Journalists like *Wired*'s Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:

https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/

Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoops:

https://www.crisesnotes.com/

But for me, it was Tkacik - as usual - in the pages of *The American Prospect* who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook.

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While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:

https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/

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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 pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless

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if they wanted to reap its benefits. The NLRA didn't just put a ceiling over boss power - it also put a ceiling over worker militancy. Von Clausewitz says that "war is politics by other means," which implies that politics are *war* by other means. The alternative to politics isn't capitulation, it's *war*.

Trump has torn up the rules to the labor game, but that doesn't mean the game ends. That just means *there are no rules*.

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Bosses hired thugs who committed mass murder - literally. In 1913, strikebreakers working for the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company started a stampede during a union Christmas party that killed 73 people, including many copper miners' children:

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

Workers didn't take this lying down. Violence was met with violence. Bombs went off outside factories and stately mansions. There was gunfire and arson.

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The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they're doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto - trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

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nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqe94hqt3fuu7rvy9rpl85h3339vtn8psgewq4u05r7q4nup2kwp4qngwten nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq8gqlyy94srh6r0g2mw2mdkxn28cl3snfdwdtd07hq5yk7ju2wjwq563gqz I have done GPG signed email thank yous before, but they were labor intensive and didn't pay for themselves. However if you buy a bundle and attach it to an email to me, I'll reply to the email with a GPG-signed thank you.

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq8gqlyy94srh6r0g2mw2mdkxn28cl3snfdwdtd07hq5yk7ju2wjwq563gqz Probably because I only registered the domain a couple days ago.

It's a redirect to

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification?ref=created_projects

Thanks!

What the Supreme Court began, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now poised to finish, through the "Department of Government Efficiency," a fake agency whose acronym ("DOGE") continues Musk's long-running cryptocurrency memecoin pump-and-dump. The new department is absurd - imagine a department devoted to "efficiency" with two co-equal leaders who are both famously incapable of getting along with anyone - but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.

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911 words (30817 total) on Enshittification (a nonfiction book about platform decay) #DailyWords

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

The hospital system responded by "upcoding' patients: if you showed up with a broken leg and a history of coronary disease, they would code you as a heart patient *and* someone who needed a cast. They'd collect both lump sums, slap a cast on you, and wheel you out the door:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195137/

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Capitalism's most dogmatic zealots have a mystical belief in the power of markets to "efficiently allocate" goods and services. For them, the process by which goods and services are offered and purchased performs a kind of vast, distributed computation that "discovers the price" of everything.

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Let's take a sec here and notice something *genuinely great* happening in the US government: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's stunning, unbroken streak of *major*, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption, *with* the backing of the Supreme Court (yes, *that* Supreme Court), and which is only speeding up!

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nostr:npub1w68t2ld70zzmj9ts6rapmdcgsaw6rfk704l2ztq0tcsxmhd9srtsst7fc6 it got compressed - here's the original:

https://craphound.com/static.html

I can't get a definitive answer on whether TV static (see attached) constitutes a strobe effect that could endanger people with photosensitive epilepsy. Anyone know? PEAT (the only tool that measures this, seemingly?!) is Windows-only and won't run under WINE.

https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/112/497/047/895/985/833/original/33369d4b2e8e06d7.mp4

Even Google admits - grudgingly - that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

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Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

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Moneybags on the moon

#graffiti #nyc #sciencefiction #monopoly

nostr:npub10qyyu0uc7dvfjujsk8jt58mwvzjglj7es7uyct8m6m53x2eqy0vq3eg39t Thank you!

Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9

https://media-ecology.org/convention

* American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21

https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/

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My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."

https://craphound.com/shop/

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