Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social)

@kims This is the best thread on the internet today

okay you lucky people 🎲

it's time once again 🗓️

for "the opposite of doomscrolling"

my latest "Linkfest" newsletter just dropped 📬

Free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-35-diasimocracy-four-loko-collectors-and/

This issue includes:

🤩 "diasimocracy"
📖 why sentences in English are getting shorter
🔊 the "Hebredian Hum"
🐻 what it's like to survive a grizzly attack
🕶️ the "millennial pause"
🦁 saving jaguars by paying for photos of them
🌲 wood that's stronger than steel
🦠 "prototaxites"

.... and much much more

Flock -- an automatic license-plate-reading service -- is adding tons of data sources ...

... so police could, upon scanning your license, get linked to tons more info about your life, relationships, etc

where did Flock get these additional sources of info?

they're using standard people-lookup tools and data brokers, but also ...

... info from *data breaches*

so great

@404mediaco has the story: https://www.404media.co/license-plate-reader-company-flock-is-building-a-massive-people-lookup-tool-leak-shows/

unpaywalled version: https://archive.is/GmuUk

USDA says it'll restore climate info to its web site after farmers and environmental groups sued

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/usda-reverses-course-commits-to-restore-purged-climate-webpages-in-response-to-farmers-lawsuit

I'll believe it when I see the pages restored, but provisionally this is good news

climate data gathered by federal agencies is crucial for farmers, insurers, airlines ... pretty much any industry that has to deal with the weather

#climate

New coinage just dropped, folks

"enshittogenic"

as in ...

... when the ecology of the online world loses crucial stabilizers, such that enshittification has not yet happened, but the conditions are ripe for it

@pluralistic on his new podcast series "Who Broke the Internet?"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/

This is an op-ed by a professor at West Point, describing the Trump/Hegseth crackdown on any sort of instruction that questions power ...

gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/opinion/west-point-trump-military.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Fk8.nAsH.FJBUeCyms015&smid=url-share

I highlighted this part here -- they just completely disbanded the sociology major

sociology and anthropology are really, really hated by Trump and his fellow travellers

they hate anything that seeks to examine the fabric of society

There's a new podcast series on the CBC by @pluralistic -- it's all about "who broke the internet?"

it's a blast -- the first ep is out, looking at google search, and I'm one of the folks Cory interviewed to talk about the heady early days of the 90s ... before things enshittified

check it out! https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16144078-dont-be-evil

"Conservatives *hate* complexity"

a superb post by @pluralistic that distills a core aspect of why right-wing ideas about how to manage things like the economy, immigration and our personal lives collide so rapidly with reality

key passage here, but do read the whole thing

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/

US border officials are so twitchy and paranoid that they detained and imprisoned two German teenagers ...

... even though they'd applied for -- and received -- their electronic approval for a five-week visit

Why were they detained? Because they hadn't booked accommodations for their full five weeks

they'd figured they'd travel around a bit and make decisions on the fly ... *like tourists do all the time, in most normal and free countries*

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/german-tourists-deported-hawaii-cbp-b2736655.html

I"m finally getting around to watching Daredevil: Born Again ...

... and it's making me reflect again how much pop culture is basically fixated on "the chaotic, crime-ridden streets of NYC / [big-cities-in-general]" ...

it's as if the cultural imagination got completely frozen in the crime peak of the early 80s, and can't move on

man alive, crime in NYC today is -- in the real world -- lower than in much of the city's history, and lower than the national average

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City

@lauren

I'm the same way -- I just type two dashes together, with a space before and after

I think it's a vestige of the fact that I first began doing word-processing using DOS software that was not yet WYSIWYG

no m-dash was possible -- two dashes was one's only alternative

the habit stuck

Apparently the use of m-dashes is now seen -- by some -- as a mark of genAI writing?

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chatgpt-hypen-em-dash-ai-writing-1235314945/

Man I dunno I use *ton* of m-dashes!

In fact a couple of years ago I created a little web tool that let you take a piece of your writing and strip out *just* the punctuation ...

1/x

@kims

glad you liked it!

same here with crowded house, they were absolutely huge amongst my friendship circle so I have always thought of them as absolute monster hits lol

@kims

yeah, that's what he ponders later in his calculation, so he does another crunch looking for bands that a) had two hits, but no more, while also b) never having a top-selling album

that second list is quite interesting! it's in my post, check it out

You know about one-hit wonders ...

... bands that charted a single hit, but never again

what about "two-hit wonders"? Are there bands that charted *two* hit singles, but never another?

Chris Dalla Riva dug into the data and found some ...

... surprising results

Pink Floyd?

Item #2 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-33-two-hit-wonders-moonglass-and-trees/

The Supreme Court has brutally enabled the Trump administration's "path of perfect lawlessness"

Adam Serwer nails it here: https://archive.is/eiFyj

Keyboard.io makes high-end angled and "split" keyboards

they wrote a letter to customers explaining how Trump's new tariffs will affect them

it's bad news for them -- prices have already shot up, and new tariffs Trump is threatening would *double* prices

their description of "why building something as complex as a keyboard is an inherently cross-border enterprise" is really interesting

they have to ship wood to China! that sort of wood isn't readily available there

https://shop.keyboard.io/blogs/news/an-open-letter-to-u-s-customers

Despite the fact that I'm a Canadian who was a young teenager when Bob and Doug MacKenzie first went on the air ...

... I did not know

a) that Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas created the "Great White North" segments specifically to parody the CBC's demand for two more minutes of "Canadian content" on SCTV, and ...

... b) they expected that the segments -- improvised with zero preparation -- would bomb

via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_and_Doug_McKenzie

@band @GhostOnTheHalfShell

good one

who could have seen *this* coming

https://futurism.com/neoscope/23andme-selling-data