The modern fascist terraforming plan is:

Step 1: Flood the zone.

Step 2: Population gives up and tunes out.

Step 3: Remove all remaining checks to power.

Step 4: Purge all political and social undesirables.

The funny thing is, Stephen Miller and the rest realized they can do the steps in parallel, each one reinforcing and normalizing the others.

The most valuable and hardest thing we can do is not give up resisting. But pace yourself, find some good in the world and give it some of your attention every day. They’re relying on wearing us down.

Hmmm, I have been skeptical of AI, but it looks like it’s getting smarter.

Thank you for submitting your final exam for AP American History. ChatGPT 5-TeacherEdition graded your Llama 6.3o answers to be 25% incorrect. This determination is only appealable by confirming an error in grading with a Gemini X-5-level grading-appeal service, with a Standard Reliability rating of 7.5 or higher. Our system notes from your records that this service is not available to your income tier.

Your future profession is selected as: Meat packer.

Have a nice day.

ChatGPT would never make those capitalization errors unless you specifically added to your prompt, “Capitalize words like you’re a brain-damaged capuchin.”

Yeah, this post started as a reassurance that Tailscale wouldn’t enshittify. But it turned out to just be an argument about how to avoid enshittification that boiled down to two principles:

1. You shouldn’t make your product worse because it’ll eventually harm the company; and
2. Founders are magic and need to never turn over control of the company to others (be it new CEOs or VC) to resist enshittification.

Both are partially right and partially wrong.

For #1: Yes, making your product worse eventually harms the company. No, you can’t expect CEOs to accept that as a reason to not make their product worse because even if it harms the company, short-term incentives that lead to enshittification are eventually going to become irresistible. His comment about reaching “zen” with leveled growth and profit will never stop VCs from calling in demands and favors.

For #2: Yes, founders typically “get it” more than their VC- or failure-initiated replacements. No, that doesn’t mean founders are uniquely resistant to enshittification. This is your point too, and it’s why I don’t believe this person - they lose credibility here because they don’t acknowledge they aren’t special. Every tech bro out there thinks they’ve cracked the code to permanent tech hegemony. That exceptionalist thinking turns into enshittification, since the product-worsening or overcharging is easier to justify as temporary/necessary/not-a-big-deal (until it isn’t).

And all of this doesn’t explain why Tailscale specifically gets immunity if the principles are true.

So interesting post, and a lot more self-awareness than most founders which is still a little reassuring, but a lot of warning signs too.

Edit: clarity

That’s some quality conspiracy thinking!

But there are too many people who could have been early adopters and have any number of random motives for this to be “likely.”

Heck, I was watching Bitcoin when it was like $0.002 a coin and someone spent 10,000 (presumably home-CPU-mined) BTC to buy a pizza. There were a ton of people there at the beginning, the barrier to purchasing a ton was very low, and unlike me, a lot of them certainly had $20,000 to spare and believed in it enough to buy.

Is it just me, or is this graph (first graph in the article) completely unintelligible?

The X-axis being time is self-explanatory, but the Y-axis is somehow exponential time but then also mapping random milestones of performance, meaning those milestones are hard-linked to that time-based Y-axis? What?

They say he was arrested for the “assault,” but yep, they intentionally phrased it to conflate “verbal harassment” with actual (if true) criminal conduct. It’s a meaningless phrase.

If anything, they put it there because to the right wing base, it justifies police violence or could support disorderly conduct, or one of the other catch-all pretextual “crimes” used when police want to arrest someone for no real reason.

Even if any of them believe they are praying, their “faith” is a sham in support of their real religion: power. To Republicans, “politics” is the religion founded on increasing personal power through performative speech and conduct.

They are hollow, nihilistic simulacrums of human-like virtue, expressing themselves only to drain the actual human value and agency from the public.

The DHS views the situation differently. In a statement to NBC, a department spokesperson said that “Garcia assaulted and verbally harassed a federal agent and that he was subdued and arrested for the alleged assault”.

They say this every time, whether or not there is footage obviously proving otherwise.

Apart from being so insulting and pathetic that this is the government’s generic response to unconstitutional arrests (though he is suing under a tort law due presumptively due to qualified immunity), it’s also outright defamatory to falsely claim that someone has committed a crime and assaulted ICE.

The story doesn’t provide evidence either way, but if this just is their typical Baghdad Bob propaganda, I hope the victims of ICE start to sue for defamation as well - drain the new bill’s obscene funding with a wave of court-ordered compensation to ICE’s victims.

Yeah, Match.com isn’t satisfied until everyone is miserable.

It’s weird to think about how dominantly successful any app that took a principled position and resisted enshittification starting in 2010 would be now.

I think civilization is probably just ending after these last few generations, frankly.

Probably for the best…

Don’t forget to bathe in raw sewage.

At least there are no official death camps in this bill.

Sorry to be a downer, but ICE’s funding is now high enough that one of the few plausible explanations for it is that they plan to create concentration camps of immigrants (and, hey, well we have all this money and space, maybe just all other undesirables too…?)

Yes, I opt out. The point of the scan is to (1) build a thorough database (although DOGE probably already did that, we just haven’t found out yet), and (2) to accustom you to your identity not belonging to you.

The second point is the real point of opting out - as soon as nearly nobody opts out, and they’ve made headway on a database, it will no longer be optional. Opting out in that sense is the only vote you’re going to get to cast against it.

Thanks, this was a fun read.

I do think the GBA and DS Castlevanias (since I’ve been replaying them lately) have distinct/unique gameplay mechanics - the most impactful of which involve collecting souls/etc from enemies to junction in new abilities - but until I replayed them I would have said the same thing. I started my replays of them by picking them at random because I couldn’t remember anything except “that was pretty good!”

I deduce that the one nerbal has now become a priceless commodity since the last person using currency now has cornered the nerbal market.

That’s what the Constitution says, and Trump now has nothing that can legally stop him from doing it.

Which means the Constitution is dead letter.

It’s going to be awhile before folks recognize just how damaging this is, if it plays out as I expect.

Trump’s entire life policy is to ignore norms, contracts, laws, and opposition until he’s stopped. It’s still dumbfounding he’s gotten this far, because he’s not some strange unknown entity - he’s a typical sociopath, pushing boundaries as far as they’ll go in his favor until he’s actually prevented from doing so.

His “litigate to delay” strategy is right in line with this. And now the norm is that his administration doesn’t just get to act unlawfully until a court enjoins him from it (if even that, and if even he follows the order). It’s now that his administration gets to act unlawfully to any individual who hasn’t, on their own, challenged it and won in court. And given how fast he is normalizing fascism, even if a substantial number challenge him, in a year when the cases are “won,” it’ll be too late, the moment will be lost.

If there was any doubt as to the health of the rule of law, this is basically the end of the line.