Forbrukerrådet – Norwegian Consumer Council
Published 27 Feb 2026Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide.
Read more on: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakin…
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March 2, 2026
A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator
February 24, 2026
QotD: The! Exclamation! Mark!
They are everywhere one looks. The mandatory symbol of the overfamiliar: “We’ve got your order!”
To the grammatically sane, reading the exclamation mark in its proper mode, the modern world appears increasingly deranged, authored seemingly by caffeinated twelve-year-olds. The delirium jumps at you in emails, on billboards, from the end of every other sentence.
The exclamation mark — the name a dead giveaway — means to exclaim. To cry out or speak suddenly or excitedly, as from surprise, delight, horror, etc. That line and dot seize your attention. Help! Now, it seizes your last nerve. Stop! If everything is exclamatory, then nothing is.
To the cynic, the exclamation mark is a hypodermic needle spiking foreign joy into the bloodstream of language. With each excitable email, I wonder, is this person in need of urgent medical attention? Or have they overdosed on Adderall?
Christopher Gage, “Against Enthusiasm”, Oxford Sour, 2025-11-21.
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October 31, 2025
The “internet of shit” is somehow managing to get even shittier
At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia enumerates just a few of the ways that advertisers have abandoned attempts to persuade you and instead now run online extortion rackets to get you to pay to avoid having to see their ads:
Advertising is no longer about creativity and storytelling. Ads are now a matter of annoyance, plain and simple (as I recently described in this article).
It’s a simple concept. Web platforms force people to pay money to avoid the ads — so the more annoying they are, the more money they make.
They used to call it extortion — pay now to avoid pain later. And it always works like a charm. Needless to say you don’t need an English major to run an extortion business. (However, they do make good victims.)
This business strategy started out in media — where it made some sense. People are familiar with the idea of advertising during screen entertainment.
And here is how it played out:
- YouTube started this with the launch of an ad-free tier in 2014.
- Paramount announced an ad-supported subscription plan in June 2021.
- Disney + launched a low-price subscription option with advertising in March 2024.
- Netflix introduced a similar program in October 2022.
- Amazon Prime did the same thing in early 2024.
But in the last few months, it’s gone crazy. The ads are spreading beyond movies and videos — and into almost anything with a digital interface. So we’ve seen the following in recent days:
- Jeep drivers started complaining about ads on their vehicle touchscreen in early 2025. An ad for an extended warranty allegedly appears every time they stop their car (at a red light, etc.).
- Meta announced an ad-free subscription option for Facebook and Instagram in September 2025. (initially in the UK).
- Microsoft announced an ad-supported subscription plan for Xbox cloud gaming in October 2025.
- A rumor about Apple inserting ads into its map app started spreading in October 2025. This will allegedly launch in 2026.
This is more than annoying — it’s also abusive. A new Jeep can cost $50,000 or more. When you hand over that much cash, you should get an exemption from spam ads on your screen.
But the most annoying move of all is coming from Samsung. They are putting ads on $3,499 smart fridges. They’re rolling out this “software upgrade” right now.
According to Samsung, your smart (or maybe smart-ass) refrigerator will soon share “useful day-to-day information such as news, calendar and weather forecasts, along with curated advertisements”. The display will change every ten seconds.
I definitely rely on my fridge for some things — milk, eggs, orange juice, and an occasional cold beer. But you don’t see curated advertisements on that list.
Ads will never be on the list.
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October 27, 2025
Trump versus Carney (and Ford, his court jester)
Another week, another set of bleak headlines about the trade relationship (or lack thereof) between Canada and the United States. For some, this is the story of how Trump Derangement Syndrome has consumed all levels of Canadian leadership, while for others it’s proof that you can’t deal with Trump as a rational adult and instead need to consider him an overgrown toddler with a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Or perhaps it’s a little from column A and a bit from column B:
At the risk of overstating my own influence, it’s like the President of the United States read my piece saying he was acting like a toddler and decided, “oh yeah? I’ll show what ‘acting like a toddler’ means!” and did this, presumably once Bluey was over:
U.S. President Donald Trump says he is raising tariffs on Canadian goods by 10 per cent, after accusing Canada of airing what he called a “fraudulent” advertisement that misrepresented former president Ronald Reagan’s stance on tariffs.
