trump is, effectively, infinity. If you buck Trump, he doubles down and demands twice as much. If you capitulate to Trump, he interprets it as weakness and comes back for three times as much. There are no deals to be made with Trump, only temporary measures that last until his next Fox and Friends binge or chance encounter with a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

Take Canada: in 2018, Trump tore up NAFTA – the deal that Bush Sr and Clinton crammed down Mexico and Canada's throats – and replaced it with USMCA, a trade treaty that was even more advantageous to America. Then, within months of his 2024 election, Trump tore up USMCA and replaced it with a chaotic series of tariffs that swung around wildly from 25% to 100% to (as of this week) 50%:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/07/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-imposes-additional-tariffs-on-canada/

Trump has no coherent reason for this new tariff. Canada has bent over backwards to give Trump everything he wants and more. Despite some high-minded words at Davos about the need for "middle powers" to decouple from the USA, PM Mark Carney has given Trump everything he could ask for. Carney allowed Palantir – a company that makes no bones about being an agent of Trump's will – inside the most sensitive parts of the Canadian military. Carney dropped his plan to charge US tech companies a 3% tax. Carney is firing tens of thousands of civil servants and replacing them with chatbots, the majority of which will be operated by US companies, running on US servers.

Sure, Canada's imposed some retaliatory tariffs on US products, but that's just a way of making everything Canadians buy more expensive, which is a weird way of punishing America. It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can in the hopes that the downstairs neighbour says "ouch." Meanwhile, Carney has consistently ignored US interference in Canadian politics, including the tsunami of dark money pouring into the Alberta separatist movement – a bid by Trump to literally steal an entire province.

Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege.

This is why – as David Dayen writes – there will likely be no peace deal in Iran for so long as Trump is in office. Why would the Iranians sign any deal with Trump when they know Trump will break it?

https://prospect.org/2026/07/10/aftermath-wars-on/

Last Christmas, I gave a speech in Hamburg about "the post-American internet" that the rest of the world has the chance to build now that Trump has zeroed-out all the value it used to get from playing by America's tech policy rules, even as Trump has weaponized US tech companies to attack world officials who buck his agenda:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

After that speech, I wrote a book (The Post-American Internet) that Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in August 2027. In the book, I describe the role that "trusted third parties" (T3P) play in complex transactions. Think of an escrow agent who holds onto the deed for the house you're buying from the seller until you hand over the money, and then forwards the deed to you and the money to the seller.

The more complex a transaction is, the more it needs a T3P. For most of the past century, the US has been the world's T3P. Most of the world's transoceanic fiber optic lines make landfall in the US and interconnect to one another in US data centres. Most of the world's international transactions are conducted in dollars and are cleared through US-controlled platforms like SWIFT. Through its aid programs, the US sets the health and public services agenda for billions of non-Americans, and the US has military installations in more than 100 countries. The US trains the world's militaries, it supplies (and withholds) information from the world's intelligence agencies, and it runs the IT infrastructure powering the world's government agencies and critical infrastructure, from tractors to medical equipment.

Right from the start, the US was never an entirely trustworthy "trusted third party." There were plenty of instances where the US abused its control over its "neutral" platforms to serve the American national interest at the expense of the countries that relied on those platforms.

But those violations were either covert or carried out under some kind of legal rubric ("the rules-based international order"). You'd probably continue to trust an escrow agent that obeyed court orders to hold onto the money after handing over the deed. That trust might persist even if the escrow agent withheld the money on the say-so of a DA or sheriff, even without a court order. You might even continue to trust the escrow agent if they sometimes said, "I'm going to hang onto this money for 72 hours because I think there might be something weird in this deal."

Same goes for the escrow agent who has a secret side-hustle with the local land-registry office and realtors that lets them skim a few points off every deal and scoop up the best properties through a shell company. Provided you never find out about this, you'll happily hire that escrow agent to handle your property deal.

Trump is the escrow agent who keeps the money and the deed, then announces he did it because the seller was a fentanyl dealer and the buyer was a lizard-person; and then publishes a long screed on Truth Social calling everyone who criticises him a terrorist, promising to do it again next time.

Even if you need to sell your house, and even if Trump is the only escrow agent you can find, you're just not going to trust him with your deed or the money. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."

Back to Quiggin: the US was the world's indispensable nation, and the cemeteries of history are full of indispensable nations. As Quiggin writes, Europe and Ukraine have largely given up on US military protection from Russia and are building their own capacity, already surpassing the US in drone and artillery capabilities. The US can no longer credibly provide missiles and anti-missile defenses, not after Trump used up America's stockpiles in his pointless, endless war in Iran.

Quiggin notes that the consensus case against the EU as a military power held that Europe "lacks the capacity to project power globally" and that it is "too disunited to act effectively." Per Quiggin, these only matter if you believe that the post-American military order will look and act like the American system that Trump just trashed. Trump has a chud "Secretary of War" who kidnaps foreign leaders and can't reliably get oil through the Strait of Hormuz – if that's the dividend from "unity" and "projecting power," you can keep it.

On finance, Quiggin notes that the EU is racing to break its reliance on SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard, and the more Trump weaponizes these against institutions like the International Criminal Court, the faster this transition will go.

America's load-bearing private institutions – like the Big Four accounting firms and the bond rating agencies – have self-immolated, thanks to decades of lax regulation by successive US administrations through scandal after scandal. Quiggin points out that there's no reason to replace these giant, structurally important (but terrifyingly unreliable) cartels with trustworthy versions. It's cheaper and more robust to rebuild our economy so that it no longer serves the finance system, returning finance to "its pre-1970s role as a provider of a relatively limited set of services to the real economy."

On manufacturing, Quiggin points to the twin facts of Trump's chaotic tariffs and China's "economic nationalism," which have put the EU in the centre of a new trade order. Here, too, we're getting something new, not a Made-in-Europe version of "the failed globalist dream of the WTO" nor "Trump’s attempts to extort surplus through bilateral bullying":

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/opinion/america-trump-nato-europe-world.html

As I said, Quiggin's article has been rattling around in my mind ever since I read it last week, but there's one area where I think Quiggin's got it wrong: the relative difficulty of building a post-American internet.

First, because Quiggin says that the real challenge is building a post-American AI. Sovereign AI is, frankly, nonsense. If Trump turns off all of your country's chatbots, nothing changes. If Trump orders Microsoft to shut off your country's access to Office 365 (as he did to the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian judge who pissed him off), your country would simply cease to function:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize

And if Trump orders John Deere to brick all the tractors in your country, you're gonna starve to death:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

In the face of these real, non-speculative, immediate, grave threats, focusing on AI – the money-losingest technology in human history, which has consistently underperformed relative to its boosters' promises – is just misguided. If you really want an "AI strategy" for your country, it should be this: wait for the bubble to burst, then buy hardware and talent at fire-sale prices in the wave of ensuing bankruptcies, and use them to extract more performance from free, open source models.

The real digital challenge is building apps and data centres to run everyday administrative, telecoms and e-commerce software on, and then moving your country's, ministries', companies' and households' data over to the new platforms. The hardware and software are challenging, but ultimately straightforward. Raising capital for data centres is just a matter of convincing people to invest in being a kind of landlord, which is among the easier sells to make (and there's plenty of investors who are looking for real alternatives to getting sucked into the AI bubble).

Getting the apps is hard, but there's an army of technologists who are ready for more, after decades of doing fake startups for a Big Tech company to "acqui-hire" and/or toiling to improve ad click-throughs. These people yearn to follow Steve Jobs's injunction to "make a dent in the universe" and they are being chased out of Silicon Valley by ICE chuds who want to send them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.

There's plenty of talent and capital for the taking.

The real hard part isn't writing or running the code – it's extracting the data, replacing the firmware, and bridging new systems – like post-American social media platforms – into the existing ones. This part is hard because every country in the world has agreed to a trade deal with America wherein they agreed to make it illegal to reverse-engineer US tech exports, in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Trump has made the case for abandoning these deals better than I ever could have:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Fagin: Will Eisner’s retelling of Oliver Twist https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/22/fagin-will-eisners-retelling-of-oliver-twist/

#20yrsago 95 Theses of Geek Activism: how to defend freedom with tech https://scienceaddiction.com/2006/07/23/95-theses-of-geek-activism/

#20yrsago Plane made of printed parts flies https://web.archive.org/web/20060823102012/http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn9602&feedId=online-news_rss20

#20yrsago Scott McCloud on the future of comics https://web.archive.org/web/20060822133933/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/1,71434-0.html

#10yrsago Middle aged Singaporean media regulators rap about the national public-private content strategy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksw2UqTyhhc

#10yrsago Laurie Penny on hanging out with Milo Yiannopoulos and the gay trolls of the RNC https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/im-with-the-banned-8d1b6e0b2932#.ftai0i9ra

#1yrago Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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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Trump's Biggest Self-Dealing Scheme Yet

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
22 July 2026 at 10:02

Friends,

Starting August 1, Trump Media and Technology Group will launch a new data feed aimed at high-frequency trading firms whose profits are made by making trades a fraction of a second faster than everyone else.

