The first thing I noticed when I gave up American technology was the silence.

My phone usually starts up before I get out of bed, buzzing every few minutes throughout the day with calls, messages, headlines, calendar reminders and social media alerts. It’s a constant pulse that averages nearly 200 iPhone notifications on weekends and twice as many Monday-to-Friday.

But on this warm mid-summer Sunday, my life was on an unlikely version of mute. After years of reporting on Europe’s push to wean itself off U.S. tech giants and cultivate homegrown alternatives, I had decided to test my own daily habit by cutting myself off from using any American technology for 72 hours.

No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.

I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk.

For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight. It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?”

Limited versions of that scenario have already surfaced. When U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration cut off French-born International Criminal Court judge Nicolas Guillou from U.S.-linked financial and technology services, he called it a form of “civil death.”

Meanwhile, U.S. export controls in June forced Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing two of its most advanced AI models, offering a glimpse of what government bans on access to cutting-edge technology can look like.

Such episodes feed into mounting fears that the Trump administration could use Europe’s overreliance on U.S. tech as leverage in trade fights or disputes over EU regulations. A Proton survey released earlier this month found that 74 percent of European business leaders worry such a cutoff could disrupt their operations.

In my own little experiment, the stakes were much lower. Yet I was about to find out that replacing American tools with those built here in Europe was going to make almost everything harder — and lonelier.

Trying to live without U.S. tech, I would find out, essentially amounts to trying to live without tech at all. That was partly because, like virtually all of my fellow Europeans, I had locked myself into those consumer choices.

Dumbphones and FOMO

The early symptoms of going cold turkey looked suspiciously like withdrawal.

On that first morning, with my iPhone shut off, I reached for a Nokia brick from Finland. The so-called dumbphone is the type of device now enjoying a second life among people detoxing from screen time and is also a favorite of drug dealers seeking to avoid getting busted by any tracking and data collection.

Several hours in, I realized there were no notifications on the Nokia. Nobody calls or texts anymore. Then came the shameful part: a sense of helplessness, followed by FOMO-fueled restlessness. The world had surely kept spinning at full speed, and I was missing it. For the next few days, I would still catch myself checking the phone compulsively like an addict.

“The phone aged you instantly,” my best friend joked later that day as we traded our now-standard FaceTime video calls for a regular one. It was unclear whether he meant the muffled audio or me struggling with a new-but-actually-old device, or both.

I did notice that I was pacing up and down my flat because my usually overstimulated brain apparently couldn’t handle focusing on a voice-only call.

One instant benefit from my dumbphone: no doomscrolling in bed.

It all took me back to my first cellphone at 13, when texting meant tapping the same tiny key several times for a single letter, every SMS cost money and abbreviations and emojis were not just stylistic choices but ways to squeeze more into a message.

I knew my social media life would be at risk in my experiment. European alternatives such as Mastodon have gained traction since Elon Musk turned Twitter into X. But who joins a social network when none of their friends are there?

That was fine. I was actually eager to disappear for a while, well aware of the anxiety social media induces in me and the insecurities created by constantly watching other people’s supposedly perfect lives.

Online shopping was out — but so too was paying by card in stores and restaurants. The payment networks I rely on are American: Visa and Mastercard dominate card payments across Europe, meaning that even a purchase made with a European bank card often still runs over U.S.-controlled rails.

It meant I had to buy everything using cash, which I hadn’t done regularly in ages. Fortunately, unlike in some other European countries, Belgian legislation requires merchants to accept banknotes. The hard part was finding some of those stores without the help of Google Maps, which I’d come to rely on almost as much as my credit cards.

The invisible grip

Swearing off Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and YouTube was also part of the deal — already eliminating a sizable chunk of my leisure time. But it turned out I could barely watch anything at all, or even properly test European streaming platforms, because my television and tablet both ran on Google software.

Thankfully, an offline Nintendo Switch from Japan, good old books and the legendary Snake game kept me company.

These invisible dependencies run deep. Beyond the products we use every day, U.S. systems often serve as gateways to European companies trying to take on Big Tech.

Take Sweden’s Spotify or the Estonia-based rival to Uber, Bolt. Both still heavily rely on U.S.-controlled app stores, operating systems, payment networks and other digital infrastructure.

And then there is the cloud: the data centers and servers that host websites, process data and route traffic. The vast majority of that market is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, whose infrastructure supports large parts of Europe’s digital economy.

Many corners of Europe would go dark if those services were shut down, with its economy, public administration and communications infrastructure struggling to function normally.

Working outside the stack

On Monday morning, I walked into the office with the slightly misplaced confidence that I had prepared for everything. My efficiency at work, admittedly during a very quiet summer week, took less of a hit than I expected.

I was still working from the office. I used an open-source, Linux-powered computer. I communicated by email through a Switzerland-based Proton address, browsed the web using the Norwegian browser Vivaldi and French search engine Qwant, wrote everything in LibreOffice and even tried Mistral’s generative AI assistant. And there was always a good old notebook.

I felt productive. But the workflow around me was not. The tools themselves worked perfectly well once I accepted that breaking years of habits would take time. The disruption ultimately came from stunted collaboration: meetings, messages, shared documents and the constant stream of small exchanges that keep a newsroom moving.