In a post published on Truth Social at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Trump wrote, “I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”
Trump’s post cited his frustration over an advertisement produced by the Ontario government that used clips of Reagan warning about the dangers of protectionism and praising free trade.
“Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs,” he wrote.
Earlier this week, Trump had cut off trade negotiations with Ottawa, explaining it was due to the “hostile” nature of the ad campaign.
“Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD,” Trump further said in the Truth social post.
The good news is, at least Trump is coming right out and admitting that his “national security” tariffs are really about nothing more than his fragile ego, just in time for the Supreme Court to hear arguments about this very issue.
The bad news is, I think it’s exceptionally naive to think SCOTUS is going to save us from this madness.
Not because I think they’ll rule that what he’s doing is legal. That might be a bridge too far for even Justices Thomas and Alito.
But because this proposition rests on the assumption that Trump considers himself bound by Supreme Court rulings and that anyone else is going to exercise their power to ensure these rulings are followed.
Or, if you think Canadian leaders are deep in a TDS binge:
How The New Republic saw Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign.
Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a widespread and serious issue. When one is afflicted by it, their capacity to sense-make becomes compromised. Emotions are a difficult thing for humans to control, and TDS-sufferers seem for the most part unaware of how much their negative, emotional feelings concerning Trump have hijacked their reason.
TDS types reveal themselves in so many ways. One specifically, which often goes unnoticed, is a general uncharitableness when it comes to interpreting the words and actions of Trump, or a general unwillingness to look beyond words – either Trump’s words or anyone else’s which have been inserted into Trump discourse. A prime example of this is the anti-tariff ad campaign involving a 1987 speech by former president Ronald Reagan which the Ford government paid $75 million to have broadcast to American audiences – key Republican areas – for the purpose of undermining President Trump’s economic policy.
Firstly, the uncharitable analysis does not allow that Trump has any right, or any good argument, or reason to be upset about Canada’s trade practices, such as supply management. The uncharitable analysis sees Canada as an innocent victim and Trump as a bully who is trying to destroy us and/or take us over.
[…]
Returning to reason and reality. Trump has justification for being upset with Canada over both our trade practices and in the under-handed and unfriendly tactics of Doug Ford and other Canadian leaders. The ad was an insult to Trump. His reaction or over-reaction to the ad, does not change the fact that what Ford did was antagonistic and not in the best interests of productive trade negotiations. The charitable analysis understands this, and does not lose sight of it, no matter how outlandish the things Trump does may be.
On the other side of the uncharitable Trump analysis concerning Ford’s Reagan ad blunder, is circulating the idea that Reagan was anti-tariff. Why is this idea believed? Because of Reagan’s rhetoric. You can find hundreds of clips of Reagan speaking about the dangers of high tariffs, or advocating for free trade. But the uncharitable analysis refuses to go beyond words. They ignore words that don’t support their argument, and act as if the words that do support their argument were the only ones spoken. Further, they act like words are the be all and end all, by not bothering to investigate the actions of those who speak the words, they pretend that word-speakers always do and intend exactly what they say. Reagan’s oratory contained lots of anti-tariff rhetoric, but his actions included lots of pro-tariff policy in an effort to deal with unfair trading partners.
None of this is difficult once you mea culpa from TDS. If you remain under the spell of TDS, you will not be rational or reasonable, and I for one, will not take you seriously. You will look increasingly foolish as time goes on and Trump’s policies turn out not to be the disasters you hysterical twits dreamed they would be. And the group of people like me, who shake their heads and roll their eyes at you, will grow and grow, under the weight of inevitable mass mea culpa. But you will remain shrouded from truth as you descend further into darkness and gloom and hate. It doesn’t have to be this way … just mea culpa FFS!
