Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

And vampire squids

Some friends and stilletto-sharp thinkers lately are busy discussing the meaning and implications of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification.” ICYMI, Macquarie Dictionary declared it the word of the year, defined as: “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

As Doctorow explained a couple of years back:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Dave Roberts (a.k.a. Dr. Volts) spoke with Doctorow a couple of weeks ago on how enshittification is impacting the right to repair, monopoly power, and the clean energy economy:

But you know, products you pay for get rampantly enshittified — like, you know, John Deere tractors and iPhones and EVs, these are not free. And paying for the product does not make you not the product. Right? It’s, you know, payment is not like a consumer loyalty program where if you pay, suddenly the venal, callow tech-boss suddenly thinks you’re worthy of dignity and respect and stops screwing you. Tech bosses screw you if they can. And right now, we are at a point where they can. So, in this second phase, things are made worse for these platform’s business customers as well.

If you are in the mood to chew through your cheek about that this morning, read “Never Forgive Them,” the Sunday-length installment on enshittification and the Rot Economy at Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At. Doctorow will at the end of his interview at least provide an escape hatch to computer users enslaved by Microsoft or Apple and for-profit online platforms.

I spent a career in consulting work for national and international clients whose products you likely own and use. I’d bet money I’ve been on the inside of more factories than 99 percent of you where they make everything from clothes to paper to tires to plastic to biotech medicines to the white-powder Ms on your M&M’S®. Nevertheless, I am a bad capitalist. I don’t object to capitalism, per se. I just object to the enshittified version that, as Matt Taibbi once wrote, behaves today like “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Now that oligarch-branded capitalism has a stranglehold on our freedoms. It is strangling values like fairness and privacy like an infant in a crib, and enshittifying your experience of being an American.

Not to cast shade on my many friends on Substack (Roberts is there), but I’m rather fond of Digby’s old-school approach to delivering content for readers here. It’s free. There are no paywalls, no ads. Subscribing is voluntary, donating is voluntary. Nobody’s trying to extract value from your attention without your consent. What a concept?

We hope your experience is not gradually deteriorating.
Happy Hollandaise!

Whether you’ve been bad or good

IYKYK: The South lost the Civil War but won Reconstruction, neutered the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments across the South, and maintained a rigid system of Jim Crow oppression for the next 100 years.

IYKYK: Each July 4th, we celebrate America’s war to overthrow rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry and to create on these shores democratic self-rule … plus a little slavery to appease the South’s economic royalty.

Like the Civil War, the American Revolution now seems to have failed. Is there any doubt?

Former bartender, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, doesn’t think so. Her Instagram followers asked about American oligarchy, and one oligarch in particular from the South (Africa).

AOC: “Oh, I don’t think we’re witnessing the START of an oligarchy. I think we are fully here.”

@aoc

Answering questions over on Instagram tonight – @aoc

♬ original sound – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

AOC: “Republicans don’t know who their Daddy is.”

@aoc

Answering questions over on instagram tonight – @aoc

♬ original sound – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Democrats might have had AOC as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee next year. What happened there?

“What we are looking at here is oligarchy”

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders could teach a master class in class politics. He sees it too.

Sanders: “My friends, what we are looking at here has nothing to do with democracy. What we are looking at here is oligarchy. This is up and up government by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”

Sanders: “What we are dealing with right now is that the billionaire class, which owns so much of our economy, which owns so much of our media, they are now moving aggressively to own our political system as well.”

Ten years ago to the day, I commented on an interview with historian Steve Fraser in which he warned about this second Gilded Age:

Bill Moyers’ guest, historian Steve Fraser, deconstructs how the second Gilded Age differs from the first. Then, people banded together and rose up to challenge their newfound serfdom. But these are “acquiescent times,” says Fraser. We live in a fable of capitalism as “a democracy of the audacious who will make it on their own, while in fact most of the people are headed in the opposite direction.”

Then on Christmas Eve in 2014, I returned to Fraser’s comments:

What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical. What their blind fealty and knee-jerk defense of this one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise says about them, I’ll leave for now. It suffices to say I find it rather peculiar.

