« Depuis 72 jours [c'etait hier], pas un seul morceau de pain n'est entré » : à Gaza, « une famine délibérée et entièrement fabriquée » par Israël. humanite.fr/monde/armee-israel…
Les 2 millions de Palestiniens qui vivent dans l’enclave font face à un risque critique de famine. Avec le blocus total imposé par le gouvernement d’extrême droite de Benyamin Netanyahou depuis le 2 mars, la faim est utilisée comme une arme de guerre…
"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":
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:
The thesis of the show is straightforward: the internet wasn't killed by ideological failings like "greed," nor by economic concepts like "network effects," nor by some cyclic force of history that drives towards "re-intermediation." Rather, all of these things were able to conquer the open, wild, creative internet because of *policies* that meant that companies that yielded to greed were able to harness network effects in order to re-intermediate the internet.
My enshittification work starts with the *symptoms* of enshittification, the procession of pathological changes we can observe as platform users and sellers. Stage one: platforms are good to their end users while locking them in. Stage two: platforms worsen things for those captive users in order to tempt in business customers - who they *also* lock in.
Stage three: platforms squeeze those locked-in business customers (publishers, advertisers, performers, workers, drivers, etc), and leave behind only the smallest atoms of value that are needed to keep users and customers stuck to the system. All the value except for this mingy residue is funneled to shareholders and executives, and the system becomes a pile of shit.
This pattern is immediately recognizable as one we've all experienced and continue to experience, from eBay taking away your right to sue when you're ripped off:
Or Duolingo replacing human language instructors with AI, even though *by definition* language learners are not capable of identifying and correcting errors in AI-generated language instruction (if you knew more about a language than the AI, you wouldn't need Duolingo):
There is clearly an epidemic - a pandemic - of enshittification, and cataloging the symptoms is important to tracking the spread of the disease. But if we're going to *do something* to stem the tide, we need to identify the *contagion*. What caused enshittification to take root, what allows it to spread, and who was patient zero?
That's where "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" comes in:
At root, "enshittification" is a story about *constraints* - not the bad things that platforms are doing *now*, but rather, the forces that *stopped them* from doing those things *before*. There are four of those constraints:
I. Competition: When we stopped enforcing antitrust law, we let companies buy their competitors ("It is better to buy than to compete" -M. Zuckerberg). That insulated companies from market-based punishments for enshittification, because a handful of large companies can enshittify in lockstep, matching each other antifeature for antifeature. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly.
II. Regulation: The collapse of tech into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four" (-T. Eastman) allowed the Big Tech cartel to collude to capture its regulators. Tech companies don't have to worry about governments stepping in to punish them for enshittificatory tactics, because the government is on Big Tech's side.
III. Labor: When tech workers were scarce and companies competed fiercely for their labor, they were able to resist demands to enshittify the products they created and cared about. But "I fight for the user," only works if you have power over your boss, and scarcity-derived power is brittle, crumbling as soon as labor supply catches up with demand. 11/
(This is why tech bosses are so excited to repeat the story that AI can replace programmers - whether or not it's true, it is an effective way to gut scarcity-driven tech worker power). Without unions, tech worker power vanished.
IV. Interoperability: The same digital flexibility that lets tech companies pull the enshittifying bait-and-switch whereby prices, recommendations, and costs are constantly changing cuts both ways. Digital toolsmiths have always thwarted enshittification with ad- and tracker-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, etc. In a world of infinitely flexible computers, every 10' high pile of shit summons a hacker with an 11' ladder.
This week's "Who Broke the Internet?" focuses on those IP laws, specifically, the legislative history of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law whose Section 1201 bans any kind of disenshittifying mods and hacks.
We open the episode with Dmitry Skylarov being arrested at Def Con in 2001, after he gave a presentation explaining how he defeated the DRM on Adobe ebooks, so that ebook owners could move their books between devices and open them with different readers.
Skylarov was a young father of two, a computer scientist, who found himself in the FBI's clutches, facing a lengthy prison sentence for telling an American audience that Adobe's product was defective, and explaining how to exploit its defects to let them *read their own books*.
Skylarov was the first person charged with a felony under DMCA 1201, and while the fact of his arrest shocked technically minded people at the time, it was hardly a surprise to anyone familiar with DMCA 1201. This was a law acting exactly as intended.
DMCA 1201 has its origins in the mid-1990s, when Al Gore was put in charge of the National Information Infrastructure program to demilitarize the internet and open it for civilian use (AKA the "Information Superhighway"). Gore came into conflict with Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton's IP Czar, who proposed a long list of far-ranging, highly restrictive rules for the new internet, including an "anticircumvention" rule that would ban tampering with digital locks.