“It was like you disappeared,” one colleague would tell me later.

European alternatives do exist in that space. The problem is, just like for social media, they only work properly when everyone else uses them too or when competing systems are interoperable — something the EU has long tried to legislate and enforce, often against resistance from large technology platforms.

For this little while, despite technically being able to continue working, I became an outsider within my own team. I had to skip our routine video meetings on Slack and Teams, while missing messages sent over WhatsApp and Signal.

In a trade, a city and an era built around instant messaging, sending a good old SMS felt almost prehistoric — a reminder of the longstanding complaints from the European telecom industry about losing messaging and calling revenues to U.S. tech firms.

Ultimately, this underscored one of the major pinch points in Europe’s push for greater tech independence: digital sovereignty is not an individual project. It only works if people, companies and institutions move together.

On their own, individual efforts are more likely to leave people feeling digitally isolated rather than digitally sovereign.

Relax and relapse

And yet, there was something blissful about these three days.

The initial anxiety slowly gave way to a kind of peace. Of course, that feeling may only reflect that the experiment was temporary and my digital life had not been erased.

The experience nevertheless highlighted how much I had taken these tools for granted. I have placed all my eggs in the same digital basket: my communication channels, the tools I use to authenticate myself and access the digital world, my polished digital self and years of accumulated knowledge, all stored inside one sprawling digital safe.

The concern is no longer simply whether that safe could be broken into from the outside. It is also whether somebody could lock it — or empty it — from within.

Now, as you might wonder how I’ll act on what I’ve learned, I am strangely reminded of Covid.

Many of us emerged from that temporary era of lockdowns and involuntary limits full of healthy new habits and grand ideas about how our lifestyles should change, only to return remarkably quickly to our old routines.

Sadly, the same thing happened here. My iPhone came straight back into my pocket. Messages began flowing through again. My bank card returned to its usual place. Within hours, I had fallen comfortably back into the U.S. technology stack.

As I switched my smartphone back on, my screen lit up with incoming texts inquiring whether my little experiment was over. After 72 hours of old-school SMS exchanges, two different friends were both clearly eager to return to reality, sending me the same final text: “Back to WhatsApp?”

Groq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation as the former AI chipmaker pivots to a neocloud business and expands its Nvidia-powered data center footprint.

Nvidia's investment in SoftBank's data center developer will guarantee its chips power an OpenAI data center.

Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled by a handful of labs, but as Equity’s […]

Microsoft, Google, and Amazon's growth depends on two companies that lose tens of billions of dollars a year. In a newsletter post, "Where's Your Ed At" reported on analyst estimates from Wells Fargo, Barclays, UBS, and Deutsche Bank.

Wells Fargo estimates Microsoft's AI revenue at $34.43 billion, with about 70% coming from OpenAI. — Read the rest

The post Microsoft, Google and Amazon now depend on two money-losing AI firms appeared first on Boing Boing.

Today's links

• Surveillance vs guillotines: Someone's gonna fleece these rubes, why not me?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: DeCSS; Warhol Worm; Camgirls x Amazon wishlists; 2021 State of Tech (in 2001); RIAA v grieving family; Stasi disguises.
• Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• 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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Surveillance vs guillotines (permalink)

In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").

This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system – the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity – are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating.

The starkest example of this in Capital 21C is Piketty's contrast between L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest woman in the world) and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (then the most successful corporation in the world). Piketty compares the growth in the fortunes of Bettencourt and Gates over two periods: first, the period between Microsoft's founding and Gates' retirement as CEO; and second, the period after Gates's retirement from his executive role, when he became a mere investor, no longer an entrepreneur.

During that first period, in which Gates was founding and running the most successful corporation in the world, he accumulated less wealth than did Liliane Bettencourt, who did precisely nothing of value over that period. Bettencourt didn't even manage her investments – that was all handled by some very clever financial planners, lawyers and accountants. In other words: for Bettencourt, doing nothing at all produced more wealth than founding the most successful corporation in the world did for Gates. Bettencourt, a person who owned things, did better than Gates, a person who did things.

And then Gates retired. He stopped doing things and started owning things. He became an investor, whereupon he out-earned both Bettencourt and Gates-the-entrepreneur. Again, the market system allocated fewer rewards to the most successful person in the doing things business than it allocated to that same person once he quit that job and got into the owning things business.

Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.

Worse: winning the orifice lottery in no way qualifies you to direct the capital you've inherited. Liliane Bettencourt had no revolutionary new business ideas, invented no miraculous new materials or processes, produced no brilliant art. She merely accumulated, thanks to the professional services of skilled technicians whose job description includes hiring their own successors to ensure that another generation of winners of the Bettencourt orifice lottery could continue to accumulate, commanding more capital and power in society.

Perhaps if these orifice winners were content to allow their bloodless Renfields to allocate their capital while consuming bonbons and attending yacht parties, this could yield a stable politics. But inevitably, people who win the orifice lottery observe that they come from a long line of wealthy people, a line that will continue with their own descendants, and conclude that they have some kind of special, heritable virtue – magic blood – that the system has recognized with their great fortunes and the power those fortunes confer.

