You might recall how Republicans (with help from Democrats) suffered a three year embolism over the national security, privacy, and propaganda problems inherent with TikTok — only to turn around and let Trump sell the platform to his technofascist billionaire friends. Who are now already hard at work preparing to do all of the stuff they claimed the Chinese were doing. And probably worse.
“Before this update, the app did not collect the precise, GPS-derived location data of US users. Now, if you give TikTok permission to use your phone’s location services, then the app may collect granular information about your exact whereabouts.”
That’s not great in a country that’s too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law, or to regulate dodgy data brokers that hoover up this sensitive location data and then share it with pretty much any nitwit with two nickels to rub together (including domestic and foreign intelligence agencies).
The “new U.S. TikTok” is already seeing a bunch of weird technical problems. And there are already influencers saying that their criticism of ICE is more frequently running afoul of “community standards guidelines,” though I’ve yet to see a good report fleshing these claims out yet.
As we noted last December, this latest TikTok deal is kind of the worst of all worlds. The Chinese still have an ownership stake in the app, and the companies and individual investors who’ve taken over the app have a long, rich history of supporting authoritarianism and widespread privacy violations.
These Trump-linked billionaires clearly didn’t buy TikTok to protect national security, fix propaganda, or address consumer privacy. They clearly don’t support the kind of policies it would take to actually address those issues, like meaningful privacy laws, media consolidation limits, data broker regulation, media literacy education funding, or kicking corrupt authoritarians out of the White House.
And they didn’t just buy TikTok to make money or undermine a competitor they repeatedly failed to out-innovate in the short-form video space (though that’s certainly a lot of it). They did it to expand surveillance. And, as Musk did with Twitter, to control the modern information space in a way that will coddle their ideologies and marginalize or censor opposition voices they disagree with.
As men like Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen have made abundantly clear to anyone paying attention, their ideologies are unchecked greed and far right wing anti-democratic extremism. Billionaires attempting to dominate media to confuse the public and protect their own, usually selfish best interests is a tale as old as time. And that is, contrary to their claims, the play here as well.
With a new board full of foundationally terrible people, it’s only a matter of time before they, like Elon Musk before them, inevitably start fiddling with the platform and its algorithms to shut down debate and ideology they don’t like. Larry Ellison in particular is clearly attempting to buy up what’s left of crumbling U.S. corporate media and turn it into a safe space for the planet’s unpopular autocrats.
It’s worth reiterating that this was all built on the back of four years of fear mongering about TikTok privacy, propaganda, and national security issues by Republicans who couldn’t actually give the slightest shit about any of those subjects. And aided by the bumbling Keystone Cops in the Democratic party, who actively helped Trump offload the platform to his billionaire buddies.
Then propped up by a lazy corporate press that’s increasingly incapable of explaining to the public what’s actually happening, especially if it involves rich right wingers trying to dominate media.
I suspect the company will try very hard for a year or so to insist that nothing whatsoever has changed to avoid a mass exodus of TikTok users. Especially in the wake of the promise of new, performative hearings by lawmakers who helped the whole mess happen in the first place.
But the ownership won’t be able to help themselves. Steadily and progressively things will get worse, driving users to another new pesky social media upstart, at which point the billionaire quest for total information control will start all over again.
Gregory Bovino has been removed from his role as Border Patrol “commander at large” and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to a DHS official and two people with knowledge of the change.
Get your popcorn, but only because (hopefully) there’s nothing more to see here:
CBP Commander Gregory Bovino made his bones as a Trump soldier before Trump even took office. He went rogue while still working for the Biden administration, engaging in an anti-migrant sweep that no one in the DHS chain of command had signed off on.
Bovino launched “Return to Sender,” the mission to California’s Central Valley earlier this year, without approval from the Biden administration, the Atlantic magazine reported.
Bovino apparently has always desired to take his work inland, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what you’d expect from anyone working for the US Border Patrol.
But these inland incursions apparently caught Trump’s eye. Shortly after Trump decided the federal government should be in the business of invading cities, Bovino popped up in Chicago and then Minneapolis.
Scapegoating sucks. But if anyone deserves to be thrown under the bus by an administration that suddenly senses it may have gone too far, it’s a guy who thinks the bus is just another power he doesn’t need to answer to.
Bovino’s sudden demotion is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is reconsidering its most aggressive tactics after the killing Saturday of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents under Bovino’s command.
Earlier today, President Trump appeared to signal in a series of social-media posts a tactical shift in the administration’s mass-deportation campaign. Trump wrote that he spoke with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—whom the White House has blamed for inciting violence—and the two men are now on “a similar wavelength.” Tom Homan, the former ICE chief whom Trump has designated “border czar,” will head to Minnesota to assume command of the federal mobilization there, Trump said.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her close adviser Corey Lewandowski, who were Bovino’s biggest backers at DHS, are also at risk of losing their jobs, two of the people told me.
[Head’s up: lots of jpegs and sports metaphors upcoming.]
I can only hope these two unnamed people are right. As great as it is to see Bovino get demoted, it would be Christmas nearly a year early to see Kristi Noem kicked to the curb. If all of this does actually happen, it would be the equivalent of involuntary LASIK surgery. (You know, to expediently fix the optics.) My fingers remain crossed.
Meanwhile, Bovino is going to suffer the relative humiliation of being sent down to the minors. Sure, his pitch-perfect blend of Cap Anson and John Rocker may have played well early on, but now that dudes with more money than training are killing US citizens on nearly a weekly basis, the time has come to reconsider this dance with the whitest of white devils. (To be fair to John Rocker, at least he expressed remorse for the things he said. Anson never did. And I suspect Bovino never will either.)
Bovino has become the JaMarcus Russell to Trump’s Al Davis [switching to football if you’re scoring at home]{and if you’re scoring at home, high five! NICE!}] — someone who looked like a sure thing early on but swiftly proved himself to be an embarrassment of historic proportions.