This was a pretty obscure and technical debate, but some people immediately grasped its significance. Pam Samuelson, the eminent Berkeley copyright scholar, raised the alarm, rallying a diverse coalition against Lehman's proposal. They won - Gore rejected Lehman's ideas and sent him packing.
But Lehman didn't give up easily - he flew straight to Geneva, where he arm-twisted the UN's World Property Organization into passing two "internet treaties" that were virtually identical to the proposals that Gore had rejected. Then, Lehman went back to the USA and insisted that Congress had to overrule Gore and live up to its international obligations by adopting his law. As Lehman said - on some archival tape we were lucky to recover - he did "an end-run around Congress."
Lehman had been warned, in eye-watering detail, about the way that his rule protecting digital locks would turn into a system of private laws. Once a device was computerized, all a manufacturer needed to do was wrap it in a digital lock, and in that instant, it would become a literal felony of use that digital device in ways the manufacturer didn't like.
It didn't matter if you were legally entitled to do something, like taking your car to an independent mechanic, refilling your ink cartridge, blocking tracking on Instagram, or reading your Kindle books on a Kobo device. The fact that tampering with digital locks was a crime, combined with the fact that you had to get around a digital lock to do these things, made these things illegal.
Lehman knew that this would happen. The fact that his law led - in just a few short years - to a computer scientist being locked up by the FBI for disclosing defects in a widely used consumer product, was absolutely foreseeable at the time Lehman was doing his Geneva two-step and "doing an end-run around Congress."
The point is that there were always greedy bosses, and since the turn of the century, they'd had the ability to use digital tools to enshittify their services. What changed wasn't the greed - it was the law. When Bruce Lehman disarmed every computer user, he rendered us helpless against the predatory instincts of anyone with a digital product or service, at a moment when *everything* was being digitized.
This week's episode recovers some of the lost history, an act I find very liberating. It's easy to feel like you're a prisoner of destiny, whose life is being shaped by vast, impersonal forces. But the enshittificatory torments of the modern digital age are the result of specific choices, made by named people, in living memory. Knowing who did this to us, and what they did, is the first step to undoing it.
In next week's episode, we'll tell you about the economic theories that created the "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four." We'll tell you who foisted those policies on us, and show you the bright line from them to the dominance of companies like Amazon. And we'll set up the conclusion, where we'll tell you how we'll wipe out the legacies of these monsters of history and kill the enshitternet.
Get "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" in whatever enshittified app you get your podcasts on (or on Antennapod, which is pretty great). Here's the RSS:
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88% of delegates in union representing a fifth of Norway’s population support immediate boycott, divestment and embargo On Saturday, the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) cast a hi…
Marysol Ruberte no podía creer lo que estaba viendo en la televisión. El presidente de Aragón, Jorge Azcón, acababa de anunciar que el fondo Azora construiría un gran centro de datos en su pueblo, Villamayor de Gállego, a las afueras de Zaragoza.
Y como no, el presidente de la comunidad es del PP. Me jode por la perdida de patrimonio cultural pero, disfrutad de lo votado.
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And, obviously, the president of the autonomous community of Aragon is from the PP political party. It pisses me off the lost of cultural wealth but, enjoy what you voted for.
I might support *some* data centers if they safeguarded human culture, literature, art, our personal memories. But the data they're hoarding is the fact that 4 years ago I compared prices on deck paint. Ephemera that no human will ever want to look at again.
Donald Trump is killing the free press at home and abroad, For those of us who’ve spent our careers defending truth in some of the world’s most repressive media environment, Kari Lake's recent announcement By Muhammad Tahir On May 6, Kari Lake, senior adviser at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, wroteUSAGM is excited to announce a partnership with One America News Network (OAN) to provide news feed services to USAGM networks,Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Martí,Voice of America (VOA).
OMG what a read… still reading but best line so far: “Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes.” 😐 Thanks for sharing this! (And I certainly do remember Vance Packard & Hidden Persuaders)
Report: The IDF murderers of 6-yo Hind Rajab have been identified
An Israeli tank unit attacked the civilian vehicle of Hind’s family & later destroyed the... ambulance dispatched to rescue her.
The Hind Rajab Foundation has identified the Israeli military unit & commander who killed the six-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza in 2024, her family members, & two medics who tried to save her.
Brussels, 3 May 2025 — Today, little Hind Rajab should have been blowing out candles on her 7th birthday . On this day of remembrance and heartbreak, the Hind Rajab Foundation has...
There is a subset of people in the world who think it's an act of bigotry to point out the supreme hypocrisy of a nation that was established to provide refuge for a group of oppressed people who were subject to genocide, using its own military might to subject *another* oppressed group of people to genocide.
If the comparison with a well known genocidal fascist regime of the past is so upsetting, maybe you should just sit with that feeling for a bit and reconsider who and what you support.