We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands. (Communists?)

The fetish for the current economic model isn’t about money or ideology, but, like The Matrix, about control. For some and not for others. Working people in the first Gilded Age, says Fraser, “summoned up a kind of political will and the political imagination” to civilize capitalism,” to say to themselves, “we are not fated to live this way.”

Now, corporate capitalism is pretty successful at what it does. But then, so is kudzu, another invasive species. I used to live on the edge of a field of kudzu. In the summer, I had to cut it back with a machete each week to keep it from taking over my yard and eating my house. On those hot, summer afternoons, not once did a passing neighbor wag a finger in my face and accuse me of “punishing success.”

Corporate capitalism has become an invasive species that has taken over government of, by, and for the People. Sen. Elizabeth Warren very publicly called out one such creeping pest recently. She suggested it was time we cut it back. She’s right.

We upgrade our hardware and software every couple of years. When was the last time capitalism got a new operating system? And what might that look like?

We’d damned well better start answering those questions or the Elon Musks and Lords of Silicon Valley will answer them for us. Corporate capitalism and our teetering republic need upgrading, but nearly half the country is just fine with being ruled instead of governing themselves. What’s it going to take for that to sink in? Making our oligarchs wear powdered wigs?

Is that lump in your stocking or in your throat?

We’re not giving up if you’re not.
Happy Hollandaise!

Happy Solstice! I thought I’d whip up a wintry mix of (literally) cool tunes to celebrate the shortest day of the year (buck up, little camper…we’ll start gaining daylight tomorrow). So for a much-needed mental health break…turn off the news, fix yourself a nice cup of hot chocolate (or kick it up a notch), dim all the lights, cozy up in front of the fireplace (real or virtual), don your favorite noise-cancelling headphones and (if I may quote from a Styx song) let the melody just drift your cares away.

California Dreamin’ – The Mamas & the Papas

A Hazy Shade of Winter– Simon & Garfunkel

Waiting for the Winter – Popguns

Theme from “Due South” – Jay Semko

Rangers at Midnight – Crack the Sky

A Winter’s Tale – Jade Warrior

Wintertime Love – The Doors

Sometimes in Winter – Blood, Sweat, & Tears

Song of the Evergreens – Chicago

Superwoman – Stevie Wonder

Snowflake – Kate Bush

Winter Wine – Caravan

Northern Lights – Renaissance

Winter in the Country – Cleaners From Venus

Ring Out, Solstice Bells – Jethro Tull

Explore more of my mixtapes (and movie reviews) in the Den of Cinema archives

— Dennis Hartley

Since it’s Saturday, I thought I would take a few minutes to talk about my pal Dennis Hartley who’s been holding down Saturday nights here at Hullabaloo for the last 18 years. I’ve actually known Dennis since I was a teenager and we were growing up in Fairbanks Alaska. We (mis)spent some of our 20s in San Francisco whiling away hours and hours in the fantastic repertory movie theaters that were numerous in all the big cities in those days. (This was before you could pretty much find every film ever made just by asking Mr Google.) In those days they had film addict types curating the bookings, which changed every day, and you could see classic film programs, foreign films and offbeat independents on huge screens in big, old movie palaces any day of the week. We devoured them. It was an incredible education in the art of film.

Dennis went on to pursue a career in comedy and radio in Seattle and I ended up in LA working in the movie business but we’ve stayed in touch and Dennis has remained a film hound on a level I couldn’t keep up with. His personal collection is probably bigger than most film schools at this point.

Anyway, back in 2006 I had been reading Dennis’s film reviews on film forums online for a while and the bright idea occurred to me that he should write them for my readership who might like to have a break from politics on the weekend. Saturday Night at the Movies was born.

He’s become well-known for his “lists” of films which he curates in much the same way those film bookers used to do the programs in the old repertory houses back in the day. And as it happens, he’s also a musician with a huge music collection which he has often shared as his “mixtapes” (or as the kids say “playlist.”)

