Linkage

Musk talks about bureaucracy as being more powerful than government officials. He claims that bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast, and that DOGE has been the exception to this rule. He is seeking to gut the machinery of government, which he believes has previously restrained people like Trump, and replace it with algorithmic governance. Even as AI technology flounders in the corporate world, Musk clearly believes he is poised to use this technology to overtake the US government and replace human bureaucracy with a monarchistic apparatus. With algorithmic governance, there would be no resistance, no shame, no compassion, and no fear of prosecution to interrupt the execution of oligarchical whims.

This is Musk’s vision, and it’s why he is battling with Open AI to dominate a troubled industry. He wants the United States to be powered by Starlink and xAI. If the richest man in the world owns all of the machinery of the US government, he can fulfill anti-democratic tech blogger Curvis Yarvin’s dream of a state “CEO” — which Yarvin describes as a kind of monarchy.

Given Musk’s current level of power over the federal apparatus, that dream is clearly in the process of being realized.

The removal of human agency and emotion from governance is consistent with Musk’s views on empathy, which he recently shared with Rogan. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. Musk qualified his remarks slightly, noting that he is not wholly opposed to empathy, but nonetheless believes that empathy is destroying Western civilization. “I believe in empathy, I think you should care about people. But you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole, and not commit civilizational suicide,” he said. After repeating multiple falsehoods about immigrants, Musk claimed it was empathy that had allowed immigrants to become a threat to the United States. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit — they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response,” Musk said.

On Thursday, music labels sought to add nearly 500 more sound recordings to a lawsuit accusing the Internet Archive (IA) of mass copyright infringement through its Great 78 Project, which seeks to digitize all 3 million three-minute recordings published on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records from about 1898 to the 1950s.

If the labels' proposed second amended complaint is accepted by the court, damages sought in the case—which some already feared could financially ruin IA and shut it down for good—could increase to almost $700 million. (Initially, the labels sought about $400 million in damages.)

[…]

The Great 78 lawsuit is clearly focused on sound recordings, with music publishers claiming IA's ambitions to preserve music history are a "smokescreen" to justify alleged infringement. They claimed that IA's project isn't fair use for educational purposes because the Great 78 Project's account on X (formerly Twitter) would announce recordings were available without sharing "historical facts associated with the recordings; it simply advertised that the recordings were freely available to download or stream and encouraged users to go and obtain them."

But David Seubert, who manages sound collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara library, told Ars that he frequently used the project as an archive and not just to listen to the recordings.

For Seubert, the videos that IA records of the 78 RPM albums capture more than audio of a certain era. Researchers like him want to look at the label, check out the copyright information, and note the catalogue numbers, he said.

"It has all this information there," Seubert said. "I don't even necessarily need to hear it," he continued, adding, "just seeing the physicality of it, it's like, 'Okay, now I know more about this record.'"

Some killer stuff in here:

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) strongly opposes the White House Executive Order of March 1, 2025 “Designating English as the Official Language of The United States.” Below we list four of the justifications given in the Executive Order in support of Official English, and explain why they are not valid—and in many cases, even undermine the order's stated goals. 

[…]

When this Executive Order is viewed in conjunction with other recent Executive Orders, including the January 20, 2025 Executive Order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” it appears designed in service of broader anti-immigrant goals, including the erasure of the history and culture of millions of people in the United States who are not monolingual English speakers. Previous attempts to create a single official language for the United States have all been rejected. We ask: if the United States has not needed an official tongue for more than 200 years, why would we need one now?

The LSA and its members stand firmly against the March 1 Executive Order, and we call on anyone concerned about the fallacies and exclusionary rhetoric found in the March 1 Executive Order to continue to support, protect, and promote multilingualism and linguistic diversity in the United States. 

Giant White Houses are white, with jet-black accents: the shutters, the gutters, the rooves. They are giant—Hulk houses—swollen to the very limits of the legally allowed property setback, and unnaturally tall. They feature a mishmash of architectural features, combining, say, the peaked roof of a farmhouse with squared-off sections reminiscent of city townhomes. They mix horizontal siding, vertical paneling, and painted brick willy-nilly.

Like the giant White House just down the road from us in Washington, D.C., the Giant White House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich. Once the house next door was finished, it went on the market for $2.5 million. The house has five bedrooms and six baths and is 5,600 square feet.

[…]

Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell argued that this architectural incoherence stems, in fact, from the modern homebuyer’s saturation in Zillow and Redfin. “Design magazines, HGTV, even Instagram—those are really media empires of the past,” she said. “Overwhelmingly, by sheer monthly users, the way people interact with architecture now is through real estate listings. We’re always Zillow browsing.”