That's when things get dangerous: when aristocrats grow bored with their leisure and mobilize their inherited capital to change the way the rest of us live. Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction, and their special projects have a wide blast radius and inflict a lot of collateral damage.

Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

Closer to home, Gates's hatred of public institutions led him to allocate millions to dismantling public schools and replacing them with charter schools, particularly for poor and racialized kids, with disastrous results:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/09/autocrats-of-trade-2/#witness-the-firepower-of-this-fully-armed-and-operational-battle-station

And of course, Gates supported and empowered Jeffrey Epstein and his rape island:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Connection_with_Jeffrey_Epstein

Capital's tendency to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats end up setting an ever-larger proportion of our societal agenda, despite their manifest unfitness to govern and their absence of any kind of democratic legitimacy.

Piketty argues that inequality is inherently politically destabilizing. A society ruled over by fools and monsters who were not voted into power and can't be voted out of power is a doomed society. Eventually – the French Revolution, the World Wars – these societies grow so unstable that they collapse altogether.

This is where Piketty and Snowden converge. When the Snowden leaks broke, there was a lot of talk about the mechanics and the legality of the NSA's global digital surveillance, but precious little consideration was given to the reason for all this surveillance. In 2013, the idea that this spying was about "security" was so obvious as to be self-evident. The questions at the time were whether spying could produce security. We weren't asking why things were so insecure.

In retrospect, the answer is to be found in Piketty. Piketty's Capital includes a long, impassioned plea to both lawmakers and aristocrats to consider redistributive policies (like a wealth tax) as the most affordable way to achieve political stability. Fundamentally, Piketty argues that the cheapest way to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn is to build hospitals and schools; this is cheaper than paying for guards and prisons to lock up would-be guillotine builders.

Today's AI debates swirl around the question of whether AI can truly make us more productive – that is, if chatbots will allow one person to do the work of two, or three, or four – or 100. But when it comes to surveillance, the digital revolution unquestionably produced a massive productivity dividend.

Consider the spying apparatus of the former East Germany ("the GDR") widely considered the most surveilled society in human history. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, there were about 16m people in the country. Of those East Germans, about 90,000 worked directly for the Stasi (the secret police), aided by another 100-200,000 paid informants:

https://www.dw.com/en/east-germany-spy-agency-stasi-surveillance/

Call it 200,000 people to spy on 16m. In other words, it took one spy to watch 80 of their neighbors. Contrast this with NSA spying: they accumulated detailed surveillance dossiers on about 6 billion internet users using a staff of no more than 5 million spooks (in 2013, about 5 million Americans were eligible for security clearance). If every single person with security clearance in the USA was working on the NSA's surveillance program, that would mean that by 2013, computers had made it possible for a spy to keep tabs on more than a thousand people.

Orders of magnitude improvements in a mere generation! This is the kind of productivity lift that economists dream of when they fantasize about the dividends from automation.

But why? Why spy?

East Germany spied on its people because the system was so unjust and cruel that its beneficiaries understood that their neighbors were forever on the brink of rising up against them. East Germany's leaders were right about that – but if anything, they didn't put enough people onto the spying project. We can tell, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989!

Of course, the GDR was already paying more than 1.2% of its population to spy on everyone else. It's likely that East Germany's leaders believed that their society simply lacked the fiscal space to hire more spies, even if short-staffing the Stasi risked societal collapse. Now, if Piketty is right, East Germany's leaders could have solved this problem by giving people fewer reasons to want to overthrow the state. They could have taken their hands out of the cookie jar, could have instituted democratic reforms – they could have made a bid for democratic legitimacy and public material comfort. But that would have come at the leaders' own power and wealth, and, lacking the stomach for this sacrifice, they lost everything.

Enter the NSA: the digitization of human civilization has drastically reduced the cost of surveillance, and – again, per Piketty – this vastly increases the amount of inequality the world can sustain before the illegitimacy, incompetence and cruelty of rule by the neoaristocratic winners of the orifice lottery brings the whole thing crashing down.

The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. Musk didn't just attack foreign aid – though the fact that the world's richest man murdered hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz isn't merely cruel, but also massively destabilizing in a way that will shake the world's politics for generations – but also domestic institutions. It was a DOGE cultist who fed the part of the NIH that tracks cyclosporiasis outbreaks into the wood-chipper:

https://truthout.org/articles/disease-researchers-blame-doge-cuts-for-spiraling-cyclospora-outbreak/

Today, tens of thousands of Americans are experiencing the literal enshittification of the American state, and this isn't just a human tragedy (though it is), it's also an economic tragedy, with massive knock-on effects for the businesses that rely on those sickened Americans and for the agricultural sector whose outputs are now being shunned by millions. Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines.

Which brings me back to Snowden. The Snowden revelations did spur a global conversation about digital surveillance, with the result that the majority of the world's digital traffic is encrypted today. That's not nothing.