It will provide “licensed, real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts.” In other words, the feed will let you know what Trump has said before anyone else knows, meaning it’s well worth the tab that Truth Social will charge to see Trump’s posts before the rest of the public sees them — up to $100,000 per month.

That’s a pittance relative to what could be made, because Trump’s words on Truth Social — about his war in Iran, about his latest tariffs, about the Fed — have caused the stock market to soar or drop. So, if you’re a trader on Wall Street, you’ll make millions if you know what he’s posting a fraction of a second before everyone else knows. Perhaps more to the point, if you’re behind on that news, “you’ll get crushed,” as one hedge-fund executive told the Financial Times.

No wonder Trump Media’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn is gloating that the feed will “become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders.” Trump Media has been unprofitable until now.

Trump, of course, is the company’s largest shareholder.

The scheme is Trump’s most brazen scheme so far to illegally profit off his presidency and enrich his Wall Street insider friends.

I say illegally because the Constitution lists “bribery” as a reason to remove a president from office, and the federal ban on bribing public officials also expressly applies to a president. (Whether these provisions can be enforced against a president who’s been given blanket immunity from “official acts” by the Supreme Court is another matter.)

The good news, though, is Americans are catching on to insider trading, and they hate it — so much so that House Republican leaders are now teeing up a vote this week on a bill that would create new guardrails for lawmakers trading stocks.

The “Stop Insider Trading Act” would bar members of Congress and their families from purchasing new shares of stock and require them to file a notice of their plans to sell shares at least seven days ahead of time.

Most Democrats say the measure doesn’t go far enough because it allows members to keep shares of stock they already own, in contrast with a competing bipartisan proposal that bars members from trading individual shares of stock altogether. And one provision Republicans have snuck into the measure —and that must be removed if they want any Democratic votes — is linked to Trump’s “Save America” voter suppression act.

My point is that at the same time Trump is rolling out a new tool to give traders more immediate access to his market-moving posts on Truth Social — if they’ll pay him up to $100,000 a month for it — Congress is limiting how members can profit from inside information they obtain through elected office.

The American public is so disgusted by corruption in Washington that even Republican lawmakers want something to show they’re not in the swamp.

Trump doesn’t give a damn about the public’s mounting revulsion at corruption. He’s not up for reelection. He doesn’t care that his polls are in the cellar. All he wants to do is make even more money, exert more power, and get even with people who have gotten in his way.

But the public wants his swamp drained.

Democrats, take note. Three months from now, ask Americans two related questions: Do they think they’re better off than they were before Trump became president again? Do they approve of the most corrupt White House in American history?

The answer to both will be a resounding no. And the best way for Americans to act on their disgust will be to kick the Republican bums out.

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Received — 21 July 2026 ⏭ Activism

Trump's Two Killing Fields

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
21 July 2026 at 10:01

Friends,

In response to public outrage following ICE’s recent murders in Houston and Maine, the Department of Homeland Security moved to pause vehicle stops. But the pause reportedly infuriated Trump, who ordered ICE to continue the stops. ICE’s arrests and aggression continue to escalate.

Trump’s war with Iran is also escalating, with the U.S. striking critical infrastructure sites including power stations and bridges, and Iran attacking a U.S. base in Jordan, killing two American troops (one is still missing).

I think the two killing fields are related, and the question I’ve been pondering is why Trump’s violence is growing both at home and abroad?

It can’t be because the violence is achieving Trump’s stated objectives. Illegal immigration was already down to a trickle before ICE’s recent violent resurgence. The escalating bombing of Iran is fortifying its militant leaders, causing even more Iranians to become anti-American, and widening the war.

Nor is Trump’s escalating violence popular with American voters. In fact, most Americans have turned against ICE and against Trump’s war in Iran. Strikingly, Trump has lost enthusiasm even among many fellow Republicans, a core source of his power for more than a decade.

So why is Trump escalating the violence, at home and abroad?

At first I thought it was to justify Trump’s use of emergency powers in the midterm elections — giving him trumped-up reasons to deploy troops at voting places, curtail times and places of voting, and confiscate voting lists and machines.

That may still be a motive, although his address to the nation last Thursday night focused on fake reports of fraudulent voting rather than Iranian aggression or a fake resurgence of immigration.

So, is there any other reason for Trump’s escalating violence at home and abroad?

As Americans and much of the rest of the world turn on Trump (and, by extension, Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller), I can’t help but wonder whether they feel their manhood to be under assault.

Remember, this is a president who staged a cage match on the South Lawn of the White House to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday and incited an attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It’s also a secretary of defense who’s testing troops for their levels of testosterone.

A vice president who excoriates “childless cat ladies” and other “people without children” for allegedly having no stake in the nation’s future.

And a White House deputy chief of staff who’s taunting Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico for having “less testosterone” than his opponent and emitting “soy milk” when his blood is drawn.

In the Trump manosphere, violence is seen as a sign of virility. When that virility is challenged, the automatic response is to escalate the violence.

Hence, the growing mayhem in Trump’s two killing fields.

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O Canada

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
21 July 2026 at 10:01

Friends,

Trump on Monday signed orders to impose a 50 percent tariff on a wide range of Canadian imports.

The White House claims the tariffs are a “punishment” for Canadian discrimination against American cars, dairy, and alcohol.

But the tariffs will also punish us. Remember, tariffs are import taxes — paid for by you and me and everyone else in America. So, we’re about to pay more for everything we import from Canada: plywood, paper, furniture, hockey sticks, cement, et al. Canada is our second-largest trading partner, for chrissake.

Even if the Supreme Court finds that Trump lacks authority to invoke these tariffs and the government must refund American importers for the extra cost — as the high court did with his first round of tariffs — you and I won’t be reimbursed for the extra costs we’ve paid.

Corporations aren’t giving their customers any of the $80 billion in refunds they’ve received from the Treasury Department for the first round of tariffs, so don’t expect any reimbursement on this second round. Which means we’re doubly screwed.

Worse yet, the Treasury isn’t really bearing the cost of the $80 billion in refunds. The cost is being borne by you and me and all other American taxpayers, because our money funds the government. And as taxpayers we’ll also be paying for the second round of refunds, assuming the Supreme Court orders them. Which means we’re triply screwed.

Actually, we’re quadruply screwed because Trump is imposing the new tariffs under the Tariff Act of 1930 — the notorious Smoot-Hawley tariff that worsened the Great Depression by causing other countries to retaliate and impose tariffs on goods coming from the United States. It’s likely to have a similar effect in coming months.

If you hadn’t noticed, the American economy is already shaky. Prices are rising faster than wages, which means most of us are becoming poorer even before Trump’s next round of tariffs. His war in Iran is pushing up the price of gas and, indirectly, food.

The real reason for the new tariffs is that Trump is pissed off that Canada had the temerity (and the right) to retaliate against his first round of tariffs, and it has resisted Trump’s calls to be annexed as the 51st state.

Why would Canadians ever want to live in a nation that could elect Trump?

In any event, I believe I can speak for most Americans when I apologize to our Canadian friends. We’re sorry we elected him. He’s made our lives worse. He’s a continuing embarrassment to us. (Did you see him grandstand at the World Cup? We have to live with this crap every day.)

Believe me, we’re doing everything we can to put him back in his cage.

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Pluralistic: Dealing with dickovers (21 Jul 2026) dickovers

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
21 July 2026 at 10:49


Today's links


A traffic cop waving a red baton. His head has been replaced with the Adblock Plus logo - a red stop-sign with the letters ABP in the center. He stands before a psychedelic rainfail. Around his baton radiates a cornea of golden light.

Dealing with dickovers (permalink)

One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for

a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data. The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the actual response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site.

These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control

But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on.

If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on – and they'll do it again, every time you visit them. The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user."

What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it isn't. Facebook claimed that they had to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had also clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote). Facebook claims that this is a contract with you, whereby the company has promised to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be violating the contract, which might make you mad, so they are legally required to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go:

https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/briefings/2023/07/european-court-of-justice-in-facebook-ruling-clarifies-interplay-between-eu-competition-law-and-data-protections-enforcement.pdf

This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. But despite the fact that surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will," these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't possibly include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon.

But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them.

Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

What's more, these measures really only work on desktop browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

Finally, this mostly only works on Firefox, and it works worst on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

So, once you're on your actual computer, using Firefox, how can you disenshittify your internet experience? The first thing to familiarize yourself with is Reader Mode, a built-in Firefox feature that switches any webpage to a black type/white background column of text. Just click the little "page view" icon next to the Firefox location bar or use the key combo "ctrl-alt-r."

Some power tips for Reader Mode: Firefox tries to guess whether a given page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You can force Firefox to always allow you to try Reader Mode by going to "about:config" in your location bar, then searching for "reader.parse-on-load.force-enabled" and toggling it to "true". If you switch to Reader Mode and the page breaks, you can switch back by hitting ctrl-alt-r again.

Many websites' "soft paywalls" (which allow you to read an article or two before getting a demand to register and/or pay) can be defeated with Reader Mode. Just hit ctrl-alt-r and see if the whole article appears. If it doesn't, try one or both of: a) reloading the page while still in Reader Mode, and/or; b) Clearing cookies for the page (click the shield next to the site's URL in Firefox's location bar, then click "Clear cookies and site data"), and then reload.

