“My name is Abdul; it means servant.” So begins the most compelling ad of this year’s election cycle. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed speaks, simply and directly, to the camera. Seated in a brown leather armchair while holding a coffee mug, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee lays claim to his Muslim faith in straightforward, affecting terms. 

“I pray everyday,” he says. “I reflect on my role in this life, on this earth, how we leave it better than we found it, to serve God, to serve our neighbors.”

A cloud of suspicion, much of it tangled up in his ethnicity and religion, has hovered over El-Sayed’s candidacy. The othering has been both blatant and subtle. In August, I spoke with Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., as he made his way from the Capitol subway to his Senate office the day after El-Sayed’s primary win. Tuberville told me the Michigan Democrat was “a cheerleader for 9/11” and “basically” a terrorist. A pair of debates has seen El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, accusing him of being “bought” by and “pledg[ing] his support” to the Muslim Brotherhood, claims that are unfounded. Others, including wavering centrist Democrats such as party strategist James Carville, who recently gave El-Sayed a reluctant endorsement, have pointed to the nominee’s attacks on Israel over the Gaza war as evidence that he is hostile to Jews and Judaism. More broadly, anti-Muslim rhetoric and attacks are becoming a defining feature of the GOP.

El-Sayed’s ad, released last Sunday, is entitled “Prayer” and marks an obvious attempt to refute those accusations and change the conversation — to persuade hesitant voters in the final days of this tight race to pull the lever for him. As El-Sayed speaks, snapshots roll. He stands with a voter, who points across the river, a subtle message of an aspirational future. There is El-Sayed standing and holding hands in prayer with a group of Black churchgoers. A menorah and a humble church flash on the screen. And then there’s the candidate himself, standing alone in prayer, his head bowed. 

El-Sayed connects his belief to a national crisis of faith embodied in Washington: “We don’t have faith in our future; we don’t have faith that we can actually fix things.” Then he returns to his own candidacy. “I’m Abdul El-Sayed,” he says at the end. “A man of faith — and that’s a good thing.”

A good election spot offers an appeal to voters by telling a story, and “Prayer” certainly does that. But there are other ingredients that can boost a political ad to the realm of greatness. In a positive ad, voters are offered an intimate look into the candidate’s reason for running. “Prayer” also does that, and therein lies its true power. It shows a different side to El-Sayed, whose refusal to back down from a fight and ability to cut through the noise, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently wrote, “terrifies MAGA.” The ad offers a reason for his candidacy and life of public service, and ends what has been a tumultuous campaign on a grace note — and with an implicit promise. Everyone is welcome in my coalition, El-Sayed is saying, I’ll protect you. 

Even though “Prayer” is targeted to Michigan voters, it cannot be divorced from what’s happening nationally. It adds El-Sayed to an emerging list of Democrats who, as unabashed members of the religious left, are comfortable talking about their faith openly. Most, such as Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico, Kansas U.S. Senate nominee Adam Hamilton, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, are Christian. Others, such as Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Pennsylvania Sen. Josh Shapiro, are Jewish. By attaching his name to those ranks, El-Sayed is staking out important space for Muslims in public life.

But there’s more to it than just his religious and ethnic identity. The ad’s message serves as a proxy for the stark choice facing voters across the country, and just south of the Wolverine State’s border. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor, funded and produced an ad attacking Dr. Amy Acton, his Democratic opponent, and featuring her own mother.

The spot, released only 24 hours after El-Sayed’s, carries a message that is the direct inverse of the Michigan candidate’s. Rooted in cruelty and scripted with a lashing of DARVO, a tactic easily recognizable to victims of abuse — Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim Offender order — the ad is uncomfortable to watch, and vile. 

Viewers see an elderly woman looking into the camera and identifying herself as Donna Arthur. “It’s not easy for a mother to say this,” she says, “but Amy has a serious problem: she is a liar.” Arthur goes on to attack her daughter’s credibility, but without producing any evidence beyond her own testimony, which is severely imperiled by a documented history of her own actions.

Arthur has been estranged from her daughter since 1978, when the 12-year-old Acton accused her stepfather of raping her. According to court records, Cledith Arthur was arrested and charged with the crime, but fled the state before being tried. When his wife supported him, branding young Amy Acton a liar, both the girl and her younger brother were removed from Donna Arthur’s custody and raised by their biological father. In a statement released by her campaign, Acton’s brother stood by his sister’s account and branded Ramaswamy’s campaign “despicable” for turning the abuse Acton says she suffered “into a political talking point.”

