Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:

Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase, belonging to the newly popular women’s dating safety app Tea. Users say they are rifling through peoples’ personal data and selfies uploaded to the app, and then posting that data online, according to screenshots, 4chan posts, and code reviewed by 404 Media. In a statement to 404 Media, Tea confirmed the breach also impacted some direct messages but said that the data is from two years ago.

Tea, which claims to have more than 1.6 million users, reached the top of the App Store charts this week and has tens of thousands of reviews there. The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.

Tea jumped to the top spot in the App Store (it’s still at #4 as I type this, trailing only ChatGPT, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video) and has been getting a lot of coverage this week. A wide open, publicly accessible database of users’ driver’s licenses and self portraits is, to say the least, pretty egregious.

I’m not accusing Tea in particular of being vibe-coded, but I do wonder if this sort of thing is going to become commonplace as more apps and services come online after being developed in slapdash AI-assisted manners.

Emma Roth, The Verge:

Google will officially deprecate links generated with its URL shortening tool next month. On August 25th, 2025, all links in the https://goo.gl/* format will no longer work and return a 404 error message.

Google shut down its URL shortener in 2019, citing “changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet.” Links created with the tool continued to work since then, but Google announced last year that it would begin deprecating them as traffic to the shortened URLs declined. “In fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month,” Google said in its July 2024 blog post.

The heyday for link shorteners was the era when Twitter (a) was still Twitter, (b) had a 140-character post limit, and (c) counted characters such that each character of a URL counted toward the 140-character limit. None of those things are true anymore. But, still. Cool URLs don’t change.

I’m sure it is true that 99 percent of goo.gl links had no activity in the past month. But I’m just as sure that it would cost next to nothing for Google to keep goo.gl up and running in perpetuity. I mean, 99 percent of all URLs probably had no activity in the last month. 99 percent of all books ever written weren’t read in the last month either, I bet — but that’s no excuse for libraries to throw them in the trash.

It’s fine that Google stopped allowing for the creating of new links a while back, but there’s no reason they should ever stop redirecting existing links. The whole reason anyone might have used goo.gl instead of something like bit.ly is misplaced trust in Google. I trust Google with almost nothing long-term. Mark my words, they’re going to do this with Gmail accounts eventually.

Update: Google has come to its senses and will keep these redirections working.

Carlos Greaves, writing for McSweeney’s:

“The president remained steadfast in his novel interpretation of constitutional law.”

“Faced with the choice between clinging to the letter of the law and marching to the beat of his own legal drum, the president chose the latter.”

Each week, the Standard reaches out to Austin’s Typewriter Rodeo for a custom poem on Texas topics.

Today's links

• Iranian brickwork, arbitrated pillows, smothered comics, and aerogel desalination: Also: bricked exercise gear, Air Canada luggage mystery, and praise for *Enshittification*.
• Object permanence: Unix War on Terror; Massive PVR; NIST meth lab; Georgia calls Carl Malamud a terrorist; Private equity destroys value; Facebook's poor morale; Surveillance pricing; NYC after Craigslist; D&D existentialism; Mexico vs US copyright; AI's productivity theater
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Iranian brickwork, arbitrated pillows, smothered comics, and aerogel desalination (permalink)

This is the 2^5th instance on which I find myself confronting a Saturday morning on which I have a zillion links that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, occasioning a linkdump post; here are the previous 31 installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I like to start these with good news, which is often hard to find these days, but here's something genuinely cool: an aerogel that can desalinate salt water using only radiant solar energy for power:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/this-aerogel-and-some-sun-could-make-saltwater-drinkable/

Aerogels are ultralight materials made of carbon nanotubes; they're incredibly cheap to manufacture in bulk, and each one can have different properties, depending on the deposition and geometry of the 'tubes. The tech is described by Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Xi Shen in ACS Energy Letters:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.5c01233?ref=pdf

You put the gel in some salt water (which can also be contaminated with pathogens, apparently) and it acts as a porous evaporator, causing pure water vapor to rise out of the mass, which can be condensed and drunk. It's not clear how many times you can do this with a given aerogel, but it's exciting stuff.

Moving from aerogel to air travel: an Air Canada passenger named Linda Royle was forced to check her carry-on on a stopover in Toronto. Someone stole her bag and Air Canada refused to compensate her for it (they disqualified her because she couldn't provide original receipts for the shoes she'd bought five years previously). That's frustrating, of course, but what happened next is a lot weirder: she got a call from a pharmacist in St John's, Newfoundland who had been entrusted with her missing bag by Air Canada, on the grounds that they didn't know who it belonged to, and they thought the pharmacist could use the labels on her prescription meds to track her down.

That's not even the weird part! When Linda Royle recovered her bag, she discovered that someone had stolen a bunch of stuff out of it, and replaced it with toiletry bags belonging to two strangers, a knife, and an Air Canada ticket scanner:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/air-canada-mystery-baggage-1.7592756

After this hit the news, Air Canada suddenly discovered that it was allowed to reimburse her for her stolen stuff even though she hadn't saved all her receipts. This is all about par for the course with Air Canada, an airline that is violently allergic to both checked baggage and customer service.

