net.wars

Apocalypse now

There is, as previously noted, a subgenre of current publishing dedicated to dissecting Silicon Valley’s hard turn to the right.

In The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, San Francisco journalist Gil Durán argues that destabilizing democracy is not a by-product but the point. The book builds on Durán’s blog and podcast by the same name.

Durán’s attention was drawn in 2021-2022 by four acrimonious, right wing-funded recall elections, first governor Gavin Newsom, then two school board members and the district attorney. He began investigating the radicalization of venture capital, starting with four articles at The New Republic.

The Nerd Reich follows the spread of ideas from a little-regarded book from 1997: The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, father of Jacob, the former MP briefly famous for reclining on a Parliamentary bench during a debate on Brexit. The book offered an extreme version of common 1990s ideas: the Internet and related technology such as cryptocurrencies would destroy nation-states (bitcoin was in part intended to bypass government financial systems, and was the culmination of 20 years of cypherpunk discussions.)

Unlike Charles Arthur, who argued in 2021’s Social Warming that social media harms grew because no one cared to stop them, Durán unfolds more of a deliberate plan built by people who see democracy as an inconvenience. He finds their resentment surprising, given how many – Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, for two – are immigrants whose US lives have been extraordinarily fruitful and whose success has been fueled by government subsidies and contracts.

Durán is not the first to notice that resentment, and he credits the person who was: Paulina Borsook, who in 1996 published Cyberselfish, anessay in Mother Jones that she developed into a 2000 book. From observation, she spotted that Silicon Valley companies, once grateful for government subsidy, were turning hostile as “technolibertarians” complained of interference. Clean water, good roads, other infrastructure, none of that registered as government-conferred benefits. The book’s warning was largely ignored, to be rediscovered last year in, for example, the New York Times and more recently in Mother Jones. It will be republished next week with a new foreword from Durán.

It’s easy to forget now how recent widespread anger at billionaire techbros is. Borsook wrote while the dot-com boom was peaking, usually dated to the merger of AOL with Time-Warner, which was announced in January 2000 and completed in January 2001. After the crash, for nearly a decade the big action was the growth of Web 2.0 – blogs and peer-to-peer networking. The 2010s saw the rise of social media, mobile phones, and apps. It wasn’t until 2017 that Doug Rushkoff documented growing hostility to the technology industry in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. In 2022, he followed up with Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which dissected “the mindset” of men seeking to survive “the event”, whose exact details were unspecified but was assumed to be apocalyptic. One aspect of that was that the rest of us are there to be exploited and discarded.

Earlier this year Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, offered “a guided tour of the innovator class”. In it, Silverman follows the attitudes Borsook spotted through to the 2024 US presidential election, choosing to focus somewhat on Elon Musk in his period of highest political visibility.

Only six months later, in Durán’s book, Musk is less of a major player, despite his DOGE adventures. Instead, Durán highlights Peter Thiel as the bigger danger, seeding the White House with 15 of his acolytes. Durán calls a-heartbeat-away-from-the-presidency JD Vance “almost entirely a creation of Peter Thiel”.

Seeing all these ideas migrate from the fringes to reach the center reminds me also of Michael Lewis’s 1997 book, Losers (US title: Trail Fever), in which he chronicled that same process in the context of the 1996 US presidential campaigns. Durán’s 2024 articles covering the plan of a group of tech billionaires to efforts by Calfornia’s Solano County and turn its cities into privately owned “acceleration zones” provide another example – from Balaji Srinivasan’s 2022 book, The Network State through California to US president Donald Trump’s beginning to talk last year about building freedom cities on public land, Newsweek describes them as “pockets of deregulated areas, with the aim of promoting innovation and technological advancements”.

Even Peter Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist follow this pattern: in 2020 Talia Lavin’s book, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, documented the right’s modern takeup of the medieval Christian crusades seen in online forums. When I wrote about similar rhetoric in the leadup to the turn of the millennium, I was told that every new apocalyptic cult recycles the same old tropes. And that – apocalyptic cult – is how Durán winds up framing this group.

Durán ends with a call to action: rethink our relationship with technology and rethink capitalism. Billionaires like Sam Altman sound weirdly socialist when they talk about universal prosperity. Maybe we keep the aspiration but find someone else to implement it?

Illustrations: Prophecies of Apocalypse, from Raphael’s Almanac by anonymouse circa 1927-1861 (via Public Domain Review).

Also this week:
– TechGrumps 3.44: My Nuclear Bunker Is Too Woke
– At Plutopia, we interview Finn Myrstad about his work at the Norwegian Consumer Council to reclaim the Internet.

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Network lock-in

At The Overspill this week, veteran UK technology journalist Charles Arthur highlighted a blog posting at the venture capital firm A16Z by cyberethnographer and NYU adjunct professor Ruby Thelot claiming that “enshittification isn’t real”.

Thelot’s main argument: “Simply put, more people use Instagram every year, they use it on average longer every day, year over year and, finally, their reported satisfaction has also grown over time, indicating no decrease in overall satisfaction, stated or revealed.” I immediately imagined a survey like this about the London railway node Clapham Junction.

Thelot uses Instagram as an exemplar. No matter how much users complain, he says, surveys show they continue to spend more time on the site and indicate greater satisfaction. To him, swapping out chronological feeds for algorithms is just part of natural evolution as platform adapt to their evolving user base. Enshittification, he concludes, provides “absolution” for “platform narcissists” who need to forgive themselves for remaining on the platforms. They’re not *really* trapped.