In the ad, Arthur does not mince words. “My daughter needs help,” she says, “and she can’t help you if she can’t help herself . . . Don’t vote for people who lie; don’t let her become your governor.”

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Setting aside Arthur’s agency and the willing role she played in the ad, Ramaswamy has chosen to retraumatize his opponent before the eyes of millions of voters. By platforming a woman who is, at the very least, an enabler and accomplice to the alleged sexual assault of a minor, if perhaps only in the aftermath, he is sending a chilling signal to victims of abuse in Ohio and throughout the U.S.: There are consequences to speaking up.

But if Ramaswamy’s behavior wasn’t bad enough, Donald Trump and JD Vance had to get in on the act. Vance, who as an Ohioan has particular skin in the game, positioned himself alongside Ramaswamy as a truth-teller, saying he “wasn’t even supposed to talk about” the ad but “couldn’t help himself.” The vice president went on to praise the candidate for having the “audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”

On Thursday, the president was even more crass, calling the ad an example of “hitting pay dirt.” Ramaswamy, he wrote on Truth Social, “should keep it up, and let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate, explain how the daughter is a DISASTER who, uncontrollably, lies, cheats, and steals! I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave.”

A handful of other Republicans, including outgoing Gov. Mike DeWine and former Ohio Rep. John Kasich, decried the commercial and said it should be taken down.

There is no other word for the behavior of Ramaswamy and MAGA leaders: It is personally and publicly cruel, and the message it sends acts as a reveals far too much about Republican policies and the political leaders who advance and implement them. In their world, victims are treated with disdain and abusers defended while the American people are subjected to severe economic and psychological mistreatment. 

The cost-of-living crisis is ignored, all because a vainglorious president decides to wage an unnecessary war in Iran. The healthcare of millions is stripped away to line the pockets of the wealthiest. The rights of women, people of color, immigrants and LGBTQ+ Americans are under assault because of leaders and voters who want to hoard their privilege. 

Against this backdrop, El-Sayed’s ad stands as a balm for voters who long not just for a fighter, as he has well demonstrated he is, but also for a leader who is unafraid to lead with compassion and humility. It’s too early to know if his appeal will result in success at the polls. But the ad, in contrast to Ramaswamy’s, nonetheless underscores what’s at stake in the midterms: a choice between faithful service and abject cruelty.

The post A tale of two election ads offering different visions for America appeared first on Salon.com.

As soon as Vivek Ramaswamy released an ad celebrating a woman accused of backing a fugitive rapist, the widespread assumption among the pundit class was that it would backfire on him. Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial candidate is falling behind in the polls against his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, in a race that threatens to turn long-red Ohio blue.

In a move reeking of desperation, Ramaswamy’s campaign ran a spot featuring Acton’s elderly mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a “liar” and suggesting she suffers from severe mental illness. But it took almost no time at all before the record was widely corrected, with extensive media reports showing the facts in black-and-white: In 1978, Arthur sided with her husband, Cledith, when he was charged with raping his 12-year-old stepdaughter Amy. 

Acton has not seen her mother since the Arthurs fled Ohio in an effort to evade justice nearly five decades ago. Her brother confirmed what both Acton and court records show, calling the Ramaswamy campaign “despicable.” The news that the GOP nominee was championing an abusive mother over her daughter quickly became the media narrative, leading to multiple predictions that the ad would backfire on Ramaswamy.

And yet MAGA leaders, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, are doubling down on the ad. At a Wednesday campaign event in Cincinnati, Vance praised Ramaswamy for his “audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is,” despite there being no evidence that Acton lied about her rape and ample evidence — such as fleeing the state — that the Arthurs did. On Wednesday, Trump defended the ad, saying, “It’s very unusual for a mother to hate her daughter, but I don’t think that has anything to do with Vivek.”

The president escalated his rhetoric on Thursday, posting on Truth Social, “let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate.” In Iowa on Thursday, Trump went further, calling Ramaswamy “lucky” to have this situation to exploit, and that he should thank “God” for the favor. 