And what do you see on Zillow? If you’re one of the lucky Americans who can afford to buy your first home, and you want to live in a neighborhood like our part of Arlington, you may find that the “starter house,” as you once knew it, is awfully hard to find. Because land is worth so much and old houses, comparatively, are worth so little, when families sell small houses here, they sell them to developers, not to other families. And those developers, driven by fear and money, knock the small houses down to build GWHs. The more GWHs they build, the more the neighborhood is made up of GWHs. The more you scan Zillow, the more it starts to make sense: Like nearly a million Americans a year, you’re better off just buying a brand-new house, too.

After all, in an era when a home purchase is likely the most secure, lucrative investment you will ever make, a house really no longer is a house. It is no longer simply the place where you live. It is your future in building form. It is the way you’ll pay for college, the way you might afford retirement. “I don’t think we think of the dream home anymore,” Wagner said. “We now see houses primarily as vehicles for investment. The best way to do that is if everything looks the same.”

Peter is co-host of the If Books Could Kill podcast, which I highly recommend.

 The percentage of Republican men who believe that women should return to their traditional roles in society has jumped from 28 to 48%. Among Republican women, the increase is from 23 to 37%. This has happened in the span of two years. As alarming as this is, it’s important to ask yourself: what do you think happened here? Do you think that Republican voters, organically and of their own volition, drastically shifted their fundamental perceptions of women’s role in society? Of course not. They are being influenced by messaging from conservative elites, who themselves are radicalizing on issues of race and gender.

This dynamic is often obvious. YouGov polling shows Republican support for higher tariffs at 51%, with just 5% supporting lower tariffs. A year ago those numbers were 38 and 20%, respectively. Again, what happened? Did they all read the same economics textbook? Or did they follow the lead of Donald Trump, who made higher tariffs a central campaign issue?

Democrats tend to miss this. When Kamala Harris lost, several prominent Democrats said the party had strayed too far from the public on trans issues. Gavin Newsom, speaking on his new podcast to his guest Charlie Kirk (Jesus Christ) repeated the talking point just this week. But just a few years ago the savvy political wisdom was that Republican anti-trans efforts had overstepped, alienating voters. Republicans, though, weren’t cowed by public opinion. Rather than retreat, they went on the offensive, seeking to reshape the public debate. And they did, leveraging inflection points like women’s sports to galvanize their base and push liberals into a defensive posture.

If you’re a political party, your goal is not just to know where voters stand, but to know how to move them. Instead, Democratic operatives seem content to reduce their platform to a focus-grouped ephemera, drifting whichever way the political winds blow it. 

I don't know about this. Treating people with respect ought not depend on identifying some anatomical feature. Situating that feature in the brain does not make it any better.

For those who question the slogan “Trans Women are Women,” the science provides a compelling answer. Gender identity is deeply rooted in brain development, and transgender women have been shown to possess brain structures that align more closely with cisgender women than cisgender men. The term “woman” is not just about chromosomes or reproductive capacity; it is a social and neurological identity shaped by a complex interplay of biology, psychology, and lived experience.

When TERFs or gender-critical individuals ask, “What is a woman?” the most accurate response is, “A woman is someone who identifies and experiences themselves as a woman, and this identity is supported by both social and biological science. Brain studies show that transgender women have neurological patterns that differ from cisgender men and align more closely with cisgender women. To reduce womanhood to mere reproductive function ignores the complexity of human identity and the science behind gender.”

The conversation didn’t stop there. Charlie Kirk quickly pivoted to other transgender issues, bringing up Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for incarcerated transgender people. Newsom agreed that the Kamala is for they/them ads were politically damaging, calling them "devastating." When asked about transgender incarcerated people, Newsom responded, "This was even more challenging… because this is issues of people who are incarcerated getting taxpayer-funded gender reassignment… that is a 90/10 [issue]," referring to how he believes such policies poll. He also appeared frustrated that Harris "was in the video and expressed support."

At the close of the podcast, Charlie Kirk shifted the discussion to transgender healthcare, stating, "I encourage you to learn about the butchery that is happening under chemical castration in this state. The American people are overwhelmingly against it." Newsom responded, "Yeah. I think we have to be more sensitized to that."

Kirk continued, "Youth should be off limits, you might be right on deportations, I know I’m right on this," to which Newsom simply acknowledged, "Yeah." Kirk then cited the Cass Report—a widely criticized and legally discredited review used to justify bans on transgender healthcare in the UK—as evidence that gender-affirming care for youth should be prohibited. Newsom offered no pushback, replying, "I’m not an expert on this, but I appreciate your broader [point]."

Newsom’s invitation and capitulation to Charlie Kirk on his podcast will alarm LGBTQ+ advocates. Kirk has a well-documented history of extremist rhetoric and hostility toward the LGBTQ+ community. In a 2023 video, he stated, “These people are sick… I blame the decline of American men. Someone should have just ‘took care of it’ the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and 60s, but as you have testosterone rates going down and men acting like women, well…”—seemingly advocating for violence against transgender people. Kirk has also repeatedly used the slur "tr*nny" and has encouraged its normalization. He once called transgender people “a throbbing middle finger to god.” In the last election cycle, TPUSA’s PAC, which he leads, spent millions on anti-transgender ads, making his presence on Newsom’s platform all the more striking.