But the American state found new ways to conduct mass-scale, global surveillance, often by collaborating directly with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy:

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2026/01/07/palantir-kill-communists/

Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government's system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

The Trump administration is the most unpopular in more than a century. Trump has stolen more money in office than any president in history. Trump presides over spiraling greedflation and collapsing buying power. The Trump administration has also presided over a titanic increase in state-aligned, privatized surveillance. The Trump years are the Flock years:

https://newrepublic.com/article/206992/flock-safety-cameras-alpr-deflock-resistance-nationwide

The Trump years are the Palantir years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html

The Trump years are the facial recognition years:

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ice-face-recognition

Trump's authoritarianism is a function of his misrule, and his misrule is enabled by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, the more he destroys with wars of choice, and incoherent tariff policies, and official pronouncements linking autism and vaccinations, the more he needs spy cameras, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, and facial recognition. Every time Trump talks about a third term in office, or canceling elections, or suppressing the vote, he creates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison the people this drives into the streets. The more mass surveillance there is, the safer it is for him to commit unpopular, corrupt acts. It's the world's worst self-licking ice-cream cone.

It's not just Trump, of course. Trump is the vanguard of a movement of orifice lottery winners whose delight in stealing, cheating, maiming and despoiling gives rise to political instability and requires them to divert some of their yacht money to mercenaries:

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/25/police-luigi-mangione-wealthy-ceos-threat/

Take AI: the Trump years are also the AI years. This is the time in which a wildly unpopular technology is being shoved into every part of every app we rely on:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

It's an era where corporate bosses can't stop gloating about how many jobs they're planning to destroy and how many paycuts they plan on imposing on the surviving workers:

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can reliably convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

And – most visibly – it's an era in which people's cities and towns are being despoiled by data centers they don't want, by local governments operating in the most extreme secrecy, who silence and even arrest citizens who demand a democratically legitimate process for deciding whether they will have to give up their power and water and land and peace:

https://www.404media.co/city-that-arrested-person-for-clapping-at-data-center-meeting-moves-to-virtual-townhalls-for-public-safety/

An economist would tell you that there's an equilibrium being sought here: between the cost of bribing a town council to ram through data center approvals, the cost of building a more modest and palatable data center, and the cost of mollifying public critics. The cost of bribing towns to foist a data center on the townsfolk is low, because there are lots of towns that fit the bill, so data center barons can shop around.

But as data center protests grow larger and better organized (oligarchy is destabilizing), the cost of dealing with public opposition is mounting. Which is why the Trump administration is teaming up with its preferred tech and military contractors to engage in detailed surveillance of data center and AI critics:

https://prospect.org/2026/08/10/private-intelligence-firms-selling-dossiers-on-ai-data-center-critics/

These corporate spooks aren't just spying on data center critics: they've got a whole portfolio of oligarchy-stabilizing surveillance services, targeting "antifa," immigrants' rights and anti-ICE groups.

They're joined by hardware vendors who offer corporations, the wealthy, and enclaves where both are to be found on literal robocops, the ultimate in cheap guard labor (alas, the robots suck):

https://www.404media.co/the-roboguard-revolution-is-short-circuiting/

Trump and his orifice-winning army are caught in the same trap as the leaders of the GDR. Every gain in guard-labor efficiency creates the space for more of them to stick more of their hands even further into the cookie jar. Every time they do, American society grows more unstable, demanding more guard labor.

As we saw in Minneapolis, guard labor – be it mass surveillance, robocops or ICE chuds – is itself destabilizing. Police states make the people who live in them want to overthrow the state, requiring yet more cops, creating more partisans for tearing the whole thing down.

In theory, the orifice class could decide to stop stealing, cheating and maiming. The problem is that for every plute who realizes that the cheapest way to keep the guillotines off his lawn is to play fair, there are three more who lack the executive function to stop cheating. That means that you might as well keep on cheating, since the instability – and the guard labor bills – are coming no matter what.

In the tale of the "Tragedy of the Commons," a common pasture is grazed to dust by shepherds who each understand that if they don't graze their flock until everything is gone, some other shepherd will do so. The original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper was a racist hoax perpetrated by an academic fraud who wanted to make the case for the expulsion of black and Brown people from America and their mass extermination abroad:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

In reality, commons need not be tragic and many of our most important resources have been managed as commons for hundreds of years:

https://archive.org/details/governing-the-commons/page/4/mode/2up

But when it comes to the commons that is "a stable society," the orifice class is caught in an inescapable tragedy, certain of the knowledge that if they don't cheat us, the next American aristo will. Thus the demand for guard labor continues to mount…as does the demand for guillotines.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• If You Get in a Car Crash, the Risk Is Growing Your Insurance Won’t Pay https://archive.is/7t58c#selection-2140.1-2140.2

• Zack Polanski Promotes Radical Plan to Break Up Britain’s ‘Billionaire Media’ https://bylinetimes.com/2026/08/10/zack-polanski-promotes-radical-plan-to-break-up-britains-billionaire-media/

• Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/subaru-socialists-and-the-great-disappointed

• Not your imagination: from backpacks to food, consumer goods are getting worse https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/consumed-consumer-goods-quality

• LAST CALL FOR HOPE 26 TICKETS https://www.2600.com/content/last-call-hope-26-tickets

