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
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January 24, 2026
Britain’s Amelia phenomenon
On his Substack, Fergus Mason talks about the new Queen of English Resistance, Amelia:
Amelia, the new queen of the British right.
Independent journalism is a pretty grim business right now. Writing about the state of our poor broken country can be soul-destroying. Good news is thin on the ground; new calamities seem to arrive daily, either a fresh atrocity committed by an illegal immigrant or some new Labour assault on our freedom. So it’s nice when something a little more light-hearted comes along — even if it does make some serious points, too.
A couple of weeks ago the media started reporting a new online game funded by Prevent, the government’s (completely dysfunctional) department for diverting people away from extremism. Commissioned by Hull City Council and produced by “creative social enterprise” Shout Out UK, the game — called Pathways — is intended to “Encourage learning about the concept of extremism and radicalisation through the process of choice and safe exploration”.
As games go, this is a spectacularly dull one. Players choose a character, from a very limited selection — there are two, one male and one female, but they’re both called Charlie and use they/them pronouns. They then have to navigate their character through a series of scenarios, answering multiple-choice questions. The idea is that if you give the “wrong” answers you’ll get referred to Prevent, but it soon becomes obvious that almost any answers will get you referred to Prevent. The constant theme is that there are approved views and ways of acting — which don’t, for example, include doing research to find out if something you saw on the internet is true or not — and that, if you deviate from this, the state will step in to “support” you. A lot of this support looks suspiciously like re-education:
[…]
Of course, if you know much about the online right, you’ll probably see the problem already. As one stunned Reddit user commented, “Wait, are you telling me they made the cute goth e-girl the ‘racist’? Do they understand how the internet works?”
Well, they certainly do now.
The Daily Telegraph published an article about Pathways on 9 January, bringing the game to public notice. That same day, X user Bovril-Gesellschaft posted “I think I’m in love with Amelia”. It seemed many other right-wingers were too, because within hours Amelia memes were appearing in large numbers. Mostly produced with AI, these depicted Amelia in a wide range of styles (probably reflecting their creators’ personal tastes), but all featured her purple hair and most stuck with the outfit of a pink dress and purple hoodie or cardigan the game depicted her in. Images ranged from cartoons in the style of the original game to photorealism. […]
There’s a lot to laugh about in this. For example, brightly coloured “danger hair” has generally been the hallmark of women on the far left. Amelia subverts this by giving our new heroine her distinctive purple bob. Will we see the pro-Hamas nuts and trans cultists abruptly return to natural hair colours to dissociate themselves from Amelia? That would be funny.
January 17, 2026
Shout Out UK – “… embracing right-wing extremism will give you a shot at getting a manic pixie dream girl gf”
At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter looks at the most amazing political own-goal I’ve encountered in a long, long time:
Somewhere in the suffocating fog of the unhappy and restless Yookay, a minor functionary of the government’s behavioural shaping bureaucracy is staring at her computer screen in appalled alarm at the horror she’s accidentally helped to summon from the churning depths of the Immaterium.
Shout Out UK, which describes its mission as “countering disinformation through political and media literacy”, released a “visual novel” called Pathways, subtitled “navigating the Internet, gaming, and extremism”. The game itself is of course terrible, a ham-fisted “teaching aid” intended to remind British teenagers that even innocuous and entirely peaceful activities – downloading memes, speaking your mind, watching videos, researching things for yourself, attending rallies – will complicate their lives if they draw the concerned and empathetic eye of the managerial state, which after all just wants what’s best for them.
Prevent, if you haven’t heard of them, are a group of government-funded busybodies whose remit is to prevent extremism via early intervention, catching impressionable youth before they can be radicalized. The organization was nominally started to deal with Islamic terrorists, but in recent years it has focused on the “right-wing extremism” of the native British to the exclusion of all else. The Southport butcher Axel Rudakubana, for instance, was referred to Prevent multiple times for his open glorification of white genocide, which Prevent ignored completely.
The player can choose either a male or female character, both of whom are amusingly and awkwardly referred to with they/them pronouns, with grammatical abominations such as “Charlie decided to look for themselves” sprinkled throughout. The character is then placed in a series of scenarios and made to choose between good and bad options: downloading extremist content or telling an adult; agreeing with a classmate that ethnic minorities are being shown favouritism at the expense of native youth vs clapping back at her unconscionable bigotry; watching a video and reading more about the subject or ignoring it; accepting or refusing an invitation to join a secret group chat; attending an anti-immigration rally or staying home. If you make the bad choice, a little “extremism meter” goes into the red.