Some of this is fair. People *don’t* like change, particularly when it removes or alters features they’re used to. It’s also true that the generation who began our online lives pre-Internet and embraced email and the open web early on are often the most loudly disaffected with the current state of things.

Thelot is also undoubtedly correct that tech moguls have learned they can ignore complaints because people will go on using their products. This is a lesson they learned years ago, when they growing explosively – and differently designed. Today, the oligopoly of competitors all behave roughly the same to promote engagement. The courts continue to repeatedly agree that these companies are abusive.

He also ignores the various forms of lock-in and network effects. These are not just individual choices. People want to be where their friends are, and it’s non-trivial to persuade all those school groups, clubs, and communities of interest to move. In fact, research from the University of New South Wales in April shows that platforms don’t have to “addict” users; they merely have to raise the cost of leaving, measured in the loss of their connections and businesses.

But Doctorow was not just talking about social media or just about users. Amazon is a great example; its product search has become broken. So is Google, a three-time monopolist whose change in behavior Doctorow blames on tech workers’ loss of power.

Enshittification is about power and its abuse. Saying it isn’t real rejects the widespread decades-old understanding that, “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product”, generally attributed to Andrew Lewis. As every business tries to expand its revenue streams, sometimes now you’re the product even when you *are* paying – which is exactly what enshittifies the customer experience. Just this week, Uber said it will start playing ads during Uber journeys even while drivers in multiple countries are suing it over using its algorithms to squeeze every last penny out of both riders and drivers. TV manufacturers are showing their own advertising, and Hyundai will charge extra for the “instrument cluster” that provides detail about what your car is doing. Whichof these moves doesn’t make life objectively worse (and/or less safe) for customers?

Enshittification became the word of the year in 2024 because it resonates with so many frustrated, angry people. Pretending they don’t really care is denial.

***

Concern over the US’s pole position in Internet governance – as in the recent case of a Texas county court ordering ICANN to lock a domain worldwide – continues to grow. Last month, the Trump administration placed Austici/Inventati on a terrorism watchlist, as Matthew Petti reports at Reason. This is an Italian provider of free encrypted email and web hosting to about 20,000 activist organizations around the world. The consequence has been to crippling. Not only does the designation put the use of US-based payment systems such as PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa out of reach immediately, but it has also losr its website worldwide, since the registry for its domain – austici.org – is also US-based.

Legacy design means that a lot of other Internet infrastructure is also US-based, such as Let’s Encrypt, used to secure connections to more than 700 million websites worldwide (says Wikipedia), more than 23 million of them in Europe.

Blocking via payment systems is not new. In 2010, the US government told PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa that Wikileaks’ activities were illegal in the US, choking donations until the organization could find alternative routes. That kind of blockade still happens; a friend pointed at the story of a Cuban sandwich shop in Belfast. which can’t get paid by Deliveroo because the latter’s bank is American and won’t pay anyone or anything associated with Cuba.

But implementing sanctions via US-based Internet governance nodes is relatively new – see last year’s sanctions against the International Criminal Court and other examples – and is harder to counter. Whatever the rights or wrongs of any one particular site or service, that one country’s leader can selectively shut down any organization in the world any time they like is alarming.

What used to be soft power is an attack vector.

Illustrations: Clapham Junction railway station, in 2002 (via Wikimedia.)

Feeding the machine

Following 1998, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was established, many were concerned that it might become a force for censorship. Critics asked: would ICANN remain the neutral technical steward it was intended to be? Turns out, ICANN wasn’t the right vulnerability.

The desire to force the Internet content to conform to “local ordinances” (as John Perry Barlow once called the US First Amendment) started before the Internet. In 1994, Robert and Carleen Thomas were imprisoned for transmitting pornographic images from their California-based bulletin board over interstate telephone lines to Tennessee, where they were illegal. Today, US companies are outraged at fines and demands for compliance with the UK’s Online Safety Act requirements for age verification.

Now there’s a new twist. In Travis County, Texas, a court has ordered Verisign, the ICANN-appointed Virginia-based registry for .com, to lock a domain belonging to the streaming platform Kick Online Entertainment SA because it has not implemented age verification as required under Texas law.

The technical bit: ICANN oversees the entire domain name system, which ties human-friendly names like pelicancrossing.net to the numbers computers actually use under the hood. Each top-level domain – .com, .net, .uk – has a single registry in charge of it. Registries oversee myriad registrars, which are the companies you pay when you register a domain. Many of the world’s most valuable businesses depend on .com, and US-based Verisign is a critical point of failure for all of them.

The court issued its writ (PDF) in June, after Kick Online ignored both a September 2024 order to implement age verification and a $9 million default judgment. To get it back, Kick Online must both post a $9.14 millionbond and implement age verification. At TechTimes, Mark Rutherford details the history, noting that Dutch authorities ordered its local host to block its site for a week earlier this year when a CNN investigation found content that’s illegal in the Netherlands. It is still under criminal investigation there. The UK’s regulator, Ofcom, has fined it £800,000 for failing to implement age verification for UK users. The Dutch action blocked the site in the Netherlands; the Texas order cuts it off everywhere in the world.