Air Canada is the airline that was discovered to have a warehouse full of "lost" bags next to Toronto Pearson Airport, none of which they bothered to reunite passengers with, donating the bags to local charities instead:

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/air-canada-passengers-complain-lost-144243835.html

Despite this, the airline registered very few customer complaints. That's because they've fired so many of their customer service reps and replaced them with AI chatbots whose florid "hallucinations" give fliers all kinds of wrong advice, which Air Canada refuses to make up for unless passengers pursue them through several rounds of appeal and then escalate to a government ombudsman:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/

Can't register complaints if you fire all the customer service reps and replace them with malfing dogshit chatbots, amirite?

But you don't have to fire all your customer service reps or invest in chatbots to create an all-consuming accountability sink that can absorb all the risk you create by screwing over your customers. The easiest way to do that is to stick a "binding arbitration" waiver in your terms of service that takes away your customer's right to sue, no matter how much harm you inflict on them.

It's getting harder and harder to move through the world without surrendering your legal rights these days. I've had to walk away from doctors, dentists, taxi companies, solar installers, and car rental companies because they wanted me to click away my right to sue as a condition of doing business with them. What's the point of a system of civil justice if everyone in a position to harm you can force you to swear off using it?

It would be different if arbitration was fair, but "he who pays the piper calls the tune" – that is, arbitrators almost always rule in favor of the corporation that's paying them, no matter how they've screwed over the other party. There are a few exceptions, but things have to be really egregious for this to be the case – as with the Fox show Bones, whose cast were so utterly screwed by Fox that the arbitrator awarded them $179m, issuing a scathing ruling that called out individual Fox execs for their scumbag conduct:

https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/fox-bones-arbitration-emily-deschanel-179-million-1203150879/

But while the corporate-friendly judiciary has a long history of forcing everyday people into arbitration when they get maimed or cheated by a capitalist enterprise, these same judges are always happy to set aside arbitrator's judgements when they go in favor of the little guy, which is exactly what happened with Bones:

https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/bones-arbitration-against-fox-1203200504/

That wasn't the last judge to experience a sudden attack of skepticism for arbitrators' decisions in the face of an adverse outcome for some corporate scumbag. This week, the Eighth Circuit overturned a $5m arbitration award that Mike "Mypillow" Lindell was ordered to pay after he lost a bet about whether the 2020 election was stolen:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/07/arbitration-for-thee-but-not-for-mike-lindell.html

Lindell offered $5m to anyone who could prove the 2020 election wasn't stolen. A software developer named Robert Zeidman analyzed the voting machine logs that Lindell used as the basis for his claims and showed that Lindell was full of shit. An arbitrator agreed, and ordered Lindell to pay $5m.

The Eighth Circuit, meanwhile, decided that the arbitrator "exceeded their powers" and set aside the award. As Credit Slips' Bob Lawless writes, it would be nice if this meant that the next time you were hurt by a dentist, a doctor, a solar installer, a rental car agency, or a taxi company, you could get out of arbitration, but he's not holding his breath: "Something tells me, however, that might not be the case in a more routine consumer dispute."

The house always wins. That's true even when the player is trying to build a casino! In her latest newsletter, Ann Pettifor writes about how "Capitalism Devours Crypto":

https://annpettifor.substack.com/p/capitalism-devours-crypto

Pettifor's writing about the institutional formalization of "Stablecoins," a form of wildcat money that is a modern update of the "narrow bank" notes that triggered a series of financial panics in the 1830s, wiping out a sizable fraction of the US economy. The GENIUS Act, which brings Stablecoins into a legal framework, has helped inflate a crypto bubble worth $4t.

Key to this bubble is to make crypto into a form of government-backed (but only barely regulated) asset, with one of the primary beneficiaries being World Liberty Financial, a company owned by the President of the United States. Other beneficiaries include Michael Saylor's "Strategy" (formerly Microstrategy), whose actual strategy is to sell shares and bonds to buy bitcoin, then use the rising price of bitcoin to issue more paper that it can use to buy more bitcoin, and so on. This is exactly how the South Sea Company ran its operation, leading to yet another global financial cataclysm:

https://www.ft.com/content/45d7c547-f686-4162-bfc3-56d609003bbb

A technology regulated by the US government and heavily manipulated by the US president is the polar opposite of the libertarian rhetoric in Satoshi's original bitcoin white paper, which bitcoin bros cite as gospel when explaining how they're doing something truly different this time.

Pettifor says that crypto is different from Beanie Babies and other bubbles – because this time, the president is in on the scam.

Speaking of the crypto bubble, one striking feature of this bubble is how many of its key players are also involved in pumping up the AI bubble. The AI bubble is a different kind of sleaze from the crypto bubble, but it's every bit as sleazy.

Ever since Openai and Trump's splashy announcement of the $500b "Stargate" plan to build AI data-centers, Ed Zitron, one of the great tech debullshitifiers, has been taking pointed notice of just how vaporous this plan is. In his latest investigation, Zitron shows how the supine tech press has played credulous stenographer to Sam Altman and Softbank in helping to sell a clearly bogus claim about Softbank's investment in Stargate:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/softbank-openai/

Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Bloomberg on down took Sam Altman at his word when he claimed that a new data-center in Abilene, TX was a) part of Stargate, and b) funded by Softbank.