[…]
If you want to play the game for yourself, your best bet is probably to download the archived version of the Government Approved Goth Girl Dating Simulator. I was able to play it a week ago, but since then it gets stuck on the loading screen, which at first I thought was because they’d taken it offline, but is probably just because Shout Out UK has gotten DDOSed by an entirely unexpected surge of interest in their execrable product (or maybe it’s just that the Shout Out UK website has a dead link on its page, as after poking around a bit on their website I was able to find one that works). Alternatively, you can find most of the screenshots archived here.
Had it not been for one unfortunate creative choice made by the development team, no one would have taken any notice of Pathways. It would have been one of countless cringe-inducing training aids churned out by regime-adjacent quangos cashing in on the flood of taxpayer lucre sluicing through the DEI-and-disinformation industry. But for some reason, which can be explained only by a calamitous failure on the part of Shout Out UK to develop an accurate theory of mind for their target audience, the creators of Pathways decided that it would be a great idea to cast the awful bigot leading the protagonist step by step to his ideological doom in the form of a cute alt girl, thereby sending the message that embracing right-wing extremism will give you a shot at getting a manic pixie dream girl gf.
Update, 18 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
November 10, 2025
Enshittification, the book
Cory Doctorow originally coined the all-too-useful name for the steady deterioration of pretty much everything in the online world and now it’s the title of his latest book:
Author and activist Cory Doctorow wants you to understand why online digital platforms are failing users, and he’s fighting for a better internet. “Enshittification” — a word he coined to describe the degradation of online platforms and services — is the slightly profane albeit funny title of his latest book.
[…]
First question from me: “What does enshittification look like in Canada?” (Try saying that word without chuckling). The country had several opportunities to lead as a global digital force to be reckoned with, Cory agrees, and in his view, “we dropped the ball on market concentration”.
“The Competition Bureau has, through almost all of its history, until last year when we got a new bill out of Parliament, been, I think, the weakest competition bureau in the world,” Cory declares, emphatically. It’s hard to refute his assessment: The merger of Shaw and Rogers, two very large telecoms in Canada, was made official in 2023, the year before Canada’s competition law was modernized.
“Wouldn’t you think, at the very least, Canada would have a robust domestic network platform available by now?” I ask. Gander Social, a made-in-Canada social media platform, designed as an alternative to large U.S.-based companies, is only now being beta tested.
“There are any number of people who would like very, very much to host a few thousand of their friends on a little Mastodon or Blue Sky server that can talk to all the other ones, and everyone can be in a conversation,” Cory counters.
“We don’t all have to be on the same server,” Cory continues. “If there’s one thing we learned from the Amazon outage, it’s that putting everyone on the same server is an incredibly bad idea, right? So we can all be on different servers in the same way we’re all on different email servers, drive on different roads. We have to live in different cities; we don’t all have to be in the same place to all talk to each other and be part of a single digital network. That’s what networks are, right?
“You know, what we don’t have, the lacuna in this plan, the thing that we need public investment in, is not the bicycles on the road, it’s the bike lanes, it’s the infrastructure, and it’s the kind of thing the private sector can’t do well,” he asserts. The pain points for small businesses, communities, large businesses, cooperatives or any entity wanting to host a social media platform, Cory suggests, include things like security audits and content moderation tools.
He also recommends “some mechanism to ease people’s passage off (existing) social media and onto a new platform”. Right now, Cory explains, “you have people building these new platforms and wondering how the people on the old platforms are going to get there. This is like West Germans building housing for East Germans in West Germany, without thinking about how they’re going to get over the wall. Except that, we built the wall. We are the ones maintaining the wall. The wall is made entirely of law. The wall could be torn down with an act of Parliament at the stroke of a pen.”
And on the related topic of artificial intelligence being crowbarred into everything we use online:
Cory’s also saying very provocative things about AI. His most-memorable quip: “AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations”. While he sees the merits of AI to support the work of radiologists or lawyers or software engineers — or nearly anyone — he doesn’t believe AI can do the job. “But,” he warns, “an AI salesman can 100 per cent convince your boss to fire you and replace you with AI”.
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October 31, 2025
“NFL media is dominated by the nerds” and their “never-ending performance of Well, Actually football contrarianism”
Freddie deBoer discusses the way NFL media coverage has changed from the retired jocks of old to today’s emphasis on data nerd analysis and clickbait contrarianism:
Being a sports media professional means forcing yourself to have this kind of a reaction every time you’re on camera.
Screencap from Freddie deBoer
Consider how smart football journalism was supposed to be by now. Long the domain of ex-jocks ladling out evidence-free bromides about how you have to pound the ball and causation-flipping claims that time of possession is the ultimate metric, today NFL media is dominated by the nerds, analysts who proudly announce that they’ve never played the game and let their teenage resentments power their never-ending performance of Well, Actually football contrarianism. Experience is out! Numbers are in! Empiricism reigns! The bible was right: someday, the meek will inherit the earth, and it’s happening every Sunday on NFL Twitter, where it’s always time to re-prosecute high school.
