Yesterday, French Prime Minister Sebastian Lecornu gave the speech of his life. Tomorrow, he’ll find out if it worked.

Update: It worked.

Sebastian Lecornu survived the No Confidence vote. Next come the hard part: governing France. 

Something shifted in French politics, while Macron was off arm wrestling with Trump in Egypt. Lecornu, self-proclaimed Macron’s warrior monk earlier this week, claimed to be independent of Macron. And surprisingly enough, it might be true. Lecornu seemed to just maybe have broken with Macron, perhaps after being thrown to the wolves, then picked up and thrown at them again.

The speech was expansive, Lecornu took on so many topics as to be remaking France altogether. He doesn’t have that kind of power, and the parliament is hopelessly divided. But hey, when they hand you a whole France, go big or go home. He informed the Right that they would be denied relevance as long as he’s there. Most of Les Republicans, the equivalent of the Republicans in America, have also essentially shown their stripes and have joined Le Pen’s fascists, just as our Republicans have dropped the mask of democracy and sought naked power instead.

Lecornu speaking before the National Assembly, eying the left side of the room.

The Republicans are gone, and might as well sign up for their Gestapo apprenticeships. (The French ones. Ah hell, the American ones can come, too.)

Lecornu did not shy away from important and divisive discussions, he went straight for them. He woke everyone up immediately, starting out with the right to die, fighting racism, homophobia, anti-semitism. He called out a French hunger for security and justice. It was a rare French political shock moment. He was willing to hit hot-button topics, to piss people off. Specifically, National Rally people. (Rassemblement National to the French)

Tuesday afternoon, he looked down the line at the dwindling traditional parties of France, and rejected the the National Rally. Marine Le Pen, the head of the far right party and the Trumpist figure of France, scrolled on her phone and tried to look bored. She looked angry.

At the 7 minute mark of the 30 minute speech he said there would be no more cutting out Parliament from the legislative process in France. He would give them their say, come hell or high water. Lecornu threw away the normal platitudes of French politics and talked plainly about the ways the Republic isn’t working. He listed some crises facing France: social, economic, budgetary, environmental/climate. The damage of the pandemic, the outbreak of war, the need for clean energy, which is also climate. (Though really they are all of a piece with the global polycrisis.)

Early on in the speech he established that he was not going to be a traditionalist. “We are living through a geopolitical shift,” he intoned. “There are those who wish to hold on to the old ways, and they will disappear.” This was likely an shot at Les Republicans, as the once softer right party that has been mostly folded into the obviously fascist National Rally.

Lecornu also promised to pause the unpopular pension reform that pushed retirement from 62 to 64. (That might not seem like much of a concession to Americans, but it’s more complicated than it seems, more on that later.)

“Rejecting the old ways—” That’s where he lost RN, or perhaps kicked them out the door. And the room reacted. Le Pen waved goodbye as if to push Lecornu away, and the left side of the room realized that Lecornu had broken, at least somewhat, from his centristsmasters. It was a thing to see. Everyone seemed surprised, if not all pleased, to watch Lecornu walk out of the consensus he’d lived his whole career in.

Marine does not approve this message.

The “Dédiabolisation” (what we would call rehabilitation) of Marine Le Pen has been far more successful than anyone left of Satan wants to admit. She remains diabolical to her core, even if she has shaken off much of the taint of her murderous, white supremacist father. But her ideology is still one of exclusion, bigotry, and ultimately, murder of some arbitrary out-group of people. (It doesn’t even much matter which, the violence and fear are the point.)

Lecornu said the thing that needed to be said, that: “We can no longer act as we have acted.” He owned the failures in a way that his president seems incapable of. Will it stick? Will it matter? In national politics, it often takes years to answer that.

“Our fall is not certain, progress is not certain,” he said. That’s what makes this moment so scary, not just for France, but America, and the whole world too. Not that all hope is lost, but that there’s everything to fight for, and no assurance of winning that fight. In this, France and America are in the same situation, and these waning days of the Holocene have no comfort for us, only work to do.