One of my favorite blog stories is about the time Dennis was trying to get accredited for a film festival, as he does every year, and one of them denied him entry. He told me about it and I asked him, “should we sic the readers on them?” He said sure and I put out the word. Some very important people in the film business who happened to be readers wrote to the festival asking them to let Dennis attend. The next morning they contacted him and suddenly they just couldn’t be more accommodating.

The running joke between us has been that people came into the office that morning, opened up their emails and all exclaimed in unison, “who the fuck is Dennis Hartley?” He’s never been denied since.

Anyway, it’s been a privilege sharing this space with him all these years and I’m so happy that I could share his film and music knowledge with all of you.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Imagine that.

Will Stancil wrote on Bluesky:” Look either the entire US economy turned around sometime in the month of November, or the economy really was great and we’ve just been mainlining media doomerism all along.” Uh yeah.

Paul Krugman:

…Anyway, there has been a running debate over why Americans were giving the economy negative reviews. One side argued that it was about perception rather than reality — that we were in a “vibecession,” Kyla Scanlon’s brilliant coinage. After all, wages for most workers have significantly outpaced inflation since the eve of the pandemic:

The other view was that the data were missing important ways in which Americans’ economic position had worsened. For example, interest rates, say on car loans, aren’t included in the CPI.

And of course there are many families in America struggling to make ends meet. But that has always been true. I mean, almost 22 million workers were laid off in 2019, which most people remember as a good year, and not all of them landed on their feet.

The vibes guys, a group that included yours truly, pointed to a lot of evidence suggesting that while Americans had a negative view of the national economy, they had a much more positive view of their own financial situation, while rating their local economy, which they could some extent observe directly, much more positively than that of the nation as a whole. You could see this, for example, in the Federal Reserve’s survey of the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households:

You could see it even more clearly in a Wall Street Journal survey reported by Greg Ip:

You could summarize public opinion as being “I’m doing OK, people I know or see around me are doing OK, but I hear that really bad things are happening somewhere out there.”

One sticking point for the vibes story, however, has been that while people have generally told pollsters that they’re doing OK, many surveys — notably the venerable Michigan Consumer Survey — have shown at least a plurality of Americans saying that they’re worse off than they were five years ago.

Now, I’ve always had my suspicions about these results. Are people answering this question reliable narrators? Obviously people who have gotten either much richer or much poorer over the past five years know it. But if you don’t fall into those categories, do you really know without looking it up how much money you made in 2019? You know that prices have risen, but have you kept a diary that lets you compare that price increase with the wage increase you’ve also probably experienced?

So I was curious to see what the first post-election Michigan survey would say. We know that there are strong partisan effects on overall consumer sentiment; supporters of both parties feel better about the economy when their party is in power, but Republicans swing much more strongly than Democrats.

Does the same effect apply to people’s assessment of their own financial condition?

Oh yes it does. The economy now isn’t significantly different from what it was just before the election; economic conditions were fairly stable in late 2019. Yet suddenly a plurality of respondents to the Michigan survey say that they’re better off than they were five years ago.

Yep. That’s the survey featured at the top of the post. To me that just shows that the “vibes” were mostly created by the endless pessimistic media feedback loop that turned into conventional wisdom.

I will never understand it but Trump just makes some people feel good. I have my suspicions about why that is but it’s so misanthropic that I don’t feel like going there right now. It’s not a very nice observation about my fellow Americans and it’s Christmas time.

Good, good, good, good vibrations…

And yes he should

I’ve been hoping he would do this since the day he got elected:

President Biden is considering commuting the sentences of most, if not all, of the 40 men on the federal government’s death row, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would frustrate President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to resume the rapid pace of executions that marked his first term.

A broad coalition of religious and civil-rights groups has been pressing Biden to take the step, and the effort gained momentum earlier this month after Pope Francis, in his weekly address, prayed for the commutation of America’s condemned inmates. If their death sentences were commuted, the prisoners, all convicted of murder, would serve life without parole. Biden, a devout Catholic, spoke with Francis on Thursday and is scheduled to meet with him at the Vatican next month, the White House said. 

A decision from the president could come by Christmas, some of the people said. A principal question is whether the president should issue a blanket commutation of all the condemned men, or whether death sentences should remain for the most heinous convicts, these people said. 