And yet … The analytics revolution promised to graft rationality and context onto our game-day commentary, but when it comes to the most common and pernicious trend in NFL analysis — overreacting to small samples and short runs of good or bad performance — nothing has really changed. That’s because NFL new media conditions dictate that even the most temperamentally sober and judicious talking heads operate as 24/7 hype machines. This is not, to put it mildly, a new problem. In 2007, ESPN’s Kevin Jackson wrote that NFL media was “Overreaction Nation – a land where no sample size is too small for drawing conclusions, where the most common movement is the knee-jerk”. That description still fits the NFL media perfectly. Week after week, cable TV and podcasters spin wild narratives, proclaiming teams hopeless or superhuman after one game, seemingly embracing the idea that “no sample size is too small”. That this all comes from people who will tell you that they’re the keepers of the flame of Rational Football Analysis only makes it all more annoying.
Modern front offices have jumped on modern statistical analysis, with every team employing analytics departments and with more and more coaches regularly expressing disdain for yesterday’s conventional wisdom. This isn’t a secret; the Ringer, which has always employed its fair share of football nerds who heap contempt on the old ways, proclaimed back in 2018 that “football’s analytics moment has arrived”, pointing out the rise of modern tracking data and explaining how it gives teams an edge. But if we’re honest, even the Ringer was clear that football will never be baseball in statistical clarity: “Football will likely never be baseball, where statistics can basically explain anything,” Kevin Clark (now of ESPN) wrote – “there are too few games and too many variables”. In other words, the sport I love the most is inherently a beast of variance, full of noise. You’d think that message would temper the beat writers.
Instead, it seems the analytics evangelists and talking heads don’t trust their own analytic philosophy. They invoke “small sample size” as a scolding cliché if you dare overreact, but shamelessly turn right around and do it themselves. With every Monday morning comes a fresh rush of oversimplified hot takes. And time has proven that the ostensibly-objective analytics peddlers are no better when it comes to hype than their old school former player competition.
The Minnesota Vikings drafted J.J. McCarthy last year as their “quarterback of the future” only to lose him for his rookie season with a knee injury in the preseason. He started two games so far this season and got injured in his first loss and will only return to play this coming weekend. Bust? A lot of online fans certainly seem to think so, on the basis of a two-game sample, one of which included one quarter of amazing work earning him NFC Offensive Player of the Week. Fans are fickle at the best of times, but the NFL media hype juices that into a kind of sports schizophrenia.
Could Drake Maye be the next big thing? Sure. He certainly has the physical ability. Or he could be Daunte Culpepper. Could CJ Stroud and Jayden Daniels justify all of the hype from their rookie years? Of course! The point is that I don’t know, you don’t know, and neither do the NFL pundits. Neither does Ben Solak. And what bothers me in particular about this species of condescending NFL pundit is that they will endorse concepts like “small sample size theater” when it conforms to their narratives and then gleefully discard those concepts when they don’t. It’s quite frustrating.
Here are tropes to watch out for when it comes to the NFL hype train:
- One Game = Season’s Fate A single loss becomes proof a coach’s job is on the line, a single win means the team is a contender.
- Player of the Year (or Bust) in 48 Hours A QB throws two picks and the media declares him washed up; the next week he goes 25-of-30 and he’s an MVP candidate. NFL pundits alternate between funeral dirges and coronation ceremonies every Monday.
- Outsized Weighting of One Stat Analysts cherry-pick a percentage or grade and assign it cosmic meaning, AKA “going the full PFF.” (This is, not coincidentally, a big part of why so many ex-players despise PFF.)
- Vox Populi Misguided NFL analysis has a habit of looking an awful lot like chatter on Reddit; go look for a team’s subreddit and note the way that supposedly adult-in-the-room analysts ape the exact same hype and intensity of the Reddit squad. A lot of new media-style entities even straight-up quote random tweets as if they’re serious analysis. When you’re looking to backstop deeply irresponsible predictions, any evidence will do.
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QotD: The Zoomers as human Giant Pandas
When was the moment you first realized you’re a cold-hearted sumbitch? For me, it was sometime in my late childhood — early high school, thereabouts — when for whatever reason I became aware of the Giant Panda. I forget the occasion — I think one of the few captive pairs was going to have cubs — but we were treated to a massive media blitz about these gentle giants. And look: they’re cute and all, but the upshot of so many of those stories was that these things are critically endangered, not least because it takes tremendous effort to get them to breed.
Not just “breed in captivity”, mind you. Breed in general. Apparently panda lovin’ is like nerds on date night — the conditions must be perfect, it’s incredibly awkward, it takes massive effort, and even the tiniest misstep can throw the whole thing off forever. Your average MGTOW gets more poony than your average panda … all of which prompted in me the very uncharitable thought: Are you sure God doesn’t want it to be dead?
