Peter Mc

The first time I met William Gibson - to interview him for the *Globe and Mail* in 1999 - there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: "What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?" craphound.com/nonfic/transcr… 1/

"Minimum wage" is one of those concepts that *seems* to have an intuitive definition, but the harder you think about it, the more complicated it gets. For example, if you want to work, but can't find a job, then the minimum wage you'll get is zero: web.archive.org/web/20200625… 1/

OG App is the coolest app you've never heard of. Back in 2022, two teenagers unilaterally disenshittified Instagram by making an "alt-client." 1/

Bruce Sterling going very, very hard (posts 117-121): people.well.com/conf/inkwell… A current political issue that seems under-recognized to me is how much Trump and his enablers have destroyed the American Establishment and the Republican Party. MAGA takes its cues from Viktor Orban and is an ethnonational-kleptocrat scam. But if you think of the situation from Trump's draft-dodging Boomer heyday, around 1968 or so, he's extremely disruptive and radical -- an "up against the Wall," smash the State type. Long-established, conventional Republican tenets that have vaporized: "Establishment Republican" protective, patriarchal, stabilizing, figures of the Nelson Rockfeller type. These guys were firmly placed in the American cultural elite of libraries and art galleries and universities. They could deliver censorious lectures on cultural propriety, and had credibility in doing it -- "Mobil Oil Company brings you the ballet." They might as well have all been hanged from lanterns. In 2016 there's not a trace of 'em. "Billy Graham" figures who were "the nation's pastor." They're all Elmer Gantry now. They nailed themselves to the wrists and ankles to public sleazebags who break all Ten Commandments every week. Their megachurches are bunkers for rifles and race-war. No one including themselves expects an ounce of moral decency out of them. They've become unholy. And they know it. "Limited government." Nope. Not any more. No government at all, sometimes, but never with well-defined "limits." Constitutional Rights: first amendment, fourth amendment, nineteenth amendment. They don't care. The Constitution is of no relevance to even to the former Tea Party. States' rights. They invade towns and states with masked squads. American states that ignore or contradict them are enemy states. Free market capitalism. They're oligarchs, grifters and kleptocrats. They also run protection rackets in which business leaders have to publicly flatter them and bribe them. Independent banking system. They hate functional bankers, and prefer crypto and money-laundering. Foreign bribes, actively sought out, more than acceptable. Reducing the debt. They never actually did that, but now they've forgotten the idea entirely. NATO. They hate and fear their own military alliances, and the older and more traditional and established those alliances, the worse they are. They'll fight with Canada, with Mexico; they're beat up Denmark. US International soft power, various influence efforts, global regulatory schemes, global trade regulations -- they hate fear and abandon every one of them. In every "developing world" burg where there was an American flag over some do-gooder scheme, they've pulled it down and burned it. Also, American power-centers that seemed really invulnerable in the USA, the true hard-core apparatus: the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Supreme Court -- and "the Republican Party," of course... all just storm-wracked, flooded, mildewed. They'll never be the same again. If you really loved those aspects of straight-laced America, the native land of squares and the Silent Majority, it's a source of grave anxiety. If you're a May '68er "Situationist," and you thought the whole Moloch-style enterprise was always rotten, exploitative, alienating and basically a paper-thin, TV-screen "Spectacle," it's incredible to see just one year of a new Presidency doing so much of your hard work for you. It's like 1968 turned inside out. The Boomers are leaving on a very bad note -- but they are leaving. They're leaving emptiness and wreckage as they head for the graveyards, but this is the second quarter of the 21st Century. It's not an era of Baby Boom Population Bomb. It's an era of radically shrinking populations and disturbed landscapes. Viktor Orban's Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, they all have severe baby-busts and mass regional abandonments. They're signature national scenes are villages demolished, shuttered factories maybe fit for a rave or some laser-tag. It sounds very alarming, but Turin is rather like that, and I spent most of this century in Turin. I've had quite a good time of it, even; not that life there was perfect, but there was so much empty room, and so many unheard-of creative things to become enthusiastic about, in a very old town with so much new elbow-room.

One of the dumbest, shrewdest tricks corporate America ever pulled was teaching us all to reflexively say, "If a corporation blocks your speech, that doesn't violate the First Amendment and therefore it's not censorship": pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/y… 1/

House and Senate Republicans are on the verge of killing Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, one of the most potent anti-corruption laws on the US statute books: thebignewsletter.com/p/house… 1/