Today's links
Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (permalink)
Obviously, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty problem – Trump has means, motive and opportunity to order his tech companies to shut down any public official, large corporation, or individual who displeases him:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize
But Americans face the same digital sovereignty risk. America is a lawless place now, where a pliable Supreme Court and supine Congress have affirmed that "it's not a crime if the president does it." The same tech giants who sold out to Trump for tax breaks and protection from antitrust enforcement will happily disconnect any member of the American public, any American company, any American official who displeases Trump.
It's a strange irony that in this moment when so many of us are struggling to "de-Google" our lives, a forcible, sudden de-Googling amounts to a sort of digital death penalty:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
In a world dominated by tech monopolies, duopolies and cartels, there's every reason in the world to seek protection and insulation from these companies that are "too big to care" – and yet, the very same dominance that makes these companies such a danger also makes them indispensable.
Take "ICE Block," an iOS app that warns you if there's an ICE thug hunting people like you in your vicinity, which might save you from being kidnapped, disappeared, sent to a concentration camp, forced into slave labor in El Salvador, or simply murdered. In order to protect its relationship with the Trump regime (and the tax breaks, monopoly power and tariff-free access to Chinese labor that that relationship guarantees), Apple declared ICE officers to be a protected class and then removed ICE Block from its App Store:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply
Big Tech is key to Trump's pogroms. Without Oracle's databases, Microsoft's administrative tools, Amazon's cloud, and Google's location data, ICE would be frozen in place. Big Tech is the source of Americans' risk from authoritarian oppression. That means that Americans cannot rely on Big Tech to protect them from that authoritarianism.
And yet, after decades of regulatory forbearance and lax antitrust enforcement, Big Tech has forced nearly all its rivals out of business. Who can compete with companies that use Irish domicile to evade taxation and US domicile to evade privacy law?
There's a joke from eastern Canada I think of often in situations like this. Its punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."
But here we are. And speaking of Canada, while it has many problems, it is not (as of time of writing) the USA, but it is connected to the USA via the internet. Which means that Americans could – hypothetically – source their computing infrastructure from suppliers that were based in Canada, and who strictly ensured that they had no dependency on US services and scrupulously avoided a US "enforcement nexus":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/
That is exactly what some American – and international – human rights nonprofits have done. The Technology Freedom Cooperative is a brand new organization founded by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (San Francisco), Kilómetro 0 (Puerto Rico), Invisible Institute (Chicago), Data Cívica (Mexico) and Innocence & Justice Louisiana:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/techfreedomcoop-stuart-flack-8eipc/
All of these organizations are longstanding, highly effective human rights fighters. They have long, storied histories of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data to address systemic discrimination, false imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, war crimes and genocides. They have concluded that they can't rely on US tech and US servers with their data. Not after Trump and Microsoft colluded to kill the online accounts of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to punish him for swearing out a genocide warrant against Netanyahu:
https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3
Tech Freedom Coop has federated computing resources in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Europe. By spreading out their data and computation across multiple jurisdictions, they seek to ensure that a US seizure or deletion of their data will not halt their work.
This federated system serves as a replacement for Big Tech's administrative tools – email hosting, cloud storage, document collaboration. More than that: Tech Freedom Coop is also building out its own AI infrastructure, locally hosted and managed.
