In vibrant patchworks of woven patterns and fuzzy fiber ends, Sarah Zapata’s sculptures (previously) emerge as wall-hung tapestries, standalone pieces, and forest-like installations. Through the convergence of architectural structures, soft textiles, and myriad patterns and textures, her site-specific works examine the nature of layered identities shaped by her Peruvian heritage, queerness, her Evangelical upbringing in South Texas, and her current home in New York.
Zapata balances time-honored craft practices with contemporary applications, highlighting the significance of Indigenous Peruvian weaving, for example, as a means of communication. Symbols and patterns composed into cloth traditionally provided a means of sharing knowledge and cosmological beliefs.
In abstract sculptures that often merge with their surroundings, Zapata incorporates unexpected and vibrant color combinations with woven fabrics and tufted textures. Resisting easy categorization, her pieces are neither functional nor purely decorative, although they play with facets of both.
Zapata consciously holds back from creating work that is too “beautiful,” inviting a remarkable, tactile exploration of relationships between craft, lineage, community, and memory.
Some of the works shown here are included in Support Structures at Sargent’s Daughters, which continues through through May 3. Find more on Zapata’s website and Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Architectural Textiles by Sarah Zapata Explore Material Culture and Intersecting Identities appeared first on Colossal.
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
The experimental 2-megawatt thermal reactor, which came online in June 2024, represents the revival of technology originally developed and abandoned by the United States in the mid-20th century. The milestone was revealed during a closed meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where project leaders shared results demonstrating the reactor's ability to be refueled without shutdown -- a capability conventional uranium reactors lack.
Though small compared to MIT's 6-megawatt research reactor, this achievement shows China's accelerating nuclear ambitions. The country has surpassed France in nuclear generation and recently approved 10 new reactors worth over $27 billion in investment. This thorium reactor joins other revived nuclear concepts, including molten-salt cooling systems and high-temperature gas reactors, as developers look to the past for solutions to advance nuclear energy's future.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Unlike traditional search results that display URLs based on user queries, AI Mode generates conversational responses from Google's search index. The feature will appear as a dedicated tab positioned before the standard "All," "Images," and other search filters. The deployment represents Google's direct challenge to LLM-powered search engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT.
AI Mode differs from existing AI Overviews in Google Search, which merely insert AI summaries between the search box and web results.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
TIL I learned about gravastars (aka a gravitational vacuum star), theoretical objects related to black holes. Both are massive & dense, but instead of a singularity surrounded by an event horizon, gravastars are made up of dark energy surrounded by a extremely thin shell of exotic matter.
The shell of the gravastar is utterly dark and the coldest thing in the universe, only a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. If we look at it in deep infrared, even the cosmic microwave background glows bright in comparison. It is made from an entirely new, unique and extreme matter that is at the very limit of what is physically possible in nature and doesn’t have a name yet. Actually, the shell is so incredibly thin that atoms seem truly gigantic next to it.
Tags: astronomy · Kurzgesagt · physics · science · video
BIRMINGHAM (ANP) - Darter Michael van Gerwen is er op de dertiende avond van de Premier League niet in geslaagd om zijn eerste toernooizege te boeken. In Birmingham bereikte hij voor de tweede keer dit seizoen de finale. Daarin was de Engelsman Luke Littler met 6-4 te sterk.
Ook bij zijn eerste finale, half maart in Cardiff, moest Van Gerwen de dagwinst aan Littler laten. De 18-jarige wereldkampioen werd de eerste darter die in één seizoen vijf avonden de beste was.
Van Gerwen had eerder op de avond de Engelsman Rob Cross met 6-4 verslagen en was in de halve finales te sterk voor Welshman Gerwyn Price: 6-3.
De Nederlander is met nog drie ronden voor de boeg nog niet zeker van een plek in de finaleronde.
BRUSSEL (ANP) - De Europese Unie is bereid voor 50 miljard euro meer uit de Verenigde Staten te importeren als dat leidt tot een handelsakkoord met president Donald Trump. Dat zei eurocommissaris Maroš Šefčovič (Handel) in een interview met de Financial Times. Het is volgens hem echter onacceptabel als de VS de importheffing van 10 procent op alle goederen uit de EU in stand houden.
Volgens Šefčovič zou met de extra import van bijvoorbeeld gas en landbouwproducten het handelstekort van de Verenigde Staten met de EU verdwijnen. Trump hekelt geregeld het handelstekort dat de VS heeft met veel handelspartners, waaronder de EU. Maar Šefčovič wijst erop dat Amerikaanse bedrijven veel diensten exporteren naar de EU, waardoor het gat tussen import en export daalt tot 50 miljard euro.