Or maybe it’s just some sort of professional jealousy. Trump likes to be the focal point for media bullshitting and Bovino has periodically made Trump look almost rational.
Or… maybe it’s something else. Maybe Trump has decided there can only be one prominent official with completely improbable hair and it certainly won’t be this cocky upstart from the California border.
Bovino repeatedly claimed that Border Patrol agents, not Pretti, were the victims.
Hmmm. I thought we were supposed to blame the victims when federal officers execute people. If the real victims are the federal po-po, maybe they shouldn’t have been where they were when they were there. If they knew what was good for them, they would have stayed away from areas where they might trip over each other in their haste to pump a full clip into someone who already wasn’t moving.
Bovino will have to go back to pomading his hair plugs closer to the border. While that will certainly suck for the recipients of whatever abuse Greg “hell hath no fury like a tiny man with anger issues scorned” Bovino inflicts in response to getting benched, it’s at least a trailing indicator that the “might means we’ve righter than any country has been in history historically, you should read the books about it they’re magnificent” administration may finally be recognizing there’s only so far you can push Americans before even the people who are fully MAGA cooked will turn on you.
Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, which was inspired by my “Protocols, Not Platforms” paper. But this post isn’t about Bluesky the app. It’s about the underlying protocol and what it enables for anyone who wants to build technology (even competitive to Bluesky) that actually respects users.
Last month, I helped release the Resonant Computing Manifesto, which laid out a vision for technology that empowers users rather than extracting from them. The response was gratifying—people are genuinely hungry for an alternative to the current enshittification trajectory of tech. But the most common piece of feedback we got was some version of: “Okay, this sounds great, but how do I actually build this?”
It’s a fair question. Manifestos are cheap if they don’t connect to reality.
So here’s my answer, at least for anything involving social identity: build on the ATProtocol. It’s the only available system today that actually delivers on the resonant computing principles, and it’s ready to use right now.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto laid out five principles for building technology that works for people:
Private: In the era of AI, whoever controls the context holds the power. While data often involves multiple stakeholders, people must serve as primary stewards of their own context, determining how it’s used.
Dedicated: Software should work exclusively for you, ensuring contextual integrity where data use aligns with your expectations. You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests.
Plural: No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit. Healthy ecosystems require distributed power, interoperability, and meaningful choice for participants.
Adaptable: Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it.
Prosocial: Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off.
If you’re building anything that involves users having identities, connecting with other users, or creating content that belongs to them—which describes basically every interesting app—you need infrastructure that makes these principles achievable rather than aspirational.
ATproto delivers all five.
Private and Dedicated come down to who controls your data. In the current paradigm, you’re rows in somebody else’s database, and they can do whatever they want with those rows. Dan Abramov, in his excellent explainer on open social systems, describes the problem perfectly:
The web Alice created—who she follows, what she likes, what she has posted—is trapped in a box that’s owned by somebody else. To leave is to leave it behind.
On an individual level, it might not be a huge deal.
Alice can rebuild her social presence connection by connection somewhere else. Eventually she might even have the same reach as on the previous platform.
However, collectively, the net effect is that social platforms—at first, gradually, and then suddenly—turn their backs on their users. If you can’t leave without losing something important, the platform has no incentives to respect you as a user.
With ATproto, your data lives in your own “personal repository” (the PDS)—think of it as your own storage container on the social web. You can host it with a free service (like Bluesky), a paid provider, or on your own server. If your current host turns evil or just annoys you, you pack up and move without losing your identity, your connections, or any of your content. The protocol handles the redirection automatically.
This isn’t theoretical. People are doing it right now. The infrastructure exists. You can literally move your entire social presence from one host to another and nobody who follows you needs to update anything (or even realize that you’ve moved).
You don’t need to figure out ways to extract data from an unwilling billionaire’s silo. It’s already yours.
And that’s beneficial for developers as well. If you’re trying to build a system, setting up the identity and social connections creates all sorts of challenges (and dangerous temptations) regarding how you deal with other people’s data, and what games you might play to try to juice the numbers. But with ATproto, the incentives are aligned. Users control their own data, their own connections, and you can just provide a useful service on top of that.
Plural is baked into the architecture. Because your identity isn’t tied to any single app or platform, you can use multiple apps that all read from and write to your personal repository. Abramov explains this clearly in that same post:
Each open social app is like a CMS (content management system) for a subset of data that lives in its users’ repositories. In that sense, your personal repository serves a role akin to a Google account, a Dropbox folder, or a Git repository, with data from your different open social apps grouped under different “subfolders”.
When you make a post on Bluesky, Bluesky puts that post into your repo:
When you star a project on Tangled, Tangled puts that star into your repo:
When you create a publication on Leaflet, Leaflet puts it into your repo:
You get the idea.
Over time, your repo grows to be a collection of data from different open social apps. This data is open by default—if you wanted to look at my Bluesky posts, or Tangled stars, or Leaflet publications, you wouldn’t need to hit these applications’ APIs. You could just hit my personal repository and enumerate all of its records.
This is the opposite of how closed platforms work. You’re not locked into any single company’s vision of what social software should be. Different apps can disagree about what a “post” is—different products, different vibes—and that’s a feature, not a bug. Your identity travels with you across all of them.
Indeed, we’re seeing some really cool stuff around this lately, such as with the new standard.site lexicon for long form publishing on ATproto. It’s been adopted by Leaflet, Pckt, and Offprint, with others likely to come on board as well.
Tynan Purdy, writing via the brand new Offprint (itself an ATproto app), captures the mindset shift that I think more developers need to internalize:
I have no more patience for platforms. I’m done.