MAGA media figures like the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, Trump’s traveling companion Laura Loomer and Newsmax’s Greg Kelly have also defended the ad. Podcaster Megyn Kelly praised Arthur for trying to expose her daughter’s “sketchy history,” citing an interview Arthur did with a woman convicted of attempting to bomb an abortion clinic. In that conversation, Arthur complained that the last time she saw her daughter, in 1978, the 12-year-old was wearing clothes she deemed immodest.

Ramaswamy’s campaign has pledged to spend $4 million airing the ad. The reason is grim political strategy. With Trump’s approval ratings hitting record new lows by the day, Republicans feel their only hope to eke out victories in close midterm races is to juice MAGA turnout. Demonizing an adolescent rape victim is a likely two-fold play; it could energize the same people who are currently attacking Jane Doe, the Cornell gang rape accuser.

But the framing of Ramaswamy’s ad also suggests there is another audience his campaign has in mind: aging MAGA voters who are obsessively angry about the phenomenon of parental estrangement.  

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As I documented in an extensive 2024 report, right-wing media frequently runs scare stories about adult children who cut off their parents, a phenomenon that gets blamed on therapists, progressive ideology and social decay supposedly producing selfish children — but never the parents themselves. Just this year alone, Fox News has run multiple stories blaming “cutoff culture,” “social contagion,” “social media” and “ungrateful” children for parental estrangement. Earlier this month, the conservative National Review castigated children who go no-contact for being too poisoned by left-wing ideology to return their parents’ allegedly unconditional love. In September, the Wall Street Journal called it an “epidemic” and quoted supposed experts who claim children suffer from “self-delusion,” “diminished skill for tough conversations” and “a focus on identity over family,” which is often a euphemism for LGBTQ+ adults who refuse to stay in the closet to placate their family. 

“No one is reckoning with the question of what is happening in a lot of families that makes kids feel like they would be better off going low- or no-contact,” explained Joshua Stein, a political researcher who has spent years tracking parental estrangement forums. Instead, there’s an “online ecosystem of estrangement experts,” who often work through right-wing media, “selling services and stories appeal to that audience by first assuring them that it’s not their fault.”

“This is the same underlying politics of grievance at the heart of the American right,” he told me, noting that the Acton situation, while an extreme example, is not unusual. 

“Donna Arthur is a symptom of the moral psychology of right-wing reactionary politics,” Stein said, noting that for the “reactionary right,” the concept of respect “is one-directional.” In this view, “authority figures are entitled to respect, regardless of conduct,” and that “respect includes deferring to the authority,” which all too often results in making excuses for child abuse. 

While none of the estranged adult children who spoke to Salon in 2024 had endured sexual violence, many described how right-wing politics were deeply intertwined with parents being controlling, cruel and abusive. Some spoke of being severely beaten. Others had parents who wanted to dictate their romantic lives. One woman was pushed into a bad marriage at an early age. Another man described how his parents ran off girlfriends for being the “wrong” race or religion. A woman reported being denied medical care for religious reasons. Another woman, who is biracial, said her white mother made racist comments to her. 

In online forums for estranged parents, which tend to lean conservative, Stein found that children’s stories of mistreatment were regularly dismissed. “The driving narrative of children exaggerating trauma is central to reactionary politics of estrangement,” he explained, noting that Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Acton’s mother is “a manifestation” of this “reasoning under its worst conditions.” 

Ramaswamy, Trump, Vance and their advisers are all notorious for being constantly online, and they are almost certainly aware that the topic of parental estrangement is a driving concern with many MAGA voters, some of whom have experienced estrangement or distancing from their own children, family members or friends, and are outraged at the thought of facing social consequences for their reactionary views. Much of the online response in right-wing spaces suggests this read on the GOP base is accurate enough. On social media, plenty of GOP voters have defended Arthur and denounced Acton. Many of them appear to be elderly.

“Because of the estrangement factor,” one Daily Wire commenter wrote, “I believe the mom.” Many concurred.

“So telling the truth is a horrible thing. Mothers know their kids better than anybody,” one person posted on Facebook in response to a local news post about the ad. “NOT all daughters are good daughters EITHER,” agreed one. “Our mothers know us best!!” added another. 

To be clear, these attitudes are not the norm among Americans generally, and pollsters haven’t had a chance to gauge if Ramaswamy’s ad has boomeranged. But if the goal is to energize Republican voters who may feel demoralized this cycle, the strategy makes more sense. There’s a widespread sense of grievance on the right over feeling rejected for their political views, which manifests in everything from Republicans complaining that liberals won’t date them to a woman at a rally for Byron Donalds, Florida’s GOP nominee for governor, demanding that the law force her “petty” daughter to stay in contact.