The thing is, neither of these are true. As confirmed by the data-center's own developers, "Softbank is not and has not been involved in the funding for its construction." Softbank is the exclusive trademark holder for Stargate, and Stargate has no legal entity apart from this trademark, so this data-center is not part of Stargate, despite widespread press coverage to the contrary.

What's more, there are no other data-centers on the horizon that are part of Stargate. Which is to say that Stargate, the $500b AI data center program, doesn't actually exist.

Zitron:

Stargate does not exist other than as a name that Sam Altman gives things to make them feel more special than they are, and SoftBank was never involved. Stargate does not exist as reported.

One of the reasons I love Zitron's work so much is that he actually really likes technology and aspires to a world where the promise of technology as a force for human thriving and betterment can be realized. That's what animates me, too, which is why I was so excited to read "Designing Sousveillance Tools for Gig Workers," a paper by a group of computer scientists who worked closely with gig workers to create a design framework for technology that helps workers get the upper hand over their bosses:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.09986

The researcher describe a radical, careful methodology grounded in co-creation, led by the users – the workers – in dialog with the tech experts. The paper's preamble, which sets out the concept of "ethics of care" is almost as interesting as the recommendations that the workers and researchers create together.

One of those researchers is Saiph Savage, who is the co-organizer of next week's ACM Collective Intelligence conference in San Diego, where I'm giving the evening keynote on Aug 5:

https://ci.acm.org/2025/speakers/cory-doctorow/

And speaking of a) great tech events and b) an ethic of care, everyone who can get to New York from Aug 15-17 should absolutely plan on attending Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in Queen's. HOPE is one of the oldest hacker cons in the world, organized by the 2600 Magazine folks, and it is human-scaled, human-centric, and dedicated to liberation through technology.

HOPE has just announced a bunch of student scholarships, so if you're not able to come up with the door fee (or the heavily discounted streaming-only ticket), HOPE is still something you can do!

https://www.2600.com/content/hope-updates-more-speakers-and-student-scholarships

One of the things I adore about hacker cons is the way they embody the hacker ethic that every 10 foot wall that some stupid corporation builds around your tech should be met with an 11 foot ladder. The ability of technologists to disenshittify the tools we love is key to resisting enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/23/resto-modding/#itch-scratchers-r-us

Here's a 10 foot wall that I'd love to see comprehensively scaled: Echelon, maker of "smart" home gym equipment, just remote-fucked all of the hardware its customers had purchased by pushing out a software downgrade:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/firmware-update-hinders-echelon-smart-home-gym-equipments-ability-to-work-offline/

The downgrade breaks compatibility with apps like QZ, which allow you to connect your Echelon gear to third-party services like Zwift, which "shows people virtual, scenic worlds while they’re exercising." QZ also lets Echelon owners make their workouts better in other ways, like automating resistance adjustments.

By blocking QZ, Echelon can force its customers to sign up for its own inferior $40/month service. When companies pull scams like this, they often claim that they need to do so in order to remain in business, but here's some even worse news: thanks to the new software that Echelon just forced into its customers' devices, these devices will no longer be able to run at all if Echelon goes out of business. This is a bad design under any circumstances, but when deployed by a company that is sufficiently desperate to rug its customers in this way, it's a dismal sign indeed. At this point, you'd have to be pretty gullible to buy a new Echelon device, given the strong likelihood that both the company and its products are headed for the scrapheap.

This is classic enshittification, of course, a subject I'm so obsessed with that I've written an entire book about it, which drops on October 7:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

The early reviews are rolling in for the book now, starting with Booklist:

This is Doctorow in full-on angry author mode; he pulls no punches here, naming names and calling out guilty parties . . . Readers will be upset, informed, and inflamed.

Not to be outdone, Publishers Weekly writes:

A razor-sharp yet subtly optimistic look at the soul-sucking state of the internet.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780374619329

Meanwhile, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman writes,

Cory Doctorow’s neologism was an instant hit, neatly encapsulating the public’s growing disappointment, sometimes bordering on rage, with what was happening to internet platforms. His pithy summary of the process was also brilliant.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=277517&post_id=169092636&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=444vl&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

I'm heading out on tour with this one in October, hitting the US (Seattle, Boston, DC, NYC, NOLA, Chicago, LA, PDX, Miami and Madison, CT), Canada (Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto); and the UK (London, Hay, and possibly Glasgow).

With all that travel on the horizon, it's time to draw this linkdump to a close, but I'll leave you with a couple of lighter stories as palette-cleansers. First, there's "Smothered," a documentary about the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers, streaming free at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/smothered-the-censorship-struggles-of-the-smothers-brothers-comedy-hour-2002

The Smothers Brothers were a musical comedy act who worked savage political commentary into their act, and when they refused to pull their punches, CBS's president canceled their show, for fear of pissing off Richard Nixon, a thin-skinned, authoritarian, dishonest vindictive Republican president. What I'm getting at here, is that Colbert is in good company.

