Pluralistic: How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth (24 August 2023)


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Pluralistic: Supervised AI isn't (23 August 2023)


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Pluralistic: Podcasting "Enshitternet" (22 August 2023)


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Pluralistic: SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules (19 August 2023)


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Pluralistic: "Open" "AI" isn't (18 August 2023)


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Pluralistic: When parties fail, movements step up (17 August 2023)


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Pluralistic: At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans' privacy (16 August 2023)


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Pluralistic: Open Circuits (14 August 2023)


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Enshitternet

The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet

A trio of public toilet stalls, each fitted with a pay toilet coin-op lock. The middle lock’s mechanism has been replaced with the menacing, staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ The space around and beneath the stalls is filled with a ‘Code Rain’ effect from the credit sequences of the Wachowksis’ ‘The Matrix.’
Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. –Socrates

Nostalgia is a toxic impulse. –Judge John Hodgman

I’m an official Old Person (I turned 52 last month). According to the AARP, that means that I am now officially entitled to complain that back in my day, things used to be better.

I am suspicious of this impulse! When I started dialing BBSes in the early 1980s, the Old Hands there told me that it was all downhill after acoustic couplers and that modems were degrading the noosphere into a fallen paradise.

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Pluralistic: Paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States (12 August 2023)


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