Rutherford notes that the basis for the order was set last year, when the US Supreme Court upheld the Texas age verification law in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton. And he warns: the court has pre-authorized other cases against foreign .com operators to obtains similar writs without court proceedings. And: it opens the way for any state attorney general “with access to a Travis County-style court order” can use this same tactic against any foreign .com operator for any category of violation of civil law.

A local ordinance has gone global.

***

In 2005, Vernor Vinge set out to imagine how the then-prevailing technology trends could enable a society of pervasive mass surveillance. I remembered that and the resulting novel, Rainbows End, this week when reading that a New Zealand used bookstore canceled thousands of orders for niche books when the owner realized they were being bought by AI companies to scan and destroy. Part of Vinge’s setting was a campus library destructively digitizing all its holdings; this was around the time that Google Books was being compiled.

Owners of second-hand book shops care about books for the knowledge they contain, but also as artifacts. Scanning them to provide greater access is compatible. Destroying them is not. Every shredded book is a lost opportunity for someone new to unexpectedly encounter it. The same is true of giant digital collections of scanned books – but it’s not true of AI chatbots, which vanish individual works and their attribution and context under a pile of unreliable summary.

Revisiting the piece I wrote for the Guardian in 2006 about Vinge’s book and his talk at the 2006 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, reminded that Rainbows End was set in 2025. As so often, it’s easier to be right about the direction of technology than its timing. In Vinge’s 2025, wearable computers were everywhere, live meetings included ultra-realistic remote projections, augmented reality was readily available to all, and autonomous taxis were easily summoned from any location. His basis for this projected future was an extension of then-controversial Trusted Computing, a security measure some feared would block open source software. Vinge’s imagined Secure Hardware Environment dedicated some bandwidth and a small portion of every semiconductor to regulatory use, enabling surveillance by providing convenience: speed through security checkpoints, pay taxes, cut crime. Larry Ellison would adopt it in a heartbeat. Vinge himself remained hopeful that friction would defeat the attempt to control and surveil everything.

Friction we have: the growing protests against data centers, some of them successful, are one example. Data centers are physical manifestations of everything people fear and resent about the current direction of travel: Big Tech, billionaires, government and industry conspiring to ignore public needs and preferences, and a growing surveillance infrastructure. Other forms of surveillance – live facial recognition, license plate-reading company Flock, Meta’s smartglasses – are also getting pushback (public campaigns, vandalism, calls to ban).

On the other hand, Vinge also imagined by now we’d have successful treatments for Alzheimer’s and other pernicious diseases. So, wash?

Illustrations: “Burning the books”, by Rowland Thomas (contributed to Wikimedia by Boston Public Library).

Also this week:
– At the Plutopia Network News podcast, we interview Leonie Tanczer, who researches technology abuse and domestic violence.
– TechGrumps episode 3.43: Loaded Laptops at Dawn.

Opportunity costs

Last week, many media reported that in January 2025 a US citizen named Sam Tunick, arriving at the international airport in Atlanta, was stopped for questioning and told to hand over his phone. It appears that he gave the border agent a “duress password” – an unlocking code that wiped the phone when the agent typed it in. This feature is included in his phone’s operating system, GrapheneOS. Now he’s being charged with a felony.

At the Guardian, Timothy Pratt reports that without his knowledge, Tunick had been put on a terrorism watch list because of his alleged connections to protests against the giant, new, and controversial police training center known as Cop City. The government’s lawyers have apparently described this stop as, as Pratt has it, “an everyday interrogation at an international airport, ‘looking for anything that’s prohibited’.” Both that description and the event itself remind that rights are scarce at borders.

The government is prosecuting Tunick under a law criminalizing the knowing destruction of property to prevent seizure. This will be an interesting argument to follow: the *phone* was not destroyed. Most likely, neither was the data; there could easily be copies held elsewhere. Accessing those would require a warrant and reading Tunick his rights, steps the agents allegedly skipped in the airport.

***

Someone tried to tell me recently that the opposition to data centers is coming from people who don’t understand them. On the contrary: the people opposing the conversion of Brick Lane’s historic Truman Brewery into a data center, for example, seem to understand perfectly well that tradeoffs are being made that pit their lives in their local community and their need for affordable housing against the demands of the nearby financial industry. The conversion was approved this week by Angela Rayner, the new secretary for housing.

Similarly, the people in Utah opposing a data center the size of two Manhattans seem quite clear about the impact on local water and power resources. The Virginia behemoth canceled a few weeks ago was said to be the size of 144 Walmart supercenters and comprise 37 data centers and 14 substations; opponents were exercised about the project’s estimated energy demands, water pollution, and location next to a historic Civil War battlefield.

Even in Texas, where data centers have been embraced with enthusiasm, the governor is calling a halt until their planned connections to the public electrical grid can be audited; the more than 1,800 projects in the queue represent more than five times the grid’s record for peak demand, according to AP News. Powering data centers is only a small part of the rise in electricity prices across the US, as Newsweek says, but looks increasingly significant (assuming all these projects are completed, which is another question). Protests are also spreading in the Middle East, as Rest of World reports.

This is the stuff today’s pub arguments are made of. Data center builders tend to wave away these concerns: they are becoming more energy-efficient, and shrinking their water use, shifting to cooling techniques such as immersion, closed-loop systems, and air. The industry body TechUK says that more than 51% of 73 sites surveyed use forms of waterless cooling and 64% use less than a typical leisure center.

