Thanks again, friends. I am so very grateful for your support after all these years. I can hardly believe it, to tell you the truth. It’s a Christmas miracle every year. It means we can keep going over the next year as we confront whatever this weird political zeitgeist is about to bring us.
I wanted to take a moment today to say thank you to my good friend Tom Sullivan. He has been holding down the morning shift for many years here at Hullabaloo and I thank my lucky stars every day that I asked him to contribute here all those years ago.
I had liked him the minute I met him and his lovely wife Sarah at a Netroots confab back in the day and I especially liked his writing and commentary. He’s a natural blogger, someone who understands the form (and yes, there IS a specific form) and executes it perfectly. I couldn’t ask for anything more in a co-blogger.
But Tom is also doing God’s work down in North Carolina which has become a petri dish for right wing electoral shenanigans. He’s been working in Democratic politics in Asheville for years and this cycle helped elevate the state Democratic Party’s rising star Anderson Clayton, who led the party to win all the top jobs in the executive branch this year. He served as a Dem delegate to the DNC and was working diligently to make sure they get out the vote when Hurricane Helaine hit his hometown.
Tom was right in the middle of that horror, no power, no water for weeks and yet was out there helping to dispel disinformation on social media and ensure that the Democrats were able to get out the vote despite the crisis. For years, Tom has been distributing his “For The Win” pamphlet to Democrats all over the country with some novel ideas to help get out the vote.
All the while, unless there’s a massive hurricane, Tom writes interesting and useful posts every morning seven days a week here on Hullabaloo. It truly was my lucky day when he said yes.
I’m happy to say that he’s going to be here through the tough times ahead and between the two of us we’ll try to stay on top of the unfolding horrors. It’s going to be a very bumpy flight and I wouldn’t want anyone but Tom to be my wingman.
If you would like to help keep this going, I would be most grateful.
One of the more annoying conceits of the MAGA cult is its insistence that Donald Trump is some kind of religious figure dedicated to bringing world peace and mutual understanding among all of humankind. They even insist that he’s been cheated out of a well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize. That anyone could believe that about the most hostile, aggressively insulting, vengeance seeking, demagogue this country has ever elected to high office is enough to make you wonder if there are hallucinogens in the water supply.
Setting aside his promises to wreak revenge on his political opponents and round up and deport mass numbers of people, including American children, there is the simple fact that his first term did not feature no war or death at the the hands of the US military as he and his acolytes so often claim. Despite his promise to end the “forever war” in Afghanistan it continued under his watch. It was left to President Biden to do the difficult task of ending it and take the heat that he was too cowardly to take. And naturally Trump criticized him for it.
He’s also supposedly an isolationist in the old “America First” tradition. Supposedly, under Trump there will be no more “interventionism” abroad. It’s none of our business what other countries do. If they decide to invade their neighbors and take their land, that’s their privilege. We have no stake in any kind of international order or stability. In fact, Trump proposes to build “a great Iron Dome over our country, a dome like has never seen before” to keep us safe from everyone else in the world. Experts told ABC News that’s “it’s unrealistic, unaffordable and unachievable.” It’s also unnecessary but I don’t think anyone will be surprised if Trump’s major domo. Elon Musk, gets a fat government contract to attempt to make it happen.
However, let’s not fool ourselves that Trump is actually an isolationist. He never has been, at least in any coherent definition of the term. He generally prefers to use economic threats to bring the rest of the world to heel, but he is all about American dominance. And in his second term it appears that he has decided that American First means a return to American expansionism.
It’s hard to say what inspired him to start threatening to seize other nations’ lands. Maybe he’s just feeling his oats and thinks he pretty much runs the world like a Roman Emperor now. Or perhaps he’s just watching his idol Vladimir Putin waging war against Ukraine and feels he should be able to do the same thing. Whatever the reason, Trump’s been on a tear in the last month threatening America’s neighbors (and some others) in increasingly hostile ways.
We knew that in the first term Trump had mused about launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” He wanted to keep it on the QT back then, suggesting that “we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly,” and “no one would know it was us.” But since then he’s been openly calling for military action.. But then virtually all the presidential candidates in the Republican primary were also slavering over the idea so it’s not just one of his rash ideas that nobody took seriously.
