New book: ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
https://t.co/YtuuAC6GPZ
@pluralistic@mamot.fr
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Aug 20 • 40 tweets • 9 min read
Forget surveillance capitalism - let's talk about *surveillance infantalism*: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.
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When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (e.g. Pac-Man ghosts) and utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:
1/ futurism.com/elon-musk-inte…
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When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.
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It's not just that Texas DA Gocha Ramirez charged a woman with murder for having an abortion (not t allowed even in Texas). It's that Ramirez paid for his mistress's abortion, after he impregnated her while having an affair with her *and* her sister:
1/ archive.is/20250812192203…
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Delta's announced new surveillance pricing: they're feeding an AI your nonconsensually harvested personal info that data-brokers and credit bureaux hold to predict the maximum you're willing to pay, and then price their tickets accordingly:
1/ fortune.com/2025/07/16/del…
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Ever notice how many right wing influencers are on the grift?
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As fascism burns across America, it's important to remember that Trump and his policies are *not popular*.
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If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).
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In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in *Perspectives on Politics*:
1/ cambridge.org/core/journals/…
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When a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's.
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Private equity firms are the demon princes of the hellspace that is the imploding, life-destroying, plutocrat-generating American economy.
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On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":
1/ soundcloud.com/thismachinekil…
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My latest *Locus Magazine* column is "Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives," about the secret engine of sweeping political upheavals (like Trumpism) and their inherent fragility:
1/ locusmag.com/2025/05/commen…
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Something's very different in tech. Once upon a time, every bad choice by tech companies - taking away features, locking out mods or plugins, nerfing the API - was countered, nearly instantaneously, by someone writing a program that overrode that choice.
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"Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" is my new podcast for CBC about the enshittogenic policy decisions that gave rise to enshittification. Episode two just dropped: "ctrl-ctrl-ctrl":
1/ cbc.ca/listen/cbc-pod…
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Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":
1/ bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optima…
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Astrophysicist Adam Becker knows a bit about science and tech - enough to show, in his book *More Everything Forever* that claims tech bros make about space colonies, mind uploading, and other skiffy subjects are nonsense dressed up as prediction:
Have you heard that tariffs are going to drive prices up? Me too. There's a good reason we're hearing a lot of talk about tariffs prices: tariffs are a tax that is ultimately paid by consumers.
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It's damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company *intended* to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn't have to fear competitors.
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A lawsuit filed in February accuses Tesla of remotely altering odometer values on failure-prone cars, in a bid to push these lemons beyond the 50,000 mile warranty limit:
1/ thestreet.com/automotive/tes…
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