However, the International Energy Agency finds that although data centers are indeed adopting less energy-intensive designs, their power use continues to rise exponentially as more people use AI systems and adopt newer, energy-hungrier technologies such as AI agents. Siting data centers in areas that are already water-stressed adds to that stress no matter how efficient they become. Plus, they remain noisy and unsocial neighbors, and once they’re up and running tend to provide few jobs.

The more serious argument is that the data centers answer people’s desire to use the services they underpin. This is clearly not the case with the Brick Lane data center, a rare case where the purpose a particular data center is being built to serve is known. Taxing the traders, as some would suggest as a remedy, doesn’t really solve that: the conversion still changes an iconic building into a guarded lifeless blob in the middle of a famously densely populated and active community. What are the opportunity costs?

The original questioner makes the assumption that if people understood the *benefits* data centers bring, opposition would melt away. I can sympathize: I recall a 1990s meet-your-MP session full of complaints about planned 3G mobile towers = even though everyone wanted to be able to use the phone in their pocket.

Data centers, however, seem more like Ogden Nash’s poem about billboards. Data centers are associated with some of the world’s most disliked companies and their owners; scary stories of technology going rogue, while the benefits seemingly accrue only to those who want to control and surveil. There’s no obvious reward for many of us from a bigger, more AI-driven Facebook, seeing the web subsumed under Google’s “AI overviews”, or the prospect of increasingly invasive, personalized pricing, and the far greater privacy invasions of as AI-powered surveillance spreads widely.

Disagree with protesters if you want, but they’re not ignorant.

Illustrations: The view down Brick Lane toward the Truman Brewery (via Gons at Wikimedia.

Journeys through online harms

X.AI – the company was-trillionaireElon Musk built in 2025 by smashing together X (the former Twitter) and xAI, which he founded in 2023 – is suing the state of Minnesota, claiming that its new law banning access to nudification technology violates the First Amendment. X.AI, which SpaceX swallowed early this year, argues that it’s already stopping this sort of thing and that the law is overbroad and will block constitutionally protected speech. At Techdirt, Mike Masnick argues the law is genuinely badly drafted.

I saw this story while reading The Chatbot Trap: How Digital Friends Can Become Life-Threatening, by Geertrui Mieke De Ketelaere, Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World, by Adele Zeynep Walton, and Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back, by Beeban Kidron. In the first, a Belgian software engineer and AI expert discovers the suicide-inducing tendencies of chatbots, investigates how they work, and builds an organization to push for regulation. In the second, a Zoomer who lost her sister following disturbing online interaction embraces a new balance between digital media and human connections. In the third, a member of Britain’s House of Lords journeys from filmmaker to tireless campaigner for child safety online. All three love technology and its benefits but oppose the business models and individuals who are deciding the direction of travel.

De Ketelaere’s book begins with an email: someone who saw her speak about AI wants help “to assert my rights as a human being” after her conversations with a chatbot turned disturbing – and after reading media stories connecting chatbot use to cases of suicide. De Ketelaere ends with ideas about regulation and ways to recognize the signs of an unhealthy situation.

At this year’s Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, De Ketelaere warned of the danger of abruptly closing off intimate connections with bots because of the traumatic loss for the people concerned. As she says, even minor tweaks that favor the owning company’s business interests can undermine the relationships users experience.

De Ketelaere’s book is particularly strong in clearly describing the technical inner workings of these chatbots, revealed to her by careful study of the chatbot conversations her contacts supply. Few writing on this topic have presented such careful detail so readably.

Walton’s book begins with loss, and goes on to outline what she’s learned about the services her sister used and her own experiences as part of the generation who adopted and obsessed over Instagram as teens. Following chapters on social media and algorithms, she goes considers the impact of technology design on workers’ rights, individuals, and society more broadly through what she calls the “endless stream of content vomit”. Following some regulatory recommendations – consider social media addiction a public health issue, amend the Suicide Act 1961 to make companies liable, adopt safety by design, and make companies pay for the harms they cause – she concludes by considering how to reshape our relationship with technology so it serves us but does not dominate our lives.

In 2011, Charles Arthur‘s Social Warming argued that social media harms continue because no one chooses to stop them. Walton – like De Ketelaere and Kidron – angrily blames uncaring companies. It’s hard to disagree, although I take issue with Walton’s calling Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act “archaic”; granted, it was not written for today’s algorithmic feeds, but there would be no content moderation without it.

Kidron is well-known as a campaigner for children’s online safety. Yet all along she has repeatedly stressed that the privacy, autonomy, and protection children deserve from data grabs and online exploitation should be available to all of us.

Appointed to the House of Lords as a crossbench peer in 2012, Kidron’s interest began with seeing her 15-year-old daughter and three friends together focused solely on their own phones. Her subsequent investigation became her 2013 documentary InRealLife and inspired her concurrent creation of the 5Rights Foundation. The film is notable for the extraordinary trust and confidence she builds with the many young people she interviews; listening to them was crucial.