Florida Governor Ron Desantis said he would “do it on day one” when he was asked if he’d send troops over the border. The allegedly moderate former S. Carolina Governor Nikki Haley told Fox News, “when it comes to the cartels, we should treat them like the terrorists that they are. I would send special operations in there and eliminate them just like we eliminated ISIS.”
That “terrorist” designation is important because that would give the White House quasi-legal authority to send in special forces or possibly even an invasion force. That’s not off the table. Vice President-elect JD Vance said at the time:
“We need to declare the Mexican drug cartels a terrorist organization because that’s exactly what they are. It allows our military to go into Mexico, to go on our southern border, and actually do battle with them.”
Rolling Stone reported last month that members of the incoming administration have been actively brainstorming “how much” to “invade Mexico.”
Recently, Trump has decided that our neighbor to the north also looks mighty tempting. He’s been taunting the Canadians with the idea that they should be the 51st state because the US is supposedly “subsidizing” them which is his definition of trade. (He thinks that anything America pays for Canadian goods is a subsidy regardless of what we get in return.) That hasn’t gone over very well among Canadians who know they are a sovereign country and are entitled to respect. So far, Trump hasn’t threatened them with military action but with the way he’s been talking, they probably shouldn’t assume it’s all just a big joke.
Over the weekend, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he intends to take back the Panama Canal, which was given by treaty to the Panamanians back in 1977 and finally completely 25 years ago. He lambasted the country for allegedly charging “exorbitant fees” (of course) and said that if they don’t change it he would “demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question.” When the president of Panama responded by saying, “the sovereignty and independence of our country aren’t negotiable” Trump posted “We’ll see about that!” and then later posted a picture of the canal with the words, “welcome to the United States canal.”
On Sunday night the once and future president announced yet another possible conquest. While announcing the nomination of his ambassador to Denmark, he threw in this bizarre statement:
“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
You may recall it was reported that in his first term, Trump floated the idea of trading Puerto Rico for Greenland. He also believed that it could be bought from Denmark which was, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in their book The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, an idea he got from billionaire Ronald Lauder and the idea actually obsessed him for months causing much concern among members of the cabinet. When the Danish Prime Minister called the idea absurd, Trump had a temper tantrum and canceled a planned trip to the country so this latest declaration may be yet another of his vendettas.
As one BlueSky commenter quipped, “threatening to invade and annex all our neighbors sure does cross off another item on the list for the ‘he’s not technically a proper fascist!’ folks.” At the very least it sure does look like “Donald the Dove,” as the NY Times Maureen Dowd fatuously named him back in 2016, is looking to make American territorial expansion great again. That Nobel Peace Prize is right around the corner.
The Ink and Adam M. Lowenstein this morning consult with a researcher on “the internet and social media shape the intersection of politics, propaganda, and people.” Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown has assembled some of her conclusions in “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.”
DiResta’s and colleagues’ work for the Stanford Internet Observatory pissed off House Republicans enough that Stanford pulled the plug on the research after five years. Let that be a lesson to libtards everywhere:
SIO and its researchers have been sued three times by conservative groups alleging that its researchers colluded illegally with the federal government to censor speech, forcing Stanford to spend millions of dollars to defend its staff and students.
(I just grabbed the audiobook. It’s how I “read” books these days.)
Her book, DiResta says, is not about social media per se, but about how “Propaganda evolves to fit the technological and communication landscape of the day.” She continues:
The content is different, the style is different, and the messages often largely remain the same, because they appeal to people psychologically. But you can’t really separate the medium and the message. That was one of the things that I wanted to highlight.
It’s also one of the things leading Democrats don’t understand. Yes, they have a problem finding a message that reaches people, but leaders who cut their political teeth in the pre-internet era of network news don’t understand how to interact with the public via any medium more relatable than a press conference.
There was a funny interview I read with Jamelle Bouie, who’s a New York Times columnist. It was saying he really cracked the TikTok code. It’s talking about him just walking around the neighborhood talking, and how this is not a thing that most journalists do. Here’s somebody who’s quite clearly “media” in his day job, but as he’s describing it in this interview, he’s not seen as media when he’s on TikTok doing his walk-and-talks. He’s just a guy. There is that almost performing-by-not-performing component of it. How can you be as relatable as possible?
Relatability connects, and most Democrats don’t come across as relatable. There’s more in the interview about the “bespoke reality” many people inhabit these days. Trying to present accurate data to refute conspiracy theories is pointless when congressional bad-faith actors are ” just going to move the goalposts, and whatever you did turn over, they’re going to find six words to hang you with.”
But the relatability problem is why Democrats are long overdue to turn over their top leadership to a younger generation. (Younger than 50, please.) Many of our politicians have not drawn private-sector paychecks in years. As soon as most leave office, some of the side gigs that supplement their congressional salaries will dry up unless they become lobbyists or pundits. So there are strong incentives to hang on into senility. But as much as we may respect their experience and accomplishments, they clearly are not equipped to press the attack on ideological adversaries in the 21st-century media battlespace.
Clingmans Dome – Great Smoky Mountains National Park – North Carolina. Photo 2014 by Doug Kerr via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
It’s Christmas week. That means drama out of Washington will subside for a couple of days. But not entirely.
President Joe Biden, largely out of sight since the election, announced he would commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row to life imprisonment. The three who remain are the worst of the worst: “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers responsible for the deadly Boston Marathon bombing in 2013; Dylann Roof, a White nationalist who massacred nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.”
The House Ethics Committee is expected to release its report Monday on former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida. CBS reports early this morning that it obtained a copy of the final draft of the 37-page report. Investigators found Gaetz “paid numerous women — including a 17-year-old girl — for sex, and to have purchased and used illegal drugs, including from his Capitol Hill office.”
“The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the 37-page report concludes.
Following the ABC News defamation settlement with Trump, the incoming administration is poised for war with the press and any members it deems insufficiently obeisant to his Second Coming. He smells blood:
Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, said the president-elect plans to focus on “blatantly false and dishonest reporting, which serves no public interest and only seeks to interfere in our elections on behalf of political partisans.”
If only. Longtime readers will recall our 2019 run-in with Trump the Litigious.
I won’t sugar-coat this. The next couple of years will be rough. How rough is anyone’s guess. But a holiday party conversation with a retired FSO on Sunday brought up a perspective it will help us all to preserve.
We shared our mutual shock at the election — reelection — of the worst president in American history. Historians normally take decades to render judgment on a presidency. Trump’s place as worst of the worst, he noted, is already secure. Trump selecting Kimberly Guilfoyle and Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner’s ex-con father, as ambassadors to Greece and France was particularly irksome, a thumb in the eye to our NATO allies as well as to the U.S. diplomatic corps.
When I remarked that I know people who have left the country already, the career public servant was adamant. He’s not going anywhere. For friends asking how bad it can get, he offers instead not predictions but “glimmers.” Of hope.
At such gatherings, I tell people I write each day for a website out of Los Angeles. As morning guy, I have a three-hour news jump on Digby. I don’t prepare a lot of posts the night before. Much breaking news drops about 5:30- 6 a.m. Eastern. There’s just enough time in the morning to review headlines, skim stories over coffee, and make a few observations before 9 a.m. my time. I try to offer glimmers where I find them.
Digby asked if I’d fill in while she was away over a weekend in August 2014. Cool! What a privilege. When she got home Sunday evening, I asked if I was done. Not if you don’t want to be, she said. And here I am.
Some weeks later, an editorial page editor for the Asheville Citizen-Times spotted me at a political debate. (I’d written op-eds for them.) He strode across the room wearing a broad smile, shook my hand, and said, “My friend, you have arrived.” I still feel that way. I didn’t know Jim was a Hullabaloo reader.
One thing I love about Hullabaloo’s old-school format in the age of substacks designed to monetize everyone’s online activity is no paywall.* We want readers here. Your contributions to the annual fundraiser tell us you value what we do here too. They keep the lights on.
Ten years on, it’s still a privilege to write for you. Who knew when I met Digby in 2009 that I’d be living at one of the epicenters of GOP election fuckery? In this increasingly insane world, it helps me retain my sanity, and I hope what we post helps you maintain. Thank you for hanging with us each day. Let’s try not to hang separately.
Happy Hollandaise!
* And no advertising. Some salesman wrote last week offering to “leverage” our audience and “optimize” our revenue. Thank you and goodbye.
Imagine Obamacare is dead and millions of Americans have lost health coverage. Abortion is illegal nationwide, pills to end pregnancies are off the market, and doctors wait until the mother’s death is imminent before attempting lifesaving care. Domestic abusers freely carry guns and government attempts to stop untraceable homemade semiautomatic rifles have been quashed, rendering gun licenses and background checks useless. Environmental regulations founder as climate change worsens. With the sidelining of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street has returned to its greediest days, making bets that threaten economic stability and preying on consumers with predatory loans and hidden fees. Officials are barred from even asking social media platforms to stem disinformation or calls to violence. Police, unrestrained by federal immigration law, round up, detain, and deport suspected immigrants. Washington can no longer fulfill treaty obligations as states erect barriers along US borders, causing international chaos. And organizing a protest against any of the above may result in you being sued successfully, making free speech an expensive proposition.
These are not mere hypotheticals. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—transformed by appointees of former President Donald Trump—has issued decisions greenlighting every one of these eventualities. While some were put on ice by the Supreme Court, others remain in effect in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the three states the circuit covers. In those states, women have no right to end pregnancies that threaten their health, the enforcement powers of dozens of federal agencies are in doubt, and protest organizers are vulnerable to legal retribution. Other 5th Circuit decisions, from a ruling hamstringing the SEC and similar agencies to one legalizing bump stocks—the device that enabled a lone shooter in Las Vegas to kill 60 people and injure more than 500 in just 10 minutes—are now the law of the land. This is neither the outer bounds of what this radical court will do, nor the end of its impact on all Americans. It is the beginning.
These are far right radicals intent upon transforming America into a Christian nationalist, far right, oligarchy. Can we be at all sure that the Supreme Court majority won’t sign off on any or all of those things? I certainly have no confidence in that assumption. Counting on some combination of Federalist Society members Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts to band together to stop it just doesn’t seem all that likely to me.
Here’s a reminder of the Federalist Society’s evolution which started as a campus debating society and quickly grew into the most influential group in the American judiciary:
Beginning with Ronald Reagan, the Federalist Society has developed extensive connections with every Republican administration. The organisation and the GOP have created a pipeline to the judiciary, making Federalist Society membership almost a prerequisite to gaining a judicial appointment during periods of Republican control. All six of the Republican-appointed justices currently on the Supreme Court are affiliated with the society, as were nearly all of the federal judges appointed by Trump.
Leonard Leo, the society’s executive vice president, has been perhaps the single most influential person responsible for building the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, having played major roles in the confirmation of all six conservative justices. Leo personally drafted lists of acceptable nominees for each of Trump’s three Supreme Court picks, and he helped both presidents Trump and George W Bush strategise about how to get their picks confirmed. Leo’s control over the Republican nomination process has been so extensive that the Trump White House was said to have “outsourced” the process to Leo.
[…]
When it suits the conservative agenda, the Federalist Society and its disciples hamstring the power of states, such as the Supreme Court’s decision last week to strike down New York’s open-carry gun regulations. At other times, however, they act as strong advocates for states’ rights. We have just seen this in their latest decision on the issue of abortion, where they moved the power back to the states at the cost of practically erasing women’s right to abortion.
Rather than an independent proponent of a coherent and overarching set of political principles, the Federalist Society’s so-called commitment to “textualism” largely serves as an enforcement arm of other conservative interests, using the judiciary to push through the agendas of the NRA, the Religious Right and other wings of the current Republican coalition.
But hey, maybe we’ll get lucky and the high court will refuse to hear some of these cases or take a middle ground that won’t be so bad.