Products come and go. This is a truism of the internet. Do not expect any particular service to exist forever, or you will be burned. It can be a depressing thought. So much of our lives are lived online. Communities and culture are created online. The play is performed on stages we call “social media”. But then they go away.
We make our homes on these platforms. Set up shop. Scale a business. Connect with our friends. Build a following. Then something changes. A change in corporate strategy. An IPO. A private equity takeover. A merger with AOL. And it’s never the same after that. All that work, all that culture, now painted in a different light. Sometimes locked away entirely.
His solution? Never build on closed platforms again:
I write to you now on a new kind of place on the internet. This place is mine. Or rather, what I create here is mine. This product (a rather fine one by @btrs.coif I say so myself), belongs to @offprint.app. They might go away. Someday they will. But this, my words, my creation. The human act of creating culture. This is mine. It lives in my personal folder. I keep my personal folder at @selfhosted.social. They will go away someday too, and that’s okay. I’ll move my folder somewhere else. You’ll still be able to read this. Offprint is just an app for reading a certain kind of post I publish to the ATmosphere. When Offprint inevitably dies, hopefully a long time from now, this post will still just be a file in my personal folder. And when that day comes, perhaps even before, there will be other ways to read this file from my personal folder. You can even do so right now.
That’s not idealism. That’s how ATproto actually works today.
Purdy mentions above his “personal folder” and in another post Abramov digs deeper into what that means:
This might sound very hypothetical, but it’s not. What I’ve described so far is the premise behind the AT protocol. It works in production at scale. Bluesky, Leaflet, Tangled, Semble, and Wisp are some of the new open social apps built this way.
It doesn’t feel different to use those apps. But by lifting user data out of the apps, we force the same separation as we’ve had in personal computing: apps don’t trap what you make with them. Someone can always make a new app for old data:
Like before, app developers evolve their file formats. However, they can’t gatekeep who reads and writes files in those formats. Which apps to use is up to you.
Together, everyone’s folders form something like a distributed social filesystem:
This is a fundamentally different relationship between users and services. And it breaks the economic logic that makes platforms turn against their users.
It’s an enshittification killswitch.
Cory Doctorow’s framing of enshittification notes that the demands (often from investors) for companies to extract more and more pushes them to enshittify. Once they have you in their silo, they can begin to turn the screws on you. They know that it’s costly for you to leave. You lose your contacts. Your content. Your community. The switching costs are the leverage.
ATproto breaks that leverage.
Because you control your data, your identity, and your connections, whichever services you’re using have strong incentives to never enshittify. Turn the screws and users just… leave. Click a button, move to a different service, take everything with them. The threat that makes enshittification profitable—”where else are you gonna go?”—has no teeth when the answer is “literally anywhere, and I’m taking my stuff.”
Paul Frazee, Bluesky’s CTO, talks about how this works in a post he recently did on the concept of “Atmospheric Computing.”
Connected clouds solve a lot of problems. You still have the always-on convenience, but you can also store your own data and run your own programs. It’s personal computing, for the cloud.
The main benefit is interoperation.
You signed up to Bluesky. You can just use that account on Leaflet. Both of them are on the Atmosphere.
If Leaflet decides to show Bluesky posts, they just can. If Leaflet decides to create Bluesky posts, they just need to use the right schema. The two apps don’t need to talk to directly to do it. They both just talk to the users’ account hosts.
Cooperative computing is possible.
The most popular algorithm on Bluesky is For You. It’s run by Spacecowboy on *squints* his gaming PC.
He ingests the firehose of public posts and likes and follows. Then the Bluesky app asks his server for a list of post URLs to render. The shared dataset means we can do deeply cooperative computing. An entirely third party service presents itself as first-party to Bluesky.
Because Tangled is Atmospheric, your self-hosted instance would see all of the same users and user activity as the first instance would.
The garden is unwalled.
SelfHosted.social is an account hosting service. The self-hosted users show up like any other user. If I had to guess, most of them started on Bluesky hosts, and then used something like PDS Moover to migrate.
It’s an open network.
In the Atmosphere, it does make sense to run a personal cloud, because your personal cloud can interoperate with other people’s personal clouds. It can also interoperate with BobbyCorp’s Big Bob Cloud, and the corner pie shop’s Pie Cloud, and on it goes.
There’s no silo to lock you in, and thus trying to turn the screws on users should backfire. Instead, services built on ATproto have “resonant” incentives, to keep you happy, to keep you feeling good about using the service, because it enables a plurality of other services as well.
In many ways it’s a rethinking of the entire web itself and how it can and should work. The web was supposed to be interoperable and buildable, but all our data and identity pieces got locked away in silos.
ATproto breaks all that down, and just lets people build. And connect. And share.
Adaptable is where the developer ecosystem comes in. Because the protocol is open and the data formats are extensible, anyone can build whatever they want. We’re already seeing this explosion right now: Bluesky for microblogging, Leaflet for long-form publishing, Tangled for code collaboration, Offprint for newsletters, Roomy for community discussions, Skylight for shortform video, Semble for organizing research, teal.fm for music scrobbling and dozens more. Some of these are mere “copycats” of existing services, but we’re already starting to see some others that are branching out beyond what was even possible before.
The key: these apps don’t just coexist—they can actively benefit from each other’s data. Abramov again:
Since the data from different apps “lives together”, there’s a much lower barrier for open social apps to piggyback on each other’s data. In a way, it starts to feel like a connected multiverse of apps, with data from one app “bleeding into” other apps.
When I signed up for Tangled, I chose to use my existing @danabra.mov handle. That makes sense since identity can be shared between open social apps. What’s more interesting is that Tangled prefilled my avatar based on my Bluesky profile. It didn’t need to hit the Bluesky API to do that; it just read the Bluesky profile record in my repository. Every app can choose to piggyback on data from other apps.