Which — black pill incoming — is pretty much what I feel about the human race right now.
Take a gander at this. The “aki no kure” guy has a lot of issues, no doubt, but when he’s on he’s a very useful read. If for no other reason than that he keeps up with the Kids These Days, and I just can’t, y’all, I just can’t. And here’s why:
Well, if Zoomers never leave the home (something they all make self-deprecating jokes about), then you *are* watching their daily lives as they sit in a chair in front of a computer set-up. Their whole lives are online and virtual, not IRL. Their daily activities are not going to the store and running into neighbors who they share funny stories with, it’s scrolling their timeline and engaging with its content. So you are watching them go through all sorts of daily activities — checking their subreddit, uploading pictures to Instagram, clapping back to haters on Twitter, reacting to other streamers’ video clips, sending text messages, and so on and so forth. And the other characters in their online lives are also entirely online — other accounts who they interact with, although every once in awhile they make an IRL guest appearance.
That right there is my definition of hell. Seriously, if that’s “life” in the Worker’s Paradise, I’m punching out. But: That’s what so many people, not just “Zoomers”, seem to want. See “Every single thing about the Holocough, 2020-present”. If that’s what Western Civ has come to, then let me complete my transformation into the goofiest hippie on campus circa 1992: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”
Severian, “Giant Pandas”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-28.
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October 18, 2025
Remembering GamerGate
We’ve lived through such a tumultuous decade that it’s sometimes difficult to remember what things were like in the “before times”. On Substack chat, John Carter linked to this essay by Billionaire Psycho which helps refresh memories about one of the seminal events that kicked off the political and social chaos of the last decade:
GamerGate is maybe the most important event of the past 20 years which never receives mainstream media coverage. Lomez will be publishing an in-depth history of GamerGate, to serve as an official record going forward, and that’s crucial as part of building a foundation for a new culture — fighting the narrative war over how history is remembered, how history is interpreted, what events are recognized as significant and influential moments in culture, and how Western identity is defined.
GamerGate was only possible because a generation of incompetent Leftists inherited an empire built on propaganda that came without a legible instruction manual. Leftists forgot how to run their imperial machine. Video games sedated young white men, funneling their energy into a simulation of achievement, an illusory power fantasy of digital significance. Leftists forgot that porn, video games, movies, junk food, and other passive consumption activities primarily existed to prevent young white men from doing anything useful with their lives. And this zone of sedation was viewed as another industry to conquer so that DEI activists could bully the video game industry into providing overproduced elites with fake jobs.
This event was important for several reasons.
GamerGate exposed American Sharia laws. It unveiled the shibboleths, religious taboos, and blasphemy codes which were considered more important than Constitutional protections on “free speech”. A gulf emerged between written laws, and selective enforcement.
GamerGate was maybe the first time in 50 years that Leftists suffered a real, measurable defeat.
It functioned as a generational awakening: a catalyst that activated a decentralized army of shytpoasters, bloggers, podcasters, streamers, journalists, and RW activists.
It mapped out in real-time the architecture and OODA loop of the Leftist hivemind, providing empirical data on how the swarm intelligence perceives, coordinates, reacts, propagates … and suffers damage.
It educated critics of the hegemonic monoculture that rules the Global American Empire.
But I think the most important aspect of GamerGate was that it disproved the narrative illusion that everyone more or less accepted as conventional wisdom, the bedrock of the uniparty worldview. Before GamerGate, it was taken as a self-evident fact that America was a capitalist country, and that all of the evil in the world was caused by Wall Street corporations chasing “shareholder value” and advancing “the profit-motive”. Capitalism and racism were the invisible demons which could be used as scapegoats for anything bad that ever happened at any point and at any place in American society.
Leftism could do anything it wanted, no matter how dumb, destructive, intrusive, or evil — and then blame capitalism and racism for the consequences.
This illusion was shattered by GamerGate.
[…]
There’s one important thing that’s been lost since GamerGate (GG) and the Meme War of 2016, which is the adolescent fun, transgressive irreverence, and juvenile sense of humor which once characterized the RW youth. There was a brief window when video game enthusiasts believed they could meme their way to victory (they did), win a landslide election (they did), and reverse imperial decline (they didn’t). Ten years have passed since then. Countless accounts have been banned, doxxed, deplatformed, debanked. Dissidents have been prosecuted and imprisoned. The presidency of 2016 was stalled out and subverted, the election of 2020 was stolen, the election of 2024 almost ended in an assassination on live television. Covid lockdowns crashed the economy and trapped everyone in their homes, while Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted outside in the name of George Floyd.
At some point, it stopped being fun, and the contest turned into a forever war.