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October 25, 2025
International FAFO – Ontario pokes Trump, Trump withdraws from trade talks
Canadian politicans seem unable to comprehend that Donald Trump is not a typical American leader — for both good and bad — and Ontario Premier Doug Ford seems to be the last one to figure it out. The Ontario government paid for ads featuring Ronald Reagan making anti-tariff comments to run in the US media and Trump reacted, strongly:
The Ontario government’s anti-U.S. tariff ad will run multiple times during the U.S. broadcast of baseball’s World Series game Friday, less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump “terminated” trade talks with Canada over the commercial.
In an email, Ontario Premier Doug Ford spokesperson Hannah Jensen confirmed information first reported by National Post that the ads will run throughout the World Series.
That means the ads, taken out by Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government, will be playing to a primetime U.S. audience less than a day after Trump cited them as the reason he was ending trade talks with Canada.
The Toronto Blue Jays are vying for the World Series championship for the first time in over three decades.
The move suggests Ford is not ready to back down on his public campaign against U.S. tariffs on key Ontarian industries including auto manufacturing despite Trump’s ire.
Late Thursday evening, Trump took aim at Ontario’s ads which quote a 1987 speech by Ronald Reagan to fight against U.S. tariffs.
“The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. The ad was for $75,000,” Trump wrote on social media.
“They only did this to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts. TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT.”
On Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada stands ready to resume trade talks with the Trump administration. But he stopped short of opining on if Ontario should cease running the ads.
If there’s a wrong way to deal with Donald Trump, you can be sure that some Canadian politician — often, but not always, Doug Ford — will find it:
Outside of the light conservatism found in the AM Talk radio circuit throughout the GTA, Ontarians didn’t really seem all that fired up when it was discovered that Premier Doug Ford spent $75 million on anti-tariff ads, the most contentious involving an audio clip of former Republican president Ronald Reagan, to be played in American cities targeting Republican audiences. They, for the most part, are also unlikely to appreciate the insult, and the damage it caused, by going directly to Trump’s base with a message that undermines the premise of his economic plan. In Canada, leaders like Ford and Carney, are permitted and even encouraged to talk tough on Trump, because it is well understood that Trump Derangement Syndrome is the leading cause of anxiety amongst Canadian leftists, and sadly, even many so-called conservatives. However, it has always been hollow, toothless, and pointless.
Carney’s elbow’s up nonsense is easily the most embarrassing thing produced by Canada in the last four decades (maybe longer). And Doug Ford is such a clueless dummy, conservative in name only, with NDP levels of TDS, and an incredibly irresponsible propensity to go off half-cocked, with such a careless abundance of volatility. No serious province can survive a leader like this. Ford is what Leftists think Trump is: a dangerous blundering idiot who can’t get anything right. But this thing with the Reagan ad is maybe the worst example in a long list of Ford blundering. Maybe Trump’s anger will blow over, maybe we will somehow come out of this episode embarrassed, yet again, but for the most part, unscathed. We will have to wait and see.
As much as I wish Canada was a force to be reckoned with, as it once was, the best I can muster is that some day in the distant future other countries might stop laughing at us. The sad reality is that generations of abysmal Laurentian elite leadership has destroyed the strength and respectability of Canada. We are a weak insignificant joke of a nation made that way by a grossly feminized ultra-weak leftist leadership class. Ford and Carney with their ineffective provocations directed at Trump in order to appease and win points with the TDS numbskull segment of the Canadian population, does little more than show the nation, and the world, the opportunism and lack of self-awareness indicative of all weak and clueless men of the social justice paradigm in the great feminized north.
To make matters worse, as if the largest and most rapidly expanding national debt in the history of Canada, the general complacency concerning government spending, or the massive affordability crises were not enough, it appears that Ford’s ad team manipulated the content of the Ronald Reagan speech they used in order to make it appear as if Reagan were anti-tariff. The ad stitches together non-consecutive segments of a five minute speech he gave in 1987. Again, the ad in question was part of a $75 million marketing campaign, paid for by Ontario tax-payers, which targeted American audiences.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute stated that “The ad misrepresents the presidential radio address, and the Government of Ontario did not seek nor receive permission to use and edit the remarks”.