An everything app tries to do everything the way they tell you to do it. An everything protocol-based ecosystem lets everything get done. How you want. Now how some billionaire wants.
It’s becoming part of the motto of the Atmosphere: we can just do things. Anyone can. For years I’ve written about how much learned helplessness people have regarding social systems—thinking their only option is to beg billionaires or the government to fix things. But there’s a third way: just build. And build together. That’s what ATproto enables.
And it’s doable today. Yes, there are reasonable concerns about the hype machine around AI and vibe coding—but the flip side is that in the last couple of months, I, a non-professional coder, have built myself three separate things using ATproto. Including a Google Reader-style app that mixes RSS and ATproto together. That’s what “adaptable” actually means: tools malleable enough that regular people with little to no experience can shape them to their needs. The vibe coding revolution will enable even more people to just build what they want, and they can use ATproto as a foundational layer of that.
This used to be close to impossible. The big centralized platforms learned to lock everything down—sometimes suing those who sought to build better tools. ATproto doesn’t have that problem. We don’t need permission. We can just do things. Today. And with new AI-powered tools, it’s easier than ever for anyone to do so.
Prosocial is where this all comes together. Not “social” in the Zuckerbergian sense of harvesting your social graph to sell ads, but social in the human sense: enabling connection and coordination between people, without a controlling body in the middle looking to exploit those connections. The identity layer handles the hard problems—authentication, verification, portability—so developers (or, really, anyone—see the adaptable section) can focus on building things that actually help people connect.
Remember why people flocked to social media in the early years? They got genuine value out of it. Connecting with friends and family, new and old. But once the centralized systems had you trapped, those social tools became extraction tools.
The open social architecture of the Atmosphere means that trap can’t close. We can engage in prosocial activities without fear of bait-and-switch—without worrying that the useful feature we love is just bait to drag our data and connections into someone’s locked pen.
The protocol itself is politically neutral infrastructure, like email or the web. The point isn’t any particular app—it’s that we finally have a foundation for building social tools that don’t require users to surrender control of their digital lives.
If you’re building an app that needs user identity, or user-generated content, or any kind of social graph, you don’t have to build all that infrastructure yourself. You don’t have to trap your users’ data in your own database (and worry about the associated risks). You don’t have to make them create yet another account and remember yet another password. You can just plug into ATproto’s identity layer and get all of the resonant computing principles essentially for free.
Your users keep control of their identity. Their data stays under their control, but available to the wider ecosystem. Your app becomes part of that larger ecosystem rather than just another walled garden, meaning you’ve also solved part of the cold start problem. Over 40 million people already have an account that works on whatever it is that you’ve built. And if your app dies—let’s be honest, most apps die—the data and connections your users created don’t die with it.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto talked about technology that leaves people “feeling nourished, grateful, alive” rather than “depleted, manipulated, or just vaguely dirty.” That kind of technology can’t exist when the fundamental architecture treats users as resources to be extracted. But it can exist when users control their own data, when developers can build without permission, when leaving doesn’t mean losing everything.
That’s not a future we need to wait for. That’s ATproto. Today.
So when people ask “how do I actually build resonant computing?” this is a key part of the answer. Stop building on platforms. Stop begging billionaires to be better. Stop waiting for regulators to save you.
The tools are here. The infrastructure exists. We can just do things.
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The thing with an invasion is that it makes enemies of everyone being invaded, even those who may nominally support the end goal. Law enforcement officers and officials are no exception, especially when they see the invading force creating problems they shouldn’t be expected to solve.
Trump has treated multiple American cities like war zones. Of course, they’ve always been cities overseen by members of the Democratic party, which actually makes this a lot worse, since it shows everyone — including local law enforcement — that this isn’t actually about enforcing laws.
This dates all the way back to Trump sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles to assist with handling what the administration constantly referred to as “violent protests,” despite all evidence to the contrary. Law enforcement officials made it clear they could handle the protests that were happening and that adding National Guard units to the hundreds of federal officers would only make things worse.
And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. This has repeated itself in every city this regime has invaded. When local cops bristle at the incursion or officials make it clear they don’t feel obligated to finish the fights the fed’s roving gang of kidnappers pick, the administration claims the representatives of the cities it’s invaded just don’t love America enough.
None of that ultimately matters. The administration will continue to treat every complaint as sedition and every protester as a terrorist. Its officers will go far beyond what any pack of rogue cops would dare to do — past bending or breaking rules to simply acting as though there are no rules at all.
Some local and state law-enforcement leaders who have seen the agency’s tactics up close are voicing concerns that agents have strayed from the administration’s stated focus on public-safety threats.
In Maine, Sheriff Kevin Joyce was among the local law-enforcement officials who met with border czar Tom Homan nearly a year ago to hear the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement priority: the removal of people with serious criminal records.
It was a mission the 39-year law-enforcement veteran could support.
But on Thursday, Joyce publicly issued blistering criticism of federal agents, accusing ICE of “bush-league policing” after he said they detained one of his corrections officers, a migrant authorized to work in the U.S., on a roadside in Portland, Maine.
In Minnesota, it’s even worse. Federal officers have executed two Minneapolis residents in broad daylight (and wounded another). In both cases, local law enforcement was told it was not allowed to investigate these shootings.
After a federal agent shot and killed a man on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said he was told over the radio his local officers weren’t needed.
O’Hara ordered his officers not to leave the crime scene. He then requested the state’s top criminal investigators take the case, but when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators arrived they were blocked by federal Homeland Security officers, the bureau said.
[…]
It was the first time Evans could recall state investigators with jurisdiction over a crime scene being denied access by federal officers.
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” he said. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
That’s fucked up. This isn’t any better:
Regular citizens aren’t the only ones complaining to police about ICE. On Tuesday, several police chiefs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area held an unusual press conference: They said federal agents had stopped, along with local residents, some off-duty police officers “for no cause” and asked them to prove their citizenship.