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Wonderfully thorough backgrounder on DeCSS https://web.archive.org/web/20010816194008/https://lemuria.org/decss/hal2001.html

#25yrsago Warhol Worm https://web.archive.org/web/20010814171036/http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/warhol.html

#25yrsago Camgirls use Amazon wishlists for payouts https://web.archive.org/web/20010821234935/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/13/cam_girls/index.html

#25yrsago State of the tech industry 2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20011216222920/http://latimes.com/technology/la-000064605aug09.story

#25yrsago List of scenes cut from Looney Tunes reissues https://web.archive.org/web/20011214095249/http://www.toonzone.net/looney/ltcuts/

#20yrsago Strategy behind using liquids to threaten planes https://web.archive.org/web/20060813001626/https://wondermark.com/d/220.html

#20yrsago RIAA to grieving family: We depose your children in 60 days https://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2006/08/riaa-wants-to-depose-dead-defendants.html

#15yrsago Stasi spywear: the inept art of commie disguise https://web.archive.org/web/20120000000000*/http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,777716,00.html

#15yrsago 1968: when Britain’s Daily Mirror tried to overthrow Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Fadamcurtis%2F2011%2F07%2Fevery_day_is_like_sunday.html

#15yrsago My panel with Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and Al Gore at Mexico City’s Campus Party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXPZnpsN4-s

#15yrsago Doctor tried to "cure homosexuality" by tasping gay man while he had sex with a female sex-worker https://web.archive.org/web/20111004080028/https://blog.ketyov.com/2011/08/self-stimulating-brain-for-heterosexual.html

#10yrsago How a digital-only smartphone opens the door to DRM (and how to close the door) https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/12/how-a-digital-only-smartphone-opens-the-door-to-drm-and-how-to-close-the-door/

#10yrsago Forget Skynet: AI is already making things terrible for people who aren’t rich white dudes https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html

#10yrsago How self-driving cars could make everything worse, and what to do about it https://web.archive.org/web/20170918192128/https://www.wired.com/2016/08/self-driving-cars-will-improve-our-cities-if-they-dont-ruin-them/

#10yrsago The Tor Project’s social contract: we will not backdoor Tor https://blog.torproject.org/tor-social-contract/

#10yrsago Cash grants to people with unexpected bills successfully prevents homelessness https://www.science.org/content/article/bit-cash-can-keep-someone-streets-2-years-or-more

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

• AI, automation and enshittification (Telecoms.com)
  https://www.telecoms.com/ai/the-telecoms-com-podcast-ai-automation-and-enshittification

• The AI Enshittification Bubble (Hidden Forces)
  https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-ai-enshittification-bubble-cory-doctorow/

• F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords

• Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY

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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

---

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:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 507 (3619 total).

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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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

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday passionately defended the use of artificial intelligence, as the rapid advancement of the technology faces increased scrutiny — and calls for regulation — in the U.S. and globally.

In a 6,500 word post timed to the announcement of his company’s new open source version of its own model, Muse Spark, Zuckerberg detailed his vision for AI, arguing the technology is not to be feared and pushing back on concerns that superintelligence could strip people of jobs.

“The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.”

Zuckerberg’s vision is a direct contrast to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s, who has previously warned how AI could cause job disruption. Meta lags behind Anthropic and OpenAI, which have the most advanced AI models.

While Zuckerberg’s essay did not name Amodei or OpenAI directly, he called to broadly distribute superintelligent AI for economic opportunity. Doing so, Zuckerberg said, would provide a safety net to prevent just a handful of governments, businesses and other institutions holding too much power.

Still, Zuckerberg emphasized that the U.S. must address restrictions on AI companies in order to create the best models in the world.

“It is also important that the US and its allies lead the open source AI ecosystem that will make up a large percent of global AI use,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Foreign labs currently hold several advantages here since American labs have to comply with many additional restrictions on training data.”

Zuckerberg’s essay comes amid growing concerns around AI safety. Last month, Anthropic revealed that several of its advanced models gained access to three organizations in three separate incidents dating back to April. That hack came shortly after OpenAI said that two of its most powerful models escaped a testing environment and breached multiple companies.

Lawmakers last month introduced a bill that would give the government power to restrict the use of models that could lead to catastrophic risks. While it is the latest bipartisan effort to address concerns around AI models, Congress has ultimately failed to advance broad legislation.

Zuckerberg urged the federal government to work with companies to test new models as he laid out his strategies for protecting against cybersecurity and bioterrorism.

“First, we should focus on limiting the physical production and distribution of harmful materials,” he wrote. “I expect it will be easier to regulate and control physical components than the spread of knowledge, so this is an important area of policy focus. Second, we should accelerate society’s ability to develop new cures and inoculate against new issues as they arise. This includes streamlining how the FDA and other regulators test and approve new treatments.”

Zuckerberg also defended the spread of data centers, arguing that the centers represent investment into communities as he touted his company’s goal of being “water-positive, meaning that we’ll restore more water than we use in the watersheds where we operate by 2030.”

President Donald Trump this week criticized Texas for being anti-data centers, just days after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott paused industry-wide approvals until the companies provide the state with more information on things like power and water use.