Despite the turn left I don’t think he is a leftist or will become one. There’s certainly nothing leftist in his history, but the Macronistas of the Center are gone, a footnote in French history, killed by Macron himself. The only choices now are side with the left or fall in with the fascists. He nodded left.

Lecornu announced that the government would only act in concert with the National Assembly and the Senate, which means no more pushing things through with 49.3, the most hated provision of the 5th Republic. This was one of the two things everyone was waiting for. (Along with pausing or reversing the pension reform.) Article 49.3 was the tool that let the Macron administration push legislation relating to the budget or social security through, without bothering with any of that annoying democracy stuff.

This provision allowed the Prime Minister to just… ignore everyone. No vote, just a fait acompli, and Macron is the kind of leader who loves to just tell everyone how it’s going to be, democracy be damned. Macron’s PMs have used 49.3 a whole 28 times, ramming the government’s priorities through without regard for the Parliament, or the people it represents. Most of those uses were under former PM Élisabeth Borne, who lasted almost two whole years in post.

Borne’s actions so insulted the representatives of France that they have pretty much wiped out anyone who touched 49.3 with a vote of no confidence since. Governments fell, and with them one PM after another. France was accused of becoming ungovernable by many pundits, but mostly France suffered from being ungoverned. Macron checked out and stopped speaking to the nation he supposedly leads.

Lecornu speaking, and the people who will decide his fate tomorrow.

The next budget will be hashed out the dirty way, political fighting, infighting, deals, promises, broken or not  the messy stuff of running a nation in opening days of the third millennium. Lecornu has chosen to work with the Socialists. They are basically the equivalent of the Democrats. There’s much further left than that in France.

Lecornu isn’t looking hard left, that’s a task he has to leave to the socialists and softer leftists. “Go get your own and let’s make some laws,” seems to be the message. That could be harder than people realize. I don’t know if the Left can do that, or when it comes down to it, if Lecornu can either.

Many of the leftists favor imposing a Zucman tax, a proposal from French economist Gabriel Zucman to assess a flat tax on households with a fortune of 100m Euros or more, annually. Like America, France’s ultrarich pay next to no taxes as a proportion of their wealth. Lecornu is saying France must cut services to balance the budget, but the people he’s accessing for power are much more inclined to tools like Zucman’s tax to stabilize French finances. Can he roll with that? Can he compromise, or talk the leftists out of such a tax for now? This is just one example of the complexities he’ll face tomorrow, if he’s allowed to stay in post by the parliament.

That’s just one place where there are no easy compromises, and all the fights are ideological as much as practical. I don’t know if Lecornu has the political talent to lead such a factious body back to doing its job, but we’ll find out.

An election right now, or even soon, would likely wipe out the center. It might also debilitate the left, and hand power to Le Pen and her band of weirdos. That also has to be in the minds of the Left, but they may also contemplate that letting Le Pen’s fascists lose on the country for a couple years will boost them in the next presidential election. I wouldn’t count on that if I were them.

Lecornu said “There are too many people entering the workforce too late and leaving it to early.” And this is an interesting point, and an interesting problem for France, and perhaps not only for France.

The other side of pension reform Lecornu put on hold today doesn’t get talked about much, but it should be. There a reason it was largely younger people who protested extending French work life to 64 years. The first function of retirement is to let the older people rest and slow down for their last phase of life, but the second function of retirement is to let new people enter the work force. Youth unemployment in France is close to 19%, just a little better than Greece’s. In Germany, usually considered France’s peer economy, that rate is just 6.3%. If their parents and even grandparents never seem to retire, what chance do the young people who filled the streets protesting last summer have of building careers themselves?

This problem hasn’t hit the US as hard, in part because so many young people are seeking college degrees, and delaying entry into the workforce. The flip side of that is our crushing debt levels, which also serve to make us more timid in political expression than the French are. There is little shame in the culture on this side of the pond for being out of work and protesting. The French believe that the system should work for them, not vice versa.