Mark Bruley, the police chief of Brooklyn Park, a Minneapolis suburb, said chiefs had received “endless complaints” and that off-duty police officers—all people of color—had experienced the same treatment. In one case, he said, one of his officers was stopped as she drove past ICE. The agents boxed her in, knocked her phone from her hand when she tried to record them, and had their guns drawn, he said.
“If it’s happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members it is happening to every day,” Bruley said.
Even if the administration can see what’s happening, it’s fifty-fifty whether it recognizes the danger of what it is and just doesn’t care or is simply too brutish to see the future it’s creating.
The administration complains about sanctuary cities and demands every law enforcement agency serve its needs, no matter what nastiness it chooses to engage in. But not every law enforcement official (along with many of the people who work for them) is interested in damaging whatever long-term relationships they might have built with the communities they serve just because the federal government wants some fuck buddies while it’s in town.
And none of this is going to go away, no matter how many times violent stooges like (suddenly former) Border Patrol head Greg Bovino says blatantly untrue things during press conferences:
“Everything we do every day is legal, ethical, moral, well-grounded in law.”
Not a single word of that is true. And the cops you expect to back you up when you engage in illegal, immoral, or unethical actions aren’t interested in helping you dig yourself out of your own holes. DHS components no longer engage in good faith with law enforcement when hunting down migrants. Nor do they cooperate with the locals when they have questions about agents’ actions.
Administration leaders think the country serves the federal government, rather than the other way around. And as often as cops can be just as awful as these federal interlopers, at least there’s a modicum of oversight still in operation that might occasionally deter, if not actually punish, wrongdoing by officers. None of that exists at the federal level. Federal officers aren’t expected to answer to anyone and they know it. That much is obvious from their everyday behavior.
But the federal government needs the support of local law enforcement, especially one that thinks it’s going to be able to oppress its way out of any situation it puts itself in. Losing the rank-and-file is something a lot of GOP legislators can’t afford, not with the midterms coming up. This party is poison and even those you’d expect to have the administration’s back are beginning to back away from America’s most toxic asset as quickly as possible.
For more than fifty years the U.S. right wing has accused academia, journalism or science of having a “liberal bias” if it reveals absolutely anything the right wing doesn’t like. It’s an easy way to quickly discredit any critics of your worldview without having to engage in thinking, introspection, or debate, and it’s been on display for longer than many of us have been alive:
Media scholars will tell you that U.S. media is, indisputably, center-right and corporatist. As it consolidates, it increasingly serves billionaire and corporate ownership, not the public interest. Layer on fifty years of bullying over nonexistent “liberal bias,” and you get the kind of journalistic fecklessness that was on proud display last election season as the country stared down the barrel of authoritarianism.
A media that routinely coddles Republicans and corporate power and refuses to cover them honestly isn’t enough for folks like FCC boss Brendan Carr, who has been busy trampling the First Amendment during Trump’s second term. Whether it’s his bungled attempt to censor comedians, or his bullying of news outlets that tell the truth, Carr and his ilk demand absolute fealty by the entirety of modern culture and media.
Clearly, Carr is disinterested in learning from his stupid mistakes. In a post to the X right wing propaganda website last week, he took a break from destroying consumer protection standards to once again issue vague and baseless threats against talk shows that refuse to coddle Republicans:
If you can’t read it, Carr is threatening to leverage the “equal time” rule embedded in Section 315 of the Communications Act to take action against talk shows that don’t provide “equal” time to Republican ideology. Carr’s goal isn’t equality; it’s the disproportionate coddling and normalization of an extremist U.S. right wing political movement that’s increasingly despised by the actual public.
The “equal time” rule is a dated relic that would be largely impossible for the Trump court-eviscerated FCC to actually enforce. Republicans like Carr historically despised the equal time rule — an offshoot of the long-defunct Fairness Doctrine, a problematic effort to ensure media fairness (specifically on broadcast TV) that Republicans have long complained was unconstitutional.
The rule was originally created to apply specifically to political candidate appearances on broadcast television, since back then, a TV appearance on one of the big three networks could make or break and politician attempting to run for office.
In the years since, the rule has seen numerous exemptions and, with the steady evisceration of the regulatory state by the right wing, is not something viewed as seriously enforceable. Enter Carr, who is distorting this rule to suggest that it needs to apply to every guest a late-night talk show has. It’s a lazy effort by Carr to pretend his censorship effort sits on solid legal footing. It does not.
Late night comedians had, well, thoughts:
It’s worth remembering that the Trump administration has consistently lobotomized FCC and FTC authority over corporations with one hand, at the behest of their corporate paymasters, while pretending agencies like the FCC have unlimited authority over those same companies. So even if Carr filed any sort of complaint against these companies, his lawyers wouldn’t have fun defending it in court.
It’s more broadly designed to warn major networks that they’re subject to costly and pointless legal headaches if they don’t take the more efficient and cost-effective route of kissing the unpopular president’s ass. Which, as we’ve seen with the CBS takeover and their firing of Stephen Colbert, and the bribes ABC has thrown at our mad idiot king, has been embarrassingly effective… so far.
It’s just another example of this administration’s weird hypocrisy when it comes to government power, free speech, and regulatory attempts to shape or stifle speech. But it’s also important to not see this as entirely new; right wing billionaires — often arm in arm with corporate power — have been attempting, with notable success, to dominate U.S. media and befuddle the electorate for generations.
It was that steady media deterioration at the hands of the right wing and corporate power that opened the door to Trump’s buffoonery in the first place. And, without a serious progressive media reform movement (which needs to include publicly funded media, serious media consolidation limits, and creative new funding models for real journalism), it’s only going to continue to get worse.
