In 2022, the tech critic and privacy advocate Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe what's happened on the Internet to a lot of the most widely used platforms: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Spotify. He writes: "First, platforms are good to their users; then they
This is the first guest essay at Meditations in an Emergency. I'm proud to bring you yesterday's speech by the great Cleve Jones, who has for nearly half a century been a key organizer for the global queer community and the San Francisco Bay Area, gave
Portlanders deploying inflatable animal costumes, a brass band, mass ukulele renditions of “This Land Is Your Land,” naked bike rides, and other tactics in their ICE protests are undermining the Trump administration’s lurid claims that Portland, Oregon, is a “war-torn” city under siege by a violent left. It’s
Many people seem to love sweeping generalizations. Not all people, but lots of people I come across trying to discuss the politics of our time fall back on pretending that a category of people is homogenous as in all its members hold the same positions. If categories were indeed airtight
An Army Called ICE Is Already Waging a Domestic War (This is a series of short essay-reports, beginning with the worst – ICE and attacks on immigrants and ending with the best – what we can do and a brief homage to Jane Goodall.) A lot of us have assumed that somehow
Tuesday, hundreds of highly skilled professionals were forced to sit in the room where their inferiors in all but rank staged long, pointless, hateful, ignorant, and undisciplined performances. Such a gathering of all top military leadership is unprecedented in modern times, a major security risk, and a big insult to
My dearest wife, It is week two of the Siege of Portland, and still these barbarians will not yield to our troops. We have severed the cords of their latte machines but they are making cowboy coffee in their camps, where loud ukulele songs of resistance even now drift in
Something that's true of all the narcissists I've known and witnessed is that they're unhappy and they can't recognize that this is an entrenched condition. They think it's due to something someone just did, and if they punish, intimidate, coerce
Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer
I drove home to San Francisco from New Mexico last weekend, and in the western Mojave desert of California I passed in quick succession three vast renewable energy sites: the first was three solar concentrator power plants, the kind where rings of mirrors reflect sun onto a central tower, which
I and we are wildlife whose natural habitat is libraries, when it comes to physical space, because they contain books in which minds roam free through time and space, encounter Dogen and Dante and Sappho and Black Elk and others long since gone, meet ideas and possibilities, meet each other
Twenty years ago, on August 29, 2005, a huge hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. New Orleans's levees failed, as had been predicted, and much of the city went underwater. Although the authorities had issued a mandatory evacuation order, they had provided no resources to the many who were