Here's a couple of my favorite Smothers Brothers bits: first, the classic "Mom Always Liked You Best," which my Dad used to recite all the time when I was growing up, until we could all hit the line "Bark, chicken, bark" at the drop of a hat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXH_hFqBPCs

And then there's "Chirp Goes the Nighinngale," which my daughter and I used to sing at bedtime after I read her a story, which would reduce us to tears of laughter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ1NfuHphOw

Finally, as a little digestif, please enjoy this article by Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner on the miracle of modern Iranian brickwork, one of the most exciting new developments in architecture of this century (notwithstanding that the US is determined to bomb it all into rubble):

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/iranian-brick-architecture/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Canadian telco that blocked union websites is breaking all kinds of laws https://web.archive.org/web/20051028181259/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=914&Itemid=85&nsub=

#20yrsago Damning Sony payola memos: “I’m a whore this week” https://somafm.com/payola/payola2.pdf

#15yrsago What “curated computing” can and can’t deliver https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jul/27/curated-computing-environment-apps-choice

#15yrsago UK govt proposes volunteer “police reserve” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jul/26/cameron-budget-cuts-diy-policing

#15yrsago Street-Fighting Math: down and dirty guide to approximation and problem-solving https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262514293/street-fighting-mathematics/

#15yrsago EFF wins enormous victory against DRM: legal to jailbreak iPhones, rip DVDs for mashup videos https://memex.craphound.com/2010/07/26/eff-wins-enormous-victory-against-drm-legal-to-jailbreak-iphones-rip-dvds-for-mashup-videos/

#5yrsago Lovely video review for Poesy the Monster Slayer https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/26/fierce-slayer/#fierce-poesy

#5yrsago Green Growth https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/26/fierce-slayer/#green-growth

#1yrago Fintech bullies stole your kid's lunch money https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/26/taanstafl/#stay-hungry

#20yrsago How Craigslist changed NYC https://web.archive.org/web/20050727011010/http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/12348/

#20yrsago Game-modder rips into anti-modder US politicos https://web.archive.org/web/20050728003228/https://illspirit.com/press_release.html

#20yrsago War on Terror as a series of Unix shell interactions https://web.archive.org/web/20050806083457/http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/ThinGuy?entry=the_war_on_terror_as

#20yrsago TSA Secure Flight: criminal disaster https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/secure_flight.html

#20yrsago Promise TV — PVR records a month’s worth of shows from all channels https://web.archive.org/web/20050811011823/http://promise.tv/

#15yrsago Federal judge says you can break DRM if you’re not doing so to infringe copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20100728090500/https://www.courthousenews.com/2010/07/23/29099.htm

#15yrsago Existential D&D comedy: when characters realize they are trapped in adolescents’ imagination https://carltonmellick.com/2010/07/01/out-now-the-kobold-wizards-dildo-of-enlightenment-2/

#15yrsago Terrified guardians of public safety protect kids from rocks, other imaginary dangers https://www.forbes.com/2010/07/21/consumer-product-safety-hazard-opinions-columnist-lenore-skenazy.html

#10yrsago Chrysler has to recall its cars due to security vulnerabilities https://web.archive.org/web/20150728041105/http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_28532995/fiat-chrysler-recalls-1-4m-vehicles-prevent-hacking

#10yrsago Jamaica’s new copyright means Jamaicans pay for reggae the rest of the world gets free https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/07/anatomy-copyright-coup-jamaicas-public-domain-plundered

#10yrsago Georgia sues Carl Malamud, calls publishing state laws “terrorism” https://www.techdirt.com/2015/07/24/state-georgia-sues-carl-malamud-copyright-infringement-publishing-states-own-laws/

#10yrsago Explosion at NIST offices was a meth lab https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/07/meth-lab-explodes-inside-government-building.html

#10yrsago If phones were designed to please their owners, rather than corporations https://vimeo.com/134128443

#10yrsago London terror cops forced to admit they’re still investigating journos who reported Snowden leaks https://theintercept.com/2015/07/24/uk-met-police-snowden-investigation-journalists/

#10yrsago Darth Vibrader: a Vader mannequin made from sex toys https://www.huffpost.com/entry/porn-star-kayla-jane-danger-builds-sex-toy-darth-vader-nsfw_n_55afdbc3e4b0a9b948535810

#10yrsago How .uk came to be (and why it’s not .gb) https://web.archive.org/web/20150910044243/https://30yearsof.uk/the-birth-of-uk-an-oral-history-ab3ebc0e499f

#5yrsago Mass market book sales surge https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/24/software-is-cake-too/#massmarket

#5yrsago Private equity doesn't create value, it destroys it https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/24/software-is-cake-too/#looters

#5yrsago Changes coming to UK's feudal "leaseholds https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/24/software-is-cake-too/#neofeudalism

#5yrsago Facebook's morale problem https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/24/software-is-cake-too/#eichmanns-and-oppenheimers

#5yrsago 401(k)s are a scam https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

#5yrsago Central London property prices tank https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#innit

#5yrsago US copyright is a disaster for Mexico https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#hecho-en-mexico

#1yrago AI's productivity theater https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

#1yrago FTC vs surveillance pricing https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• San Diego: ACM Collective Intelligence keynote, Aug 5
  https://ci.acm.org/2025/speakers/cory-doctorow/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io

• Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409

• If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw

---

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Roz Doctorow, Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/), Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/), Dr Savage (https://www.saiph.org/).

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1005 words yesterday, 10190 words total).

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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Ah, it feels good to be back! Yes, it’s been a few years since I’ve done a Big Show Top Ten, but wading into the sea of work that is Lawndale’s annual juried exhibition The Big Show felt like visiting an old friend. This year’s iteration, curated by Dr. Phillip A. Townsend, engendered a similar atmosphere of vibrancy and variety (and sometimes overwhelm) we’ve come to expect. However, the show is more diverse than I remember from previous iterations, which is refreshing and more reflective of Houston’s demographic. There is quite a bit of strong work in the exhibition, and also a lot of unfamiliar names (at least to me), which is nice considering The Big Show tends to cart in the same cadre of usual suspects year after year. 

On the other hand, the show reads as sparse and top-heavy in 2D work. It’s of course possible that the 3D submissions this year were weak and Townsend was simply doing the best with what he had. However, the arrangement of the work did the sculptures no favors, which were swallowed up by the space in the John M. O’Quinn Gallery. There was also zero video work, which strikes me as odd. Again, we don’t know what Townsend was working with, but given nearly 1,000 submissions and an art community as large as Houston’s, it’s hard to come up with a legitimate excuse as to why a Big Show wouldn’t be, well, big. Or at least complete.

Townsend describes his show, entitled Between Lines and Faces, as exploring “the intersection of three seemingly disparate elements: text, portraiture, and the mundane.” While that is clear, another throughline I found in the show is the proliferation of work that explores the way men and boys negotiate and perform masculinity, whether it be through the lens of queerness, aging, or childhood. This topic reads as particularly poignant in times like these: a fascist takeover of men desperate to assert power, of young men mired in a “loneliness epidemic,” and of good men trying to raise boys amidst competing bizarre, conflicting messages from an ever-burgeoning manosphere.

Without further ado, here are my top ten picks for 2025:

10. Lisa Cain, Wash Day, 2025, mixed media

Wash Day is a slow burn. There is something innocuous and easy-to-miss about this piece, but its subtle mix of tenderness, naïveté, and uncanniness lodged something within me that grew over time. A lot of mixed media pieces tend to be overwrought, but Cain’s use of collage is sparse and controlled, and disorienting in a way that makes me feel like I can’t quite trust the lovingness of the landscape and the tenderness of the quilt hanging to dry, like there is something shifting and unspoken just beneath the surface.

9. Julia McLaurin, Whataburger Meal, 2022, 5 piece ceramic

People who aren’t from here often wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to live in Texas. They may have a point — especially these days. But outsiders only see a stereotype, whether political or otherwise, missing all the nuance that can make Texas, particularly Houston, feel like home. I don’t think McLaurin, with her enlarged ceramic Whataburger value meal, was necessarily speaking to the spectacle of consumerism à la Claus Oldenburg. Or maybe she was, but it feels beside the point here. Like Texas can be, Whataburger Meal is so darn sweet and endearing, it’s hard not to be pulled in by its charm. 

8. Dea Campbell, Overgrowth, 2024, archival inkjet print

Campbell’s yellowed, golden hour photograph reads as at once ubiquitous and mythical. The pile of vines writhe and snake up an electrical box, culminating in a background canopy of a tree seemingly merging with the plant life in the foreground to emerge as some feathered, explosive head. It’s a moment of fleeting magic in a wasteland: I can practically hear the cicadas and feel the oppressive humidity emanating from the image.

7. Jai España, The Space Between, A Painful Reminder and A Terrible Dream, 2025, acrylic on stretched canvas

Other than the title’s suggestion of a narrative, a narrative that tells us we are standing at the threshold of a terrible memory, there is something more profound and interesting going on in The Space Between. The meta-cognition of standing in front of a portal (the bathroom), which leads to another portal (the window leading to the outside), to yet another portal (the window leading us inside the building across the alley way), leads us into the constant push/pull between public and private space. It reminds me of On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection by Susan Stewart, in the sense that as we immerse ourselves in psychodramas within our own domestic sphere, there are little stories going on everywhere, all around us.

6. Lucy Malone Haslam, Relentless, 2023, oil on canvas

“Relentless” is definitely an apt word to describe Houston traffic. Yet, Haslam’s Relentless feels vastly more meditative than your average logjam on 45. The bridges and concrete barriers on the highway read as geometric abstraction slicing through a panorama of a city gone by.

5. William Maxen, Wish I Could Hold, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas

Townsend describes Wish I Could Hold as “a visceral exploration of longing, inadequacy, and isolation from an adolescent’s perspective.” The title of Maxen’s piece suggests that he desires to hold someone. However, Wish I Could Hold screams of a child who needs to be held. The redness of the painting, normally an archetype of love or passion or rage or violence, instead feels womblike.

4. Kevin Lopez, A Thinning of the Veneer, 2024, oil on canvas

Changing the size or shape of a canvas has been a modernist trope for moving painting beyond the flat surface and into the realm of sculpture. Sometimes in contemporary painting, such a strategy can read as trite, but for Lopez’s A Thinning of the Veneer, it’s a sculptural move that fits, as the canvas contorts itself just as much as the young man is — attempting to grapple with the mixed and confusing messages he may receive about masculinity, trying to understand his place as a man in the world.

3. Lee Deleon, Block Party in Third Ward, 2024, digital inkjet print

Speaking of the aforementioned charm oozing from Whataburger Meal, the three young gentlemen posing for Block Party possess it in spades. There’s an adorable specificity yet universality in their character: I feel like I’ve had these boys as students a thousand times over. Yet, within their seemingly confident poses lies an air of trepidation, particularly with the boy in the middle. You can feel their uncertainty — as much as they want to project otherwise — of how they are supposed to, as young men, navigate the world.

2. Chayse Sampy, Otherwise Loving Beings, 2023, oil, charcoal, toy soldiers, and carving on wood panel

Townsend describes Otherwise Loving Beings as being partially inspired by a 1951 portrait, although it is unclear what portrait Sampy is drawing inspiration from. Regardless, we feel, with these three juxtaposed men, a simultaneous sense of power and weight — an implicit understanding passing through generations that their Blackness and their queerness makes them unique, beautiful, and woefully misunderstood. Sampy’s use of vibrant, inky blues and blacks commands the piece’s weightiness and pregnant silence, all while feeling uplifting and rife with possibility. Otherwise Loving Beings is anchored in the past, yet Afrofuturistic and earnestly spiritual.

1. Preetika Rajgariah, the plants have enough spirit to transform our limited vision, 2024, yoga mats, saris, and acrylic paint

Of the plants, Townsend claims that the “work combines yoga mats and saris, two materials with distinct cultural and gendered meanings, to explore identity, cultural exchange, and the shaping of bodies by society.” This all reads as awfully literal and overly symbolic to me, even if that was Rajgariah’s point. Even so, this piece is androgynous, fiercely queer, and delightfully confrontational in a time where homophobia has made a comeback in mainstream society. Even if the yoga mats and saris, at least symbolically, are too heavy-handed, what they do is add texture, dimension, and tactility, giving the woman’s defiant stare humanity and warmth. Close up, the faint lines of the yoga mat echo the striped shadows draped across her body.

 

The 2025 edition of TheBig Show, curated by Dr. Phillip A. Townsend, is on view at Lawndale in Houston through August 2, 2025.

The post Betsy Huete’s “The Big Show” Top Ten of 2025 appeared first on Glasstire.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. I was hired to manage an unmanageable team

Just about a year ago, I started managing a team of creatives. I had worked alongside them for several years and had a good rapport with all of them. That all changed the instant I was promoted.

Right up front, two of the seven called our division director and said he had made a huge mistake by promoting me. Another told me to my face on day 1 that she would have been a better manager and then took an unplanned vacation for two weeks. Two more started hiding their work from me. Another sends me messages about how “disappointed” she is in how I handle situations. Only one was open to the change, and has frankly thrived under my management.

I have made exactly two changes since taking over: First, I asked each of them to share their (existing) project plans with each other in advance since they often need to go into all-hands-on-deck mode when deadlines hit. And second, I wrote some documentation for other divisions so they would know which team members were responsible for which project. My team characterized these moves as micromanagement and complained en masse to the division director.

I confided in a colleague about my struggles and they told me the team has always been unmanageable. In fact, it turns out I was promoted into this role because the department director was fed up with their attitudes. But since our company doesn’t have a “my way or the highway” philosophy, the director couldn’t clean house and instead tried a Hail Mary, hoping a new manager (me) would shake things up. Is this just an unwinnable situation? Do I need to get out?

It sounds pretty unwinnable, yeah. That is some strong and frankly bananas opposition to the changes you described. I admit that before I got to the middle of your letter I was thinking, “Any chance the problem could be on your side?” but after hearing what your colleague told you about the history of the team … it really sounds like them, not you, and if your company won’t support you in dealing with them decisively, you’re almost certainly better off getting out.

Before you decide that, though, talk to your boss about what you’re encountering and what you’d like to do to fix it (presumably, holding people accountable for professional behavior and making it clear that they need to meet reasonable expectations if they want to stay — ideally similarly to this). It’s possible that if your boss realizes they’re about to lose a second manager over this, they might be more amenable to changes than they were the last time around.

2. Microwaving eggs at work

After the microwaving fish at work question, I have to know, is it okay to reheat egg-based dishes such as quiche in a microwave at work? There is no ventilation in the kitchen.

Fish is the notoriously bad one (in the U.S., at least; it’s heavily based on culture). Burned popcorn and cruciferous vegetables seem to be tied for second place.

I think you’d be fine reheating quiche. The goal isn’t to never heat up anything that someone somewhere might object to, but to avoid the really high-profile “don’t do it” category of (most) fish.

3. My new job told me skip a family funeral or convince a coworker to change their own plans

My question is about the role of a manager in a small office. This happened several years ago, and I’ve been wondering about how a situation could have been better resolved.

I had just begun working for a small nonprofit office — a manager (Rowan) and three employees (Jamie, Robin, and me). Before I’d been hired, a series of weekend events had been planned. These were fun events and I was quite happy to be involved. Running occasional 2 -3 hour events on weekends was part of the job, and there was flexibility about taking time off before or after the event. In general, it was a great system. Jamie and I ran all in-person events. Robin was non-vaccinated (tail end of Covid times) so could not attend public events. Rowan, the manager, was not directly involved.

Within my first month on the job, we had a scheduling conflict. Jamie had a long-planned special outing with their family for a day on the weekend, and I would run the activity on my own. Then I unexpectedly had a significant family funeral on the same day as our program (not parent or sibling but still a big deal). I went to Rowan, expecting them to offer a solution, possibly to cover for me or to cancel the event. Their point of view was, Why Are You Bothering Me with This? Rowan, who also had plans for the weekend, told me to either not go to the funeral, or to convince Jamie to cancel their plans.

Rowan was visibly very frustrated, not with the situation but with me personally. I did not ask Jamie about changing plans. I hardly knew them yet, and it all felt very awkward. I was just politely assertive with both that I would not be able to work that day. I would have quit (or been fired) over this. I was in the fortunate position of not needing the job.

Poor Jamie very reluctantly, and quite sadly, rescheduled their family outing. I felt quite guilty. Jamie and I developed a positive working relationship in spite of an awkward beginning.

How could the manager have handled this in a better way? What could I have done differently?

Rowan sucks here. I don’t know how cancelable the event was or how important Rowan’s own plans were, but telling an employee “skip a family funeral or convince your coworker to cover for you” is not a reasonable stance. If Jamie were a potential option, Rowan should have talked to Jamie themselves, not left it to you.

As for you, it sounds like you handled as well as you could: you made your boundaries clear (you wouldn’t be working that day) and were clear in your own mind that you were willing to leave over it if you had to. I understand why you felt guilty when Jamie ended up having to cancel their own plans, but that’s on the organization for not having a better system in place, not on you.

4. Employer is hinting I owe them money for used PTO now that I’ve resigned

I’m salaried exempt. According to my employee manual (which disclaims that it is not a contract or comprehensive document and can be changed at any time at my employer’s discretion without notice), I get five sick days (40 hours) a year, and three weeks (120 hours) of vacation time.

Technically speaking, the vacation time is accrued at a rate of 10 hours per month, and my employer just chooses to front the time. When you put in your notice, the vacation time is recalculated based on the accrual rate and any remaining time is paid out. There is no indication in the employee manual that this is also true of sick time.

I gave my bosses a heads-up that I might be leaving last month and formally put in a month of notice last week. This extra notice was not in any way required; I just knew they wouldn’t push me out and thought it would be courteous since they’d had trouble filling the position back when they hired me. I took a two-week vacation well before I put in my notice and I have continued to use sick time as normal.

One of my bosses has just hinted that I might get my pay docked because by their calculations I owe the company 10 hours of vacation time and 20 hours of sick time. I know the answer is probably yes, but I have to ask: Can they really do this to me retroactively?

It depends on the exact wording of their policy. In general, employers can require you to pay back any PTO they advanced to you before you had accrued it. It’s considered akin to a loan or a cash advance. But it depends on whether their written policy indicates that they advanced the leave to you, in which case they can make you pay it back, or whether it was considered earned as of the first of the year, in which case you already earned it and they can’t. Also, federal law says they can only deduct it from your paycheck if they informed you that was their policy before they advanced the leave — so look at your handbook to see if it’s spelled out in there.

It’s also worth checking your state law, because some states prohibit paycheck deductions for PTO repayments without your written consent. (That wouldn’t mean the debt disappears; they could take legal action to get it if they wanted to, although the odds of them doing that are fairly small.)

5. Has Ask a Manager become more anti-corporate?

I’m a very long-time reader and fan. Recently, I’ve noticed a subtle tone change in your responses to be more … not pro-worker, you’ve always been pro-worker … maybe anti-corporate? For examples, on a response to a question about AI, you recently called this a “dystopian hellhole,” which is kind of more blanket negative than I’ve come to expect. You are more blunt about the things that suck widely in the world of work and less … measured? in your responses.

This is by no means criticism. I too have gone from “there are good companies you can work at, you just need to find them” to “yeah, this is a corporato-crazy nightmare and it’s all falling apart and any place you work might get eaten by the system at any moment.” I’m currently at a place that, until recently, I was happily planning on retiring from and had invested nearly 15 years in … now I’m glancing around nervously and leaning into side hustles because I just can’t see anything good coming out of the current chaos. And I’m far enough in my career, that I’ve been through three mass layoff / economic downturns (the dotcom bubble, ’08, and Covid) and it never felt like this before.

You might not feel comfortable answering this, and if so I get it! I was just curious about the change I sensed and the impact that your role has had on you.

There’s been a definite evolution in my perspective over the years! Watching the choices a lot of companies made during the pandemic was a major turning point for me, but I’d probably been moving in that direction for a while. You can’t read years of the mail I get with unending stories of people being harmed by their employers and not be influenced by it.

The other factor, and it’s a big one, is that when I started writing the site I was writing from the perspective of someone for whom the system had worked pretty well, and I didn’t have enough appreciation of the fact that while my approach had worked well for me, it wasn’t going to work well for everyone … or enough appreciation for all the reasons behind that. Over time, I’ve become a lot more aware of that, and that hopefully comes across in my writing here.

Beyond that, our culture as a whole has become much more clear-eyed about the systemic injustices built into our labor system as it’s currently practiced (along with a whole bunch of other things, like growing income inequality, stagnant wages, soaring costs, and the absolute catastrophe that is our health care system) and I’m no exception to that.