The obvious end point, if we can’t galvanize some form of reform resistance, will be the sort of state media control we seen in countries like Russia and Hungary. At which point all of the problems we’re seeing now at the hands of our violent, dim autocrats will only get worse.
In my previous posts about the use of generative AI tools in the video game industry, I have tried to drive home the point that a nuanced conversation is needed here. Predictably, there were many comments of the sort of stratified opinions that I was specifically attempting to avoid, but I always knew they’d be there. And that’s okay. Where there is novelty, there is disruption and discomfort. And, frankly, some of the dangers here aren’t unfounded.
But in the end, I remain of the opinion that generative AI will be a tool used by game developers generally in the future, if not the present. I also still firmly believe that the conversation we should be having is not whether AI should be used in games, but how it should be used.
And people like the CEO of Shift Up in South Korea sure aren’t helping when they insist on the need to use AI by trotting out the Chinese boogeyman.
Will gen AI be part of Stellar Blade 2‘s development? It doesn’t sound entirely outside the realm of possibility after recent comments from developer Shift Up’s CEO. The South Korean game studio is currently working on a sequel to the 2024 sci-fi action game and its boss thinks AI is the only way to compete with the massive development teams coming out of China.
“We devote around 150 people to a single game, but China puts in between 1,000 to 2,000,” Hyung-tae Kim, who also served as director on Stellar Blade, said during a recent conference briefing according to GameMeca (translated via Automaton). “We lack the capacity to compete, both in terms of quality and volume of content.”
Where do I even begin with this nonsense? First, it’s completely devoid of the nuance I was asking for in these kinds of discussions. This is essentially stating that developers can make up for China’s massive human assets it can throw at game development by using AI to make up the difference. 1 employee using AI, doing the math, can be the equivalent of 100 or so Chinese workers. That sounds like you’re looking to stave off hiring by using AI and you aren’t helping!
It also fails, somehow, to recognize that generative AI can be used in China as well. China isn’t exactly ignoring AI tools, you know, so this arms race makes no real sense.
Finally, it’s just kind of bullshit. Chinese studios have certainly produced some games, some that have been quite successful. But when we think about the major players in the video game industry, especially in terms of quality and revenue, China is but a fairly average player on the world scene. Tencent, NetEase, and MiHoYo all crack the top ten in revenue, but the rest of the longer list is filled with American, Japanese, and South Korean studios, among some other countries. They’re a player in the industry, to be sure. But they aren’t some dominant force that requires special tactics to compete with.
But despite all the above, Shift Up has been both successful and has committed to retaining and treating its staff well.
Was Kim actually worried about rising competition from China, or was he just flexing his geopolitical muscle as Stellar Blade‘s popularity catapults Shift Up into the big time? After all, that game sold millions of copies across console and PC without the help of AI, even as Tencent, Net Ease, and other major Chinese publishers flood the market with AAA free-to-play games.
For now at least, Shift Up employees are being well taken care of. Seoul Economic Daily recently reported that all 300 employees at the studio were given AirPods Max, Apple Watches, and a bonus $3,400 to celebrate the company’s profitable 2025. Why no video game consoles? It already gifted PS5 Pros and Switch 2s last year.
That sure doesn’t read like a studio in dire straits due to the scary Big Red Machine or whatever he’s trying to pitch. How about you keep making good games and all will be fine?
Then we can get back to the real, more nuanced conversation about just what place AI has in video game production.
If you want to understand how little the current administration cares about the First Amendment, look no further than a pre-dawn FBI raid on a journalist’s home—conducted in apparent violation of a federal law specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of thing.
Last week, FBI agents showed up at the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seized two phones, two laptops, a Garmin watch, a portable hard drive, and a recording device. Natanson has spent the past year covering the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the federal workforce. She is not accused of any crime. She is not the target of any investigation. The FBI told her as much when they were busy carting away basically all of her devices.
The raid was ostensibly connected to an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor with top-secret clearance who was arrested and charged with illegally retaining classified documents—not leaking them. Again, because this seems to have gotten lost in much of the coverage: Perez-Lugones hasn’t been charged with leaking anything to anyone. Just retaining documents. The government isn’t even alleging—at least not yet—that he gave anything to Natanson or any other journalist. But the DOJ apparently decided that the best way to investigate this guy was to ransack a journalist’s home and vacuum up everything she’s ever worked on.
There’s a law that’s supposed to prevent this. It’s called the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, and it was passed specifically because Congress recognized that letting law enforcement raid journalists to fish for evidence of other people’s crimes has a catastrophic chilling effect on the press. The law bars searches and seizures of journalists’ work product when the journalist isn’t suspected of a crime, with very narrow exceptions that don’t appear to apply here.
Yes, some will argue the government has legitimate interests in protecting classified information—but that interest doesn’t override the Constitution, and it certainly doesn’t justify ignoring a federal statute specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of fishing expedition.
“This is an alarming escalation in the Trump administration’s multipronged war on press freedom. The Department of Justice (and the judge who approved this outrageous warrant) is either ignoring or distorting the Privacy Protection Act, which bars law enforcement from raiding newsrooms and reporters to search for evidence of alleged crimes by others, with very few inapplicable exceptions.
Beyond the PPA, even the DOJ’s own internal guidelines—which Attorney General Pam Bondi already weakened from their Biden-era form back in April based on an outright lie—are supposed to treat searching a journalist’s materials as an absolute last resort, reserved for rare emergencies. Not as Plan A when you want to know who a reporter has been talking to.
There was also an obvious, less constitutionally catastrophic option available. On the same day as the raid, the DOJ issued a grand jury subpoena to the Washington Post seeking substantially the same records. As the Post’s attorneys noted in their court filing:
Nothing prevented the government from issuing a subpoena to Natanson instead of executing a search warrant, which is what, historically, would have been mandated by government policy
That’s how this is supposed to work. You issue a subpoena. The news organization gets the chance to challenge it, to assert privilege, to go to court if necessary. The process allows for the adversarial testing that protects both the government’s legitimate investigative interests and the constitutional rights of a free press. But that process takes time and might result in the government not getting everything it wants.