"Als het probleem een tekort van 50 miljard euro is, kunnen we dit probleem volgens mij zeer snel oplossen met lng-inkopen en agrarische producten als sojabonen of andere categorieën", zei de eurocommissaris.
BERLIJN (ANP) - Volgens de Duitse politie namen op 1 mei in totaal meer dan 25.000 mensen deel aan de jaarlijkse demonstraties van links en extreemlinks in Berlijn en Hamburg.
In tegenstelling tot voorgaande jaren bleef het grotendeels rustig. In Berlijn meldde de politie dat er tussen de 15.000 en 18.000 mensen deelnamen aan de demonstratie door de wijken Kreuzberg en Neukölln.
Sommige demonstranten gooiden vuurwerk naar politieagenten en een aantal deelnemers werd gearresteerd.
Een boodschap van de gevangengenomen voormalige RAF-terroriste Daniela Klette werd voorgelezen, waarin zij het kapitalisme en Israël veroordeelde en haar solidariteit betuigde met mensen "in de illegaliteit".
In Hamburg namen ruim 9000 mensen deel aan drie demonstraties van linkse en extreemlinkse groeperingen. Linkse en extreemlinkse groeperingen hadden opgeroepen tot de demonstraties, die in voorgaande jaren vaak aanleiding waren tot rellen.
John from Brisbane has added a photo to the pool:
Tuesday this week and the autumn weather at Shorncliffe in Brisbane is perfect. It's now Friday and a large rain front is nearly on us, again! Hope you have early voted or take your brollies. Election day for Federal Parliament tomorrow in Australia. Early voting has been open for two weeks, best thing that came out of COVID in my view.
Today's links
- Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order: They lied to the judge, then covered it up, and now she's PISSED.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
- Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order (permalink)
Epic, makers of the wildly popular Fortnite video-game, have waged a one-company war against the "app tax" – the 15-30% rake that the mobile duopoly of Apple/Google take out of every penny we spend inside of apps.
Epic's own digital practices are hardly spotless: just this year, the company was caught cheating players – many of them children – with deceptive practices and had to refund over $72m:
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/fortnite-refunds
But in this fight, Epic is on the side of the angels. The 30% that Apple/Google sucks out of the mobile economy is a brutal tax, and not just on app makers. Patreon performers recently raised a stink when the company announced that it would be clawing back 30% of the money pledged by their supporters – that 30% surcharge is passed straight through to Apple/Google:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24218629/patreon-membership-ios-30-percent-apple-tax
From independent news outlets to crafters selling their work out of small storefronts, all the way up to massive entertainment services like Disney Plus and Fortnite, the mobile cartel takes 30% out of every dollar, a racket they maintain with onerous rules that ban apps from using their own payment processors, or even from encouraging users to click a link that brings them to a web-based payment screen.
30% is a gigantic markup on payment processing. It's ten times the going rate for payments in the USA, already one of the most expensive places in the world to transfer money from one party to another. In the EU, payment processing typically runs 1%…or less.
But crafters, Patreon podcasters and small-town newspapers are in no position to fight Google and Apple. Instead, we get Epic, a multi-billion-dollar company that's gone to the mattresses to fight these multi-trillion-dollar companies. Personally, I dote on billionaire-on-trillionaire violence.
Epic was wildly successful. It mopped up the floor with Google, securing an especially punitive award from a judge who was furious that Google had destroyed evidence:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger
Epic also won against Apple, though not as thoroughly as it had with Google, because Apple had the commonsense not to get up to the kind of shenanigans that make federal judges very, very mad. In the Google case, the court found that Google had acted as a monopolist and ordered it to open up the payment system in Google Play, a direct blow to the Android app tax.