A White House spokesman said that no final decision had been made. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland, who oversees federal prisons, has recommended that Biden commute all but a handful of the sentences, the people familiar with the matter said, excepting a few terrorism and hate-crimes cases. The Justice Department had no immediate comment.

Possible exceptions could include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three and wounded more than 250 others, Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

On his way out of office Trump executed a whole bunch of federal prisoners within just a couple of weeks. It was one of the most grotesque parting shots he made and that’s saying something when you consider the Big Lie and January 6th. Biden needs to save the rest of them.

I actually think he should give clemency to all of them, even those hideous mass murderers. The reason is that the death penalty is immoral and it is immoral for the state to execute those murderous sociopaths who cannot be allowed to walk among us.

Biden is a very committed Catholic and he is close to meeting his maker. He will never run for anything and he has no offspring or other family that is set to follow in his footsteps. He has no reason to care about the political ramifications. This is purely a matter of principle and he needs to save those people from the bloodthirsty Trump regardless of the criticism he will almost certainly get from the right (and probably establishment Democrats who are desperate for Real American credit.)

It’s the right thing to do. Just do it Joe!

That came after his earlier endorsement and a flood of criticism.

Then the VP-elect also endorsed German neo-fascists and threatened a woman who works for a think tank called The Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He may think his sarcasm masks the fascism but he’s wrong.

This is unamerican, obviously.

These are the people who will be running our country for the next four years openly aligning with Nazis and deploying Nazi tactics.

By the way, the man who ran his car into that crowd in Germany is a big fan of Elon Musk:

Taleb A. apparently shared the resentment of conspiracy ideologists and agitators such as the US podcaster Alex Jones or the British right-wing activist Tommy Robinson. The entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has increasingly openly expressed his sympathies for right-wing parties, was also one of his role models: “If you listen to someone like Tommy Robinson or even Elon Musk, and even if you are ignorant of the process of Islamization, you will think that they are both conspiracy theorists,” said A. in an interview. “But I can say from experience that everything Robinson says, what Musk says, what Alex Jones says, or anyone who is described by the mainstream media as a radical or right-wing extremist – they are telling the truth.”

They do have a lot in common.

Coal-rolling Trump’s enemies

The old, red-brick Memorial Auditorium where the spouse as a tween saw The Monkees is long gone. Its replacement sports a plaza in front, a modern, electronic marquee, and a name that expires with its corporate sponsorship. Before pyrotechnics, before Vince McMahon made professional wrestling professional and a media empire, the old joint is where Monday Night Wrestling was as much local culture as ambulances and cop cars outside west-end beer joints on Saturday nights. What the hell, I thought. A friend and I went out for pizza and beer, then took in the show once. Once.

Wrasslin’ wasn’t the spectacle it is now. It wasn’t even mildly entertaining. But for fans it was a weekly morality play of “The Drunkard” sort. Clean-cut heroes. Snidely Whiplash villains (heels) to hiss, and The Foreign Menace. Like McMahon’s empire, Donald Trump’s MAGA show offers obvious heroes and dastardly, America-hating villains. It’s more mildly threatening than mildly entertaining. But it’s a kind of theater with similar morality-play charm for a similar audience. As my high school journalism teacher said of supermarket tabloids, at least people are reading.

David Kurz of TPM sees the wrestling parallels in the just-averted budget showdown:

This week’s debacle is not your grandpappy’s horse-trading in a smoke-filled room or LBJ dishing out the Johnson Treatment. The only arm-twisting going on is the kind you see in pro wrestling, which is probably the best parallel for what the GOP’s performative politics amounts to. Spending bills, speakership elections, and other real and pressing matters of government put the GOP’s kayfabe under extreme duress. When that happens, we get eruptions like this one that periodically pull the curtain back on what is really up.

We’re more than a decade now into the GOP’s performative politics of destruction. It gains power by touting its aim to break stuff and then runs into a brick wall when it’s forced to make the hard choices that come with holding power. Any GOP effort to govern at least temporarily is susceptible to being undermined by its many bombthrowers, who can exert leverage by striking a purer “blow it all up” posture.