Also, it’s not as intimidating for journalists.
So instead, they just kicked in the door.
The Post didn’t mince words in its filing seeking the return of Natanson’s devices:
The federal government’s wholesale seizure of a reporter’s confidential newsgathering materials violates the Constitution’s protections for free speech and a free press and should not be allowed to stand. It is a prior restraint and a violation of the reporter’s privilege that flouts the First Amendment and ignores federal statutory safeguards for journalists. The seizure chills speech, cripples reporting, and inflicts irreparable harm every day the government keeps its hands on protected materials. The government cannot meet its heavy burden to justify this intrusion, and it has ignored narrower, lawful alternatives.
And:
The government seized this proverbial haystack in an attempt to locate a needle. The search warrant orders that the government’s search of the seized data “must be limited to all records and information . . . from the time period October 1, 2025, to the present, which constitute records received from or relating to Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones.” … Even the government cannot expect to find many records responsive to the warrant in this ocean of data because its criminal complaint alleges that Perez-Lugones possessed only a small number of documents potentially containing classified or secret information, which he only began collecting three months ago. Meanwhile, Natanson has thousands of communications across her more than 1,100 sources. … And her devices contain years of data about past and current confidential sources and other unpublished materials. … At best, the government has a legitimate interest in only an infinitesimal fraction of the data it has seized.
There is, at least for now, a small piece of good news. On Wednesday, Magistrate Judge William B. Porter granted the Post’s motion for a standstill order, blocking the DOJ from reviewing any of the seized materials until the court authorizes it:
“The government must preserve but must not review any of the materials that law enforcement seized… until the Court authorizes review of the materials by further order,” the magistrate judge wrote.
Oral arguments are scheduled for February 6. So for the moment, the administration shouldn’t be able to rifle through a journalist’s entire professional life looking for evidence against someone else. But the fact that this happened at all—that the FBI executed a pre-dawn raid on a reporter’s home, that a federal judge signed off on the warrant, that the DOJ thought this was an appropriate course of action—tells you everything you need to know about how this administration views the role of the press.
Attorney General Bondi, for her part, initially issued a statement that was, as we’ve now come to expect with this administration, almost comically tone-deaf to the actual concerns at play, while ridiculously belligerent:
The Trump Administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our Nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.
Except, again: it’s not illegal for a journalist to receive leaked information and report on it. That’s journalism. The person who leaks may face consequences, but the reporter doesn’t become a criminal by doing their job. The Supreme Court made this clear in the Pentagon Papers case over fifty years ago, when the government tried to stop the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing classified documents about Vietnam. The press won. The principle established then—that the government cannot criminalize the act of receiving and publishing information in the public interest—remains the law today, however inconvenient that might be for an administration that doesn’t like what reporters are writing about it.
What makes this particularly galling is the context. Natanson has been reporting on the Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers—the very story the administration would prefer not be told. As CNN noted, she’s been called the Post’s “federal government whisperer” for her coverage of how DOGE-driven cuts have affected government agencies and the people who work in them.
If you wanted to send a message to journalists covering this administration that they should think twice about cultivating sources, you could hardly do better than raiding one of them at dawn and seizing every electronic device in her home.
This isn’t some abstract concern. Every source who has ever talked to Natanson—about anything—now has to wonder whether their communications are sitting in an FBI evidence locker. Every journalist covering this administration has to wonder if they’re next. That chilling effect is the point.
We’ll find out on February 6th whether the court orders the devices returned and tells the DOJ that the Privacy Protection Act means what it says—or whether we learn that the rules designed to protect press freedom don’t actually apply when the Trump administration really, really wants to know who’s been talking to reporters.
Either way, the damage is already done. The raid happened. The message was sent. And the MAGA world that spent years screaming about censorship and free speech has, once again, made clear that its commitment to those principles extends exactly as far as speech it likes.
Alex Jeffrey Pretti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. He spent his days caring for American veterans—the men and women who served this country and came home broken in body or mind. He wanted to make a difference in this world. That is what his parents said, in a statement released hours after federal agents killed him on an American street.
Ten shots.
His phone was in his right hand. His left hand was raised above his head. He was being pepper-sprayed. He was trying to protect a woman that ICE had just pushed to the ground.
Ten shots.
The Department of Homeland Security told the nation he was armed and dangerous. They said he had a gun and two magazines. They said this justified what they did.
His parents say the administration is telling “sickening lies.” The video shows no weapon drawn. His hands were visible. He was not a threat. He was a nurse. He was a caregiver. He was a citizen of the United States, exercising his right to exist in public, and they executed him for it.
Ten shots.
⁂
Bruce Springsteen wrote “American Skin” after police fired forty-one shots at Amadou Diallo in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building. Diallo was reaching for his wallet. They thought it was a gun. It wasn’t. He died in a doorway, guilty of nothing but living in a body that power had decided was dangerous.
Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life.
The song was about what it means to be Black in America. About teaching your children how to survive an encounter with police. About the terror of knowing that compliance might not save you. That your hands can be up and empty, and you can still die. That the story they tell afterward will have nothing to do with what happened.
Twenty-six years later, the principle has expanded. The American skin now belongs to anyone who stands between federal power and its chosen targets. Anyone who does not move fast enough. Anyone who tries to protect their neighbor. Anyone who makes the mistake of believing their rights are real.
You can get killed just for living in it.
⁂
They said Renee Good was a domestic terrorist. They said she weaponized her vehicle. They said she tried to run over an agent.
The video shows her trying to slowly drive away. They shot her through the windshield, point-blank, in the face. She was a mother. She was a poet. She was trying to leave.
