Pluralistic

Follow-up/P.S.: There's a Doctorow piece [0] which I think is relevant here. It's about how individual refusal (e.g. to quit your job at an employer when they require an authenticator-app) is an inferior substitute for "real" politics on both a practical and emotional level.

> It's obvious why we might prefer to substitute voting or shopping for politics: they're activities you do alone. You don't have to find anyone else to do them with you. [...] Individual consumption choices don't change the world, but if you've been convinced that the only way to change the world is by voting with your wallet then when the world stays terrible, you can only conclude that your friends and neighbors have ruined by things by voting (shopping) wrong. [... and] every political disappointment in your life is down to your friends' personal defects.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/

This can work both ways, ordinary people can add EULA's to their web presence. See Cory Doctorow's version:

https://pluralistic.net/

READ CAREFULLY By reading this website, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

This would negate Disney's claim if anyone at Disney ever happened to read the page it seems. I claim the above agreement applies to this post.

"If the problem were primarily mechanical—too much typing, too complex syntax, too many steps—we would have solved it by now"

And yet we see management and the AI boosters still talk about productivity in terms of lines of code written,
or proxies for that metric, likes number of features shipped.

We definitely have solved the mechanical problem,
and we did so decades ago when wizards
and IDEs able to auto-generate boilerplate stubs came along.

Still we see the process discussed and boosted in terms of sheer quantity of "stuff",
even as we are drowning in accidental complexity and tech debt.
Adding yet more code generated by a synthetic text extruder is not solving any problem of consequence,
but is in fact making things worse. "AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society" https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

You're right that the US is very proud of their trigger and muzzle discipline. Or at least half of it. The other half points loaded guns with the safeties off directly at their own crotches to own the libs[0].

Going a layer deeper, Americans really, really love to abuse the shit out of customer service workers. To put it extremely charitably, we're used to being fucked by corpos so we pre-emptively fuck them back in the dumbest way possible. Less charitably, our country has a bunch of bullies that want to shout at anything they can bully. I don't think they'd actually pull the trigger, but, y'know, law of large numbers, times small but non-zero probability of homicide by virtue a gun being present on the scene equals probably at least one murdered cable tech.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

The fiscal-progressive nature of the New Deal earlier in the century was so successful it created the middle class in the post-war era (90% marginal tax rates!) and it was being followed up by a socially-progressive era of the civil rights movement in the 60s and the powers that be had to make a concerted effort to derail both.

The takeover of the political dialog by economism using the Freshwater/Chicago school of economics started in earnest around this time and was so remarkably successful that Democratic presidents were spouting the neo-liberal conservatism[0] hogwash by the time of Clinton.

I am a member of the Cory Doctorow school[1] of political thought.

[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

[1] https://pluralistic.net/tag/political-science/

Cory Doctorow had a great write up two weeks ago, Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement

His end thesis is that even though Meta knows of the Streisand effect, even though they full on expect to lose, badly, and look like bullies chuds and losers, with no real defense, they are doing it to keep everyone else who works or worked at Meta on line, to engage in gratuitous overkill as a message. Sounds about right!

He also had a very excellent piece on pro-Monopolists like Thiel, which just feels so close a breed of absolute deranged fucking madness. Excellent read. Realest of real problems. Deranged billionaires and their syndromes, https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/16/lucky-orifices/