Performatively breaking “the rules” is part of the show in the wrasslin’ world. The bad guys become good guys and vice versa, just to keep things interesting. Performers getting even for “done me wrongs” sells tickets to the next event.

The financially struggling news media hasn’t caught on to that. Kurz provides examples of anodyne headlines from media outlets that while “literally true … fail to capture the true dynamic.” I’m not arguing that headlines should be as sensational as the tabloids, but if you want to sell papers and draw public attention to events that impact people’s for-real lives, perhaps a little more showmanship is in order. Republicans are hanging truck nuts on America’s trailer hitch fergawdsakes. MAGAs in Congress are coal-rolling Trump’s enemies. Maybe say so.

When is revenge not revenge?

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller spoke with recently incarcerated Steve Bannon, “Trump’s on-again-off-again adviser,” about plans for not-revenge against Trump’s enemies (and Kash Patel’s). The law firm of Bannon, Patel, Musk, and Trump will instead attempt “cleansing of institutions that Trump and the MAGA movement believe are fundamentally broken,” Miller explains, and break them some more. There will be a heavy focus on the January 6 “fedsurrection” plot by the FBI to pin the Capitol assault on MAGA “patriots“:

“I think there will be a massive investigation. The vast criminal conspiracy, including the media’s—what was it, Andrew Weissmann and all those FBI guys that work on MSNBC—I think there will be big investigations into all these people, I just do. I think there is going to be a huge investigation, I believe, into 2020. I think it’s going to be a huge investigation on January 6th, the fedsurrection, I think it’s going to be a huge investigation about the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump.”

The facts won’t matter. The play’s the thing that will catch the attention of the MAGA king and his rabid fans. They want a show. He’ll give them the circuses if not the bread. The press will dish up bland.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (@sensanders)

Thank you for coming to our “show” each day.
Happy Hollandaise!

Does Musk own a hollow volcano somewhere?

Our oligarch overlords have long treated the land of the free as the home of the knave. Now that President Musk, our first non-native-born chief of state is calling the shots, that state of affairs is even more apparent, if less publicized.

“Why is corporate media not covering this more?” asks Dean Obeidallah. Mediaite:

Democratic Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) accused Elon Musk of working to kill Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) initial bipartisan spending proposal because it would have regulated his investments in China.

DeLauro said in a statement Friday she “sent a letter to congressional leadership raising concerns that Elon Musk may have upended the government funding process to remove a provision that would regulate U.S. investments in China.” Her statement added:

“The four corners of the Appropriations Committee and Congressional leadership reached a government funding deal earlier this week that included a key provision that would screen U.S. investments in critical sectors in China,” said DeLauro. “Musk’s investments in China and his ties with the Chinese Community Party have only grown over the last few years with Tesla’s Shanghai plant producing about 50 percent of Tesla’s global automobile output. It is no surprise ‘President’ Musk does not want to see a funding deal containing this provision be signed into law.”

In the letter she wrote, “ It is particularly disturbing that Musk may have sought to upend this critical negotiated agreement to remove a bipartisan provision regulating U.S. investments in China in order to protect his wallet and the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of American workers, innovators, and businesses.”

Disturbing? Yes. Surprising? No.

Why is corporate media not covering this more? "House Dem Accuses Musk of Killing Initial Spending Deal to Protect His Investments In China." No debate that the second GOP budget bill took out the ban out on China investments and China is Musk's second biggest market www.mediaite.com/politics/hou…

— Dean Obeidallah (@deanobeidallah.bsky.social) 2024-12-21T12:24:34.969Z

Musk responded with his characteristic panache.

Musk responded to DeLauro’s accusation by ridiculing the 81-year-old lawmaker’s appearance. Musk posted an AI-generated image of DeLauro as a kind of monster and wrote, “Turns out that Washington DC swamp creatures are real.”

Musk really is an Octopussy-level Bond villain.

Thank you visiting with us each day. And look! You’ve even taken time out from last-minute shopping to be here! Know we appreciate your support.

Happy Hollandaise!