This is a brilliant explainer. Here's the punchline:

Industrial policy was once central to the rise of today’s wealthiest nations. Yet, after achieving their own development, many downplayed the state’s role, promoting free-market rules abroad. The climate crisis forces a re-evaluation of that legacy. China offers a striking example of what strategic planning can achieve. Long before emerging as a global leader in green technologies, it used industrial policy to build manufacturing capacity, infrastructure and innovation. Through the coordinated efforts of state-owned enterprises, long-term planning, public procurement and technology transfer, China now leads global production of solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles. These interventions have helped drive down global costs, making renewables more accessible and helping to accelerate the energy transition worldwide.

This kind of coordination cannot be replicated by merely relying on market inducements like carbon pricing. When climate action is framed primarily as a problem of mobilising finance, the role of the state is reduced to simply enabling private investment rather than leading the transformation. Public institutions are cast not as planners or investors but as guarantors, tasked with making green investments more attractive to private actors. Tools like blended finance and public-private partnerships are promoted as solutions, but their logic reinforces the idea that structural change must be routed through private investors’ incentives. In practice, this limits the scope of public ambition and steers policy toward projects with clear financial returns rather than broader social or ecological value.

Market mechanisms may help reduce emissions at the margins, and may generate some revenue, but they are not designed to coordinate across sectors, manage trade-offs, or drive large-scale transitions. Treating finance as the central constraint sidelines the essential questions of what gets built, by whom and in whose interest. The belief that markets alone can deliver the necessary scale and direction has not only delayed progress but also distorted priorities—placing finance at the centre while allowing questions of production, capacity, and coordination to fade into the background.

As the United States retreats from managing the international order, returning under Trump to a more transactional and coercive approach to foreign policy—ditching the Paris Agreement, undermining multilateralism, and waging tariff wars under the banner of economic nationalism—it also exposes the fragility of the existing system. The version of globalization built on US financial dominance, free capital flows and market liberalization is beginning to crack under the weight of its own contradictions.

If this chaos has an upside, it is that it presents an opportunity to build an alternative—and radically more just—financial architecture, and to confront the economic orthodoxies that needlessly constrain what is considered possible.

A grounding in the queer history of the legal system in the United Kingdom reveals striking parallels between the moral panic leading to the enactment of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, and the current moment’s discourse surrounding the inclusion of transgender people in social spaces and their potential right to self-identification of gender in law. Through use of moral panic theory, this article examines and contextualizes the historical forces at play in the formation of laws around queer and trans lives in the UK, and in particular the instrumentalization of fears over the safety of children and cisgender women. The article also provides a practical example of the influence of the trans moral panic on law reform, by evaluating the debate surrounding the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill 2022. It concludes that there is no ‘gender crisis’ in the UK, but there are powerful social forces at work to stoke a moral panic and, in doing so, stigmatize and alienate trans people in a similar manner to the stigmatization of homosexuality as an illegitimate way of life under Section 28.

For more than two decades, I’ve been what some might call a hoarder but what I’ve more affectionately dubbed a “digital packrat.” Which is to say I mostly avoid streaming services, I don’t trust any company or cloud with my digital media, and I store everything as files on devices that I physically control. My mp3 collection has been going strong since the Limewire days, I keep high-quality rips of all my movies on a local media server, and my preferred reading device holds a large collection of DRM-free ebooks and PDFs—everything from esoteric philosophy texts and scientific journals to scans of lesbian lifestyle magazines from the 1980s.

Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of The Sopranos. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off.

Amazon is far from alone in this long-running trend towards eliminating digital ownership. For many people, digital distribution and streaming services have already practically ended the concept of owning and controlling your own media files. Spotify is now almost synonymous with music for some younger generations, having strip-mined the music industry from both ends by demonetizing more than 60% of the artists on its platform and pushing algorithmic slop while­ simultaneously raising subscription fees.

Of course, surrendering this control means being at the complete mercy of Amazon and other platforms to determine what we can watch, read, and listen to—and we’ve already seen that these services frequently remove content for all sorts of reasons. Last October, one year after the Israeli military began its campaign of genocide in Gaza, Netflix removed “Palestinian Stories,” a collection of 19 films featuring Palestinian filmmakers and characters, saying it declined to renew its distribution license. Amazon also once famously deleted copies of 1984 off of people’s Kindles. Fearing piracy, many software companies have moved from the days of “Don’t Copy That Floppy” to the cloud-based software-as-a-service model, which requires an internet connection and charges users monthly subscription fees to use apps like Photoshop. No matter how you look at it, digital platforms have put us on a path to losing control of any media that we can’t physically touch.