“I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers,” Trump said in a nearly hourlong sit-down interview with Punchbowl News released Friday. “I think it’s a mistake. And I’m not taking positions, I just think it’s a mistake, because there are other communities that want it. When a community wants it, it means a lot of money is going to come into that community.”

Abbott’s spokesperson in a statement Friday defended the policy move as necessary because less than 10% of data centers responded to the state’s requests for them to report their power and water usage.

“Many are unaware that [the Electric Reliability Council of Texas] is tracking a more than 500% increase in peak electricity demand. This unprecedented growth could endanger the reliability and stability of the Texas electric grid,” Andrew Mahaleris said. “The Governor’s pause requires data centers to provide [Public Utility Commission of Texas] and ERCOT with the required information for them to make fully informed decisions. Simply put, Texans must come first.”

The moratorium, which Abbott announced Monday, will require state regulatory agencies to audit proposed data centers seeking connection to the state’s electric grid and find out whether they’re receiving tax breaks, how much power and water they will use, what kind of cooling they will use, what efforts they’ve made to reduce community impacts, and who owns the facilities.

Any projects that fail Abbott’s ordered “comprehensive verification and audit” should be denied connection to the grid, the governor said.

The move was in contrast to the Republican’s typical pro-business stature, underlining how the data center debate has put Texas conservatives between Trump and angry constituents in rural, unincorporated areas where The Texas Tribune has reported most planned data centers are set to be located. Texans have mobilized across the state to oppose the new developments, airing concerns that the facilities will drain local water supplies, drive up electric bills and cause noise, light and air pollution.

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Abbott’s announcement came after he had previously been bullish about the industry, calling Texas “epicenter of AI development” in November when he unveiled Google’s $40 billion investment in the state that included data center facility development.

The three-term governor’s Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, has made greater oversight of data centers a key piece of her campaign.

“Abbott’s call for a ‘pause’ could be for one day – and no one buys it,” she said in a statement this week. “He’s taken millions from data center CEOs while giving Texans lip service to non-existent restrictions.”

Trump went on to say that data centers are “tremendously important for the economics.”

“For Texas to say no to data centers is a mistake in the sense that it could be bigger than oil,” he added.

Disclosure: Google and Punchbowl News have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post Trump calls Texas’ data center opposition a “mistake” appeared first on Salon.com.

Tech companies and developers have been scouring the U.S. for places to build data centers, and they’ve been drawn to Texas’ loose regulations and seemingly abundant power supply. But even Texas can be pushed to the brink.

No popular music genre despises the present as much as country music. Through quirks of form and function, all other radio-ready music is incredibly focused on its immediate surroundings. Pop has trendiness in its very bones, and its songwriters’ striving for universality tends to create songs focused on broad, current feelings: the sharp sting of a fresh heartbreak, the effervescence of new heartbreak, the joy of dancing in this club right now. 

Rap is usually made quickly by impossibly young stars for an equally young audience, so it tends toward today’s fashion. Micro-trends in production, slang and topics come and go quickly. Last month was another era. Last year might as well be prehistoric.

Country music, though, is a different animal, born out of the urban migration of the 1930s as a way to sell a slice of an idealized past on wax to newly minted city-dwellers longing for home. Sonic trends — from the slick countrypolitan in the 1970s to the neo-traditionalist 1990s and on through the trap-indebted 2010s —  have come and gone. Demographics on the dial have shifted. Stars are younger and more male than they’ve ever been. But that focus on greener pastures is as persistent as the apparent blood feud between Texas and Tennessee. 

The average country listener wants to have their past misremembered for them, whether it’s the Judds asking Grandpa about the good old days or Tim McGraw missing the nebulous “back when.” The biggest hits sand down the rough-hewn edges of Mama’s metaphorical front porch to up their resale value, perhaps never funnier than Luke Bryan’s bullet-point summer vacation on “Fish, Hunt, Golf, Drink.” All that cornpone Luddism floating around made Gillian Welch’s “Everything Is Free” feel remarkable upon its release 25 years ago.

The concerns of the track from 2001’s “Time (The Revelator)” are topical and immediate. Welch responds to the then-new phenomenon of online music piracy with practical concerns. How am I going to pay my bills if no one wants to pay me for my music? How do I put gas in the car right now? Nearly a decade before the launch of Spotify, Welch saw clearly that someone was bound to “hit the big score” off of the new model — it just wouldn’t be her.

“Everything is free now, that’s what they say. Everything I’ve ever done, gonna give it away,” she sings, before immediately shifting toward plans to make money elsewhere so that she can keep performing.

A quarter century on from the song’s release, the U.S. economy is overrun with people who believe that nothing should come with a price tag. The finance industry is dominated by private equity firms that offload the debt of their corporate acquisitions onto other companies, the better to walk away clean when those companies collapse. The biggest players in Silicon Valley are building data centers to more efficiently run copyright-infringement machines built on terabytes of pirated material. 

The journalism industry was hollowed out by the same forces that sliced up Welch’s catalog, leaving few journalists to report on the graft and theft this post-payment class of billionaires are carrying out across the country. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, once a world-class newspaper, has turned into a shell of its former self following a conservative reorientation of its opinion pages and a corporate downsizing that saw over 300 of newsroom journalists laid off in February, representing about 30% of its total staff.