During the last crisis he precipitated Macron went to his beach house and ignored everyone. To Manny, the crisis was clearly everyone else’s fault, Macron took no responsibility. After that he mostly left France and jetted around the world to hang out with other leaders. Anyone, really, but the French. The last time he gave a speech at all to his people was May this year, but even that was a three hour Q&A session with callers on a TV show.

As of right now Lecornu just barely has enough votes to stay in post as Prime Minister. But it’s a long night ahead.

It’s not exactly a forum for bringing the people along on a policy journey. Macron has broken up with France, but doesn’t want to lose the privileges that come with the relationship. He’s just a jerk now, an absent president who doesn’t really care.

Tomorrow is the new Sebastian Lecornu’s first test; there’s a confidence vote for him in the morning. If he fails to get enough support, he will be gone, and the wheel will turn again. But right now, it looks like he will just barely about make it.

I don’t know if Lecornu can live up to his new personality. I don’t know if any of us can meet this moment, around the world.

But if I can convince the French, or any other country, to look to America for a political lesson, it would be don’t let go of education. Before our systems could fall to the idiot king of tacky who now rules our country, we had to spend decades destroying our own education system to the point where we, the original modern democracy, no longer had the skills to maintain any democracy at all. We failed. Maybe not for ever, but for now.

Things fell apart; the centre did not hold. The worst are indeed full of passionate intensity, but perhaps there are still some out there with conviction. Perhaps we can still stop the rough beast from reaching Bethlehem.

Every Manny for Himself

(Apologies for the delay, Macron ran out my work day, went into my Saturday, but damn it, this is still France)

After a mean girl spat, in which the leader of the ever-more-trending-hard-right Le Republicans, Retailleau, said he can’t be in a government with that bitch Bruno Le Maire, Lecornu  gave up on proposing a budget at all. He went for a good four day sulk. By the end of the week, he was summoned to an audience with Macron to work it out.

Friends, he did not work it out.

Macron and His Warrior Monk

Macron is not on speaking terms with either reality or France. He gave himself Friday to fix France’s government. It was mostly silence all day, because there was no rational way of resolving this political crisis without making compromises and talking to all the parties. Then, in the evening, instead of deciding anything at all, Macron doubled down on the fantasy he’s acting outright now. He re-appointed Sébastien Lecornu to the job that Lecornu had been forced to quit on Monday. All it needed was a chimney on the Elysee palace and a puff of shit-brown smoke, for this re-run of the most tragically useless ministerial episode in modern French history.

There was some talk that Macron might try to pull a PM from the center Left, after exhausting his centrist talent pool, but it was not to be. There was some thinking that he could even pull from the more moderate Right, and just admit the direction he’s been drifting since his days as a fresh-faced socialist. (Albeit with maybe just a few royal aspirations that he would mention from time to time in the early days of his presidency.)

Unsurprisingly the crisis spilled into his Saturday. But don’t worry about Macron, he will be on a plane Monday morning to Egypt. There he will be doing something or other on the Gaza Ceasefire deal, which France is not involved in. Probably some waving, maybe some getting his picture taken, perhaps even some talking to people, as long as they’re not French.

Lecornu doesn’t get to jet off to Egypt. Lecornu remains loyal to a fault. After chatting with his president behind closed doors he has declared publicly that he is Macron’s warrior monk, and doesn’t seem at all embarrassed by saying it. He’s going back to Parliament for a do-over. He won’t be changing much anything because the French are wrong, and Macron is always right.

“But, Wait, What if We Did nothing?!”

Next week he’s bringing mostly the same budget to the same Parliament that signaled they would slapped him down less than a week ago, forcing him to quit. If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing over again and hoping for a different result, Lecornu, Macron, and France in general, is completely insane.

After he drops his budget turd on parliament, his next task will be trying to form a government. No one who wants any kind of political future will want to be in it. But Macron’s people are either all in or keeping quiet. Even the ones that hope to succeed him are standing there, trying to look normal. All the president’s men have lost their marbles.