Or you could just use DARVO tactics and turn other people's critical observations of one's support for something so unjust and terrible into an excuse to portray yourself as the true victim.
This, by the way, is a common approach of oppressors everywhere.
"But it's wrong to use the fascist regime of the past who subjected members of that nation to genocide as a means of criticizing the hypocrisy of this nation subjecting another group of people to genocide."
Your sense of "wrong" defies logic, ethics, and common sense empathy for others.
And you can (and will) reflexively label this as bigotry because it's a useful thought-stopping action and an ass cover for your own support of brutality, abuse, and horror.
You don't have to think about the nature of what you support if you can just reach for that convenient response.
You're covering for the murder of others by doing this.
Qassam have never said it intentionally mimics the anti fascist red triangle that was reclaimed after WWII, but calling their use of it "revisionist" is beyond ironic
Once worn by political prisoners in Nazi camps, the symbol has recently been associated with Hamas, but also with pro-Palestinian activism. Opinion is divided on whether Germany is justified in mulling a ban.
A majority of Australians support the idea that gas exports should be taxed, a policy proposed by both the Liberal Party and the Greens during the election campaign, regardless of who they think proposed the idea.
Their concern about climate change is routinely mocked as a religious orthodoxy, often by commentators who claim to be concerned about religious freedom for “people of faith”.
Although their income taxes and GST supply the great majority of government revenue, they are regularly treated as parasites living off the relatively modest amounts paid by mining companies in royalties and company taxes.
While the struggles of other Australians are treated sympathetically, young metropolitans, unable to enter the housing market, are blamed for spending their money on smashed avocado — or just for not having parents wealthy enough to support them.
When then deputy prime minister Michael McCormack described millions of hardworking metropolitans as “woke, inner-city greenies”, no one batted an eye.
On Saturday, however, metropolitan Australians found their voice. They are sick of being put down and ignored by the elite rural and regional minority who have held an unfair share of political power, and they are not going to take it any more.
But if the Liberal Party ignores the results of the election or, worse still, follows the lead of Barnaby Joyce and the National Party in denouncing city-dwellers, they will face immense difficulties.
John the "old foe" has been vanquished, it's time for people like me to "go into the west", we've done our job, took a couple of tries but people finally started thinking with their own brains instead of just accepting whatever garbage the media was spewing at them.
The primary vote for the Liberal Party proper (excluding NP, ONP and Qld LNP) must be close to, or even below, 20 per cent. That's stunning for a historically dominant party #auspol
Who is going to be elected prime minister of Australia tomorrow? The weak as piss Labor Albanese or the Trump look alike Liberal Dutton?
Either way we lose, probably more with Dutton than Albanese... but what a choice. The menu is disappointing, we should all try a different restaurant! #auspol
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his rival Peter Dutton will face off in a tight election next week in the midst of housing shortages and a cost-of-living crisis. Read more from @BBCNews flip.it/E8bSrl #Australia #Elections #Albanese #PrimeMinister #Politics
One of Texas' most celebrated authors, author of the classic novel Lonesome Dove, is also one of the authors who could face #censorship under HB 3225. Chris Barton, vice president of the #Texas Institute of Letters, explains why we must oppose the latest batch of book ban bills ... texasobserver.org/texas-legisl…
Looking at LNP and Labor billboards, a picture of harmony. Both agree on the message "You should vote for us because the other lot are even worse" #auspol
“I wanted to do something that would amplify and support poets across the state and amplify and uplift poetry for everyone.” texasobserver.org/texas-first-…
Featured story: “Greg Abbott relied on a last ditch phone call from Donald #Trump to bully Republican lawmakers to fall in line.” texasobserver.org/abbott-trump…
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Question raised by Russian military links w Indonesia: if Indonesia attacked us, w Russian backing, where would US stand? My judgement, with probability 1, Aside, with nice words for the Russians 60% 2. Actively aiding the enemies against us 30 % 3. Helping us 9% 4. Fighting on our side 1% #auspol
Fortunately, this is highly unlikely. But our ties with the US make us less safe, not more. We should be supporting our neighbours against aggressive US policy, not trying to cut a separate deal based on our historical alliance #auspol
only actual security here is Australia joining the China bloc. But the task of getting Australians to join is pretty massive. I honestly don't know where to start.
[BLOG] L'incroyable Marcel Pagnol ! Au début, la langue paraît simple et les personnages caricaturaux. On le voit venir, Marcel, avec ses gros sabots. Mais on se rend vite compte qu’on n’est pas là pour ça, que ce que Pagnol recrée, c’est aussi sa nostalgie à lui. Les histoires de villages, les rivalités, les chèvres dans la colline, le Pernod en terrasse, les parties de boules endiablées, les caractères à la serpe. On a l’impression de toujours les avoir connus...