That's Reader Mode, and it comes built into Firefox, and can be installed via various extensions on other browsers. Now let's move on to more advanced techniques, starting with "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that deletes any "static" elements in a web-page you've loaded (broadly, this is anything that won't change position when you scroll your browser).

Just click the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet and all the static elements in the current tab go away. This includes things like navigation bars, which are often (but not always) useless annoyances. The original Kill Sticky, created by Alisdair McDiarmid, is 13 years old, and it still works great, but eight years ago, gala8y created a new version that caught some outliers that the original Kill Sticky missed. I've been running gala8y's version for a year now with no problems, and I recommend it as your second line of dickover defense (after Reader Mode):

https://github.com/gala8y/kill-sticky–forked

Kill Sticky is great for getting rid of the dickovers on a website you're not planning to visit more than once. But if you visit a dickover website regularly, you can permanently block its dickovers by using the Adblock Plus (ABP) browser extension:

https://adblockplus.org/

Once you have Adblock Plus installed, you can instruct your browser never to render a given website's dickover. Just load the website, hover your pointer over the dickover, and click your right mouse-button (Mac users need to ctrl-click). This will pop up a Firefox context menu, and at the bottom of that menu is "Block Element…".

Select "Block Element," then move your mouse around the screen. Different regions of the screen will glow pink, showing you which element (part of the page) ABP can access there. Once you've highlighted the dickover, click the "Preview" button on the ABP dialog in the bottom right corner. This will show you how the page looks after you've banished that element.

If it's an element you want to delete forever, click "Create" and ABP will create a new rule for that page that blocks that element. Note that many dickovers consist of several elements, each atop the other, and after you block one element, you might have to repeat the process to delete the element "behind" it, digging your way down to the actual webpage. Each element you block is listed in the top pane of the ABP dialog box. For example, here's Wired.com's UK dickover:

||media.wired.com/photos/6a565246c8e0799a2981818e/1:1/w_*c_limit/WEB_2026-06-21_EA-WIRED-NBNO-FullQual_0011.jpg

If you block an element by accident and want to restore it, just delete its corresponding line in the Block Element dialog. When websites change their layouts and their dickovers come back, just add the new one to the Block Element for that page. No need to delete the old entries.

Finally, if all else fails, there's Remove Paywall, a website that tries several different ways to load a page without its interrupters, nag screens, regwalls and paywalls:

https://www.removepaywall.com/

It's also available as a browser plugin, so you can just right-click on any page and select "Remove Paywall" from the pop-up menu. Remove Paywall often loads a page with all of its dickovers, and you can use all the techniques enumerated above – Reader Mode, Kill Sticky and Block Element – with Remove Paywall versions of pages.

Back in 2024, Ed Zitron tried an experiment: he bought Amazon's bestselling laptop and tried to use it, discovering it to be a horror-show of shovelware, including processor-devouring preinstalled spyware that rendered it all but unusable:

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

Zitron's (excellent) point is that technically proficient people have better computers than most users, and these computers are configured in better ways, and as a result, we participate in a fundamentally different internet to the one that normies are forced to use.

It's an excellent observation, and Zitron's point – that these laptops were actively enshittified by hardware makers and OS vendors – is an important one (the essay is called "Never Forgive Them").

But to this point, I would like to add another: we have a duty and obligation to the people we love to show them how to seize the means of computation. The normies in your life need the tips and tricks I lay out in this article more than anyone. Sure, it takes some doing to install Firefox, Kill Sticky, Adblock Plus and Bypass Paywalls; it takes a minute to figure out Reader Mode.

But if you install these tools for the people you love and show them how to use them (or just reconfigure the sites they visit most frequently to block dickovers and other annoyances), you will permanently improve their internet experience, clawing back hours of annoyances every week, while also protecting their privacy.

Anyone who is confused by switching to Firefox is also going to be confused by the deceptive language and practices that go along with dickovers. By leaving your unsophisticated loved ones exposed to dickovers, you're not decreasing the amount of technological confusion they're likely to experience in a day – you're vastly increasing the amount of danger they face as a result of that confusion.

There's never been a better time to disenshittify your cherished normies' computers. The AI companies' illegal monopolization of the memory market has sent the price of new computers, RAM and storage skyrocketing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BORRBce5TGw

All of us – but especially normies – are having to do more with less. The best way to squeeze extra performance out of any computer (but especially an aged and underpowered computer) is by switching to a free/open operating system like GNU/Linux and replacing your proprietary, resource-gobbling apps with free/open alternatives:

https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm

Seizing the means of computation isn't theft, it's bargaining. Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it's a "market" where as soon as you stop to browse someone's wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In "markets," prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold.

Adblocking, dickover blocking and other customizations are a way for you to bargain back, to answer the opening bid of "How about you give me all of your data forever and let me do anything I want with it?" with "How about 'nah?'"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Dickovers are companies' illegal response to privacy laws. Privacy laws are the public response to companies' out-of-control data theft and weaponization. They call us thieves, but they're the ones who embarked upon a generation-long campaign of unrestricted data plunder. What they call "theft" is just self-defense.

A generation ago, publishers and advertisers fell in love with pop-up ads. Early pop-ups were virulent in ways that are hardly imaginable today: visiting a website summoned dozens of pop-ups, some of them employing dirty tricks like spawning as an invisible 1×1 pixel, or running away from your cursor when you tried to close them. They auto-played sound and music. They were Satanic.

We got rid of pop-ups by installing pop-up blockers. Browser vendors (starting with Opera, then Mozilla) blocked pop-ups by default. Soon, pop-ups simply ceased to exist for the majority of internet users, and at that point, the same companies who'd insisted that they would go out of business unless they could fill your screen with pop-ups quietly gave up on them and found another way to advertise.

No one should ever have to look at another dickover. If dickovers become invisible for everyone on the web, there won't be any dickovers. Companies claim they need dickovers to survive. It's bullshit. They want dickovers, but if dickovers cease to be rendered on their target audience's screens, they'll switch to less invasive tactics, just like they've always done.

(Image: Kanerva T, CC BY 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Worst week in the history of broadcast TV https://web.archive.org/web/20060717100605/http://asia.news.yahoo.com/060711/ap/d8iq1l8g0.html

#20yrsago Pen with built-in WiFinder https://web.archive.org/web/20060808191736/https://informatica.shopwprintit.com/index.cfm?action=ViewDetails&ItemID=135&Category=95

#15yrsago Russian Pirate Party must change name, contemplates “Pira7e Party” https://torrentfreak.com/judge-pirate-party-name-ban-decision-stands-110722/

#15yrsago Public special ed employee has $0 paycheck after health insurance deductions https://web.archive.org/web/20110726080414/http://www.educationvotes.nea.org/2011/07/20/a-special-education-worker-talks-candidly-about-empty-paychecks-organizing/

#15yrsago Act now! Congress wants to kill WiFi-like spectrum, sell it off to highest bidder instead https://web.archive.org/web/20110722113231/https://publicknowledge.org/dont-let-cos-buy-way-out-regulation

#15yrsago New Yorkers freestyle rap in Union Square https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3fd9mzfRoQ

#10yrsago Advances in transparent, brain-revealing skull-windows https://web.archive.org/web/20160722140424/https://www.medgadget.com/2016/07/transparent-skull-implant-repeat-brain-laser-therapy.html

#10yrsago EFF is suing the US government to invalidate the DMCA’s DRM provisions https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/digital-millennium-copyright-act-eff-supreme-court

#10yrsago Ed Snowden and Andrew “bunnie” Huang announce a malware-detecting smartphone case https://www.tjoe.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/release/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 20 July 2026 ⏭ Activism

Office Hours: What Will Trump Do in Iran NOW?

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
20 July 2026 at 10:02

Friends,

Trump’s war with Iran has resumed (it never really stopped). The U.S. is sending more warplanes to the Middle East. Two American service members were killed in an Iranian missile attack on Jordan, and a third is missing. The Strait of Hormuz is again closed. Meanwhile, Mojtaba Khamenei issued his first statement following his father’s funeral, saying “revenge is the will of our nation” and that Iran would act against “criminals whose names are known.” In response, Trump threatened to “completely decimate and destroy” Iran if assassination threats against him were acted upon.

How long can Iran continue the war? Its economy appears reasonably stable; it has exported oil sufficient to meet its needs. Its population has become used to sanctions and economic pain, and has no voice, in any event. As shown by its attack on Jordan, as well as those on Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, and Qatar, Iran has ample missile stocks and has also become more adept at evading U.S. air defense systems.

How long can the U.S. continue the war? America doesn’t have sufficient munitions to maintain the current bombing campaign indefinitely. World oil reserves are almost depleted, which means that continued blockage of the strait will cause even more economic pain. Oil has again topped $90 a barrel. Plus, there are midterm elections to think about.

So, what’s Trump’s likely next move? I’ve made the rounds of the foreign policy advisers and experts I consulted with in early March, asking what they believe Trump will do now.

Their responses are arrayed below. I’d appreciate hearing from you as well, about what you think Trump will do.