Comedy turned serious.
But it should be remembered that in the aftermath of GamerGate, humor and a playful, childish energy fueled the engine of RW victories. That’s the secret ingredient.
Samizdat is the key to winning.
Always remember to keep having fun, and keep laughing, because our enemies are ridiculous.
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October 2, 2025
UNshittifying the internet
In The Line, Matt Gurney asks if we can go back to when the internet (and by extension, all the other tech toys and gadgets we see everywhere) was … good?
Have you heard about enshittification? It’s not just a potty word. It’s actually a pretty fascinating concept, and you read about it mostly in tech circles. Enshittification is the process by which something becomes worse over time, instead of better, normally as people try to squeeze more efficiency and revenue value out of it. Through that process of squeezing, the thing becomes enshittified.
If you want a proper definition …
Enshittification: The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
There are lots of examples. My favourite example? My video doorbell has an annual service fee. Another great example? Cars that now require payments to access certain features, like heated seats. You own the device. But you need to pay a recurring fee to use it. That’s enshittification.
It’s everywhere. And it’s getting worse, especially online. And, perversely, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it’s going to force us to stop, rethink how we use the digital realm, and, basically, try again. Start over. And get it right this time.
Noah Smith is an American economics writer whose work I enjoy. Smith noted on Twitter recently that we are rapidly getting to the point where we should declare social media a failure. It’s passé to criticize social media on social media, but Smith wasn’t making the usual warmed-over moral argument. He wasn’t saying that it was bad because people are mean there or that they fall down dark rabbit holes and end up believing insane things. Those are problems! But Smith’s concern was the extent to which AI-generated content and bots have simply flooded all the social media channels. Even a responsible user trying to use these platforms for the good is going to find it increasingly difficult to derive any value from them. They’re being rapidly enshittified.
I share his view of the trajectory. I don’t really know anyone who doesn’t. But Smith’s comment led me to ponder what value I actually derive from them — what I would miss if they were gone. I came up with four broad use cases.
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September 29, 2025
Screen addiction – “No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen-and-app companies”
Ted Gioia on the eight things about screen addiction that David Foster Wallace tried to warn us about before he took his own life in 2008:
Those same youngsters are now showing up on college campuses, and we can begin to gauge the societal impact of a screen-driven life. It ain’t pretty.
So this is a good time to revisit what Wallace tried to warn us about thirty years ago. He was ahead of his time in the worst possible way, experiencing firsthand all the debilitating symptoms that now plague millions.
That’s why his writings feel so eerily contemporary. They read like commentaries on what’s happening right now.
Of course, Wallace knew very little about the Internet — he deliberately avoided it. He also refused to own a television. He understood how susceptible he was to screen addiction, and took drastic steps to reduce his exposure to all screens.
But he wrote about it — most tellingly in his huge novel Infinite Jest. The title refers to a film that is so addictive that people who watch it can’t stop. They literally watch it to death. It’s an infinite diversion, much like the endless scrolls on today’s social media apps.
He returned to the topic in his final book The Pale King, and also discussed it in interviews and essays. I’ve read through all of these including more than thirty interviews with the author. These allow me to put together a point-by-point summary of what Wallace tried to tell us.
We ignore his warnings at great risk.
(1) Screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people.
In almost every interview, Wallace eventually talks about loneliness. It was a looming crisis, he insisted. But he was one of the first to link this to the ways we divert ourselves via screens. […](2) This will lead to widespread depression.
Wallace also knew this firsthand. He suffered intensely from depression. His inability to find a suitable treatment led to his suicide in 2008. […](3) This will also happen at a larger scale. Society will grow more fragmented and disconnected.
As each person falls into an isolated relationship with a screen, larger communities begin to fray. Wallace anticipated a “new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of watchers and appearers”. […](4) Screen technology promises to liberate us, but the reality is that it controls us for the benefit of others.
The most dangerous part of the screen entertainment is the illusion that it serves us. But the reality is that we actually serve tech platforms and their advertisers. […](5) The people who control the technology work to hide their purposes and goals.
“They’re trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery in 1993. “This is McLuhan right? ‘The medium is the message’ and all that? But notice that TV’s mediated message is never that the medium is the message.” […](6) Our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces.
If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda to monetize us — at a tremendous cost in loneliness, depression, and social disconnection. […](7) We don’t have many tools, but kindness and compassion will be the starting point.
We need to replace irony, sarcasm, and cynicism — which have contributed to our self-debasement — with softer, gentler attitudes. Cynicism is useful in criticizing, but is impotent when we need to build something better. Irony only destroys, never builds. […](8) Art can help us heal.