In the Apple case, the judge did not find that Google had acted as a monopolist, but did rule that the App Store's payment processing racket violated the law, and ordered Apple to end its own app tax:
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/30/epic-games-just-scored-a-major-win-against-apple/
That's where things get gnarly. Apple is addicted to corrupt sources of income – like the tens of billions it illegally receives every year in bribes from Google make it the default search:
And it really, really loves the app tax. When the EU ordered Apple to allow third-party app stores (as a way of killing the app tax), the company cooked up a malicious compliance plan that was comically corrupt:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma
So, the mere fact that a federal judge had ordered Apple to open up its app store to competing payment processors was not going convince Apple to actually do it. Instead, Apple cooked up a set of rules for third-party payment processing that would make it more costly to use someone else's payments, piling up a mountain of junk fees and using scare screens and other deceptive warnings to discourage users from making payments through a rival system:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-apple-executive-lied
That's the kind of thing that is apt to make a federal judge angry – and, as noted, angry federal judges can make life very hard for tech monopolists, a lesson Google learned when it destroyed key evidence in its Epic case. But Apple didn't just flout the court order – they lied about it to cover it up, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is furious. She held that Alex Roman, Apple's Vice-President of Finance, "outright lied under oath," and she has raised the possibility of criminal contempt penalties for Apple:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/05/01/pacer_epic_vs_apple_injunction_judgement.pdf
The judge further wrote:
This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases
In other words, any junk fees, any impediments to opening up third party payments, will be switfly and harshly dealt with. As of right now developers can start to build third-party payments into their apps and Apple cannot block them. It's the end of the app tax, a source of about $100b/year for Apple:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/apple_epic_lies_possible_crime/
The world is on fire and everything is terrible, but we are also living through the most consequential season in the history of the war on corporate tech power. Google has been convicted three times of being a monopolist and is almost certainly going to have to sell off Chrome, most of its ad-tech stack, and possibly Android. Meta just put up a pathetic showing in an equally serious antitrust case that could see it forced to sell off Instagram and Whatsapp:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete
Countries around the world have passed big, sweeping, muscular antitrust laws specifically aimed at smashing corporate tech power, like the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act:
https://www.eff.org/pages/adoption-dsadma-notre-analyse
Most importantly, all of this is happening from the bottom up. There is no dark money campaign to fuck up the tech companies. The politicians and enforcers who are taking on Big Tech are being shoved from behind by billions of everyday people who are furious and refuse to take it any longer:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism
I am deeply grateful for the public servants who have championed this cause, but I also know that these people are the effect of our movement, not the cause. When Kier Starmer fires Britain's brilliant and effective top competition enforcer and replaces him with the former head of Amazon UK, that does nothing to tamp down the political outrage that Britons feel towards America's tech giants:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter
All over the world, countries that passed IP laws to protect US tech interests in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets are grappling with the end of free trade with America. This represents a generational opportunity to pass laws that enable local technologists to jailbreak US tech exports and liberate their people from the extractive practices of Big Tech forever:
There is nothing harder to stop than an idea whose time has come to pass.
(Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil, CC BY 2.0; Hubertl, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)
Hey look at this (permalink)
- How an AI "therapist" relates to someone in active psychosis https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1916889492172013989 (h/t Super Punch)
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The digital countermove to Trump tariffs https://www.ft.com/content/b882f3a7-f8c9-4247-9662-3494eb37c30b
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Cage-Tech https://www.cage-tech.com (h/t JWZ)
Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago Doonesbury on DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20050501170432/http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050501
#15yrsago AT&T asks government to create national censorwall and system for disconnecting accused infringers https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/04/att-calls-for-us-3-strikes-tribunal-web-censorship/
#15yrsago Asimov’s opens to electronic submission https://web.archive.org/web/20050514080931/http://www.asimovs.com/info/guidelines.shtml
#10yrsago Lego store detains 11 year old customer, accuses his father of being an unfit parent https://www.freerangekids.com/lego-store-detains-boy-11-for-being-too-young-to-shop-alone/
#10yrsago Telescreen watch: Vizio adds spyware to its TVs https://web.archive.org/web/20150905093150/http://www.vizio.com/smartinteractivity
#5yrsago AMC: "We will never show another Universal movie" https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#vertical-integration
#5yrsago Financial services workers dying for junk mail https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#broadridge-financial-solutions
#5yrsago Swedish covid death rates soar above neighbors' https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#tubers
#5yrsago Medicare for All (Congressjerks) https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#m4a4c
#5yrsago Berlin in color, after the Reich's fall https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/30/day-and-date/#bouncing-rubble
#1yrago Live Nation/Ticketmaster is buying Congress https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM
https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199 -
Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM
https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow -
Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515 -
Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/ -
Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley):
https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/ -
PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 -
PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 -
London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ -
Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 -
Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3
https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place -
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Recent appearances (permalink)
- How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Cloudfest)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-fC-2Bpo -
Move Fast and Break Kings
https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s -
Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ
Latest books (permalink)
-
- 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).
- The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
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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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
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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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
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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
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"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
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"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
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"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
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"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Upcoming books (permalink)
- 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/ -
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
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Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
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The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025
Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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ISSN: 3066-764X
Seriously, HTF does Reality Labs bleed SIXTY BILLION US DOLLARS in FIVE years?
Meta's Reality Labs division continued its losing streak with another $4.2 billion down the drain in the first quarter of 2025. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's stated priorities on Wednesday's earnings call suggest his metaverse dream is well and truly over.…
Why optimize code when you can just start running sooner?
Microsoft later this month plans to begin loading Word shortly after folks' computers begin booting up – to "optimize performance" or at least improve their perception of it.…