Her book is long and loaded with detail on her efforts and frustrations in working on legislation and amendments (making the book’s lack of an index infuriating). Disabused of the hope that a film would do the job, she travels the world, pushing everyone from Nobel Laureates to Silicon Valley CEOs to politicians to popes (plural) to take Internet harms seriously. She explains well the lobbyists’ playbook as she hopes for the industry’s “tobacco moment”. Late on, Oprah Winfrey links the lack of change to the silence after her show on sexual abuse, saying that parents don’t believe it will happen to their child, and they don’t want the fear. In response, Kidron attempts to show a positive vision, including personal changes to reclaim our lives.

Kidron’s tale largely ignores civil society other than the Campaign for Countering Digital Hate and Max Schrems. Yet she has more in common with groups like ORG than she may realize: many strange bedfellows are converging on digital sovereignty to enable resistance against the terms dictated by a distant, self-interested country.

Illustrations: Children playing, by Hubert-François Gravelot, 1760-1761 (via Smithsonian).

Waste management

This week, Amazon announced it would cripple a bunch of older Kindle models. Users will be able to go on reading the books that are already stored on their devices, but they won’t be able to add anything new, whether it’s borrowed, bought, or downloaded. The switch will be toggled on May 20, and applies to Kindle ereaders and Kindle Fires released in or before 2012. These devices had already been locked out of the store in 2022.

There is no benefit to consumers from doing this, even though Amazon is offering a substantial discount on newer devices for those who want to switch. There are presumably benefits to Amazon – namely, that it can update its store and other software without having to cater to older devices, plus sell an extra bunch of new ones. But overall, it’s a globally hostile move that creates a new pile of electronic waste composed of functioning hardware. One of these days, that’s going to be your car when some auto manufacturer decides that a “legacy” model isn’t worth supporting any more.

One option is to stop buying devices whose manufacturers demand that you surrender ownership in favor of their ongoing control. The other main possibility is to continue spreading right to repair laws so that a company like Amazon (or John Deere) wishing to shed itself of the responsibility of supporting older devices would be required to open them up to their users and the third-party ecosystem around them that would doubtless form. As the population of Internet of Things devices continues to grow around the world there will be much more of this – when we need much less. It’s absolutely maddening. Try a Kobo and the Gutenberg project.

***

It came out this week that language added in October 2025 to Microsoft’s terms of use says: “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.”

This is like the disclaimers that psychics and mediums in the UK issue to prospective customers to prevent exploitation of the credulous. A software company, though…if it’s going to admit up front that the service it’s providing can’t be relied on, why force it on people in the first place?

Obviously, the point here is to cover the company’s ass in case of lawsuits. It fits right in with companies’ general refusal to accept liability for problems created by the software they make. I’m glad the company is warning people, but the better solution – if the company can’t bring itself to discontinue it altogether – would be to either remove Copilot and let people download it if they want it or leave it turned off by default, warning people up front instead of in terms of use that normally wouldn’t have been read. Instead, what we have to do is search for instructions to remove it and hope Microsoft hasn’t made following them impossible.

***

In the midst of a lot of science fictional hype-scares about “AI” along come some more real concerns. We’ll start “small”: The New York Times has done a study that finds that Google’s AI Overviews are right 90% of the time. Sounds not-so-bad, until you remember the Law of Truly Large Numbers. That “90%” success rate when the remaining 10% is applied to trillions means the overall result is, as Ryan Whitwam puts it in summarizing the story for Ars Technica, “hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day”. That’s automation for you. Used to be you needed an army of bots to disseminate misinformation at any sort of scale, and even then it was less effective since it wasn’t backed by an apparently authoritative name (see also Microsoft, above).

More alarming are the reports surfacing about generative AI’s effectiveness at aiding and amplifying online crime. In November, Google announced internal researchers had found hackers experimenting with a script that interacts with Gemini’s API to create just-in-time modifications. Last month, at Hacker Noon polymorphic viruses, but again, this appears to be a step up in sophistication and speed.

At the same time, Casey Newton reports at Platformer, Anthropic’s latest model is likely the first of many that can find and exploit vulnerabilities in software in “ways that far outpace the efforts of defenders”. The announcement, which appears to have been inadvertent, was quickly followed by another, formally launching the new model, Claude Mythos, and Project Glasswing. The latter, per Newton, gives more than 40 of the biggest technology companies early access so they can use the model to find and patch vulnerabilities in both their own systems and open source systems that underpin digital infrastructure.

Unlike most AI-related scare stories, this one is backed by people who are usually sensible, such as Alex Stamos, formerly chief security officer at Facebook and Yahoo, and other security practitioners. These warnings are not coming from AI company CEOs with a concept to sell .

So: on the one hand, (hopefully) better software; on the other, (potentially) newer, more dangerous attacks. Ugh. To restore calm, I recommend Terry Godier’s essay The Last Quiet Thing.

Illustrations: Bill Steele, who in 1970 wrote the environmental anthem Garbage!.

The Silicon Valley chronicles

We should have seen this coming. At Platformer, Casey Newton reports that Meta has discussed pulling funding for the Oversight Board after 2028 after already reducing it “significantly” this year. Who needs fripperies like independent governance after reporting billions of losses in its Reality Labs unit, the bit responsible for the seemingly now-abandoned metaverse, the smartglasses, and, of course, AI? Per Newton, there are ongoing discussions about continuing the Oversight Board somehow, perhaps by opening it up to adjudicate for other platforms.