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More recently, Louisiana officials recently inked a secret agreement with Meta to build a five-mile-long data center in the state. The New York Times eventually sniffed out the backroom deal. The local papers were too busy covering the hors d’oeuvres at Mark Zuckerberg’s celebratory luncheon.

At the same time, the ham-fisted hollowing out of regulatory agencies by the Trump administration has had predictable results. Outbreaks of new livestock diseases, parasitic produce and slower responses to global crises followed the Department of Government Efficiency’s wild budget-slashing even as Elon Musk, the man who helmed that project, is richer than anyone else in the history of earth — and he’s gearing up to throw millions into the 2028 presidential and congressional elections.

It would be a stretch to say that Gillian Welch saw all this coming. But listening back now, it’s hard not to marvel at how timeless this timely track feels. You can’t help but sympathize with her desire to skip the coming crisis in her industry. She “never minded working hard,” she sings, but she had a lot of concern about “who I’m working for.” Seeing into the future that she’d soon be asked to work for pennies while someone else got obscenely rich, she passed.

“If there’s anything you want to hear,” she says, “you can sing it yourself.” 

If only we all could have opted out in a similar fashion.

The post Gillian Welch’s “Everything Is Free” warned us all along appeared first on Salon.com.

Matt Long stood before the Granbury City Council at an April zoning meeting to oppose the influx of proposed data centers in Hood County, likening them to a spiritual abomination.

“I’d consider us a Christian city inside a Christian county,” said Long, a member of the county’s development commission who lives near Granbury. “As Christians, do we think that trading 2,100 acres of natural beauty for godless technological complexes is moving us closer to the creation, or further away?”

“Do we think that entering into negotiations with Google, Meta and Amazon are closer to making a covenant with God, or making a deal with the devil?” he asked the council.

Christians, Long concluded to applause, must stand up to data centers.

Controversy surrounding data center construction has roiled Texas in recent months, fostering a bipartisan coalition of opposition, particularly among rural and suburban residents. With at least 248 planned data center projects and 335 in operation, Texas is poised to become a leader in data center development.

Opposition has also coalesced around religious appeals from a theologically diverse group of residents, leaders and politicians who see data center development as an affront to their most sacred values.

Much of the opposition focuses on environmental impact and the large amounts of water and power needed by massive facilities that operate AI applications.

Clayton Tucker, a Democrat running for Texas agriculture commissioner, is a leader in the anti-data center movement. A Catholic, he wonders if data centers are akin to the apple in the Garden of Eden.

“If we take a bite of that apple of knowledge, is that what’s going to kick us out of this blue marble of Eden … that we call Earth?” Tucker said.

 

Religion isn’t solely the domain of the opposition. Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, a Republican, said he supports data center construction because “throughout history, Christians have embraced innovations that improve lives, from the printing press to modern medicine.”

“We should approach data centers the same way: embracing their benefits while ensuring they’re built responsibly,” Christian said in a statement.

For Long, biblical passages such as Daniel Chapter 2 and Revelation Chapter 13 reveal that there are spiritual implications to replacing God’s creation “with things created by man.”

The books of Daniel and Revelation, known as apocalyptic literature, have been interpreted in some theological circles as warnings about the misuse of technology — such as artificial intelligence — in ways that threaten God’s intended order and vastly increase the government’s ability to conduct surveillance.

“They’re going to be able to track where we go, they’re going to track our money. … You’re going to have to essentially stay in line socially,” said Long, who believes this generation will be judged by its response to data centers.

“I just don’t want to read that everybody complied, everybody gave in, everybody quit. I want to hear about this small contingent of people that stood on their principles, that saw it coming from a mile away, and said, ‘We’re not budging,’” he said.

Joseph Locke, a professor of Texas and American religious history at the University of North Texas, said he was not surprised that Texans were making religious arguments against data centers.

“Texans have often drawn on religion when they want to enact social or political change,” he said in a statement, adding that “the rhetoric of spiritual warfare is pretty common, especially among today’s Christian nationalists and their conservative allies.”

Long has hosted well-attended prayer meetings in his home and taken his fight online, where he is not alone. Religious arguments are a periodic feature of comments on several dozen Facebook groups dedicated to opposing data center development.

Last month, Clarendon resident Maria Miller asked members of the Texans United Against Data Centers Facebook group to pray against data centers.

Miller said she sees parallels between the rapid development of data centers and the story of the end times told in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. “It’s kind of a no-brainer,” she said in an interview.

“People of faith feel a moral duty”

Not all religiously grounded opposition sees data centers as apocalyptic or part of a larger cosmic battle between good and evil.

“People of faith feel a moral duty to make sure that people have the things they need to live lives of dignity and thriving, and so water and energy are really important for that,” said Rev. Dr. Becca Edwards of the interfaith policy advocacy group Texas Impact.

“We’re called to be stewards of creation, which means caring for the world as God does. And I think what we see in the creation story is that the world was created to be a place of fruitfulness and plenty,” Edwards said.

Locke said many Texans have drawn on their faith “to attack inequalities, provide for the needy and, yes, advocate for environmental protections.”