The Donna Arthur ad was designed to stoke that very sense of entitlement and persuade conservatives to use their vote to punish liberal family members and neighbors for shunning them. It may not be enough to overcome the disgust that Ramaswamy stirred up in voters who have a healthier attitude about family and boundaries. Still, from the party that gave us “Haitians eat pets” and “LGBTQ kids poop in litter boxes,” there really is no move too morally depraved, if they think they can get votes with it. 

The post Ramaswamy’s ad exposes MAGA’s obsession with parental estrangement appeared first on Salon.com.

Today's links

• The technopolitics of ad-tech: Spying is good for tech, context is good for publishers.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: PNH x Mike Ford; Singapore v Far East Economic Review; Publishing v bestsellers; Architecture v security; Vista v everyone; Free Bieber; Belarus sells the sugar bowls; OCCUPY GEORGE; Grey type sucks; Spinal Tap v studio math; Terry Pratchett x $10t coin; Boy Scouts x copyright maximialism; Canadian Tories x DRM; Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan; ACLu v secret laws; Fined for suing the cops who shot you; Chicago PD steals millions for cop toys; Turing's Law; Copyleft v Vizio; Trump's killswitch.
• Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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The technopolitics of ad-tech (permalink)

"Technopolitics" are the politics embedded in technology. The Ur-text of technopolitics is "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" by the rock critic turned scholar Langdon Winner:

https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf

With "Do Artifacts," Winner demands that we move beyond the idea of technologies having "intended consequences" and "unintended consequences" and towards a political economy of tech. In service to this, he divides the politics of artifacts into three categories:

I. Artifacts that have politics embedded in them by their creators, like Robert Moses's infamous bridges over the Long Island parkways. According to Moses biographer Robert Caro, Moses deliberately specified that these bridges must be too low for a city bus to pass under, in a bid to block Black people from traveling from New York City to the beaches he'd developed on Long Island.

Today those bridges are more than a century old, and they are still too low for city buses to pass under them, and this continues to mean that people who don't own private vehicles find it more difficult to get to the beach, and as it's still the case that race is a predictor of low incomes, those are still racist bridges.

II. Artifacts whose politics are accidental but unavoidable. Winner cites a kind of tomato harvester that vastly improved the efficiency of tomato pickers. These harvesters became very popular, which allowed tomato farmers to lay off large numbers of agricultural workers, and also allowed them to price the mechanically harvested tomatoes so cheaply that they crowded out other kinds of tomatoes.

Because these machines created a large pool of unemployed workers, they shifted power from labor to capital, and because these picking machines were too rough for all but the hardest varietals of tomato, they changed the flavor profile of tomatoes in America for the worse, towards a bland, tough tomato.

These picking machines were not designed to make workers poorer, nor were they designed to make tomatoes taste worse, but because of their technical characteristics, this was the unavoidable outcome, the inextricable politics of these machines.

III. Artifacts whose politics are intrinsic to their design. Here, Winner contrasts solar panels with nuclear reactors. Solar panels may require highly centralized industrial systems to produce, but once they are in the field, solar panels are compatible with looser, less coordinated political arrangements. A world of small anarchist communes is fully compatible with solar energy.

Contrast this with nuclear reactors: the prudent ongoing operation of a reactor requires a highly centralized state that is capable of fielding reliable, trustworthy independent inspectors. This state must also be capable of exercising the coercive power to shut down badly maintained or incompetently operated reactors.

The politics of nukes are the politics of a centralized, powerful state; the politics of solar are less determined. Solar is compatible with a wide variety of political systems, including (but not limited to) weak, decentralized states.

(For a further exploration of "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" I highly recommend Ginger Coons' reading guide:)

https://www.not-so-obvious.net/reading-do-artifacts-have-politics/

I really like Winner's framework for exploring technopolitics, but I have my own gloss on it. Winner's framework doesn't explicitly contemplate the idea of technological countermeasures. For example, what if someone were to design a city bus that was low enough to fit under Robert Moses's bridges? At that point, they'd cease to be "racist bridges," and merely become "bridges built by a racist":

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-technopolitics/

Which brings me to the technopolitics of ad-tech. Lots of people think that advertising is "the original sin of the internet," setting in motion the surveillance dystopia that is closing in on us from all sides today:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/17/mercenary-spyware/#discover-tech

I think this is wrong. I think that finding ways to communicate ideas and pitches to the general public is fine. Without some channel for reaching people with ideas and propositions they may not be familiar with, it would be infinitely harder to reach people for political causes. It would also be harder for new books, movies and music to find new audiences. It would be much harder to get people out to your independent craft fair, your zine show, or your No Kings march.