Read more

He Can't Resist

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
20 July 2026 at 02:35

Friends,

Here’s you-know-who trying, as ever, to be the center of attention today, even though it was supposed to be about celebrating those who deserved it. Congratulations, Spain — along with apologies for our Malignant Narcissist-in-Chief.

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Received — 19 July 2026 ⏭ Activism

Sunday caption contest: Floating

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
19 July 2026 at 23:00

Friends,

Please submit your caption in the Comments section and, as before, please use the Comments section only for captions.

Winners will be announced next Sunday. For consideration, please post your caption by Monday at 9 pm PT, 12 midnight ET.

Leave a comment

Last week’s winner:

“If you were a Republican you would still be in the race.”

(Congratulations, Esther.)

Runners-up:

“You only have 2 women who are accusing you of sexual misconduct--come back when you can match me.”

(Congratulations, Donald Hodgins.)

“No, you can’t run as a Republican either. You were only accused of but not indicted for sexual abuse.”

(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)

“Now that we know, go register Republican!”

(Congratulations, Tom Hale.)

“They weren’t even underage. SHAME!”

(Congratulations, Victoria Sweet.)

“Nice try, but I’m the only one who can get away with doing that. Because when you’re MAGA they let you do it.”

(Congratulations, Rachel Brown.)

“Stop working my side of the street!”

(Congratulations, NatteringNayBob.)

“Out! You’re a godless lunatic Communist. Other than that, you seem like a nice enough guy.”

(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)

“Hey oyster man. Go shuck yourself!”

(Congratulations, Mike Hammer.)

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Sunday thought: Integrity

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
19 July 2026 at 10:02

Friends,

There’s been a lot of discussion this past week about the meaning of integrity.

You didn’t hear the word used directly; it was alluded to indirectly — in wondering whether Lindsey Graham was an immoral opportunist or clever pragmatist; in suspecting Todd Blanche of being more loyal to Trump than to the nation; in distrusting Erica Schwartz, Trump’s latest pick to lead the CDC, when she said she’ll never compromise on the science; in doubting that Jay Clayton, his pick for director of national intelligence, will tell Trump anything he doesn’t want to hear.

The word integrity is rooted in the Latin word integer, meaning “whole” or “complete” — living by your principles, choosing honesty over opportunism, making ethical choices that may be inconvenient or unpopular, maintaining your moral compass.

Graham’s public record of denouncing Trump on the Senate floor after January 6, 2021, and then becoming Trump’s most loyal Senate apologist revealed someone who traded honesty for influence — a person with little or no integrity.

Blanche, in his hearing to be attorney general, said he wanted to bring trust back to the Justice Department but then accidentally referred to himself as Trump’s lawyer —before clarifying that he “was” — had been —Trump’s lawyer. Blanche’s momentary lapse revealed a deeper conflict, as evidenced by his unswerving loyalty to Trump. He lacks integrity.

Schwartz, in her confirmation hearing, undercut her pledge to be guided by science in saying she believed Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would “never” implement policies that aren’t scientifically sound. That’s enough to cast doubt on her integrity.

Clayton, in his confirmation hearing, repeatedly refused to say Biden won the 2020 election, causing Senator Jon Ossoff to ask Clayton: “You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election? But you ask to lead America’s intelligence community? Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question, why can you not give it?”

It is not possible to have integrity and be loyal to Trump. The two are in direct conflict.

No one can be honest in a regime based on big lies. As the poet, philosopher, and statesman Václav Havel put it, “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.”

So a choice must be made — personal integrity or loyalty to Trump.

In his book The Art of the Deal, Trump wrote that he preferred loyalty to integrity — as epitomized by his mentor, Roy Cohn.

History remembers Cohn for his ruthless bullying, profane braggadocio, opportunistic bigotry, lying, and more lying. Like Trump, Cohn was utterly without principle and prioritized personal power that could be leveraged for wealth, influence, and celebrity. In 1986, Cohn was disbarred by the New York State Bar for unethical conduct after attempting to defraud a dying client by forcing him to sign a will amendment leaving Cohn his fortune.

Yet in his book Trump praised Cohn for his loyalty, contrasting him with “all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty …. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite.”

It is not possible for Blanche or Schwartz or Clayton or anyone else in Trump’s orbit — nor was it possible for Lindsey Graham — to be loyal to Trump and simultaneously maintain their own integrity. It must be one or the other.

Yet integrity is more important than loyalty. As Trump demonstrates time and again, someone lacking integrity is inherently untrustworthy. Such a person cannot serve the people of the United States.

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Received — 18 July 2026 ⏭ Activism
Received — 17 July 2026 ⏭ Activism

Donald Trump is 100% right about US election vulnerabilities and frauds

✇Just an invitation...
By: Marco Fioretti
17 July 2026 at 20:41

As usual… If you like what you read here, thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, one-time donations for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work.

I just read CNN’s copy of “Trump’s speech claiming US election vulnerabilities, annotated”“, and after that here’s the one thing I can tell you with full confidence: as far US elections vulnerabilities and voting in the US in general are concerned, Donald Trump is 100% right and, albeit it is only for its own personal advantage, he really seems to have a much better grasp of what really matters in those areas than any other US politician.

Just an invitation... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

What Trump gets 100% right about US election vulnerabilities and voting in general is something that’s a) really simple, b) wouldn’t change one bit if all his accusations and claims of voting fraud turned out to be 100% false, and c) can only benefit populists and shameless demagogues like him.

More specifically, the one take-home message of Trump’s election integrity speech and what Trump gets 100% right is not whether China, Russia or anybody else meddled with any US elections. Trump himself doesn’t really care anymore at this point, and CNN itself points it out:

What really matters here, and Trump gets 100% right, is these three really simple things:

  1. In general, voting really enables and supports democracy only if everybody really trusts it, that is only if everything about voting is so damn simple that everybody with basic education can, without having to trust any “expert”, really understand how it works and autonomosly conclude that it could never, ever produce frauds at any scale large enough to change the result of an election

  2. For many decades, Americans have let their administrators and representatives make anything related to voting as uselessly complex (that is: impossible to trust) as they could, and accepted to be told that no-brainer rules in any other country where voting happens (e.g. photo voter ID) are either impossible or attacks to their rights and freedom (seriously?)

  3. If doesn’t matter at all if Trump’s accusations of fraud are true or not. If they are, of course action is needed. If they arent’, making all that noise about something that’s impossible to deny, that is rampant, unneeded complexity and incomprehensibility in the country that should be the beacon of democracy... it’s a perfect way to convince even more Americans to not vote anymore. Yesterday’s speech is Trump’s 2026 way to repeat “you won’t have to vote anymore”:

He DID told you. Two years ago.

Making all that noise is a perfect excuse to replace the current systems with something that’s simpler on the surface... but eventually makes it much easier for Trump to manipulate elections as he wants.

Summing up, Trump is 100% right about the objective impossibility for Americans to trust the American voting system, which is even greater than he can see, and the only real solution is to make voting in the US much, much simpler and trustable than Trump himself claims to want.

Thanks for sharing this post as much as you can, both inside and OUTSIDE Substack!

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I took the time five years ago to lay out all the main ways in which voting in the US is an embarrasment for a great country, and how to fix them. For your convenience, I have copied that analysis and request below (**). Thanks in advance for sharing your opinion in the comments!

Some comments I’m seeing on Georgia’s runoff... (first published on 2021-01-06)

...just confirm one thing I’ve always thought of Americans.

Unavoidable disclaimer

This is NOT a Republican post or a Democratic post. I am not American, nor I live in the US. I follow certain US events only because I have to, to the extent that who becomes President of the USA, or the composition of its Senate and Congress still heavily influence other countries. Apart from that, what Americans do, who they elect and how they live is none of my business, no question. And, like any other country, America has a lot of other things to imitate, things I envy Americans for. But there is one thing they really get wrong, sorry.

ADDED on 2021/01/06, 6:34pm, GMT+1: let me stress that what worries me and pushed me to write this post is not what Americans vote. It is only the fact that a voting system designed and imposed for decades in this way, even if 100% executed in perfect good faith by 100000% honest and competent people can only increase the fragmentation of any society. With dangerous long term effects for the whole world, when that society is as influential as the US.

ALSO: do NOT miss the follow-up, that is the reaction of an american election inspector, and my reply!.

Ten minutes ago, browsing YouTube...

Ten minutes ago, YouTube decided to suggest me a video of an American citizen very, very upset for the results of the Georgia runoff. So were the majority of people who commented his words. Some of those comments catched my attention, and are pasted below, because they confirm one bipartisan thing, well within scope of this website, that I have always thought of the USA.

Here are some of the comments I am talking about:

  • If we can’t vote in open, honest elections then there are only two outcomes. Neither will be good

  • The Dominion algorithms make it to where they only win by 2% or less so it doesn’t raise any red flags of voter fraud.

  • The vote harvesting is the devil

  • When they said they’d add 3 more hours to count mail in and absentee ballots I knew this was a lost cause

  • my voting machine had molded onto its plastic case the word DOMINION

  • Same machines, same software, why would you get different results?

  • Vote switching software was deployed again. They already have the proof. Just hold on.

  • The Dominion machines crashed again, so I’m not placing any faith in the results.