They said Alex Pretti was armed and resisting. They said he physically intervened. They said he was a threat.
The video shows a man with a phone in his hand and his other hand raised. His parents say he was trying to protect a woman. He was a nurse. He cared for veterans. He died in the street outside a donut shop.
This is the pattern. Kill first. Lie second. Let the Community Notes and the spokespeople and the Fox News chyrons do the work of making the murder disappear.
Stephen Miller called him a domestic terrorist. After he was dead. The label applied retroactively, to justify what had already been done. This is how it works. This is how it has always worked. The power to kill and the power to define are the same power.
⁂
Here is what we know:
Three thousand federal agents occupy Minneapolis. They wear masks. They operate without meaningful oversight. They have killed two people in less than three weeks. They have shot another. They deploy tear gas on crowds, including children. They refuse to let local police secure crime scenes. When a police chief insists on preserving evidence, they try to order him away.
The Attorney General of the United States has sent a letter to Minnesota officials: ICE will leave if the state turns over its voter database.
Ten shots in the back.
Federal paramilitaries are killing citizens in the streets of an American city. And the price of their departure is control of the state’s elections.
This is not immigration enforcement. This is not public safety. This is extortion. This is the use of state violence to seize election infrastructure in a swing state. This is the thing itself, undisguised, in plain sight.
⁂
I am watching the tech executives I used to work alongside post about AI, tariffs, and founder mode. I am watching them calculate the angles. I am watching them decide that this is not their problem, that the adults will handle it, that surely someone will restore order before it affects them personally.
There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than over masked federal agents executing civilians in the streets.
That tells you what you need to know about the values of our industry. That tells you what the costume was worth. That tells you what “freedom” means to the people who claim to love it most.
⁂
Forty-one shots for Amadou Diallo.
Ten shots for Alex Pretti.
The math is not the point. The math is never the point. One shot would have been enough to end a life, to orphan a future, to prove that none of us are safe when power decides we are in the way.
Alex Pretti’s parents asked the public to get the truth out about their son. He was a good man, they said. He cared for veterans. His last act was trying to protect a stranger.
This is the truth: your son was murdered by agents of the federal government. They lied about why. They will not be held accountable unless we make them accountable. The system designed to prevent this has failed, and the people with the power to stop it are afraid to use that power.
The wire still holds. Because some of us continue to insist on holding it.
But the wire is fraying. And the hands that hold it are bleeding. And the only question that matters now is whether anyone with power will do anything other than issue statements of concern while the bodies accumulate.
Forty-one shots. Ten shots. Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a phone? Is it your life?
You can get killed just for living in your American skin.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
If you’re not aware, America’s unholy alliance between U.S. corporations and the right wing grifter economy has an elaborate public messaging and manipulation system that continues to demonstrate its influence and power.
The latest case in point: K Street policy and lobbying firms appear to have leveraged a bunch of right wing influencers to launch a coordinated social media campaign attacking the AI Overwatch Act, which would tighten restrictions on the export of advanced artificial intelligence chips to foreign adversaries.
The bill was introduced last December and hadn’t really been seeing a ton of traction (as we saw with the TikTok “ban” most of this country’s rhetoric on “protecting people from China” is corrupt, self-serving smoke). But Model Republic curiously noted that a whole bunch of prominent right wing influencers have been sharing rants against the bill, all including the same language and typos:
We’ve seen this sort of “astroturf” campaign many times before. It usually involves some K Street lobbying firm that covertly get right wing influencers and fake news companies to parrot policies of interest to party ownership or a corporate donor, resulting in a singular, brutal repetitive message that gets shared across both traditional and new media.
We saw it pop up during the TikTok hysteria campaign, when Facebook lobbyists were caught spreading scary stories in the press to get a competitor banned. We saw it during the scuttled appointment of popular media reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC, when telecom and media giants got right wing influencers and propaganda rags to frame her as an anti-cop extremist.
You’ll most effectively see this media manipulation symbiosis at work any time anybody proposes consumer protections corporate power doesn’t like, as we’ve seen with both basic privacy protections and during the net neutrality wars, when popular, basic consumer protections were broadly framed as extremist by right wing influencers and the corporate press.
In this case, Model Republic offers up a reasonable guess of what lobbying and policy org was responsible for this latest campaign:
“Several of the accounts quoted above have documented or apparent ties to previous campaigns run by Influenceable, the PR firm that pays conservative influencers to post coordinated content without disclosure. To be clear: we don’t know that Influenceable orchestrated this particular campaign, and it’s possible that another organization or no organization was involved. But the overlap with accounts that appear to be involved with past Influenceable campaigns is suggestive.”
It’s not clear which tech giant (or country) is funding this operation. Microsoft claims to be on board with the Overwatch Act, possibly because it potentially wrote some of it. China certainly doesn’t like the restrictions. And most tech companies really don’t want any regulations governing AI.
They don’t want rules preventing their data centers from polluting and killing minority communities, rules preventing companies from using AI to unfairly attack labor, or any rules whatsoever attempting to impose baseline ethical guardrails on their relentless pursuit of badly automated mass media engagement at unmanageable and impossible scale.
Whoever is behind it, these messaging campaigns are generally quite effective. It’s pretty easy for a handful of right wing influencers and news outlets to generate an entire media cycle out of thin air on a fairly limited budget. It’s relatively easy to manipulate our broken, lazy, and highly consolidated press in a way that undermines or badly frames a particular legislative proposal or candidate.
And while corporatists, culture war propagandists, and their deep-pocketed contributors have mastered modern media in a way that’s uniformly harmful, the nation’s good faith progressive reformers routinely still seemingly struggle to find where their pants are located in a media landscape that’s increasingly tilted in opposition to the public interest and an informed electorate.