For me, the internet's original sin isn't advertising, it's surveillance. Contrary to what you have been told – and pax Winner's framework – the internet is fully compatible with privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

It wasn't the internet's technopolitics that made it a surveillance nightmare. It was just plain politics. Specifically, our politicians decided to stop enacting and enforcing privacy laws. The last consumer privacy law we got in America was a bill that made it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals:

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

(As I type these words, the Supreme Court is poised to eliminate even that dried-up old crumb of privacy protection:)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/10/supreme-court-privacy-rights-case-bork-kavanaugh.html

The widespread phenomenon of ad-tech companies spying on us is the result of the decision to allow them to do so. That decision has had innumerable negative downstream effects, such as skyrocketing "surveillance prices":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography

And collapsing "surveillance wages":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

It's created vast surveillance databases that are critical to Trump's racist pogroms, providing dossiers and precise location data on the people ICE kidnaps to Salvadoran slave-labor camps:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/10/ice-tech/#foreseeable-outcomes

Surveillance also promotes oligarchy. Without surveillance, oligarchs must give up more of their fortunes to keep the public happy, because the alternative is spending even more money on guards to keep the public from building guillotines on their lawns. Surveillance lets oligarchs make targeted strikes on restive radicals, which is much cheaper than broad-spectrum policies that make us all better off and neutralize the case for guillotines:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/26/autostabilizer/#slicey-bois

These are the technopolitics of surveillance, not advertising. There is nothing about advertising that demands surveillance. For centuries, advertising was not meaningfully linked to surveillance. The decision to fuse surveillance with advertising was just that – a decision, not an inevitability.

Any time we forget this, we let spying tech bosses off the hook. After all, if advertising demands surveillance, then tech bosses are just the avatars of the great forces of history, prisoners of the imperative to spy in order to advertise. By remembering that surveillance advertising is a choice, we put the blame squarely where it belongs: on the guillotineable oligarchs who made that choice, and amassed spectacular fortunes thereby.

Surveillance is political, but surveillance advertising has its own distinct technopolitics, and to understand those technopolitics, we must contrast them with the technopolitics of contextual advertising. Up until a decade or two ago, contextual advertising was simply called "advertising." Contextual advertising is the practice of running refrigerator ads next to articles on cooking and kitchen remodeling; ads for roadside restaurants on highway billboards; ads for Disney vacations in parenting magazines.

Your intuition probably insists that context advertising is less effective than surveillance advertising. After all, surveillance advertising allows a running shoe company to target users who are training for a marathon no matter where they are and no matter what they're doing. Surely this translates into increased "conversions" (clicks and/or purchases, depending on who you're talking to)?

It does, but not by much. Advertisers get about 5% more value from surveillance ads than they do from context ads:

https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/05/WEIS_2019_paper_38.pdf

Partly, that's because surveillance ad companies grossly overrate the efficacy of surveillance advertising:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

But surveillance advertising's anemic returns to advertisers are down to another aspect of the system: its tendency towards monopolization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2023)

Surveillance is a capital-intensive activity: spying on billions of people as they move through the digital and physical world is incredibly expensive. That is a good part of the reason that online advertising has collapsed into the Meta/Google duopoly, who control about 80% of display advertising.

The harms of surveillance monopolies have a severely distorting effect on policy debates. For example, it's led some anti-monopolists to call for government-issued surveillance identifiers that follow us from birth to death in order to facilitate commercial spying to foster more competition in surveillance:

https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/

Here's the thing about monopolists: they cheat. Google and Meta have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the advertising market, overcharging advertisers and underpaying publishers:

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

The ad-tech giants have taken in hundreds of billions that they simply can't account for. It's disappeared down a fraud-hole:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/25/lying-spies/#spying-liars

All of this has driven the majority of web users to install a privacy-blocker (like EFF's Privacybadger.org), meaning that surveillance ads are disproportionately likely to not even show up in a reader's browser:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

So while it's possible that, in a state of nature, a surveillance ad would outperform a context ad, delivering more sales for advertisers and more revenue for publishers, the monopolistic tendency of ad-tech means that publishers earn less from surveillance ads (because more users block them, and because monopolistic ad-tech platforms extract higher commissions), and advertisers see fewer sales from them (because more users block them, and because monopolistic ad-tech platforms extract higher prices).