Nice work, Doug. You can stop any time now …
Update: Fixed broken URL.
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August 3, 2025
20th century advertising alchemy rediscovered
Much sound and fury has been devoted to the ritual denunciations of American Eagle and their new ad campaign featuring blatant Nazi ideology and imagery, er, I mean Sydney Sweeney:
Whenever I endure a sentence which trespasses into a jibe about whiteness or men or some other illusory bugbear, I stop reading and launch the laptop through the window. This week, I’ve cleaned out eBay. As one delivery driver lugs a fresh laptop to my front door, another scoops up the last to fall from the sky.
Those all-too-common laments about skin colour or genitalia are the scarlet letter imprinted on the chest of the thoughtless bore. It’s a mind virus without antidote. Screeching “whiteness!” upon snapping one’s shoelace betrays sound psychological health.
Take Sydney Sweeney, an American actress blessed with a merciless, unfair genetic inheritance. This week, Sydney broke the internet. Her crime? She’s rather attractive. Worse yet, Sydney flaunts her icy, Scandinavian beauty.
In an advert for American Eagle, the dewy, lissom blonde squeezes her gymnastic body into a pair of denim jeans. Smouldering before the camera, Sydney flutters her “great genes”.
Those great genes sashay around a classic Mustang — 400 horses of unapologetic masculine energy. Sydney pats her hypnotic behind. She fires up that climate-melting engine. The infernal marriage of masculine-feminine consummates as she roars off into the distance.
Advertisers know what they did. Diana, Roman goddess and huntress of men. Her chariot, the male appendage made steel and exploding gasoline. A combination to light our monkey brains on fire. The symbolism hijacks our amygdala: buy these jeans, and she’s yours. Or, for the other sex, buy these and manipulate them.
I’m sorry to be so blunt, reader. Those claims, as primitive as they may appear, are the animating spirit of advertising. Back in the 1920s, Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, transplanted Uncle Siggy’s theories into the advertising business. Out went staid adverts praising a product’s utility. In went adverts selling visions of your unconscious, insatiable self. Bernays transformed the public relations and advertising worlds. He sold products that stirred the galloping herds of the subconscious mind.
Take cigarettes. Before Bernays, smoking was a decidedly male pursuit. Tobacco giants, keen to double their potential customer pool, turned to him. Bernays transformed smoking from a vulgar, unladylike pastime into a symbol of freedom and female empowerment. Men buy Patek Phillipe watches for the same reason. As Dave Chappelle put it: “If a man could fuck a woman in a cardboard box, he wouldn’t buy a house”.
In just a few moments, Sweeney’s serpentine hips lulled advertising away from overt wokeness to its subliminal witchcraft. It worked. American Eagle’s stock surged fifteen percent.
For research, I studied the ad twenty-seven times. Your humble narrator bought thirty-seven pairs of jeans and then signed over his entire inheritance to Ms Sweeney.
The reaction on the identitarian left authored five additional chapters to the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
By teasing the words “genes” and “jeans”, Sweeney called for the annexation of Poland and the Sudetenland. MSNBC excelled itself, even birthing a new pidgin English indecipherable to 97 percent of native speakers:
“Sydney Sweeney’s ad shows an unbridled cultural shift towards whiteness”.
Well, that’s one way to think about it.
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July 31, 2025
QotD: Web browsing “naked”
David Thompson, commenting on “Scenes from Woketopia”, davidthompson.com, 2020-06-23.
July 22, 2025
The internet keeps getting worse. Let’s talk about why.
Jared Henderson
Published 16 Jul 2025Why do major online platforms keep getting worse? Cory Doctorow’s work helps us understand the pattern of growth, decline, and eventual demise.