He wrote his big books with the hope that they would help us find a way back to a more caring and connected world — but connected via people, not screens. […]
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September 27, 2025
Canada’s supply management cartels benefit “an affluent few, burdening the poorest, and creating needless friction with allies and trading partners”
In Reason, J.D. Tuccille explains to an American audience why Donald Trump has been playing hardball with Canada on trade issues:
President Donald Trump justifies his enthusiasm for prohibitively high tariffs by insisting the U.S. is being “ripped off” by other countries. It’s a strange argument, since people only trade with one another if they see benefit in the deal. But the president is right to complain that other governments impose trade barriers of their own that are often every bit as burdensome as the high taxes Americans pay on imports. If foreign officials honestly wish to restore something like free trade, they should emphasize dropping their own barriers in return for lower U.S. levies. Case in point: Canada, which sends three-quarters of its exports across its southern border but imposes damaging restrictions on imports.
In a February proclamation of trade war on the world, Trump announced, “the United States will no longer tolerate being ripped off” and complained that “our trading partners keep their markets closed to U.S. exports”. The first part of that claim is silly. But the second part has a kernel of truth.
A glimpse at that truth came in June when Trump angrily posted that Canada “has just announced that they are putting a Digital Services Tax on our American Technology Companies” and, as a result, “we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada”.
The threat had the desired impact. Canada rescinded the tax immediately before it was supposed to take effect. While nominally targeted at all large tech companies, in practice that meant American companies and everybody knew it, since U.S. firms dominate the industry.
But that was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Canada’s trade barriers. Also in June, international trade attorney Lawrence Herman, a senior fellow at Canada’s C.D. Howe Institute, bemoaned proposed legislation in the Canadian parliament that he characterized as “yet another regrettable effort to enshrine Canada’s Soviet-style supply management system in the statute books.”
He added, “the bill would prohibit any increase in imports of supply-managed goods – dairy products, eggs and poultry – under current or future trade agreements”.
The legislation about which Herman complained has since become law.
[…]
More skeptically, Fraser Institute senior fellow Fred McMahon notes, “supply management is uniquely Canadian. No other country has such a system. And for good reason. It’s odious policy, favouring an affluent few, burdening the poorest, and creating needless friction with allies and trading partners.”
McMahon elaborates that the supply management process is controlled by agricultural management boards which “employ a variety of tools, including quotas and tariffs, and a large bureaucracy to block international and interprovincial trade and deprive Canadians of choice in dairy, eggs and poultry”.
But as we’ve seen so many times over the years, it disproportionally benefits Quebec, and the Liberals desperately need those Quebec votes to stay in power, so the government would rather destroy the national economy rather than give up on our Stalinist supply management cartels.
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September 19, 2025
QotD: The sub-generations of Generation X
Then there’s the group that was in high school in the late 1980s. I squeak into this group (barely). We’re the mid-Xers. The real “grunge” generation. If Dazed and Confused is a pretty decent late-90s approximation of late-70s high school kids, then the best description I can give you of a “grunge” kid is the movie Deadpool. Made in 2016, by guys who were born in the mid-1970s. That’s grunge, in a way Kurt Cobain couldn’t even imagine. Fourth wall breaks! Sarcastic asides about the fourth wall breaks! Profanity! Masturbation jokes! And snark, snark, snark — unrelenting snark, about everything, all the time. Every second of that movie screams “I can’t believe you fags are amused by this, but since you obviously do, here’s lots more! Choke on it!!!”
The writers obviously wanted to work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Joss Whedon was too cool for them — imagine the twisted psyche of a person who thinks Joss Whedon is cool — and Sarah Michelle Gellar just laughed at them, so they made Deadpool out of spite.
Then there’s the late Xers. They were in high school in the late 1990s, which is why us oldsters call them “Millennials” (as the term is now used, it seems to mean “those born around 2000”, i.e. the generation just now getting out of college. We took it to mean “those who were just getting out of college around the turn of the century”). Obviously I use the Internet. I’m using it now, but I’m not on the internet, and I’m certainly not an Internet Person. The very late Xers are Internet People. The very first Internet People; they invented the concept of Internet People. Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984) is a late Xer. The people behind Twitter (Jack Dorsey born 1976; Biz Stone 1974; Evan Williams 1972) are mid-Xers; they were ahead of the curve.
Severian, “Addendum to Previous”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
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August 29, 2025
The dangers of joining the online hive mind of social media
At The Freeman, Nicole James discusses the experience of being immersed in a social media swarm or hive mind phenomenon:
Ever noticed how your social media feed doesn’t sound like “independent thought” so much as a stadium of people chanting, “Yaasss, queen!” in matching sequins? One minute you’re scrolling idly, the next you’ve been recruited into a sect with better lighting filters and the odd ironic dog meme. All it takes is clicking on one video of a dachshund in a raincoat, and suddenly you’ve been ordained High Priest of Sausage Dogs, condemned to a lifetime of puddle-splash reels and algorithmic sermonizing. That’s the hive mind. It’s the Internet’s favorite parlor trick, turning ordinary humans into synchronized swimmers thrashing about in a soup so murky it makes the Hudson on a hot July afternoon look like Perrier.
Bees and ants nailed this millennia ago: buzzing, working in lockstep, worshipping a terrifying queen—basically the Kardashians of the insect world. But instead of honey, humanity now churns out TikTok dances, Reddit debates about whether Die Hard was a Christmas movie (it wasn’t), and Facebook is where your uncle accidentally joins a cult.
Yet this collective buzz can tip into something darker. Collaboration can harden into groupthink, flattening individuality like a raccoon on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Cristina Dovan, a life coach based in the UK, calls the hive mind “group decision-making where individuals meld into one big throbbing consciousness”. Which sounds noble, and also like the worst hangover imaginable.
Collective intelligence can shine. Wikipedia (on a good day), Reddit’s problem-solving posters, Kaggle competitions, GitHub fixes. It’s a brainstorming session without the burnt office coffee and stale biscuits.
But history, and the Internet, remind us there’s a darker wing.
Psychologist Irving Janis, who coined “groupthink,” pointed to the Bay of Pigs invasion as Exhibit A.
Let’s return to 1961 where JFK is young, popular, and surrounded by Very Serious Men in suits. The CIA pitches a plan to topple Fidel Castro that went roughly like this:
- Train a ragtag bunch of Cuban exiles.
- Drop them on a swampy stretch of coastline actually called the Bay of Pigs (because nothing says “stealth” like announcing your arrival in Pork Bay).
- Hope the Cuban people spontaneously rise and overthrow Castro, preferably in a neat anti-communist conga line.
Everyone in the room knew it sounded dodgy. The beaches were wrong, the surprise was nonexistent, Castro’s army was enormous and very much awake. But instead of saying, “Excuse me, Mr. President, this is bananas”, the advisors all nodded along as if they were trapped in a corporate retreat exercise called Let’s Pretend We’re Bold Visionaries.
The result? A fiasco. Castro’s forces crushed the invaders in three days flat. America looked ridiculous, Kennedy was humiliated, and “Bay of Pigs” became shorthand for “the world’s worst team-building activity”. In short, a textbook case of groupthink, or as we’d call it today, “watching as your drunk mate climbs onto the shed roof, yells that he can backflip, and you cheer instead of calling an ambulance”.
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August 27, 2025
In praise of the book
Ted Gioia contemplates the glorious future of the book:
A decades-old bookmark from a Toronto Book City location (probably the store on the Danforth near Chester).
Can you imagine data storage that never needs an upgrade. Even better, there’s no subscription fee. And the system never crashes — there hasn’t been a single minute of down time in recorded history.
And there’s still more:
- There are no terms of service.
- No hidden fees.
- No customer service bots to deal with.
- No annoying follow-up spam emails and texts.
- No privacy intrusions or surveillance of any sort.
- No data incompatibility issues now or in the future.
- No advertising or solicitations of any sort.
The list continues — no cookies, no credit cards, no come-ons, no conditions. None of that.
What a miracle!
I’m talking about my favorite handheld device, and I don’t need a cloud to hold its contents. Just a shelf.
You guessed it — I’m referring to books. They’re the greatest hard storage concept in human history, and nothing else comes close.
The book is the ultimate killer app.
People have been predicting the death of the book for decades. The Internet was going to make them obsolete. But somehow they survived.
The launch of the Kindle in 2007 posed a bigger threat. Even I was convinced — at least for a while. I bought a Kindle and tried it out, plunging with enthusiasm into the world of eBooks and digital storage.
But a month later, I’d returned to physical books. It was a better experience in every way.
It didn’t help when Amazon started deleting books from Kindles. Much to the customers’ surprise, they learned that they didn’t own the book they had bought — they were merely “purchasing a license to the content“.
Access can be terminated. And Amazon is the ultimate terminator.
That’s never happened to any physical book on my shelf. I own thousands of them, and nobody has ever revoked my access. I can also sell or give them to others, and they will retain rights in perpetuity.
You can’t do that with a Kindle. You’re not allowed to sell an eBook. You can’t even donate it to a library. Your license is restricted and non-transferable.
But transferability is how books and literary culture survive. Books are supposed to move without friction across generations and borders and boundaries. Some books have had dozens of owners over hundreds of years — creating a legacy unknown in the world of digital technologies.
Even more insidious, Amazon will update books on your Kindle — changing the text without the reader or author’s permission. That’s happened, for example, to books by Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie. If somebody in a position of power decides that an author’s work is problematic, your e-book gets cleansed.