Groups like HRDAG have decades of experience using cutting edge statistical techniques to uncover and reveal the extent of crimes committed during civil wars, hot wars, genocides and secret wars. They built the largest human rights database ever created, to track every death in the Colombian Civil War and estimate the likelihood that each killing was carried out by a CIA-backed militia, FARC guerrillas, or the Colombian military:
https://hrdag.org/colombia/
They conducted the first ever census of killing by US police officers:
https://hrdag.org/poli/
They partnered with Innocence Project New Orleans to sift through mountains of arrest reports to surface cases similar to successful exonerations, helping more innocents to win their freedom:
https://hrdag.org/2025/02/20/ipno/
Today, they are active across the USA, tracking and analyzing the crimes committed by the Trump regime:
https://hrdag.org/2026/07/05/naming-police-officers-who-kill-in-california/
And they are working in Gaza, to document the genocide so that someday, the truth can be acknowledged and the perpetrators brought to justice:
https://hrdag.org/pressroom/nyt-gaza-toll/
I've known Patrick Ball, the statistician and programmer who founded HRDAG, for more than 20 years, and every time we meet, I learn something from him. He's the person who comes to mind whenever people tell me that AI is useless and that programmers who claim otherwise are deluded. Patrick is one of the best programmers I know, he is the very best statistician I know, and he's found many, many ways to use coding assistants to help him perform massive data-analysis projects that are vital to human rights struggles. He's a "centaur" if ever there was one:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
It's exciting to see Patrick and his colleagues and collaborators taking these decisive steps to begin building the post-American internet and a kind of post-bubble AI, where AI tools are treated as normal technologies, capable of helping skilled practitioners who have discernment born of experience to apply them wisely to achieve important things:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh
For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been impressing me with the things we can do using advanced statistical analysis. The current generation of AI tools are founded in advanced stats, too. No one should think that advanced stats can solve all your problems of course. The AI bubble is madness and will lead to ruin – environmental, economic, political:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves
The world would be a better place without the AI bubble. But AI? It's fine. It's another form of statistical analysis and inference. There's no reason to use all the planet's energy, computing and water to perform that analysis, but the correct and desirable amount of useful AI-style computation is nowhere near zero.
The coop is building good AI tools – ones grounded in a realistic assessment of their usefulness and a reasonable commitment of resources to them. They're running open models based on their own data, on computers they own and control. Their stated goal is to "help organizations test whether models are accurate, reproducible, secure, and appropriate for specific human rights use cases."
Which brings me to the final component of Tech Freedom Coop: training. They're teaching people who work in human rights how to administer their own servers, secure their data and communications, and analyze data. As their press release says, these are all "skills that are increasingly necessary for human rights organizations documenting abuses of power."
I've known this was coming for a while now, and I'm so pleased to see that it's finally launched. At last, the first steps towards a post-American internet.
Hey look at this (permalink)
Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago Asia Carrera’s makeup tips http://www.asiacarrera.com/makeup/welcome.html
#25yrsago Tommy Chong's Urine Luck https://web.archive.org/web/20010818124925/https://hempmasters.com/urineluck/
#15yrsago German cops call airport full-body pornoscanners “useless,” EU requires opt out from scanning https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/german_police_c.html
#15yrsago Write an adventure novel in three days, the Michael Moorcock way https://web.archive.org/web/20110705155756/https://wetasphalt.com/?q=content/how-write-book-three-days-lessons-michael-moorcock
#10yrsago DRM: You have the right to know what you’re buying! https://www.eff.org/files/2016/08/06/eff_request_for_investigation_re_labeling_drm-limited_products.pdf
#10yrsago Bureaucrats disqualify Hong Kong legislative candidates for insufficient loyalty https://globalvoices.org/2016/08/05/hong-kong-election-officials-disqualify-six-legislative-candidates-for-not-being-loyal-enough-to-china/
#10yrsago The Vlogbrothers guide to voting in every state in the union https://www.youtube.com/c/howtovoteineverystate
#10yrsago Vocal fry, uptalking, nasal: women’s voices can never be “right” https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/female-voice-anxiety-c-v-r.html
#5yrsago Facebook escalates war on accountability https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck
#5yrsago Drone delivery crashes https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#droned
#5yrsago Anti-vaxers cool the mark https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#goffman
#5yrsago Meet the new generation of pro-abortion activists https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#never-again
#1yrago Bragging about replacing coders with AI is a sales-pitch https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
Recent appearances (permalink)
- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
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"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
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"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
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"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
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"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
- "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 692 (692 total).
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"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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