The reality is the Oversight Board’s moment has probably passed. In 2018, creating it was an effective public relations response to a series of scandalous revelations, beginning in 2017 with Carole Cadwalladr‘s work exposing Cambridge Analytica‘s use of Facebook to collect personal data to target political advertising. Its biggest moment was probably in January 2021, when the Oversight Board backed Facebook‘s decision to ban then-“former guy” Donald Trump for two years following the January 6 insurrection. Twitter banned him, too, and there was a brief crackdown on postings calling for violence. Much public criticism followed from whistleblowers such as Frances Haugen and Sarah Wynn Williams (2025), and the Netflix documentary The Great Hack..

Today, though,the big technology companies seem not to care. Maybe they will again if usage shrinks enough – the BBC reports an Ofcom study showing that UK adults are actively posting 61% less than last year. But defunding the Oversight Board seems consistent with the general decline of content moderation on Facebook and elsewhere. Neither fines, nor spreading age verification laws, nor other constraints can be remedied by funding an Oversight Board that is already rarely mentioned.

Besides, the years since 2018 have seen the “billionaire class” take a hard turn to the libertarian right; they show little inclination to be constrained personally or corporately by national laws or governments.

In a January 2025 interview, Netscape creator and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen provided this explanation: US Democrats “broke the deal”. That is, Silicon Valley supported Democrats as long as they left technology companies free of regulation. (Democrats might reply that they were responding on behalf of the public to changes in Silicon Valley companies’ behavior.)

In addition, Connie Loizos reports at TechCrunch that the billionaires who signed Warren Buffett’s and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge would now like it forgotten. At Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson fears most Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey’s enthusiasm for incorporating AI and robotics into more and bigger weapons. Anduril was founding in 2017, the year before Google employees petitioned the company to exit its contract with Project Maven, the Pentagon’s effort to harness machine learning and automatic targeting. By 2021, Tom Simonite was reporting at Wired that Google was bidding on military contracts. A few weeks back, at the Financial Times, Jemima Kelly called Silicon Valley billionaires “enablers, keeping us distracted and dumb”, citing a recent podcast interview in which Andreessen said he never engages in introspection.

Available to link all this together is Jacob Silverman’s new book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Musk is not the sole focus of Silverman’s “guided tour through America’s self-designated innovator class” and its resentment of government and power to change it. Much of the book, which Silverman began researching in 2023, focuses on other high-dollar funders such as David Sacks and DOGE co-mastermind Vivek Ramaraswamy (whom Silverman introduces as the boss who fired him from an early job), as well as members of the “Paypal Mafia” including Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Silverman also includes chapters on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Saudi Arabia’s growing connections to Silicon Valley, the cryptocurrency boom, the fight over TikTok’s US presence, a so-far failed plan to take over California’s Solano County, Sam Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall, and the choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. The book ends with the donors’ success – that is, Trump’s election in 2024.

With Gilded Rage, Silverman revives a formerly niche publishing subgenre , which documented the beginnings of this shift. First on the scene in the US, to the best of my knowledge, was northern California native Paulina Borsook with a 1996 essay for Mother Jones, Cyberselfish. In it, and in the subsequent 2000 book, she laid out Silicon Valley’s refusal to recognize the government assistance and military funding that enabled its wealth and growth. To Borsook, who described herself in the 1998 book Wired Women as the “token hippie feminist writing for Wired“, Silicon Valley’s turn to the right and distaste for government were already visible even then. In November, David Streitfeld profiled Borsook at the New York Times and noted the price she paid for her contrarian view.

In a 1995 essay The Californian Ideology, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron pushed Europe to take a different path.

Silverman’s most recent predecessor is Douglas Rushkoff’s 2022 skewing of “The Mindset” in Survival of the Richest. In Rushkoff’s telling, these high-wealth individuals are planning their safety and/or escape during and after “the incident” – that is, whatever catastrophe is going to wipe us all out.

So Silverman is less documenting a shift than he is describing an outcome: a political wave whose emergence into the mainstream only seems sudden.

Illustrations: Political cartoon from 1904, showing Standard Oil’s stranglehold on US industry (via Wikimedia).

Also this week:
At Plutopia, we interview Paulina Borsook.

Power games

UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s desire to bring in a UK digital ID is awake again with the announcement that the government plans to make the IDs available for “a handful of uses” before the next general election, due by 2029, . The requisite consultation closes May 5.

At Computer Weekly, Lis Evanstad adds a summary and detail about the consultation. Government by app! What could possibly go wrong?

Among other new information in the consultation: the age for being able to get a digital ID could drop below 18, perhaps even to issuance at birth. There might be a single unique identifier to enable linking data throughout government systems. Darren Jones, the prime minister’s chief secretary, talks smoother access to government services and the ability to share only the piece of data that’s needed for a specific purpose, but not about the risks of tying everything to a single identifier whose compromise can reverberate throughout your life.

In his Guardian piece, Stacey quotes Jones, who positions the digital ID as a way to improve fairness in access to government services, which he says accrue disproportionately to “pushy” people with time, patience, and energy.

This sounds good until you read Government Digital Service co-founder Tom Loosemore‘s blog, where he notes that creating that sort of stonewalling bureaucracy is often a deliberate strategy to manage demand. Loosemore argues that agentic AI will force an end to this strategy because agents will have unlimited patience and “reduce the cost to citizens of appeals, challenges, and calculations etc to near-zero”. Instead of having to manually dig through financial records, Loosemore finds in an experiment that an AI agent can scan the documents, find the information, and present only the data required to establish the citizen’s entitlement to benefits.

