In case you'd forgotten just how subversive and angry the Declaration of Independence actually is, in case the words have turned into hollow platitudes due to repetition and archaic language, feast your senses upon "A New American Manifesto."
Absurdist Words has updated the Declaration into contemporary, informal language, updating the references for eerie correspondences to our current political fights:
Here are the Receipts:
1. He is lawless. He has no respect whatsoever for the rules of this country
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2. He has interfered with state Governors’ abilities to take care of their states in times of crisis, constantly breaking promises and being unreliable, just to wear them down so that they will do whatever he wants and then neglects them even when they do it
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3. He has abused the powers of the Presidency, leveraging people’s rights for business purposes.
4. He turns public events into personal campaign stunts, wearing all the rational people down with his antics and erratic behavior...
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....We tried to be empathetic to those who support Trump and his nationalism. We tried to give them the heads up that they had made a terrible choice. We tried to remind them that many of them were immigrants and that they should think twice about how we deny others entry.
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...We tried to appeal to their sense of honor. To their sense of civics. To their sense of duty. We tried to appeal to the fact that we’re all in this together and that we are all one nation. We tried to explain that backing authoritarianism would be terrible for everyone.
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...But they wouldn’t listen. We tried. We wanted to fight Trump together. But they mock justice and shun the idea of unity. So nothing personal, but they picked a side.
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In other words, the world we're living in is the best possible world, and the fact that you got contact burns from collapsing on the scorching sidewalk outside of the grocery store where you couldn't afford your weekly shopping is unfortunate, but unavoidable.
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*Corporate Bullshit: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America* is @NickHanauer, @joanwalsh and @donaldrcohen12's 2023 book on the history of corporate apologetics; it's great:
I found out about this book last fall when @ddayen reviewed it for the @TheProspect; Dayen did a great job of breaking down its thesis, and I picked it up for my newsletter.
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Last weekend, I was at @Defcon 32, where I had the privilege of giving a talk: "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification."
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):
Once you learn about the "collective action problem," you see it everywhere. Democrats - including elected officials - wanted Biden to step down, but no one wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding "license fees" that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked.
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Every performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross earnings, which will be diverted to Apple, the most valuable company on Earth. Apple contributes nothing to their work, but it can steal a third of their wages:
Enshittification starts with companies being good to end users. In this case, Apple made a quality product - Iphones - and carefully tended its App Store.
Walmart didn't just *happen*. The rise of Walmart - and Amazon, its online successor - was the result of a specific policy choice, the decision by the Reagan administration not to enforce a key antitrust law.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: