Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social)

How the behavior of DOGE -- and Trump's lackeys who are running riot through the federal government -- is exactly that of ...

... a protection racket

An excellent way of understanding it, via @Dahlialith at Slate

unpaywalled: https://archive.is/tNrHM

An excellent interview with Elizabeth Warren ...

... about the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ...

... how much banks loathed it ...

... how much money it has put back in the pockets of Americans, by cracking down on deceptive and usurious bank charges ...

... and why Musk in particular would hate the CFPB: He wants X to be a financial app, and doesn't want to treat his customer's privacy and rights seriously

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/sen-elizabeth-warrens-two-word-plan-to-save-the-cfpb-from-elon-musk

"I wrote in my notebook, from the front seat of a silent Tesla carrying me, its driver, and one other person through a pastel-toned tunnel, that 'nothing can prepare you for how fucking stupid this shit is.'"

David Roth on this year's CES

https://archive.is/mo4AS

I'm working at a cafe today and "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House comes on

during the chorus I look to my left far across the cafe where two young women, maybe 20 years old, are sitting together

they both have their heads tilted back and eyes closed, mouthing DON'T DREAAAAAAAMMM it's OHHHHHHH-VER like they're onstage in American Idol

man, I had no idea Gen Z kids even *knew* that song

Well what do you know

Marko Elez, one of the young software guys Musk has illegally turned loose to alter critical government high-tech services ...

... was, just back in December, posting on X about how he wanted there to be a "eugenic immigration policy" ...

... how "you could not pay me to marry outside my race" ...

... and "Normalize Indian hate", referring in this case to folks from India

the Wall Street Journal just broke the story (gift link): https://www.wsj.com/tech/doge-staffer-resigns-over-racist-posts-d9f11a93?st=8613EM&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

In addition to formal government institutions, Musk is also trying to tear apart Wikipedia

That is almost certainly, as this analysis notes, because Wikipedia is "a last bastion of shared reality" ...

... and Musk, in contrast, only wants online sources that repeat his sort of conspiratorial blather

The piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-musk-wikipedia/681577/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/1mjMq

"Of course it's a coup"

as ever, Timothy Snyder cuts to the chase

https://snyder.substack.com/p/of-course-its-a-coup

More excellent reporting from the team at Wired, on the activities of Musk’s group of 20something tech folks

Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who worked at SpaceX and X has admin privileges over critical systems the federal government uses to pay money out out — to agencies, individuals, contractors, you name it

In addition to being able to cause damage, Elez is now a *mammoth* security risk

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-payment-system/

Ryan Broderick's "Garbage Day" newsletter has been good at compiling details on Musk's government coup and his twentysomething employees who are doing the work for him

https://www.garbageday.email/p/musk-s-superteam-of-former-ipad-babies

Garbage Day is always good but he's good at keeping track of what's going on in washington right now

Over at @WIRED, reporters like Vittoria Elliott are doing excellent work documenting Musk's takeover of the federal government

In this piece, she tracks down the names of the people Musk has installed at various agencies

these guys are all 19 to 24 year old engineers -- one is a Thiel fellow

Story here: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/L2C7d

US media has traditionally been far more clear-eyed about antidemocratic purges abroad

so here's an exercise in how a US correspondent might describe the events of the last week in Washington, were it occurring overseas

https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/musk-s-junta-establishes-him-as-head-of-government

So Trump has revoked Antony Fauci's security detail

this comes after Trump himself has spent years attacking Fauci and whipping up violent sentiment against him

https://apnews.com/article/fauci-trump-security-detail-4b2e317dc9e7768c0571df30750e863a

A hacker developed an "infinite maze" to trap web-crawlers/scrapers from AI companies

basically, if the server code detects that a web crawler from an AI firm is trying to scrape the site ...

... the code begins spinning up an infinite, nesting warren of new sham pages, filled with random text

so the crawler gets stuck crawling and scraping endless and meaningless pages

fun @jasonkoebler piece at @404mediaco

https://www.404media.co/email/7a39d947-4a4a-42bc-bbcf-3379f112c999/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

Behold Sophie O'Neill's "embroidery journal"

each day she stitches an icon representing something she did, felt or experienced

by the end of the the year the whole thing is a gorgeous aide memoire

Item #1 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-30-greyscale-gelato-the-ott-derivimeter/

A wonderful essay by @benjedwards about the joys of the early phase of personal computer ...

... i.e. when computers were indeed "personal" ...

... which is to say, under our own control, serving us, and not being tweaked/juked on a daily basis by remote megacorps

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3292/the-pc-is-dead-its-time-to-make-computing-personal-again

Behold the AI slop that google served up when these folks asked it "does corn get digested"

I just checked that query, and it now serves up this story itself, bien sur

but overall I agree with the deck to the headline

"slopaggedon cometh"

https://futurism.com/google-image-corn-ai-slop

A spectacular piece by Brendan Koerner in Wired about the lives of young men doing door-to-door solar sales

one just came by my house the other day! (I already have panels, so there was no sale to make)

Every new industry produces some sort of Glengarry-Glen-Ross boiler-room culture

this is solar's, apparently

https://www.wired.com/story/spectacular-burnout-solar-panel-salesman/

@bmacDonald94 @soc_i_ety

lol

that reminds me of the lyric from "Love Shack" by the B-52s

"I got me a chrysler / it seats about 20"

Back last spring I visited Denver ...

... where the city was two years into a fascinating experiment:

Subsidizing residents who wanted to buy an e-bike

Turns out the program was exceptionally successful

People rode 'em 26 miles a week on average, rode them year-round ...

... removing 6 million miles of car-driving each year. Cleaner air, healthier residents getting exercise

And: *way* cheaper than subsidizing electric cars

My piece on it for Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/e-bike-subsidy-programs-denver-states-walkable-cities-urban-infrastructure/

Excellent analysis by Annie Lowery on how the volatility of the crypto market could infect the regular markets: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/cryptocurrency-deregulation-future-crash/681202/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/iD2vy