Context ads, meanwhile, are always going to give power to publishers, because publishers will always understand the materials they publish better than any ad-tech platform could. Commissioning, editing and publishing an article, podcast or video gives a publisher unique and inalienable insight into that material.

Surveillance data about audiences is a kind of ambient vapor floating around websites and places and payments that has to be condensed through a heroic and expensive effort that gives power to whichever company can muster the capital and infrastructure to do so. Meanwhile, information about the content of publishers' offerings arrives pre-refined into ingots that are already in publishers' own possession.

It's possible to run "programmatic ads" without surveillance. Rather than building an ad-tech stack through which publishers transmit sensitive information about their audiences ("Who will pay me to advertise to this 18-34 year old man-child from the outer boroughs who owns an Xbox and has recently researched gonorrhea symptoms?"), we can build systems through which publishers transmit information about their own materials ("Who will advertise to a user with a New York IP address who is reading an article comparing running shoe brands?").

Not only is this possible, but it actually generates more revenues for publishers than the surveillance-based ad-tech stack:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/24/data-from-dutch-public-broadcaster-shows-the-value-of-ditching-creepy-ads/

On top of that, publishers who don't gather personal information about users also don't need to show their users those awful pop-up ads asking their permission to gather their data. Everyone hates those notices, and they are yet another negative aspect of surveillance advertising that disappears with the switch to context ads.

An ad-tech stack for context ads is far less prone to monopolization. Such a stack can be "federated," with multiple "demand-side platforms" (the part of the system that advertisers use to place bids for the right to show their ads) all communicating with the same "supply-side platform" (the part of the system publishers use to transmit opportunities to place ads).

This is also in the technopolitics of context ads: they do not tend toward the "efficiencies of scale" that lead to abusive monopolistic middlemen who steal from publishers and advertisers and sell out the public to fascists who want to arrest them and deport them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.

When the ad-tech sector is composed of smaller companies that are more competitive with one another, it is much harder for any of them to collude to rig the market. That fierce competition also means it's harder to create a cozy conspiracy to lobby together to block privacy laws, and it leaves the companies with lower margins and less retained earnings to spend on those lobbying efforts.

Surveillance ads also promote all kinds of parasitic businesses. The fact that a publisher can serve ads related to users rather than the subject of their media means that sensationalistic and deceptive websites can sell ads that run against content that's totally unrelated to advertisers' products and services. And because it's cheaper to produce lies and garbage, these publishers can undercut the ad prices demanded by high quality outlets and let advertisers reach the same users. This is the whole reason that "chumboxes" exist:

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

Just as nuclear power favors a centralized state, surveillance advertising:

• favors middlemen over publishers and advertisers;

• tends toward monopoly;

• favors low-quality media over high-quality production;

• impedes the passage of privacy laws;

• provides authoritarian states with an off-the-books, warrantless source of surveillance data.

And just as solar allows for decentralized, anti-authoritarian societies, context advertising:

• favors publishers over middlemen and advertisers;

• tends towards pluralism and diversity of voices;

• favors high-quality media by reserving the lion's share of the rewards to the producers;

• does not rely on a weak privacy environment;

• does not militate for "democratizing spying" by issuing every person with a permanent advertising identifier.

There's nothing (necessarily) wrong with building systems to tell people about things you want them to know. There's nothing (necessarily) wrong with paying for media with ads. It's possible for both of these things to go awry, but they are not in and of themselves bad. They have contingent technopolitics.

But surveillance ads have completely unavoidable, absolutely ghastly technopolitics. Surveillance ads are bad for publishers, for advertisers, and for democracy. We should ban surveillance ads:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

(Image: Jess, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified).