He believes AI agents will also bring a new level of transparency (and perhaps “pushiness”): “AI Agents will always dig out that 93 page PDF of guidance hidden.” Governments, he writes, will be forced to “clarify and tighten policies & processes, with all the painful political trade-offs therein”.

Or: will budget-protecting governments adopt their own agentic AIs to move and re-bury the stuff they don’t want applicants to find and recalibrate their requirements to make them resistant to automation? Seems just as likely, really.

While all that was going on, significant votes took place on the future of access to online content. On Tuesday, Jennifer McKiernan reports at the BBC, MPs rejected the proposed social media for under-16s, which would have been added to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill. Instead, the government is continuing to collect information from the consultation it launched on March 2, which closes on May 26.

Some MPs seem to have been persuaded by the argument – mooted by, among others, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children – that banning children from social media will simply push them to find darker, less visible unregulated online spaces with less in the way of protection or moderation. The Commons did, however, support a government proposal to give the relevant ministers greater powers to restrict or ban children’s access to social media services and chatbots, limit their use of VPNs, and change the “age of digital consent”. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill now goes back to the Lords for more discussion. .

As an unelected body, in recent years the House of Lords has often been a damper on hastily-passed legislation in response to political trends, but here they’re leading. The social media ban passed there. This week, as Dev Kundaliya reports at Computing. the Lords voted on two amendments, one to the Crime and Policing bill, the other to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill. At the Online Safety Act Network blog, University of Essex professor Lorna Woods explains these in detail. The first would enable the government to amend the Online Safety Act to “minimize or mitigate the risks of harm to individuals” from illegal AI-generated content. The second would give the government latitude to change the age of consent.

Woods’ main point is the extreme power being given the government here to bypass Parliament, calling the clauses Henry VIII powers – that is, giving the government the power to change or repeal an Act of Parliament without consulting Parliament. The government’s official justification is to give the government greater flexibility to adapt on the fly to new technologies and online harms. Or to bar access to stuff it doesn’t like, presumably.

The Open Rights Group agrees, calling the plan powers to restrict the entire Internet. ORG also cites a March 0 open letter from 400 scientists and calls for a moratorium on age assurance to learn more about the technological hazards and social impact and for adopting alternative measures in the meantime, such as regulating algorithmic manipulation and providing parents with support.

At DefendDigitalMe, Jen Persson points out that the books already contain laws enabling considerable digital control of children; surveillance, she writes, is being “dressed as ‘safety'”. None of this, she writes, is compatible with children’s *rights*, which don’t seem to get much of a look-in.

Illustrations: Henry VIII, as painted by Hans Holbein the Younger (via Wikimedia.

Also this week: TechGrumps 3.38, The Bettification of Everything.

In search of the future Internet

“What kind of Internet do you want [him] to inherit?” “Him” was then measuring his age in weeks.

“Not *this* Internet.”

Now, when said son has grown to measure his life in months, my friend and I are no closer to a positive vision. But notably many more people seem to be asking the same kind of question.

In the last week I’ve been to two meetings convened to pull together a cross-section of activists, policy wonks, and techies to talk about building movements to push back against the spread of technological control. The goals of these groups, like my friend’s and mine remain fuzzy, but they reflect a widespread growing alarm about AI, US entanglement, and our other technological ills.

“When did the future stop being something we plan for and become something done to us?” a friend asked about five years ago. That sense of being held hostage by the inevitability narrative is there, too, in a jumble including job loss, the evils of capitalism, the embedding of companies like Palantir in the health service and soon in policing, the speed of change, widespread loneliness, sustainability, and existential threats. So the overall feel has been part-Occupy, part consciousness-raising session.

Those who did have visions to propose often seemed to be describing things that already exist: trusted, authoritative content (the BBC, Wikipedia); ending capitalism in favor of shared ownership and distributed power (“there’s always someone reinventing communism,” the person next to me muttered), and recreating the impossible dream of micropayments.

One meeting polled us with a list of concerns about AI and asked us to pick the most important. The winner, by far, was “consolidation of power”. This speaks to a wider movement than merely opposing AI or resisting the encroachment of the worst technology surveillance practices into daily life.

Similar discussions have been growing for at least a couple of years. At The Register, long-time open source advocate Liam Proven writes after attending the Open Source Policy Summit that Europe is reassessing its technological reliance on US IT services, which offers the potential for a US president to order disconnection. The lack of European billion-dollar technology companies leads people to forget the technology invented here that instead embraced openness: the web, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Open StreetMap, the Fediverse.

It’s a little alarming, however, that all of this discussion hovers at the application layer. Old-timers who’ve watched the Internet build up understand that underneath the social media and smartphones lies the physical layer, the infrastructure that is also condolidated and controlled: chips, cables, wireless spectrum. For younger folks, those elements are near-invisible; their adult lives have been dominated by concerns about data. Yet in the last year we’ve been warned of sabotage to undersea cables and chip shortages. There’s more general recognition of the issues surrounding data centers’ demand for power and water.

Even so, there’s a good amount of recognition that all the strands of our present polycrisis are intertwined – see for example the mission statement at Germany’s Cables of Resistance. A broader group, building on the 2024 conference convened by Cristina Caffarra, who called out policy makers at CPDP 2024 for ignoring physical infrastructure, is working on a EuroStack to provide a European cloud alternative.