→ Timestamps
00:00 Beginning
00:51 How Platforms Die
08:29 The Death of a Platform (From the Inside)
12:14 Ads, Everywhere
14:47 Yes, I Make Money from Ads
16:32 Bots
22:04 The Internet We Need
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June 13, 2025
The new marketing strategy is “Always Be Annoying”
Ted Gioia explains that the rules of marketing as explained in Glengarry Glen Ross no longer apply:
The rules of marketing never change. That’s what they told me in business school.
If you could peer inside the meetings at head office, you would see a never-ending loop of Glengarry Glen Ross.
Always be closing. Those are the A-B-Cs of business.
But that’s not true anymore.
In recent days, a new marketing strategy has emerged. I’ve never seen it before. And I wish it would go away. You probably do too.
It’s a new way of advertising. It’s a new way of marketing. It’s a new motivational tool.
It didn’t exist when I studied marketing back at Stanford GSB. I had the best marketing teachers in the world, but they never dreamed of doing this to customers.
Here’s the new marketing playbook of 2025:
- Do NOT try to close.
- Do NOT try to sell.
- Do NOT try to persuade.
- Don’t even listen.
The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.
Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.
You will pay just to get rid of the ad.
In this topsy-turvy world, the more painful the ad, the better it works. The digital platforms have studied this — YouTube has tested using up to ten unskippable ads on users.
That’s not marketing — it’s water-boarding. But they need to test these techniques. Their business model is built on optimizing the level of annoyance.
And guess what? Even paying for premium doesn’t guarantee escape from ads. Welcome to the new digital platforms — which increasingly resemble prisons.
[…]
We once lived in an industrial economy — built on industry. Then we shifted to a consumer economy — built on consumption. And more recently we lived in a service economy — built on service.
But we now are entering the age of the Annoyance Economy. And it is the inevitable result of corporations battling for your attention.
They monetize your eyeballs — measured in clicks and microseconds — and they will do anything to hold on to them. This increasingly involves annoying, intrusive actions that no business would have dared to implement in a consumer-oriented economy.
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March 1, 2025
Celebrity fatigue
I’ve always been pretty disinterested in products and services with celebrity endorsements, but they must have worked well enough as they suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Grant McCracken notes that they seem to have reached their sell-by date recently:
Wayne Gretzky Estates produces wine and other beverages in the Niagara Peninsula. They may be fine products, but I’ve never tried them.
Talented, wealthy, beautiful, admired, they live charmed lives.
Until the last decade or so. Now they take turns doing an Icarus off the high board.
And investors are noticing.
Ann Gehan reports “Investors Drop Celebrity Brands From A-List”.
Four early-stage investors who previously backed celebrity brands said they are shifting focus to promising products as opposed to celebrity buzz
What are investors noticing?
Well, there was COVID. We all noticed how really irritating celebs were, singing us songs from the well staffed majesty of their magnificent homes. This cost them some standing.
And then there was the presidential elections. Say what you will about Kamala, the celebs who supported her must have worried about a loss.
Right?
Of course not.
Celebrities don’t lose elections. Neither do the politicians they support.
So the election too was costly.
You don’t get famous unless you know how to read the room. Celebs are their own strategists. They can hear what the country wants. They can detect change and adapt.
Until they can’t. And now they can’t.
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February 21, 2025
Tech enshittification continues
Ted Gioia notes that even the world’s biggest search engine provider is doing almost everything it can to make your search experiences worse and worse:
Almost everything in the digital world is turning into its opposite.
- Social media platforms now prevent people from having a social life.
- ChatGPT makes you less likely to chat with anybody.
- Relationship apps make it harder for couples to form lasting relationships.
- Health and wellness websites make it almost impossible to find reliable health advice — instead peddling products of dubious efficacy.
- Product review sites now prevent people from reading impartial reviews by actual users of the product, instead operating as pay-for-play vehicles.
- Etc. etc. etc.
You can often tell by the name. PayPal will never pay you a penny, and it’s certainly not your pal. Microsoft Teams only works if you stay away from your team. If you keep using Safari, you will never go on an actual Safari.