Chez moi, Marcel Pagnol est très attaché à l’enfance, à ma grand-mère et son coffret VHS des adaptations de Jean de Florette et Manon des sources regardées un nombre incalculable de fois pendant le…
“We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time, and this is just the start, says investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. In a searing talk, she details a fast-moving technological coup and the rise of the “broligarchy”: an unprecedentedly powerful class of tech executives who are complicit in dismantling democracy and enabling authoritarian control across the world."
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Torment Nexus that was titled "Be careful what you post on social media, they are listening," which was triggered in part by the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student at Columbia University who took part in …
The next events in the Heard & Mc. Donald Islands vs. USA trade war does not cool down as Heard & Mc. Donald Islands dictator, Generalissimo Pingu, vows to take over the USA to make it his 3rd state, thus totally ignoring the recent referendum for self-determination of the people.
Donald Trump, the current president of the USA, has not yet responded.
Eric Ciotti, après sa démission de la tête de l’exécutif départemental en 2017, pour cause de cumul des mandats, aurait conservé, en tant que président de la commission des finances du département, les mêmes avantages qu’il détenait en tant que président de la collectivité. #AnticorAgitnouvelobs.com/politique/202504…
Le chef de file des députés de l’Union des Droites pour la République (UDR) à l’Assemblée nationale est accusé d’avoir conservé, en tant que président de la commission des finances du département des Alpes-Maritimes, les mêmes avantages qu’il détenai…
Google just added a powerful new feature to Android: The Linux terminal. It's easier than you think to use and it unlocks a whole new level of control.
finding a linux distro that runs on old iphones would be handy. i was given a box full a while back.
i agreed because i was going to harvest them for batteries and speakers. however in hindsight it is still a lot of tech waste if we can not recycle the rest of them too.
#JeRecrute enfin pas moi mais l'association de protection de l'enfance pour laquelle je travaille.
Profil recherché : #directeur #directrice de dispositif, titulaire d'un diplôme de niveau I, expérience requise sur un poste à responsabilités du secteur social ou médico-social
Type de poste : CDI à temps complet, forfait jours annualisé, véhicule de service, poste soumis à astreintes, mutuelle d'entreprise
@yapluca Oh purée, merci mais non merci. Je cherche un poste de responsable achat et logistique dans l'industrie, pas le 4ème burn-out le plus rapide du monde en semi bénévolat. J'ai déjà du sang de malades, de vieux et d'universitaires sur les mains, je veux pas en plus celui des enfants de l'ASE. @nasher : Tu pourras dire à ton employeur que "diplôme de niveau I" ça n'existe plus dans la nomenclature maintenant (depuis 2019 quand même) c'est "niveau 7" et que "véhicule de service" qui signifie "tu paieras pas tes déplacements pros de ta poche" c'est un peu du foutage de poire?
Moins d'un an. Empathie et bienveillance ont été vues comme de la faiblesse par une cheffe de service qui briguait le poste. Frustrée d'avoir été écartée, elle a monté les autres chefs de services contre la directrice.
Je vais regretter cette collègue TSA non diag, on avait un bon relationnel de travail.
@uichelorraine 14 kilos perdus en moins d'un an à cause du stress lié à la situation et un risque d'AVC. Maman de 3 enfants, elle a préféré se mettre en sécurité.
@uichelorraine @yapluca Pour le sang, ça va, on n'a eu "que" deux morts sur les 7 années que j'ai pu observer de l'intérieur : une ado qui s'est défenestrée d'un internat au deuxième étage et un autre qui s'est noyé pour cause de non-respect par les éducs des consignes d'encadrement de sortie.
Par contre, comme on peine à recruter (tout le secteur médico-social, pas que nous), y'a un gros recours à l'intérim, donc pas vraiment de constance sur les personnes entourant les gamins, notamment dans les MECS.
On a depuis peu une DG de transition qui va redresser la barre mais on a vraiment besoin de recruter des directeur•ice•s engagés.
Les rares personnes qu'on arrive à recruter sur des postes d'éducs sont généralement en reconversion pro, n'ont ni la culture ni les pratiques.
Ça a pu donner lieu à une situation ubuesque où un service d'hébergement (chef de service, éducs et veilleurs) se ligue pour dire à la directrice de tutelle qu'il faut mettre un gamin dehors pcq il est trop compliqué à gérer...
@uichelorraine @yapluca Je parlais de directeur•ice•s engagé•e•s, c'est pas pour rien que je diffuse sur le Fédivers ces offres-là, parce que je sais que sur ce réseau, y'a des gens qui portent leurs valeurs aussi haut que moi et avec qui j'aurai grand plaisir à travailler.
食 Shoku the MN Wolf
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