Notices by Malte Engeler (malteengeler@legal.social)

@anneroth "souverän"

"My family is fleeing the country. [...] It is only a matter of time before Trump and Elon take this next step. Once they have consolidated their power at the federal level, and once their regime is secure enough that public outrage cannot threaten it, they will be free to defy the courts as much as they want. I give it less than six months before we reach that point."

https://www.damemagazine.com/2025/04/29/why-i-am-leaving-the-usa/

This could be a moment of uproar against the catholic church but it's a moment of dutiful obedience.

That even progressive voices feel obligated to voice ambiguous praise for a not-as-terrible-pope says little about how okay-ish the pope was and a lot about how afraid we are to speak truth to this violent and oppressive institution (and the far-right alliances it is part of).

This is not respect. It's fear of being outside public expectations.

The capacity for civil disobedience does not magicially form when needed. It has to be nourished and trained with daily acts of resistance. Speak up, be in the way, be the uncomfortable person in the room.

Yesterday I was invited to speak for the @AfDVerbotJetzt campaign at the "Good Night Far Right" conference of @rosaluxstiftung.

It was humbling.

Also on the panel were brave humans from Greece, Peru and Brasil who shared strategies and learings from their fights against their regions flavor of the extreme right.

What stuck with me is how fundemental this well known and ofter repeated truth ist:

DO NOT OBEY IN ADVANCE!

"Die Federführung und die Aufsicht über die Wirtschaft soll beim Bund angesiedelt werden. Die bislang für den Datenschutz zuständige Behörde "Bundesbeauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit (BfDI)" soll umbenannt werden in "Beauftragte für Datennutzung."

Hey Zivilgesellschaft, some opposition please 👀

https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/koalitionsverhandlungen-digitales-datenschutz-ki-digital-ministerium

I see some of you starting to type something like

"But Malte, in the EU we have value-based regulation like GDPR and DSA. Our Big Tech would be much friendlier than THOSE americans."

I'll tell you a secret: We only have GDPR, DSA etc because it's foreign Big Tech. If it were European corporations digitally dominating the globe our regulation would be as tame as those in the US.

If your criticism of "big tech" is merely a result of the unhappiness about the fact that Meta, Google and Microsoft aren't EU-corporations you are missing the point.

There is nothing that indicates that SAP or Deutsche Telekom would hesitate a second at the chance of becoming the equally violent and exploitive forces.

The solution to Big Tech isn't EU Big Tech. It's de-commercialisation and democratization of tech.

Wann? WANN um alles in der Welt ist aus "Robin Hood" eine Abwertung geworden?

"Vor die Wahl gestellt zwischen Unordnung und Unrecht, entscheidet sich der Deutsche für das Unrecht."
(Goethe)

Auf Insta werden Linke-Wählerinnen jetzt dafür getadelt, dass sie verhindern, dass starke SPD oder Grüne in Koalition mit Merz mehr Gegengewicht zu seinem Rassismus bekommen.

Liebe Merz-Enabler, man kann kaum besser zeigen, dass man nicht verstanden hat, warum Leute links wählen. Tipp: Gerade WEIL sie keine Partei wählen wollen, die Merz zum Kanzler macht.

Now that the authoritarian government of the USA is going all in on crypto and blockchain (and slashing respective regulation) we will surely see the inherently democratizing and empowering power of these technologies, yes?

The fact that "enshittification" as a term was successfully popularized in public discourse seemed like a win to me at first. To me it accurately serves as a synonym to "capitalist competition" and "market" (the driving dynamics behind the problems of platforms and digital services).

It did that and simultaneously offered a new vocabulary that did not immediately alienate liberals, much like "democratizing the economy" replaced "economic planning".

Now it seems like the term achieved the opposite though.

Much like Zuboffs "surveillance capitalism" the term "enshittification" has successfully replaced any structural criticism of capitalism. We are again left with talking about some unwelcome symptoms of (digital) capitalism while - unintentionally - reinforcing the idea that "competition" and "markets" are in fact working and suitable systems of economic organisation.

It de-radicalized the debate instead of radicalizing it.

Die Abgrenzung zum neuen libertär-rechten Block aus AfD, CDU und FDP scheint für SPD und Grüne zunehmend nur noch eine formale. Es geht immer weniger darum, dass man inhaltlich auseinander läge, sondern nur noch darum, dass "die AfD pfui" ist. Dieser rein formale Antifaschismus trägt nicht.

Es ist die rassistischen Politik der Gegenwart (die längst auch bei SPD und Grüne mehrheitsfähig ist) die es abzulehnen gilt: Und zwar unabhängig von den sie tragenden Mehrheiten.

What a wonderful and fitting article by @manualdousuario about the narrow-mindedness that is "freeyourfeeds".

https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2025/bluesky-free-our-feeds-mastodon/

The privatisation of common land at the start of the industrial "revolution" is a powerful metaphor for what is happening in the fringes of the digital industry.

It was for web3 and it is for biotech enabled worker-optimisation (sometimes euphemistically referred to as "human enhancements"):

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-enclosure-of-the-human-psyche

I finally finished "Blood In The Machine" by @brianmerchant and can only find words of glowing praise.

The book retells the story of the "Luddites", an early 1800 workers and protest movement against automation and workers exploitation.

The book is so valuable because it doesn't simply report the historical events, the years of the uprising and the important figures but uses the Luddites as a blueprint for analyzing the economic dynamics of automation and resistance against Big Tech today.

Over the course of around 400 pages Brian deconstructs and analyzes how terms like "entrepreneur" or "innovation" changed their meaning and how the blatant attack on workers rights or shameless manipulation of regulation were used then and now by tech corporations.

The book gives a most valuable framework to understanding todays reality of (digital) capitalism and what we can learn about avenues for fighting back from battles won (and lost) in the past.

As a bonus you will also learn how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ada Lovelace's work on (proto) computation are closely linked to Luddism.

Two quotes stayed with me the most:

"Some machines must be broken, so that they stop producing monsters."

"If the Luddites have taught us anything, it's that robots aren't taking our jobs. Our bosses are."

A wonderful and inspiring book, really ✨