Everyone’s been saying that Elon’s really in charge. And it stands to reason. Poor Trump is obviously past his prime. He’s 78 and fading fast. It happens.
But he’s not happy about it:
Trump: The new one is President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk. No, that's not happening. pic.twitter.com/wTeDA06muo
Trump: [Elon Musk] is not going to be president. That I can tell you. I’m safe. You know why? He can’t be. He wasn’t born in this country pic.twitter.com/YpgcGZ0jF4
He’s rattled. And I don’t think he got quite the crowd reaction he was expecting…
Trump most definitely does not like having smart people around him and he certainly doesn’t like having someone who take the spotlight as Musk does. It’s bothering him. But I don’t know if he can get rid of him. He’s scared of Musk’s money and the fact that Musk is now a MAGA leader means he is a competitor. He showed that this week with the wrecking ball he took to the continuing resolution that Trump had signed off on.
And yes, he did sign off on it, despite what the Trumpers are saying. The Washington Post has a good tick-tock on how it all fell apart (gift link):
Several people close to Johnson say the speaker talked frequently with the president-elect and kept him abreast of ongoing negotiations. But another Trump adviser described him as blindsided by the bill’s contents and furious. The first adviser said the president-elect was with Musk at the time, and Trump told NBC he encouraged Musk to post messages condemning the bill.
“I told him that if he agrees with me, that he could put out a statement,” Trump said.
But two people familiar with the situation say that Trump and Johnson were on a call Wednesday morning where the president-elect did not express displeasure with the proposal.
I think we know what really happened. Johnson kept Trump appraised every step of the way because of course he did. Trump lied about telling Musk to post those messages. He would have been right there with him if it was a strategy. No, he was on the golf course or still in bed when it was going on and only after he saw the huge brouhaha caused by Musk’s tweeting did he get in on the action.
He knows he’s weak. And he knows Musk is making him look weak. But he may be stuck with him. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller went to the TPUSA pre-Christmas “Gathering of the MAGAlos” as he does every year. He’s very brave:
I was standing beside the step-and-repeat at James O’Keefe’s annual AmFest afterparty nursing a bourbon and coke when out of the corner-of-my-eye emerged a face that was mostly familiar, minus the signature sepia blur. The face was approaching fast. Wide TV anchor smile. Caked on make-up. Main-character energy.
I quickly realized I was in its sights.
Immediately I’m greeted with the familiar booming, midwestern-announcer voice. Knowing that I was on enemy turf I attempted a pleasant return greeting, hoping to disarm and signal that I came in peace.
The face briefly collects itself and appears to look back and see if her husband was taping the exchange. One of the many observers of the scene—and let me tell you, it was a SCENE—later told me that they thought Cameraman Lake had missed the approach, possibly the cause of Kari’s decision to double back for more.
She turns back around.
“You are a piece of shit!” she repeats over, and over, and over, and over, and over, staring up at me with increasing rage in her eyes and at times pinching my arm like an angry grandmother.1 Lake goes on to make a series of other accusations about my integrity. Among them: That I don’t care about “fentanyl mothers,” that I am a “fake news” “liar,” and that I was hiding my signature pearl necklace underneath a button up shirt. (On this last count, at least, I can conclusively say that she was incorrect. )
The attack subsided when an unlikely peace-maker emerged from the growing crowd of onlookers: The right-wing conspiracist Laura Loomer, who you may recall as the Trump hanger-on who briefly became a lightning rod during the 2024 campaign. Loomer made her way through the crowd of onlookers, stood next to Lake and echoed her assessment that I was a lying POS, but in a tone that was more appropriate for a public gathering. Loomer’s calm-disdain-mixed-with-curiosity about my presence seemed to cause Lake’s manic rage to peter out.
Throughout Kari’s tirade, I think I mostly smiled awkwardly. Though who can say. Unless she releases the video, I can’t be sure what I looked like. I remember looking around at my surroundings with low-grade anxiety and trying to assess whether this was real life or if I had mistakenly taken a hallucinogenic gummy. A few times I attempted to congratulate Lake on her new role as the nominee to be the director of the Voice Of America. At first I was trying to de-escalate, but eventually I confess that I was mocking her.
