The week's doomscrolling in review: Issue 8
Big Tech always bends the knee to power. And other notes from this week (and a bit) of watching things get worse.
Lizzie Presser, photography by Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt for The New York Times
As I write this one, the world is a day out from the return of the Trump regime. The ProPublica article here, She Wanted an Abortion. A Judge Said She Wasn’t Mature Enough to Decide, is from a couple of years ago, though I just read it this week, and am starting off with it for three reasons:
- It's just a cracking good piece of public service journalism.
- As we get the return of the far right into power in America, remember those people most impacted by it.
- While it's tragically sad how everything in the U.S. has been allowed to devolve so quickly, the things in this article happened when Trump was not in power.
Very little was proactively done to prevent the return of The Donald or to protect the most vulnerable.
And so here we are.
It was kind of symbolic that the Trump Act II wold be heralded with the fiery debris of one of Elon's failed rocket tests blazing through an evening Caribbean sky like some sort of portent of doom. It's a fireworks display to announce that Big Tech is on side with much of what's in Project 2025.
Historically, technology giants are often among the first to "obey in advance. This time around it's the evisceration of news media, with Bezos stuffing AI in the Washington Post, Meta and Amazon killing off DEI programmes, Zuckerberg's sudden bizarre interest in more "masculine energy" in a company that's working hard to make it easier to use its platforms to attack LGBTQ+ and other often targeted users. It's interesting to me that both Steve Bannon and Joe Biden would use the oligarchy word to describe what Trump has on his side, though one of them is more gleeful about it while the other was hoping they'd be his.
It's the oligarchy of surveillance capitalism. If you think this POTUS is going to destroy that with any regulation, you've not been paying attention.
Meanwhile...
On the blog in the last week (and some days)
The year started off with renewed fervor about the impending emergence of General Artificial Intelligence, or what is supposedly a machine with smarter smarts than us meat creatures. There are several avenues that can rat out the marketing hype behind the this latest round of prophesying (that still continues), but why do so many people choose to believe in it?
Yours Truly
Subscriber tiers
The blog now has exciting different subscriber levels dependong on if you want to underwrite any vices or just fill my tip jar. I don't have big plans to monetise any of this content and the commitment kind of sounds exhausting, but making the tiers on the Ghost platform was kind of fun and educational and I won't say no to cash. As always, "watch this space" for further developments live from the scene.
Ditched Proton for Tuta
You win a special No-Prize if you noticed the blog went offline momentarily the other night as I messed up and deleted the wrong DNS records when migrating this blog's email services from Proton to Tuta (formerly Tutanota). I'll save the details for a longer blog on why we need better web platforms that are resistant to CEO-induced fuckery, but the short version is that Proton's CEO Andy Yen continues to praise Trump on Twitter, and lately seems to be having the company itself do likewise.
The latest batch reads like he was feeling late to the ring-kissing party. I started having Proton misgivings when it strangely got into the crypto wallet business, it's usually a sign a company has run out of ideas and is having less faith in its core product. So much for that famous "Swiss Neutrality." Tuta is a Proton competitor with a leaner product focus and a dedicated commitment to open source software, and still focuses on usability of end-to-end encrypted emails outside of the surveillance capitalism model. There is no such thing as a privacy advocate finding value in the Trump regime.
More digital safety and security for bad times
I'll be adding a couple new resources to the blog's Digital Security resources section when I get a chance. But here they are for now.
- The 2025 journalist’s digital security checklist by Freedom of the Press Foundation — This one in an easy-scroll single page with a handy risk assessment toolkit in some pull-down menus.
- Top 10 "How to Make Signal Safer and Super Secure" (HMSSSS!) Tips by people who know how to do this really really well (with some sweet and usable graphics here) — This was shared in a Signal group I follow and is released into the wilds for more people to learn about the security features that the end-to-end encrypted app Signal has to protect you, your contacts and your communications. Super handy and usable, with shortcut links back to Signal's own documentation.
Best read of the week
She is in Love with ChatGPT — This NYT piece by Kashmir Hill (gift link) is equal parts sad and chilling, as people are continually encouraged to anthropomorphise AI. “If we become habituated to endless empathy and we downgrade our real friendships, and that’s contributing to loneliness — the very thing we’re trying to solve — that’s a real potential problem,” Hill quotes Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. More sinister, he added that "the corporations in control of chatbots had an 'unprecedented power to influence people en masse. It could be used as a tool for manipulation, and that’s dangerous."
Session app security in question
Security engineer Soatok blogged in detail about their concerns in the Session App's security architecture, and Session app developers have responded, so choose your sides. Based on Soatok's analysis I removed it from the list of apps I'll consider secure for higher risk users. I mean, I'll meet someone anywhere, but for better security I would definitely recommend an app with forward secrecy properties and stronger encryption. The rationale underpinning some of Sessions choices read like a mix of hope and very narrow threat modelling. But that's my take on it.
Until next time...