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Trump DOJ Launches Bogus TV News Antitrust Probe
  https://economicpopulist.substack.com/i/220751828/trump-doj-launches-bogus-tv-news-antitrust-probe

• US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers “ownership,” not “a license” https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/us-rep-proposes-bill-to-give-video-game-buyers-ownership-not-a-license/

• Saviour or Scoundrel? https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/14308c3b-4f2a-4f39-a365-192c0206f886

• Tiny Little Office https://tinylittleoffice.com/

• Future? No Thanks! – an ecosocialist game https://futurenothanks.com/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Patrick Nielsen Hayden interviews Mike Ford https://user.well.com/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue&f=0&t=126

#20yrsago Singapore bans Far East Economic Review https://web.archive.org/web/20061010002951/https://www.feer.com/articles1/2006/0610/free/p006.html

#20yrsago Publishing isn’t bestseller-driven https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/conventional_un/

#20yrsago Why architecture and security don’t mix https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/architecture_an.html

#20yrsago Vista licence: Microsoft’s abusive relationship with you https://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/forbidding_vistas_windows_licensing_disserves_the_user.html

#20yrsago Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20061110065012/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi%3Ffile%3D/news/archive/2006/10/20/entertainment/e110452D84.DTL

#15yrsago Canadian Tories admit that Canadians don’t want DRM rules, push for them anyway https://web.archive.org/web/20111022210131/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6071/125

#15yrsago Visualizing Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20111021103517/http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/9-9-9-in-one-really-long-graph/

#15yrsago Free Bieber: campaign to kill proposed law that would send you to prison for 5 years for singing copyrighted music on YouTube https://web.archive.org/web/20111020145336/http://freebieber.org/

#15yrsago Belarusian central bank auctions off its sugar bowls https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/19/belarus-central-bank-sells-office-furniture

#15yrsago Dataviz as defacement: OCCUPY GEORGE https://web.archive.org/web/20111022022046/http://www.occupygeorge.com/

#15yrsago HOWTO avoid a copyright shakedown legal threat: be famous, a politician, a cop, a soldier or a corpse https://torrentfreak.com/undercover-cops-and-politicians-escape-bittorrent-lawsuit-111013/

#10yrsago Popular design guides are responsible for plague of grey type https://web.archive.org/web/20170914051800/https://www.wired.com/2016/10/how-the-web-became-unreadable/

#10yrsago Digital Defenders: a free open-licensed booklet for kids about privacy and cryptography https://edri.org/files/privacy4kids_booklet_web.pdf

#10yrsago Public universities and even the US Navy have sold hundreds of patents to America’s most notorious troll https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/inside-intellectual-ventures-portfolio-nearly-500-university-patents

#10yrsago Airportraits: composite photos of all the daily takeoffs from the world’s airports https://mikekelley.art/?category=airportraits

#10yrsago Rich people can afford to buy more sleep than poor people https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/the-rich-can-sleep-in-thanks-to-better-transit/

#10yrsago Harry Shearer sues studio over Spinal Tap, says he’s received $98 in royalties over 30 years https://web.archive.org/web/20161224224142/https://www.yahoo.com/movies/harry-shearer-files-125-million-spinal-tap-fraud-suit-copyright-termination-150031664.html

#10yrsago ACLU asks court to reveal 23 secret surveillance laws https://web.archive.org/web/20161019224447/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/aclu-wants-secret-surveillance-laws-made-public/

#10yrsago Montana judge unrepentant after sentencing man to 60 days for repeatedly raping his own 12 year old daughter https://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/19/us/montana-judge-incest-case-trnd/index.html

#10yrago Turkish court fines bystander/tourist who sued police for shooting out his eye https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/kyrgyz-tourist-wounded-in-gezi-protests-ordered-to-pay-debt-to-turkish-state–104964

#10yrsago By stealing from innocents, Chicago PD amassed tens of millions in a secret black budget for surveillance gear https://web.archive.org/web/20160929143255/https://chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-department-civil-forfeiture-investigation/Content?oid=23728922

#10yrsago Turing’s law: UK to retroactively pardon thousands of men prosecuted for having sex with men https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37711518

#5yrsago The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#capital-as-power

#5yrsago Copyleft lawsuit against Vizio will allow anyone to defend the commons https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast

#5yrsago The true, Terry Pratchett-esque origins of the trillion-dollar coin https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/19/moist-von-lipwig/#gimmick-v-gimmick

#1yrago The mad king's digital killswitch https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

• Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
  https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

• Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30
  https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
  https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html

• Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
  https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

• Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
  https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Life After AI (Brain Bar)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

• How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

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Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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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

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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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.

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The digital rights unit found evidence that dozens of devices at media organization Al Jazeera were hacked after being shown malicious online ads.