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August 24, 2025
Much of our prosperity is based on trust, and we’re rapidly losing it
Ted Gioia foresees a precipitous fall in trust coming at us very soon, and I’m afraid he might be being too optimistic:
During the great purges of the 1930s, Stalin ordered the execution of a million people, including some of his closest associates. But it wasn’t enough to kill these victims — they also had to disappear from photographs.
In a famous case, Nikolai Yezhov got removed from his position next to Stalin in a photo taken by the Moscow Canal. This erasure alarmed many party elites because Yezhov, head of the secret police, had been one of the most feared men in the Soviet Union.
And now he got totally deleted.
Well, not totally. In those days of print media, original photos survived, and a paper trail made it difficult to erase history.
So this photo was later used to mock Stalin, and the pretensions of dictators. They can try to change reality, but that’s not possible.
Or is it? Maybe dictators now get the last laugh. Because in the last few months, reality has been defeated — totally, completely, unquestionably.
It is now possible to alter reality and every kind of historical record — and perhaps irrevocably. The technology for creating fake audio, video, and text has improved enormously in just the last few months. We will soon reach — or may have already reached — a tipping point where it’s impossible to tell the difference between truth and deception.
- Can I tell the difference between a fake AI video and a real video? A few months ago, I would have said yes. But now I’m not so sure.
- Can I tell the difference between fake AI music and human music? I still think I can discern a difference in complex genres, but this is a lot harder than it was just a few months ago.
- Can I tell the difference between a fake AI book and a real book by a human author? I’m fairly confident I can do this for a book on a subject I know well, but if I’m operating outside my core expertise, I might fail.
At the current rate of technological advance, all reliable ways of validating truth will soon be gone. My best guess is that we have another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality.
But what happens when it’s gone?
Back in 2023, I asserted that trust is the most scarce thing in society. But that was before all these tech deceptions came online. Trust will soon get even more scarce — or perhaps disappear completely from the public sphere.
This is not a small matter.
Most discussions of this issue focus on the technology. I believe that’s a mistake. The real turmoil will take place in social cohesion and individual psychology. They will both fracture in a world where our shared benchmarks of truth and actuality disappear.
We will be — already are — in desperate need of Robert Heinlein’s Fair Witnesses:
A Fair Witness is an individual trained to observe events and report exactly what is seen and heard, making no extrapolations or assumptions. While wearing the Fair Witness uniform of a white robe, they are presumed to be observing and opining in their professional capacity. Works that refer to the Fair Witness emphasize the profession’s impartiality, integrity, objectivity, and reliability.
An example from the book [Stranger in a Strange Land] illustrates the role of Fair Witness when Anne is asked what color a house is. She answers, “It’s white on this side.” The character Jubal then explains, “You see? It doesn’t occur to Anne to infer that the other side is white, too. All the King’s horses couldn’t force her to commit herself … unless she went there and looked – and even then she wouldn’t assume that it stayed white after she left.”
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August 12, 2025
AOL to shut down its last dial-up access: dozens to be inconvenienced
James Lileks on the end-of-era announcement from AOL — and I can’t recall the last time I thought of that company — that they’ll be eliminating the last of their dial-up internet access accounts:
New tech: shiny today, tarnished tomorrow. Everything that was once bright and brilliant now stamps its walker towards the exit door. The headlines wave goodbye: Last telegram office in the US shut down.
Last phone booth in New York is decommissioned. The latest: AOL to shut off its landline customers.
You’d think this would be news on the level of “homing pigeon trainer employment hits record lows”.
Who uses dialup? Yahoo, which now owns the AOL brand, says that the user base is in the “low thousands”, which suggests that some people forgot to turn off autopay in 2005. What does AOL do today? The usual basket of dross and chum. A website that offers “trending videos” — gosh, don’t know where else you’d find those — and a lot of news stories, supplied by Yahoo, and its … numberless army of journalists, I guess.
It’s a legacy brand for people who want to slide into the internet like comfy slippers they left under the desk. And that’s fine. Facebook serves the same function. It’s a place to start, a home base. A familiar window out which we gaze daily We all have them. But let us not get nostalgic for AOL and the early days of the internet. Some people, of course, love to talk about the pioneer days, and how it required some technical know-how:
Well, we didn’t have those fancy little pre-made modems like you got in the 90s, so we had to get a little matchbox and fill it up with a certain kind of specially-bred insect that sang a note at a particular pitch when exposed to electrical current. So you’d crank up the generator and put the little alligator clips on the box and hold the box up to the phone while you entered your user name in Morse code by pushing on the hang-up buttons, and then you had to shake the box so the insect singing would modulate. Took about an hour, but then you’d be “On the Line”, as we said, and you could go to a Usenet group and call people Nazis. Kids today, they can call someone a Nazi without lifting a finger.
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