The rest is just as good. And he notes something that I’ve been sort of seeing on social media:
The Lake exchange, while frivolous and a quite a bit cray, was telling. Her behavior was the most unhinged—by far—of anyone I encountered. But it reflected the broader vibe I got from the attendees: People just didn’t seem as happy and fulfilled as I expected.
Then there were the speeches from the main stage, where the crowd reaction was tepid compared to last year. You could sense the speakers searching for material that would generate some heat. Many settled on talking about how this year proved that God was on Trump’s side and that His hand had emerged from the heavens to protect him on that field in Butler. (This bit was well received.)
But in years past the real juice had come from defining foes. The crowd would get rabid as speakers railed against the deep state, and the election thieves, and Dementia Joe. Kamabla. The Never Trumpers. Kevin McCarthy. The Establishment RINO Cucks. The Muslims. The Killer Migrants. The Trans people who worked in the Biden Administration. Etc. Etc.
The problem for speaker’s this year is that most of their enemies have been defeated and are down bad. And sure, some of us got kicked around a bit on stage to standard applause. But the rabidity was missing. Turns out that it’s hard to get it up for kicking the wounded donkey.
They are tired of winning, I guess. The libs have been owned so they just don’t have any reason for being.
The Washington Post sounds an alarm about the erosion of press freedom. They outline all the cases that are pending and the collapse of the ABC case, all of which sounds pretty bad when you see it all together. They seem to be serious.
It is hardly unusual for a president to clash with the press. Richard M. Nixon kept journalists on his enemies list, while his vice president, Spiro Agnew, dubbed them “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Bill Clinton griped about coverage of his White House sex scandal, and Barack Obama’s administration brought a record number of prosecutions against journalists’ sources for leaking government information.
But legal experts say Trump has taken attacks on the press to an entirely new level, softening the ground for an erosion of robust press freedom.
“The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September in an attack on NBC News.
Experts in polarization said that Trump’s posture toward the press has eroded trust in the Fourth Estate. From the Oval Office, he can do even more.
“My concern is what he does when he has the power of the U.S. government in his hands,” said Liliana Hall Mason, a political science professor at the University of Maryland. “It looks to me like all the guardrails have been removed, and we are in for a presidency unlike any we’ve experienced before.””
One of the articles I read about the ABC case (which I can’t seem to find now unfortunately) said that the corporate legal suits were very nervous about the Florida judge who was hearing the case. Apparently, they interpreted her earlier rulings to be a little bit eccentric and not in a good way. I got the sense they thought there was a little Aileen Cannon energy.
Whether that’s just rationalization, I don’t know. it’s very possible the cave was just another gesture to the Dear Leader from Disney, which was already feeling a little bit vulnerable after the DeSantis business. But reading it did remind me that that with judge shopping being so prevalent and so many hardcore right wing judges on the bench from Trump’s first term, it might be smart to recognize that all the assurance we hear from the various legal beagles that the suits or indictments can’t possibly be found to have merit in the courts may not be taking that into account. With Clarence Thomas talking about overturning NY Times v. Sullivan defamation case, who knows what might happen? The courts are a very weak guardrail at the moment.
I’m guessing someone told him about the fees and he got all excited and happy that he has something new to complain about. But he obviously subbed out this tweet to a donor or adviser because it’s far too coherent. I think what the important Heather said was correct:
In the old days I would have said Steve Bannon but I’m not sure who it is today. One thing we can be sure of is that Trump isn’t reading anything. Unless it’s the Classic Comics version of the McKinley era.
It sure seems as though Trump is on an expansionist tear these days. Personally I expect that the pending Mexico invasion is the most likely but who knows? Maybe someone should tell him to colonize Alaska. He almost certainly doesn’t know it’s already a state.
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.”
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, pop-up or otherwise. Subscribing is voluntary, donating is voluntary. Nobody’s trying to extract value from your attention without your consent. What a concept?
We trust your experience here is not gradually deteriorating. Happy Hollandaise!