  • plus lots of comments in the “I’ll never bother to vote again, it’s totally pointless” category

And the thing I am talking about is...

This: Americans are great people from lots of points of view. Sincerely. But trust them to get everything conceivable about voting, as wrong as possible. Sorry, this is what it looks like from outside.

This is how any political vote with only a few, binary choices should happen:

Ballot of the 1946 italian institutional referendum. Image source: Wikipedia.

The piece of paper above is the paper ballot of the 1946 Referendum with which Italians chose between Republic and Monarchy. For the purpose of this post, it is an almost perfect picture of how political elections still happen in Italy, today:

  • only with paper ballots that any analphabet could understand: cross the picture you want, done

  • with the mandatory, same copying pens for everybody, provided at the booth by voting officials

  • ballot counting done manually, in each booth right after it closes, by a committee of representatives of all major parties

  • with photographic voter ID documents that everybody has anyway, so why the hell not

  • voter registration handled as described below

  • everybody votes in the same few hours, nationwide, always on Sundays and (sometimes) the following Monday morning. No ballots to send for counting to no warehouse, with all the risks involved

In the US, instead...

Again: as far as I am concerned, what follows only matters for votes that directly influence the whole US, and with them the rest of the world. How the residents of any US county or city decide, their major, or how to finance their local aqueducts is only their business, seriously. The US, we were saying...

E-voting

The only thing worse than e-voting is online voting, for all the reasons I already explained in detail elsewhere. Here, today, it is only necessary to highlight one thing:

the comments above, and the millions similar that will surely follow, simply could not exist, if US voting happened as described two paragraphs above. If vote casting were manual, and vote counting happened that way, maybe under a live webcam in every booth... this would not completely eliminate frauds (nothing could), but it would make large scale fraud immensely harder, while making immensely easier to trust the system. It’s as simple as that. No, better: voting has to be as simple as that. See here, again.

Mail voting/early voting

Having lived under assorted lockdowns for most of the last ten months, and being likely heading for more, I do acknowledge that, this time, mail or early voting had some advantages.

But the basic idea is flawed, and not democratic. Check again the paragraph above: “Everybody votes the same Sunday, nationwide” means nothing less that everybody votes with the same information available, without being influenced by what happened in other districts thousands of miles away, weeeks if not months before.

Oh, and with no risk of candidates changing programs on the fly, every week. Plus, quoting myself, “No ballots to store for weeks to wait counting to no warehouse, with all the risks involved”, that is, even on this side: more trust in the system.

That is democratic.

Simplicity is democratic. Everybody voting whenever they want, or are influenced to do, adding lots of unnecessary “risk points” along the chain, is the opposite. See next paragraph.

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Primaries and Caucuses not happening all in the same day nationwide

Caucuses seem different from democracy to me, but never mind, it’s just my opinion, really. The real problem with US Caucuses and Primaries is exactly the same as with mail voting, and early voting.

Try to imagine the USA 2020 primaries, happening all in the same day, Supertuesdays be damned, and all that implies, from candidates and strategies in both parties, to fundraising and propaganda. I dare suggest they would have been more authentic, more representative of the actual country, regardless of their outcome.

Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is wrong, and if I understand correctly, it is much worst in the USA than elsewhere, especially since when it was digitally enhanced.

No automatic registration

Voter registration? Which registration? This other piece of paper, also from Wikipedia:

is the paper “Tessera Elettorale” (Election Card) that every italian citizen automatically receives as proof of its right to vote, as soon as he or she comes of age (18 years). That is, every italian adult is, by definition, also in the voting register. Every time you go to vote, the voting officers stamp one of those circles. When all the circles are stamped, you get another card. Usually takes 2 or 3 hours, when it just does not arrives in one’s mailbox. Of course, together with that card, everbody has to show a photo ID, to avoid impersonation, or multiple voting.

Resistance to photo ID

The country that gave the world Echelon, NSA, Facebook... complains about mandatory photo ID? Well, OK.

Scandalously low number of polling booths.

I have voted in person in Italy for decades now, and with one exception it never took more than 45, 50 minutes, including walking to the polling booths. That, in Rome. In rural areas it surely takes longer, but you get my point. We are about about 46 million voters, we always vote all in the same days, and still we never experience anything remotely like this:

Why all this?

All the useless voting complexity listed below is a major, major factor why so many US citizens (on both sides!) are disenfranchised, and dangerously, DANGEROUSLY fragment their “news sources.

It is this that makes possible, every time, not “just another Florida, but a dozen Floridas”.

If, by magic, I could plant one idea firmly in the brain of every American, it would be this: Always vote, but only for candidates, of whatever party, that seriously commit to drain THIS particular swamp. All the others may wait.

(*) MANDATORY CLARIFICATION, July 2026: of course, how Americans vote about their own local lives, issues and representatives is only their business. That request only applies to american elections that, just as a hypothetical example, may bring to Washington people who could make countries half a planet away starve by giving a theocratic regime plenty of proofs that it can choke global trade, and plenty of reasons to do it, even if there were no proofs of imminent nuclear threats. Just as a hypothetical example, of course.

Last but not least… the one sentence in Trump’s speech that caused me physical pain

Of course, Trump being Trump, he couldn’t help throwing into the speech something that made me laugh so hard my stomach is still aching:

[Today] America is respected like we have never been respected before.

Huh? “Respected like never before”? No way unless, but that’s a mistake only functional illiterates would make in good faith, one tought “respect” exclusively means “fear of being bombed or starved by stupid sanctions, just by cynicism“.

What respect REALLY means is not what America is getting (source: Webster)

Even if everything Trump boasted about the economy, immigration and healthcare were 100% true... Today, what America is getting worldwide as it never got is some mix of outright derision, compassion and a general wish to cut any bond with the whole country as soon as possible. To read how this (starting before Trump) happened to me, and why I’m sincerely sad about it, click here.

Just an invitation... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

You Can't Make Old Friends

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
17 July 2026 at 10:02
Yours truly with four young friends in 1960 (I’ve remained in contact with two)

Friends,

An old friend of mine passed recently.

When an old friend passes, you can’t replace them with another old friend. You have only a limited number of people who have shared your history, moved through life with you, talked and laughed and pondered the universe and their lives with you.

It’s these cumulative understandings, the sweetness and depth of long familiarity, that give meaning to old friendships.

I spend most of my days now writing — much of it to you — and when I’m not writing, I’m in meetings with colleagues who are decades younger than I am.

My old friend’s passing makes me painfully aware of how little time I spend — and how little effort I’ve made — reaching out to old friends. I’ve taken them for granted, as if they’ll always be there. After all, they always have been there.

But old friendships don’t last forever because neither they nor we last forever. Old friendships have to be appreciated, preserved, and savored when we can.

Starting today, I'm going to invite them to join me for breakfast or lunch a few times a week. Or if they’re far away (years ago, I left most of my old friends on the East Coast), I’m going to phone them, maybe even FaceTime them, and make it a point to see them when I’m next on the other coast.

I remember my father telling me that the hardest part about growing old was losing his old friends.

I didn’t quite understand what he meant. I asked him: “Why can’t you just make new friends?” He explained that he had tried to make new friends, and had succeeded somewhat. But he couldn’t make an old friend, and there was a difference.

I didn’t understand him then. I do now.

Share

The Real Message of Trump's Address to the Nation

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
17 July 2026 at 05:26

Friends,

The real message to be drawn from Trump’s address to the nation tonight is that he will call into question the votes of every state and city that chooses a Democratic senator or representative in the 2026 midterm elections. He’ll push Republican governors and mayors not to certify the results. He’ll demand recounts and audits.

We’ve been here before, but this time he’s even less restrained than he was in 2020 and is surrounded by people who will do his bidding.

His address tonight was absurd. It was riddled with so many lies that I’m reluctant to dignify them with rebuttals, but you should have them.

He mentioned a newly declassified investigation into a voter registration group in Muskegon, Michigan that apparently had invited fraudulent registrations in 2020 — but Trump didn’t mention that the applications had been caught and none of them had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly. The FBI closed the investigation, stating “the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.”

He alleged, once again, that foreign powers have hijacked votes, or that federal or state officials plotted to rig the 2020 election. But no evidence has ever emerged showing that vote counts have been manipulated or corrupted. Intelligence reports, state audits of vote tallies and lawsuits have repeatedly affirmed official results in 2020 and other years. Nothing suggests China manipulated votes. Instead, U.S. intelligence assessment says China “probably also continued longstanding efforts” to gather information on U.S. voters and public opinion and to use that information to influence U.S. policy “as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008.”

The most significant foreign influence operations occurred in the 2016 presidential election and were conducted by Russia, in favor of Trump, according to the Mueller report. To the extent that this and other reports appeared to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s victory, they have had the effect of fueling his distrust of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Despite his repeated assertions that U.S. elections are not secure, Trump during his second term has significantly cut the budget of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, including its election work. That’s because Trump grew contemptuous of the agency, and the government’s election security work generally, after it validated the integrity of the 2020 election.

So the entire performance tonight was fake — an extension of his Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

It was also a commercial for the “Save America Act,” which would make it harder for many American citizens to vote. Voters would have to prove their citizenship in person upon registering to vote, with documents such as an enhanced form of REAL ID (a state ID card compliant with federal regulations) that indicates American citizenship; a birth certificate; a passport or military identification card.