But the worst reversal is happening with search engines. They now prevent you from searching.
I’ve known Google up close and personal from the start. I initially found the company quirky and endearing — but those days ended long ago. The company is now clueless and creepy.
Almost every day I read some ugly news story about Google. Here are a few headlines from a typical week:
- “Google ditches promise not to develop AI weapons” (February 12)
- “Millions of Google users alarmed after discovering new AI tool they can’t turn off” (February 14)
- “Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests” (February 15)
- “Google’s new fingerprinting policy sparks privacy backlash as ads become harder to avoid” (February 17)
- “Google data centers used nearly 6 billion gallons of water in 2024” (February 11)
This company goes out of its ways to do mischief. Messing with people is in its DNA.
Meanwhile, its base business is degrading at an alarming rate. The company doesn’t seem to care.
In a strange turnaround, search engines don’t want you to search for anything. That’s because searching leads you on a journey — and Google doesn’t want you to leave their platform.
The search engine was invented as your gateway to the web. The inventors of this technology tried to index every page on the Internet — so that you could find anything and everything.
That was an exciting era. Search engines were like train stations or airports. They took you all over the world.
At Google today, the goal is the exact opposite. You never leave the station.
Techies once described the Internet as a digital highway. But we need a different metaphor nowadays. Web platforms want to trap you on their app, and keep you there forever.
So, instead of a digital highway, we have a digital roach motel. They let the roaches check in — but not check out.
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February 14, 2025
Trump may start paying attention to Canadian cultural protectionist polices next
Michael Geist points out just how many Canadian federal policies and programs will likely come under scrutiny by the Trump administration for their blatant protectionism against US cultural products:
My Globe and Mail op-ed argues the need for change is particularly true for Canadian digital and cultural policy. Parliamentary prorogation ended efforts at privacy, cybersecurity and AI reforms and U.S. pressure has thrown the future of a series of mandated payments – digital service taxes, streaming payments and news media contributions – into doubt. But the Trump tariff escalation, which now extends to steel and aluminum as well as the prospect of reviving the original tariff plan in a matter of weeks, signals something far bigger that may ultimately render current Canadian digital and cultural policy unrecognizable.
Our cultural frameworks are largely based on decades-old policies premised on marketplace protections and mandated support payments. This included foreign ownership restrictions in the cultural sector and requirements that broadcasters contribute a portion of their revenues to support Canadian content production.
As we moved from an analog to digital world, the government simply extended those policies to the digital realm. But with Mr. Trump appearing to call out what he views to be Canadian protectionist policies in sensitive sectors such as banking ownership, the cultural and digital sectors may be next.
If so, there are no shortage of long-standing policies that tilt the playing field in favour of Canadians that could spark some uncomfortable conversations.
Why do U.S. companies face ownership restrictions in the telecom and broadcast sectors? Why are Canadian broadcasters permitted to block U.S. television signals in order to capture increased advertising revenue? Why do Canadian content rules exclude U.S. companies from owning productions featuring predominantly Canadian talent?
The Canadian response that this is how it has always been is unlikely to persuade Mr. Trump.
Canadian policies premised on “making web giants pay” may also be non-starters under Mr. Trump. For the past five years, the Canadian government seemingly welcomed the opportunity to sabre rattle with U.S. internet companies. This led to mandated payments for streaming services to support Canadian film, television and music production; link taxes that targeted Meta and Google to help Canadian news outlets; and the multibillion-dollar retroactive digital services tax that is primarily aimed at U.S. tech giants.
Not only have those policies raised consumer affordability and marketplace competition concerns, they have also emerged as increasingly contentious trade issues. If the trade battles with the U.S. continue, the pressure to scale back the policies will mount.
Beyond rethinking established cultural and digital policies both new and old, the bigger changes may come from re-evaluating the competitive impact of policies that rely heavily on regulation just as the U.S. prioritizes economic growth through deregulation. Proposed Canadian privacy, online harms and AI rules have all relied heavily on increased regulation, looking to Europe as the model.