The post I was hired to manage an unmanageable team, microwaving eggs at work, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Donkey Kong Island, DK – Trump has announced that he will be placing a 200 percent tariff on all products imported from Donkey Kong Country. “We’ve been subsidizing Donkey Kong for too long,” explained the US President in a rambling press conference last Thursday. “I’ve been talking to a good friend, King K. Rool, he’s […]

The post Trump places 200 percent tariffs on Donkey Kong Country appeared first on The Beaverton.

New comic!
Today's News:

But this is an enhanced experience of the crime scene, because now the floor is blue.

Susan is not your normal itinerant warrior, is she? There’s something distinctly un-savage about this savage sword. Sadly the page count did not leave me space to explore her Corbinian origins (on the Bernsen Delta).

The post Apple? appeared first on Bad Machinery.

Let’s get funky now… 70’s style.

#Rowen #RoninWarriors

You ever read any Jack London?

As you can see, we have a special guest here on the corral and his name is Moonbeam Maragold Sunflower. #CowboyWho

#CowboyWho

#Kento #RoninWarriors

Watch these AI Agents mess around in a virtual environment. I use google's gemini, anthropic's claude code, and NOT codex. They make some code and art and other stuff, and have some weird hallucinations.

~ MY LINKS ~
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/emergentgarden
Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/emergentgarden
Prompts: https://github.com/MaxRobinsonTheGreat/agent_prompts
Twitter: https://twitter.com/max_romana
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/emergentgarden.bsky.social

My Music Guy: https://youtube.com/@acolyte-compositions?si=2P97LlROhNgQYOa-
"Deliberate Thought", "Equatorial Complex"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

~Timestamps~
(0:00) AI Agents
(2:15) Agentic Art
(8:02) A Country of Morons in a Datacenter
(12:03) Do whatever you want

TORONTO – A recent housing survey suggests that the uptick in melancholy exhibited by the millennial generation is the result of realizing that they will never be able to yell at children on the lawn of their own home. “It’s disheartening that so many people’s aspirations are crushed by the reality of the situation,” said […]

The post Millennials increasingly depressed they’ll never be able to tell children to get off their lawn appeared first on The Beaverton.

TALLAHASSEE, FL – Ghislaine Maxwell, former girlfriend of financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has reportedly offered up a list of 100 names of individuals who are connected to the crimes of disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. During a meeting with Deputy Attorney General and former Donald Trump personal attorney Todd […]

The post The 100 names Ghislaine Maxwell named as being on the Epstein List appeared first on The Beaverton.

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Hollywood, call me. I can have this script done on a weekend.

Today's News:

I'm a whale guy now

Well, then, are we all set? All on the same page? Good. Human civilization is dead and apes rule the world. Everything you ever knew or loved is no more.

Well, your movie this week…

BRANDON, MB — A local woman has discovered that her accrued credit in sleepiness does not transfer from her couch to her bed. Cory Lachlan, 26, made the disturbing discovery when she finally decided to head to bed after getting Netflix’s “Are you still watching?” pop-up for the third time that evening. It was only […]

The post Sleepiness credit non-transferable between couch and bed appeared first on The Beaverton.

Hulk Hogan, who used his bombastic showmanship to transform professional wrestling and take the sport mainstream, died in Florida at the age of 71. What do you think?

The post Hulk Hogan Dead At 71 appeared first on The Onion.

You ruined my pedicure!

On Monday, Tyler, The Creator released his ninth studio album, Don’t Tap The Glass. The Onion shares everything you need to know about the artist. 

Birthplace: Vans store

Birth Name: Tyler, The Friendly Ghost

Genre: Guy-who-has-a-pet-tarantula rap

Vocal Range: Subwoofer

Vocal Signature: Can make the sound a cat makes before throwing up

HTML Coding Level: Intermediate

Biggest Rap Beef: Internalized homophobia

Thing You Accomplished In The Nine Months That He Released Two Albums: Bought one new pair of pants that don’t even fit that well

The post Artist Profile: Tyler, The Creator appeared first on The Onion.

The FDA’s new AI designed to speed up drug approvals has been found to fabricate studies and misrepresent research. What do you think?

The post FDA Drug Approval AI Generates Fake Studies appeared first on The Onion.

LOS ANGELES—Discussing his preparation for the role during a press junket for the Marvel film, Fantastic Four star Pedro Pascal told reporters Friday that he had spent months working with a trainer to be able to stretch his limbs up to 50 feet. “The moment I got the call that I was playing Mister Fantastic, I got in touch with my trainer and told him I had six months to be in the stretchiest shape of my life,” said Pascal, noting that his team created an intense regimen aimed at getting the star from a 5-foot, 11-inch wingspan to the 100-foot, 8-inch wingspan required to fill out his Mister Fantastic costume. “We started slow with just stretching my arms out 10 or 15 feet, then gradually worked up to shooting my limbs in every direction as I stretched my torso into a trampoline. I was sore every day, but leg day was always the hardest. If you watch Eddington, you can actually tell I’ve been getting stretchy—the costume department really hated me.” Pascal went on to say that, while he’s proud of the work he put in, he’s worried that he could be setting an unhealthy stretchiness standard for young men.

The post Fantastic Four’s Pedro Pascal Recalls Working With Trainer To Stretch Limbs 50 Feet  appeared first on The Onion.