An estimated 9 percent of eligible voters, or 21.3 million Americans, either do not have documents that prove their citizenship, such as passports and birth certificates, or cannot retrieve them in a day or less, according a study by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at University of Maryland and the Brennan Center for Justice. And 45 states do not issue the kind of enhanced driver’s license indicating citizenship status that would be needed to verify voting eligibility.

The point is that American democracy is acutely endangered by a sociopath who will stop at nothing to get the results he wants.

This means that you and I and every other patriotic American have to do whatever we can to ensure free and fair elections and fight Trump’s torrent of lies and authoritarian moves.

If you’re anything like me, you’re worn out by Trump. You’d like nothing better than to tune him out. I get it. But American democracy is seriously on the line here. We must keep up — and accelerate — the fight.

Share

A 10-Point Plan To Make America Affordable

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
16 July 2026 at 23:26

Friends,

Trump’s economy is truly sh*tty for most Americans. Every time Trump or his lapdogs in Congress tell voters that the economy is terrific, they seem more out of touch.

A significant number of Democrats have won elections over the last several months — mayoral, gubernatorial, and special elections — by stressing affordability.

Democrats can show America that they can be better trusted than Republicans to bring prices down and real wages up by pledging 10 things.

***

Pledge To Make America Affordable Again

1. We’ll eliminate Trump’s across-the-board tariffs. They’re import taxes that are raising the prices of just about everything American consumers buy. We’ll eliminate them where their costs to consumers are far higher than any potential benefits in the form of new jobs.

2. We’ll get energy prices down by ending Trump’s war in Iran and shifting to renewable sources of energy.

Trump’s war has increased gas prices by $1 a gallon over most of the country. It’s accomplished nothing but give Iran bargaining leverage to close the strait — which was open before the war. We’ll bring down energy prices by ending the war and then reduce energy prices by shifting to renewable sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels, such as solar, wind, and biomass.

3. We’ll bust up monopolies. Another major source of high prices is monopolies — especially in high tech, healthcare, food, and finance. We’ll vigorously enforce antitrust (anti-monopoly) laws so that corporations don’t have the power to raise prices. We’ll bust up giant corporations. We’ll bar large firms from merging or acquiring other firms.

4. We’ll fight for stronger unions. Workers need more bargaining power to get higher wages. Part of the answer is stronger unions. Democrats will make it easier for them to start or join them.

5. We’ll raise the national minimum wage to $20 an hour. No one who works full-time should be in poverty. And we’ll raise it even higher for employees of big corporations that pay their top executives more than 200 times the typical worker.

6. We’ll make housing more affordable. We’ll stop private equity firms from buying up large tracts of housing and colluding on prices. We’ll get rid of zoning laws that keep housing prices high. And we’ll raise taxes on big corporations that drive up housing prices where they’re headquartered or have major facilities and use the funds for more affordable housing there.

7. We’ll cut healthcare costs by making Medicare available to everyone. Giving everyone the option of buying into Medicare would bring healthcare costs down because it’s cheaper and more efficient than private for-profit health insurance.

8. We’ll get working families help with childcare and eldercare. Both are essential for working families who must now pay out large portions of their incomes to provide care for family members.

9. We’ll give working families paid family leave. Twelve weeks of unpaid leave has proven useful but not adequate. Every other advanced country provides paid leave; the richest country in the world should too.

10. We’ll raise taxes on the wealthiest to pay for this. Since Reagan, the rich have paid far lower taxes while accumulating a near-record portion of total income and wealth. It’s only fair that they pay more so that the rest of America can afford what Americans need. We’ll raise the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent — what it was before Reagan. We’ll also impose a 0.5 percent tax on wealth in excess of $100 million. We’ll also eliminate the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes, require that the ultra-rich pay annual capital gains taxes on unrealized income, and eliminate the stepped-up basis at death.

These 10 steps are crucial for making America affordable again.

***

Please share this with all Democrats who are running for office and ask them to make the pledge.

Share

Received — 16 July 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: Deranged billionaires and their syndromes (16 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
16 July 2026 at 20:13


Today's links


A gigantic king, crowned and naked, sits on a lavishly curtained stage in a 19th century ballroom, before many ranked men and women dressed as gentry.

Deranged billionaires and their syndromes (permalink)

The theory of markets goes like this: even the best of us can fall prey to selfishness and rationalization, so let's arrange society so that people acting on their most selfish impulses end up producing benefit for all of us. That'll be easier and more reliable than convincing everyone to be more generous.

How do you arrange society so that selfishness produces public benefit? With markets. Faced with relentless competition, the most effective way to accumulate and retain wealth is by striving to make your wares cheaper and better. In a competitive labor market, we can secure fair treatment for workers without labor law or unions – bosses who treat their workers badly will lose them to better bosses. Just "align the incentives" and let markets do the rest.

This is an area where there's broad overlap between the left and the right. Chapter one of The Communist Manifesto is Marx and Engels' love letter to the incredible power of markets to improve everyone's material conditions by increasing production while lowering costs:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yFA.YcmQ.KuTFFpUAnlmt&smid=url-share

Meanwhile, over in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith comes to the same conclusion:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

In other words: if you get the incentives right, then even the greediest baker will resist the temptation to fill his loaves with sawdust and gravel. The greedier he is, the more he'll strive to make his bread cheap and delicious, because that will let him sell as many loaves as possible, thus maximizing his own wealth.

It's not exactly horseshoe theory vindicated, but if you squint just right, you'll see both communists and capitalists agreeing on this one thing: if you want the bourgeoisie to bend its efforts to producing something that the rest of us can benefit from, you'll get further by appealing to their fear and greed than by trusting in their munificence.

This is how you can have both leftists and market true believers coming onto the same side on antitrust: they may not both exactly agree that the best way to run things is by appealing to capitalists' fear of being dethroned by a competitor, but they absolutely agree that the worst way to run things is to simply trust in capitalists' generosity.

They're right, of course. As Lina Khan likes to say, companies that are too big to fail become too big to jail, and thus too big to care. If you doubt it, consider this internal email sent by an Apple executive insisting that the company is wasting money by making iPhones that are too good, and counseling a corporate strategy of deliberate shittiness:

In looking at it with hindsight, I think going forward we need to set a stake in the ground for what features we think are 'good enough' for the consumer. I would argue we're already doing more than what would have been good enough. But we find it very hard to regress our product features YOY [year over year]." Existing features "would have been good enough today if we hadn't introduced [them] already," and "anything new and especially expensive needs to be rigorously challenged before it's allowed into the consumer phone.

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-06/423137.pdf

Policymakers can assume the profit motive, but they have to craft the conditions under which that motive is shaped by competitive anxiety to produce quality goods and services at a fair price.

Anyone who believes in markets must also tacitly believe that successful market participants don't believe in markets. They should understand that capitalists hate capitalism, that every pirate yearns to be an admiral. They should understand that capitalism's winners only defend disruption when they're the ones doing the disrupting. They should understand that profits are only good when you're a scrappy challenger, but once you've conquered the market, every capitalist seeks to become a feudal lord, converting profits to rents and insulating themselves from an exhausting life of constant competition:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The (smart) defenders of markets do understand this, but they face a dilemma. By definition, the benefactors with the most money and power to contribute to their think-tanks, university economics departments, conferences and publications are the rentiers – the billionaires who've shored up their fortunes with Warren Buffet's beloved "moats and walls." They're the blitzscaling billionaires who thrive on predatory acquisitions and high capital costs that prevent new market entrants from challenging their incumbency and its easy profits. They're the pirates who've become admirals.

As Upton Sinclair famously quipped, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." When your right-wing, "pro-market" think-tank depends on the largesse of someone who made their money by capturing a market, capturing its regulators, and capturing its labor force, you need to tie yourself into some very weird knots to explain why your market advocacy shouldn't start with stripping your funders of their power, wealth and position.

This is pretty much the entire edifice of neoclassical economics. There's the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust, that says that monopolies are efficient and insists that an inefficient monopoly would immediately tempt new competitors into the market who would compete away the monopolist's advantage:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/#invest-dont-acquire

"Consumer welfare" is a perfect apologetic because it contains a lurking syllogism: it holds that "inefficient monopolies" will always bring forth competitors who trash their margins, which means that any actual monopoly we see in the wild must be efficient. If it wasn't, it would have been competed out of existence by now. QED. This means that you can be a "pro-market" think-tank and take infinite money from monopolists without any contradiction: by definition, any monopolist with extra cash on hand to fund your PR blitz on its behalf must be efficient, otherwise it would have gone broke.

This is the structure of so many of economics' "empirical, scientific" theories that boil down to new ways of saying, "Actually, your boss is right."

Take "revealed preferences," the idea that people's actions are a better indicator of their preferences than the things they say they prefer. While this theory has a certain superficial plausibility, it can really only be embraced by people who have suffered the highly specific neurological injury you get by taking an economics degree: an injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power.