At the political layer, we have Dutch News reporting that Dutch MPs are pushing their government to move away from depending on US technology companies to provide essential infrastructure. In the UK, LibDem and Green MPs are calling on the government to reconsider its contracts with Palantir.

A group called Pull the Plug will lead a “march against the machines” in London on February 28 to demand the UK government create citizens’ assemblies and implement their decisions on AI.

It feels like change is gathering here. In the US, the future still looks much like the past. In a blog post this week, here is Anthropic, presumably responding to OpenAI’s plan to add advertising to ChatGPT:

But including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking…We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users’ interests. So we’ve made a choice: Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won’t see “sponsored” links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude’s responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for.

Compare and contrast to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their 1998 Google-founding paper:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users…we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers…we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

No wonder Anthropic adds this caution: “Should we need to revisit this approach, we’ll be transparent about our reasons for doing so.” Translation: we may need the money.” Of course they’ll frame it as serving the customer better.

Illustrations: (One of) the first Internet ad, for AT&T, on HotWired (via The Internet History Podcast.

Also this week:
At the Plutopia podcast we talk to science fiction writer Ken MacLeod.

The censorship-industrial complex

In a sign of the times, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that in 2029 the annual Oscars ceremony will move from ABC to YouTube, where it will be viewable worldwide for free. At Variety, Clayton Davis speculates how advertising will work – perhaps mid-roll? The obvious answer is to place the ads between the list of nominees and opening the envelope to announce the winner. Cliff-hanger!

The move is notable. Ratings for the awards show have been declining for decades. In 1960, 45.8 million people in the US watched the Oscars – live, before home video recording. In 1998, the peak, 55.2 million, after VCRs, but before YouTube. In 2024: 19.5 million. This year, the Oscars drew under 18.1 million viewers.

On top of that, broadcast TV itself is in decline. One of the biggest audiences ever gathered for a single episode of a scripted show was in 1983: 100 million, for the series finale of M*A*S*H. In 2004, the Friends finale drew 52.5 million. In 2019, the Big Bang Theory finale drew just 17.9 million. YouTube has more than 2.7 billion active users a month. Whatever ABC was paying for the Oscars, reach may matter more than money, especially in an industry that is also threatened by shrinking theater audiences. In the UK, YouTube is second most-watched TV service ($), after only the BBC.

The move suggests that the US audience itself may also not be as uniquely important as it was historically. The Academy’s move fits into many other similar trends.

***

During this week’s San Francisco power outage, an apparently unexpected consequence was that non-functioning traffic lights paralyzed many of the city’s driverless Waymo taxis. In its blog posting, the company says, “While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.”

Friends in San Francisco note that the California Driver’s Handbook (under “Traffic Control”) is specific about what to do in such situations: treat the intersection as if it had all-way stop signs. It’s a great example of trusting human social cooperation.

Robocars are, of course, not in on this game. In an uncertain situation they can’t read us. So the volume of requests overwhelmed the remote human controllers and the cars froze, blocking intersections and even sidewalks. Waymo suspended the service temporarily, and says it is updating the cars’ software to make them act “more decisively” in such situations in future.

Of course, all these companies want to do away with the human safety drivers and remote controllers as they improve cars’ programming to incorporate more edge cases. I suspect, however, that we’ll never really reach the point where humans aren’t needed; there will always be new unforeseen issues. Driving a car is a technical challenge. Sharing the roads with others is a social effort requiring the kind of fuzzy flexibility computers are bad at. Getting rid of the humans will mean deciding what level of dysfunction we’re willing to accept from the cars.

Self-driving taxis are coming to London in 2026, and I’m struggling to imagine it. It’s a vastly more complex city to navigate than San Francisco, and has many narrow, twisty little streets to flummox programmers used to newer urban grids.

***

The US State Department has announced sanctions barring five people and potentially their families from obtaining visas to enter or stay in the US, labeling them radical activists and weaponized NGOs. They are: Imran Ahmed, an ex-Labour advisor and founder and CEO of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate; Clare Melford, founder of the Global Disinformation Index; Thierry Breton, a former member of the European Commission, whom under secretary of state for public diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers, called “a mastermind” of the Digital Services Act; and Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, managing directors of the independent German organization HateAid, which supports people affected by digital violence. Ahmed, who lived in Washington, DC, has filed suit to block his deportation; a judge has issued a temporary restraining order.

It’s an odd collection as a “censorship-industrial complex”. Breton is no longer in a position to make laws calling US Big Tech to account; his inclusion is presumably a warning shot to anyone seeking to promote further regulation of this type. GDI’s site’s last “news” posting was in 2022. HateAid has helped a client file suit against Google in August 2025, and sued X in July for failing to remove criminal antisemitic content. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has also been in court to oppose antisemitic content on X and Instagram; in 2024 Elon Musk called it a ‘criminal organization’. There was more logic to”the three people in hell” taught to an Irish friend as a child (Cromwell, Queen Elizabeth I, and Martin Luther).

Whatever the Trump administration’s intention, the result is likely to simply add more fuel to initiatives to lessen European dependence on US technology.

Illustrations: Christmas tree in front of the US Capitol in 2020 (via Wikimedia).