For example, consider the Canadian approach to AI regulation in the now-defunct Artificial Intelligence and Data Act. It specifically referenced the European Union’s regulatory system, which establishes extensive regulatory requirements for high-risk AI systems and bans some AI systems altogether.
However, the European approach is not the only game in town. Mr. Trump moved swiftly to cancel the former Biden administration’s executive order on AI regulation, signalling that the U.S. will prioritize deregulation in pursuit of global AI leadership. Further, the arrival of DeepSeek, the Chinese answer to ChatGPT, took the world by storm and served notice that U.S. AI dominance is by no means guaranteed.
The competing approaches – U.S.-style lightweight regulation that favours economic growth against a more robust European regulatory model that emphasizes AI guardrails and public protections – will force difficult policy choices that Canada has thus far avoided.
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December 26, 2024
QotD: The essence of journalism
It’s not a profession, it’s not a calling and it has no public purpose. Trial and error has shown that peeps out there just won’t go out and buy booklets of adverts. They won’t even pay all that much attention to free books of them stuffed through their letterboxes as local freesheets show.
In order to get people to see the piccies of fine cavalry twill trousers (an ad that has been running beside the Telegraph crossword for at least four decades), or to drool over offers of lushly organic bath salts, experience has indicated that someone needs to be employed to write about the footie – see that parrot bein’ sick? – or the weather – cloudy with a chance of meatballs – or the thespian who should only have been stepped out with – Meghan Steals Our Prince! – or you know what they’re doing with your money – Tax Rise Shocker! – to fill in the blanks between the commercial offers.
And that’s it. That’s what we do.
We can even prove this. The editorial line of absolutely every publication is one that follows the prejudices of its readers. When setting up a new one the big question is, well, who are we going to appeal to? Not what truths are we going to tell but who will look at the ads based upon the truths we decide to tell.
All that speaking truth to power, interrogation of structures and inequalities, that’s for the awards season. It has as much to do with reality as calling politicians statesmen – entirely irrelevant to the working day and something more suited to those dead.
Entirely true that journalism comes in flavours, even layers, styles and stratified along socioeconomic lines. But then so do restaurants come in manners that appeal to different audiences despite their output all ending up in the same place – the U-bend – some limited number of hours after consumption.
Journalism is simply entertainment that is, journalists just those who do so with words. There is a market for that truth-telling to power stuff, just as there is one for vegan meals. But they’re both limited to those who are entertained by such which is why Maccy D’s bestrides the world and the Mail and The Sun outsell Tribune, Counterpunch and Salon.
Tim Worstall, “The Grandiosity Of Modern Journalism”, Continental Telegraph, 2020-05-02.
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October 22, 2024
The “Man Enough” ad for the Harris campaign
Janice Fiamengo on the amazing political artifact that was the “Man Enough” ad by Kamala Harris supporters trying to persuade men to vote for her:
I wasn’t going to write anything about the “Man Enough” political ad that came out last week, an awkward attempt to woo male voters by a group calling itself Creatives for Harris (a “grassroots collective of ad execs, TV writers, and comedians“). The ad acknowledges a growing gender divide in the U.S. presidential election, especially among younger voters, as feminist belief or lack thereof has become a significant indicator of party affiliation.
By the time I had heard of the ad, there were already dozens of reactions to its bizarre masculine stereotypes and ponderous feminist messaging. It has been called “the Mount Everest of Unintentional Comedy“, “The Most Self-Sabotaging Political Ad Ever” and “an attempt to gain votes by insulting the people it’s courting“. (It also received plaudits from many voters who support Harris.)
Cramming into 90 seconds every feminist cliché of the past two decades about regressive and progressive masculinities, the ad was so cartoonishly overdone as to leave some viewers unsure whether it was a parody or not. How could anyone have thought that undecided male voters would respond positively to an obese chicken farmer boasting about his ability to rebuild carburetors, or a muscular black man telling us that dead-lifting weights doesn’t prevent him from “braiding the sh*t out of my daughter’s hair”.