To fully embrace "revealed preferences" is to observe someone who has just sold their kidney to make rent and exclaim, "Look at this person with a revealed preference for only having one kidney":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

Then there's the right's conception of regulatory capture. When you think of "regulatory capture," you might picture a company or sector that has grown so powerful that it can boss the government around, so that it can abuse you with impunity. But for a neoclassical, "regulatory capture" isn't the result of too much corporate power – it's the result of too much state power. If states have the ability to do real things (the theory goes), then capitalists will do everything they can to take over the state and use it to punish their competitors, so the only answer is to eliminate state capacity altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

And finally, there's "meritocracy," which is a way of dressing up the Puritans' concept of divine providence as a scientific theory about how society must work. Puritans insisted that their god reached down into the human realm to elevate the truly virtuous among us, and that this divine favor could be discerned in the way that wealth and power were distributed among us. The rich and powerful were god's "elect." You could tell this was true, because they were rich and powerful. The corollary is that the poor and downtrodden are disfavored by god, and must therefore lack some virtue that the rich and powerful possess.

This same syllogistic thinking underpins the economic doctrine of "meritocracy," which holds that markets are giant computers that process uncountable trillions of decisions we all make about what to buy and sell and at what price, seeking out the "correct" price for every commodity and also elevating the people who are best at allocating capital in ways that arrive at the best prices for the best goods. Just as a Puritan believes that wealth is evidence of virtue, a hewer to economic orthodoxy believes the meritocratic system graces the best among us, giving them control over our lives by allowing them to "allocate capital" to create or destroy jobs, or entire firms, or whole sectors of the economy. You can tell they're the right people to do be doing this because the market chose them – if they were bad capital allocators, they'd have gone broke by now. QED.

When capital allocators' kids end up allocating capital too, well, that just shows that "merit" is a heritable trait and the people who have it are born to rule over us. Meritocracy cashes out to a eugenic belief in royal blood and royal dynasties. We know King Arthur was suited to rule us because he pulled a sword out of a stone, and we know Bill Gates is suited to rule over us because he pulled a fortune out of an operating system:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/20/big-cornflakes-energy/#caliper-pilled

Consumer welfare, revealed preferences, regulatory capture and meritocracy are just some of the ways that capitalism's alleged defenders cooked up to insist that they love the competitive discipline imposed by markets while being totally dependent on self-described capitalists who have utterly escaped from that discipline and have committed to doing everything in their power to prevent themselves from ever coming under any form of constraint.

These champions of "free markets" have spent decades defending policies like noncompetes, which makes it a crime for a fast-food worker to quit their job at Wendy's and take a job at the McDonald's across the street in order to get a $0.25/hour raise:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

They defend anticircumvention laws that make it a literal felony for you to install someone else's app store on your phone or put someone else's ink in your printer:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

They somehow believe that value arises when the best among us are forced to contend with the stark terror of losing everything to a competitor, but also that there is a group of people who are so perfect, so virtuous and brilliant that they do not need this kind of goad to prod them into action. Indeed, these genetic sports and generational talents are so amazing that to force them to sully themselves with grubby competition is to deny us all the fruits of their genius.

Who are these people? Why, they're billionaires of course. All billionaires: after all, if providence and the market's invisible hand has seen fit to bestow nine or more zeroes upon someone, that is an indicator of 10^9 times more virtue than someone with only a dollar to their name. But especially: intellectual billionaires, the kinds of "curious" billionaires who write books, give lectures, and (especially), make gigantic cash donations to think-tanks, university economics departments, conferences and journals.

Billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, in other words.

These are the billionaires that capitalism's (alleged) defenders are caping for when they deplore "billionaire derangement syndrome," and fret that candidates for office now routinely cite enmity for billionaires in their campaign materials:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/andrew-hall-is-on-a-roll.html

But as Tim O'Reilly writes, these billionaire-defending intellectuals always told us that markets would protect us from the madness of kings, by constraining the folly of the wealthy and powerful through the discipline of competition. Meanwhile, those billionaires were busily transforming themselves into kings, unshackled from rules, morals or consequences:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/07/12/elon-musk-is-building-a-form-of-capitalism-that-adam-smith-would-hate

Reflecting on this, the political scientist Henry Farrell notes that the most vocal defenders of billionaireism – the Musks and Thiels of the world – never made a secret of their desire to become kings and insulate themselves from markets and discipline of every kind, and they've grown brazen. Musk makes social media posts deploring the very idea of elections, agreeing with the idea that only "makers" should be allowed to vote and that "takers" should not, because "universal suffrage leads to universal suffering":

https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/2073312715985309698

As for Thiel, he has long openly advocated the idea that there exists among us a latent aristocracy who do not need the discipline of markets to keep them from lapsing into folly or self-dealing. These people – born to found tech startups and to rule – are nonconformists who, in Thiel's writing, are "the most important" and "should be let off the hook":

https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24578683805/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-18-notes

Thiel makes no bones about his idea that people who have the right stuff should be exempted from any constraint. He writes "capitalism and competition are opposites." Rather than compete, Thiel says the true entrepreneur should seek to establish a monopoly, because "Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t…Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits."

It's not that Thiel opposes constraints per se – he clearly thinks that most of us should operate under constraints – constraints that are dreamed up and enforced by people like him. Those people are born to rule: they emerged from a lucky orifice, in possession of lucky genes. How can we tell they were born to rule? Because they're ruling. If they weren't born to rule, they wouldn't be in a position to rule. As ever, a syllogism solves all our ideological and existential problems.

Thiel lives in what Naomi Klein would call "the mirror world." While counterculturists have long celebrated misfits and communities of nonconformists, they were invested in the idea of a space protected from power, where weirdos could let their freak flags fly:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

But Thiel's version of this is to celebrate the "nonconformists" whose heterodox belief is that labor, privacy, finance and consumer protection laws shouldn't apply to them. He wants to protect those people so they can wield power. They should form "mafias" (like the "Paypal mafia") not solidaristic affinity groups. As Farrell writes:

Entrepreneurial risk taking can be awesome; weird people are often more likely to be original; densely linked communities have many advantages. Furthermore, I would guess that none of these factors was sufficient on its own to precipitate the madness of princes that we see today. It is perfectly possible that they would have worked together in much more benign ways under different external circumstances. But we are in the world we’re in: one where the boundless appetites and irrationalities of a small number of billionaires seem increasingly incompatible with the need to maintain a stable civil society.

A new would-be aristocracy was always the visible trajectory of these guys. The only people who couldn't see it were the think-tankies they funded to write papers explaining that their paymasters didn't need market discipline to keep them from sinking into folly or attempting to overthrow democracy.

Today, these Renfields clutch their pearls at the "demonization" of the ultra-rich, calling it "billionaire derangement syndrome." But the only "billionaire derangement syndrome" that matters is the syndrome that affects billionaires and convinces them that they are above any discipline or rules.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Gadget-friendly chinos https://web.archive.org/web/20010717133013/http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/wireless/2001-07-16-smart-pants.htm

#15yrsago Brazilian bodges: “Gambiologia” https://web.archive.org/web/20110720231142/https://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/07/gambiologia.php

#15yrsago Privacy risks in collaborative filters https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/05/24/you-might-also-privacy-risks-collaborative-filtering/

#15yrsago Tenn. state rep: “I carved my initials in my desk in the House, but I don’t understand why it’s news” https://web.archive.org/web/20110715202451/http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/jul/11/state-rep-hurley-admits-carving-initials-house-flo/

#15yrsago Who holds the copyright to a picture taken by a monkey? https://www.techdirt.com/2011/07/13/can-we-subpoena-monkey-why-monkey-self-portraits-are-likely-public-domain/

#15yrsago Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe slams Internet censorship, copyright disconnection https://web.archive.org/web/20121108080007/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/yet-another-report-internet-disconnections-a-disproportionate-penalty/

#10yrsago Mississippi’s prison town are in danger of collapse, thanks to tiny reforms in the War on Drugs https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/mississippi-jails-revenue_n_57100da1e4b06f35cb6f14e8

#10yrsago Pokemon Go players: you have 30 days from signup to opt out of binding arbitration https://web.archive.org/web/20160715142246/https://consumerist.com/2016/07/14/pokemon-go-strips-users-of-their-legal-rights-heres-how-to-opt-out/

#10yrsago Trump makes it easy to forget what a dumpster fire all the other GOP nomination hopefuls were https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n15/eliot-weinberger/they-could-have-picked

#5yrsago Interop and the Public Interest Internet https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/16/pidgin/#splicers

#1yrago Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine" https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/16/beautiful-code/#hackers-disease

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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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NO to CRYPTO

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
16 July 2026 at 10:02

Friends,

I’m sorry to say that several Democratic senators appear willing to support the CLARITY Act—a sweeping pro-crypto bill that will be voted on next week. All they’re demanding is that Republicans agree to a few cosmetic changes such as a slight toughening of ethics rules, a modest expansion of law-enforcement authority, and a tad bit of strengthening of financial regulators.

All worthwhile improvements, but they don’t cure the bill’s fundamental defects.

Let me get right to the point. Congress should not enact legislation that further legitimizes and expands an industry whose promised public benefits are zilch while its costs and risks are increasing by the day.

There’s simply no legitimate use for crypto. Its only practical uses are tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, speculation, and crime.