American Eagle is standing by its fall denim campaign starring “Euphoria” and “Anyone But You” star Sydney Sweeney after a wave of criticism accused the ads of leaning into racially coded language and imagery.

The campaign hinges on a pun: Sweeney talks about inherited traits before a male voiceover says, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

In some ads, “genes” is crossed out and replaced with “jeans.” What AE framed as playful wordplay struck a nerve with critics, who argued it echoed historic eugenics rhetoric, particularly given the ad’s focus on her physical appearance like her blond hair and blue eyes.

Social media reaction was swift, with detractors calling it “tone‑deaf” and “Nazi‑coded,” while supporters, especially conservative commentators, praised the joke and dismissed the outrage as performative.

On Friday, American Eagle posted a statement to Instagram defending the campaign: “This is about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story,” the company wrote, adding, “Great jeans look good on everyone.” The retailer noted that proceeds from Sweeney’s campaign will go to Crisis Text Line to help victims of domestic violence.

Sweeney herself has stayed silent. Still, the uproar has boosted visibility for the brand, driving spikes in online engagement and even a reported uptick in AE’s stock price — suggesting that in the culture‑war economy, controversy can be as valuable as the clothes themselves.

The post American Eagle defends “Great Jeans” campaign after backlash appeared first on Salon.com.

American Eagle’s new fall campaign starring Sydney Sweeney is under fire—not for the jeans, but for the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.”

The phrase, used in bold on billboards in Times Square and Las Vegas, was designed as a denim pun. But online, many saw something else: “great genes,” a phrase historically used to celebrate whiteness, thinness and attractiveness. This makes this campaign seem to be a tone-deaf marketing move.

And it’s not like they were being subtle about it. One campaign advertisement literally has Sweeney “painting” over the words “great genes” to become “great jeans.”

“Maybe I’m too … woke,” one viral post read, “but getting a blue-eyed, blonde, white woman and focusing your campaign around her having perfect genetics feels weird…” Others described the slogan as too close to “master race” propaganda and said it echoed eugenics-era language used to validate and promote the superiority of white beauty.

Eugenics movements in the U.S. often promoted the idea of “good genes” to encourage reproduction among white, able-bodied people while justifying the forced sterilization of others. Critics say those ideas still show up in modern advertising and influencer culture, often unexamined.

American Eagle has not addressed the backlash directly. The campaign features Sweeney modeling a limited-edition “Sydney Jean” denim collection that benefits Crisis Text Line (a helpline for victims of domestic violence), along with AR filters, AI try-ons and massive 3D billboards in Times Square and Las Vegas.

Despite the controversy, the campaign caused American Eagle stock to spike by as much as 16%. Analysts pointed to meme stock behavior, a viral surge driven by retail traders on Reddit and Stocktwits, not by fundamentals. Like GameStop or AMC before it, AEO became a momentary favorite based on online buzz and speculation.

One commenter summed up the tension: “It’s not just about the jeans. It’s about who gets to be the face of America’s ‘best genes.’”

The post Sydney Sweeney’s new campaign draws fire for racial undertones appeared first on Salon.com.

X is turning its NFL-focused Gametime feature into a year-round sports destination, starting with MLB and with other professional leagues to follow.

The new ads will begin to appear later this month in the U.S. only for now, and will feature products and services from an initial test group of advertisers.

A social media ad for "nutritionally complete" meal replacement shakes was banned by the UK's advertising watchdog over a suggestion the shakes can replace conventional food. Huel's ad, which ran on Instagram and YouTube, showed celebrity entrepreneur Spencer Matthews talking to Huel Founder Julian Hearn about a race-winning athlete who "only eats Huel." — Read the rest

The post Ad for Huel meal replacement shakes banned in UK appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1967, Kleenex offered pop art pillows in the shape of giant size Kleenex boxes. They cost $2.95 each plus two premium seals cut from Kleenex packages. You could get all three for $8.25 and six seals.

The pillows came in three designs. — Read the rest

The post In 1967, Kleenex sold pillows shaped like giant Kleenex boxes appeared first on Boing Boing.

A dad named Dave said he got called into a meeting with his boss to explain the $118,000 bill on his company credit card.

The culprit was his 9-year-old son, who bought ads on YouTube to promote his Minecraft and Roblox videos. — Read the rest

The post 9-year-old ran up a $118,000 bill on dad's company credit card appeared first on Boing Boing.