All of the men in the ad, after first touting their hyper-macho proclivities (for weight-lifting, steak, Bourbon, motorcycles, trucks, hay bales), then assure us that as manly men (“I’m a man, man,” says one), they are more than willing to emote, cry, and — above all — give support to “women who take charge”. I’m surprised we weren’t also told how happy they are to vacuum, and to take submissive postures during sex.
Being pro-woman, according to the ad, means supporting every choice a woman could make, including killing her unborn baby. The ad even comes with an accusatory warning near the end: real men like these are “sick of so-called men domineering, belittling, and controlling women just so they can feel more powerful”.
Statements from the ad’s main creator, Jacob Reed, a comic who has worked for Jimmy Kimmel Live and other productions, proclaimed the ad a genuine attempt to appeal to men, a humorous yet sincere invitation for them to embrace pro-feminist masculinity. Reed mentioned in interview that earlier versions of the ad, which had actually been even more preachy and censorious, with lines like “I’m not afraid of a woman having rights because what kind of creep would I be then?” had been toned down out of respect for male viewers.
“Reed realized the last thing he wanted to do was condescend to his potential audience,” wrote Fast Company author Joe Berkowitz approvingly. “Ultimately, he decided viewers would be savvy enough to intuit the negative implications of the opposing viewpoint without having it spelled out.” How broad-minded of Reed not to spell out the loathsomeness of non-feminist men!
Far from offering a parody of feminist dogma, then, the ad was a straight-up celebration of it.
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September 1, 2024
The supermarket master plan to defeat the “far right” in Germany
There are elections ongoing in the German states of Thüringen and Saxony, and the polls show that the “far right” Alternative für Deutschland is potentially going to get 30% of the votes, which would give them more representation in those states than any of the other parties. Panic and hysteria have set in not only among the politicos and the mainstream media, but even among some businesses:
In Germany, all political parties have a colour. The Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union are black, the Social Democratic Party is red, the liberal Free Democratic Party are yellow and the evil fascist Alternative für Deutschland are blue. This coming Sunday, Thüringen and Saxony will hold state elections, and the blue AfD are leading the polls in both states with about 30% support. This has a lot of people very, very upset. Most of them are merely upset with the AfD, but some psychologically unstable people have allowed their anger to embrace the colour blue more generally, because there can be no limits when it comes to resisting the evil antidemocratic forces of fascism.
Among the new sworn enemies of the blue band of the visible electromagnetic spectrum are the marketing team at Germany’s largest supermarket corporation, the Edeka Group. A few days ago, this supermarket chain, whose own logo strangely enough is primarily blue …
… ran an ad in Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung explaining “WHY BLUE IS NOT ON OFFER AT EDEKA”.
That wall of text in the middle reads as follows:
Yellow bananas, red tomatoes, green lettuce, purple grapes, orange carrots, pink dragon fruit … EDEKA’s fruit and vegetable department is full of colourful diversity. Or is it?
If you look closely, there’s one colour you won’t see: blue. And that’s no coincidence. Because blue food is nature’s way of warning us: ‘Watch out! I could be harmful!”
Evolution has taught us that blue is not a good choice.
And speaking of choices: Blue is not only the natural enemy of a healthy diversity of fruit and vegetables. In Germany, “the blues” are also the biggest threat to our diverse society.
So let’s read the warning signs correctly ahead of the state elections in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg in September – and ensure that we can live together in harmony. Because we love diversity.
For those wondering whether Edeka have decided to cease selling fascist blue fruits like blueberries, there is a helpful note down in the corner:
There we learn that, while “‘Blueberries’ or ‘Blue cabbage'” may have “‘blue’ in their names”, their “colour pigments” are not blue. This is “at least what Science tells us – and as we know you should always listen to Science more”. Nothing about this is remotely obnoxious; indeed, if current-year Germany needs anything, it is more blind platitudinous calls to Follow the Science – particularly when it comes to exonerating innocent fruits and vegetables from suspicion of blue fascism.
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