The crypto lobby is large and well-financed. It has already bought off many members of Congress including, sad to say, a number of Democrats. The Wall Street Journal reports that the parent company of Crypto.com has so far donated $35 million to MAGA Inc. — Trump’s giant PAC to support candidates who embrace Trump’s agenda — and is pushing for legislation freeing crypto from securities regulation.

There’s no lobby on the other side to guard small investors who are losing their shirts on crypto, or to guard the public against the crime, money laundering, and human trafficking that crypto facilitates.

The crypto lobby says blockchain technology and digital assets will foster innovative companies, create new payment systems, strengthen small businesses, generate wealth, and expand opportunities for younger Americans.

Bullsh*t. There’s no evidence of these benefits. Even if crypto did any of these things, crypto’s costs and risks significantly exceed them.

Aren’t Trump’s crypto conflicts of interest evidence enough? Isn’t the Ponzi scheme he created sufficient proof of how many people will get snookered?

The CLARITY Act would narrow the authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission over digital assets and give authority over crypto to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

This means investors will be shafted and the public will be left in the dark because of the lack of disclosures, the absence of fiduciary obligations, and the deficiency of investor safeguards. All these would apply under federal securities law, but none of these exist under laws governing futures contracts.

In other words, the CLARITY Act would give crypto even more cover. It would make crypto even more opaque. It would allow even more tax evasion, more money laundering, more fraud, more speculation, more ripoffs, and more crime.

I have no hope for Republican politicians. They’ve already sold their souls to Trump and the crypto lobby. But shame on any Democratic senator or representative who votes for this abomination.

It’s well worth your time to phone your senators and representative and tell them NO to the CLARITY Act. The congressional switchboard is (202) 224-3121. You can call this number to be directly connected to the office of your specific senators or representative.

The vote is next week. Please phone now.

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Trump's National Socialism

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
15 July 2026 at 23:00

Friends,

Quietly and without any fanfare, the Trump regime is becoming a shareholder or profit-sharer in an array of corporations thought to be critical to the nation’s security.

For example, in one of the most remarkable turnarounds in corporate history, the U.S. chipmaker Intel’s shares have more than quadrupled in value since March 2025. The stock has surged 464 percent in the past 12 months, with the company hitting a market cap of $608.7 billion.

A year ago, Intel was on life support. Many predicted its death. What happened?Intel’s rebirth is partly due to the AI boom, which requires huge quantities of computer chips known as CPUs, which are Intel’s specialty.

But a far larger factor in Intel’s stunning resurgence has been the Trump regime’s direct interventions — not only into Intel but also into other tech corporations: Apple and the giant super-chip maker Nvidia.

The Trump regime has justified this on grounds of national security. But it’s socialism because the downside risks are broadly shared by the public.

Yet the upside the benefits go to the U.S. government and to top corporate investors and executives.

And it further centralizes power and control over key industries in Trump’s hands.

Call it national socialism.

In August 2025 — in one of the most audacious moves by any administration — the U.S. government converted $9 billion in federal grants to Intel into a 10 percent stake in the company, thereby becoming Intel’s single largest shareholder.

Can you imagine if the Obama administration had converted its bailouts of Wall Street, GM, and Stellantis into equity stakes in the big banks and automakers? Republicans would have been on rooftops hollering: Socialism! Communism!

But the Trump regime did the deal without so much as a Republican peep.

At about the same time, Apple CEO Tim Cook came to Washington, seeking to persuade the Trump regime to abandon its plan to impose tariffs of 100 percent on all semiconductor imports. The tariffs would have dramatically increased the cost of Apple’s iPhone and other products, which relied on imported semiconductors.

Apple eventually won an exemption to the semiconductor tariff, on one condition: Apple would work with Intel — it would commit to buying from Intel certain chips used for iPhones and Macs, use Intel’s manufacturing plants (or fabs) to make some of Apple’s chips, and collaborate with Intel on chip design and production.

Then in January, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, came to Washington seeking the Trump regime’s approval for Nvidia’s sales to China of its H200 chip for artificial intelligence.

Huang was desperate to get access to China’s giant and potentially lucrative market, but the sale would require an exemption to America’s policy of not selling or licensing to the Chinese our advanced AI technology, to minimize any risk to U.S. security.

Huang got what he was after, after agreeing to two conditions. First, the United States government would get 25 percent of all profits from Nvidia’s sales in China. Second, Nvidia would invest $5 billion in Intel and buy its custom data center chips. Huang called the deal a “historic” partnership.

This isn’t capitalism, folks. It’s government becoming the major shareholder of the biggest chip-making in America, then giving a tariff exemption to another key tech corporation on condition it buy the products of and collaborate with the first, and giving a national-security exemption to a third key tech company on condition it also buy the products of the first and give the government a portion of its sales in China.

And who the hell knows what Trump and Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce who spearheaded these deals, grabbed for themselves or their families along the way?

Trump’s national socialism doesn’t stop here. Under Trump, the U.S. government has also become the largest shareholder of MP Materials, which operates the only mine for rare earth minerals in the United States, after sinking $400 million of taxpayer dollars into the corporation.

And when Nippon Steel acquired U.S. Steel in June of 2025, it was announced that Trump would personally control the so-called “golden share” that his regime forced U.S. Steel to accept as part of the deal.

It’s ironic that Trump is berating the Democrats for electing and nominating a group of young people who call themselves democratic socialists when he’s been shifting the United States to national socialism.

Doubly ironic because Trump’s national socialism is making fortunes for a small group of top executives who were already fabulously wealthy, while the democratic socialists in the Democratic Party want to tax the wealthy to provide funds for better schools, better wages, and healthcare for all.

And Trump’s national socialism is concentrating ever more power in Trump’s hands. A whole new range of decisions is being made about the U.S. economy but without any congressional oversight or public knowledge. Which corporations get major infusions of taxpayer dollars in return for partial government ownership? Which get tariff exemptions and under what conditions? Which get exemptions to trade with China and under what conditions?

It’s all up to Trump and his lapdogs in the White House and at the Commerce Department. And it helps explain why corporate America will do whatever Trump asks, say whatever he wants, and obey whatever he demands.

The result is not unlike the world’s last big experiment with national socialism — in the 1930s, in Germany.

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Received — 15 July 2026 ⏭ Activism

Office Hours: Will Progressive Populists Triumph Over Establishment Dems?

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
15 July 2026 at 10:02

Colorado’s Melat Kiros

Friends,

Are we witnessing the takeover of the Democratic Party by its progressive wing? And, if so, will that help the Dems in their races with cowardly Republicans this fall, or hurt them?

A new generation of Democrats — some calling themselves social democrats — have been elected mayors of New York, Seattle, and effectively Washington, D.C. And a growing number of them have toppled incumbents and establishment Democrats — in Colorado, New York, and elsewhere.

But establishment Dems are fighting back, particularly since the implosion of Graham Platner’s campaign in Maine. They’re calling the progressive populists “too extreme” or “too far left” for the electorate. But maybe the electorate isn’t as easily mapped on to the old “left” versus “right” continuum. Maybe voters in both parties have turned anti-establishment and populist.

I’ve spent much of the past week talking with leading Democrats, campaign advisers, and people I consider among the wisest political thinkers in America about what they foresee for the Democratic Party and its candidates, especially going into the midterms. Given what’s happened to the Republican Party under Trump, I asked them which part of the Democratic Party is likely to triumph — establishment Democrats or insurgent progressive populists — and whether this will help or hurt Dems in the critical midterms.

I’ve grouped their answers into the following categories:

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Abolishing ICE is the bare minimum

✇Robert Reich
By: Robert Reich
15 July 2026 at 01:11

Friends,

I apologize for this additional invasion of your inbox, but ICE has gone rogue, and we must stop its mayhem. Organize, mobilize, demand answers. We cannot allow this violent police force to intimidate voters three months from now. Please watch and share:

1. Please continue to protect the vulnerable in your communities. Make sure they have Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center informing them of their rights.
https://www.ilrc.org/redcards

2. Report ICE sightings to your local Rapid Response Network (RRN) to ensure the community is alerted and those affected receive legal support. You can also submit and track anonymously and locally using the ICE Activity Tracker. (When making a report, be sure to note the specific location — intersections or addresses — the number of agents, the types of vehicles, and whether anyone is being detained. Document the activity if it can be done safely from a distance.)
https://www.iceinmyarea.org/


3. Report all ICE activities in your area to your local newspaper, radio, and other local media. Take videos of what ICE is doing — again, doing it safely and from a distance. Share with your local media and ask them to pass it on to their affiliated national broadcast networks.

4. Contact your members of Congress and tell them your thoughts. They need to hear what you think about ICE’s deadly rampage. It’s their job to represent you!

Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

An operator will answer and route your call after you state the name of the lawmaker you wish to reach. (Before calling, you can look up your specific representatives using your ZIP code on the House Finder Service or search for your elected officials on Congress.gov.)

5. Above all, do not be intimidated by ICE and the police state Trump and his assistant Stephen Miller are creating. Its purpose is to intimidate. We have a responsibility to one another and to future generations to resist it with the same sort of courage and commitment to democracy our founders summoned just over 250 years ago.

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