In addition, conservative Christians have been “generally supportive of Texas’ conservative economic and environmental policies,” Locke said.

“The oil industry, for instance, has long been wed to conservative Christianity,” he said. “Billy Graham was backed by Texas oilmen, and George W. Bush, who helped bring Texas’ religious politics to Washington, D.C., was rooted in the oil industry.”

Texas churches also spoke out against inequality during the Gilded Age — a late 19th-century period of rapid industrial growth that produced extreme wealth inequality, Locke said. Evangelical leaders “helped to organize the Populist revolt of the 1880s and 1890s” and others “urged Texans to see the sins of our economic system,” he said.

“Texas’ conservative Christian nationalism may win the most headlines, but Texas religion contains multitudes,” Locke said.

Tucker, the Democratic candidate for agriculture commissioner, is a fifth-generation Texan who ties his campaign to Texas’ populist movement and focuses on issues that receive the most petition signatures on his website.

A petition on data center development has been a top performer, and as long as it remains popular, “that’s gonna be our top issue,” Tucker said while driving between anti-data center meetings, many of them held in churches.

“Had you told me a year ago that running for agriculture commissioner, I’d be talking mostly about data centers, I would have looked at you funny,” he said, adding that the facilities’ high-volume water use caught his eye.

“If we run out of water, nothing else really matters,” he said.

 

Long, who identifies as a conservative-leaning libertarian, said Tucker, although a Democrat, is “the only politician that is saying anything negative about data centers.” Older Republicans, he added, “don’t understand, like, the good versus evil fight that I believe we’re in.”

Polls show in many cases opposition to data centers transcends political partisanship. According to a June poll by the Texas Politics Project, 71% of registered Texas Democrats and 44% of registered Texas Republicans oppose data centers, with only 14% of Republicans strongly in support. National polls indicate even greater bipartisan alignment: a May Gallup survey found that 63% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats oppose data centers.

Long said he’s also found himself in a surprising alliance over data centers with some “liberal white women.”

“After the meeting … we’re hugging, and we’re all on the same page, trying to fight this,” he said.

“Humanity over injury and profit”

Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs, a Democrat running for the U.S. House in Virginia, called opposition to data centers a “unifying factor” that crosses political lines. Virginia is home to the world’s largest data center market, with about 685 operating or planned, and Texas advocates have looked to the state as a cautionary tale.

“I guarantee you Jesus would be outside right now flipping tables,” Beggs said in a recent public testimony against data centers.

People “deserve a place that is safe to raise their children, and we know the harm that data centers are doing,” Beggs said in an interview. “That’s not something you can tolerate as a mother, as a citizen, and as a Christian.”

Long, who has nine children, said in testimony earlier this year that data centers create “a sacrificial zone” that negatively harms children. It is ironic, he said, that Hood County adopted a “sanctuary for the unborn” ordinance while not being a sanctuary for the born.

 

Some Jewish leaders have also based their opposition on religious grounds.

“At the core of most religious traditions is a recognition of the sanctity of life and humanity over injury and profit,” Rabbi Jennie Rosenn of the Jewish climate advocacy group Dayenu said in a statement.

Rosenn said data centers are an affront to Judaism’s most foundational teachings of “life, not death (bacharta bahayim), protect creation (shomrei adamah), pursue justice (tirdof tzedek), not waste (bal tashchit), protect the most vulnerable (shomer ger yatom v’almanah), and ensure that life can continue l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation).”

“If this sounds like Judaism’s greatest hits, it’s because it is,” Rosenn continued. “That is how fundamentally the explosive growth of data centers across our nation threatens the values we — and many other people of faith — hold most dear.”

Jane Bannor, treasurer of Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community, a progressive advocacy group, said Unitarian Universalists around the nation are calling for moratoriums on data center construction based on a “respect for the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part.”

“We want to see businesses benefit not just corporate shareholders, but also the surrounding population,” Bannor said.

Tucker hopes religious-based opposition can affect the data center debate in Texas.

Faith appeals carry extra weight, he said, “when you can kind of tie [data centers] to those stories that are foundational to Christianity, that are foundational to a lot of our worldviews.”

(Mark Weinberg / Food52) 

This story is published through a collaboration between The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service.

Disclosure: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Meta and University of North Texas have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post “A deal with the devil”: Religion motivates data center opponents in Texas appeared first on Salon.com.

We held an event Wednesday evening at a bar in Brooklyn, co-hosted by TPM and Marisa Kabas’ indy site The Handbasket. I really enjoyed it and I wanted to thank everyone who came out. We have an expanding roster of in-person events. We’ve held events in Chicago, Boston and Austin over the last year or so — usually live podcasts — and we do them more frequently in our home bases in New York and D.C., where they’re easier to put on. Please join us for one of these when we do one in your area. They’re so much fun and it’s really special to meet and spend time with members of the far-flung or sometimes close-flung TPM community.

It’s become a cliche of the politics of this moment that the one thing that unites all Americans in our polarized age is that they hate data centers. But a dimension of this occurred to me during the discussion between Marisa and I that was moderated by TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo. I hadn’t thought of it before.