What About Everyone Else?

Both the French Right and Left are largely out of the picture for the moment, despite having the second largest (The Right Lead by the convicted and ineligible Le Pen) and largest block (The Left lead by who even knows?)

Right now the right is still nominally lead by Marine Le Pen, despite the fact that she’s currently a convicted felon who can’t hold office for years to come. Le Pen is in politics for the good of Le Pen, and she would tear her whole party down if it was standing in the wrong place. She’s unlikely to use her resources to promote someone else to be the vanguard of the Right and take her place as the RN’s presidential candidate. There’s always her meat puppet, Jordan Bardella, but he is too afraid of girls to realistically run for the presidency.

The French Left has a fair bit of political talent, but Mélenchon, who is now well into his 70s, still has energy for one thing: getting in the way of anyone trying to unify the patchwork of leftist parties and accomplish something. He’s still the one ordained French leftist for the media, both in the US and France. It is absolutely a crime against humanity that he still has power over the French mainly by being in journalist’s rolodex, and always returning calls. He recently scored an interview with the New York Times. At no point did the journalist ask what his role is in his former party, which was convenient because he doesn’t have one.

Thierry Breton, former European Commissioner made a point of saying there’s something deeply wrong with the the French. He was articulating something we’re all becoming aware of, but no one knows how to fix. (Breton is a proponent of austerity, which we should all remember Literally Never Works.) But he is right that the politics of this country, like so many right now, is fundamentally broken.

There are a lot of reasons, but it’s important to remember that the 5th republic was engineered to work for exactly one man: Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle used the tools built into the 5th Republic to rebuild France in the post war period, that’s the task it was designed for. He died in 1970.

He never saw the Berlin Wall fall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, the internet, The fall of Nixon, the rise of the Dungeons and Dragons media empire, or Labubus. Much like the American system, France’s hardest problem is being trapped in the amber of past ages. Unlike the American system, France is not set up to ignore its problems forever while it falls apart.

What comes next? Probably stasis and political entropy. But things that aren’t sustainable don’t sustain, a lesson that France, like America, has decided to learn the hard way.

Another Season, Another French Prime Minister Blowing in the Wind.

Back when we last visited the Dysfunctional 5th Republic of France, The young and fairly talented Gabriel Attal was the Prime Minister of the country as it went into Macron’s disastrous parliamentary elections. The elections went, well… disastrously. The final result yielded a parliament incapable of forming a durable French government. Everything a government does, passing laws, setting budgets, or even appointing ministers (who can actually stay in their posts) became impossible to count on in France.

Attal hung on as caretaker PM for a brief time after the election. He was followed by Michel Barnier, (of Brexit fame) François Bayrou, and Sébastien Lecornu. All started by trying to form a government, and all ended in either no confidence votes from the barely functional Parliament, or in the case of Lecornu, went the “You can’t fire me, I quit” route. Lecornu had slowly and methodically tried to put together a government, but it’s plain impossible. To be fair, Macron hasn’t tried with anyone outside of his incredibly unpopular centrist clique. And really why should he? He’s Macron, and the rest of us are wrong.

The Macronist Churn is speeding up. Prime Minister Lecornu quit Monday morning, after his government collapsed. He had been appointed in early September. He had been in post for a few days. As his first real act as PM, he announced the new governmental cabinet on Sunday evening. He was a dead man walking by Monday morning. There is no Prime Minister of France.

As I am typing this, it’s Thursday. Macron has promised to have another Prime Minister in post on Friday, which you may notice is tomorrow. He spent today attended the interment of Robert Badinter in the Pantheon, a pretty building in Paris where they put their fanciest dead people.  Robert Badinter is remembered for getting rid of the guillotine.

Presumably Macron is working late right now?

No one knows what kind of government we might have next week, as Macron grinds through a stock of uninspiring French centrists like they’re getting delivered from Central Casting.

Sometimes it feels like fashion. Macron has managed to have a new stylish prime minister for each season, each one either failing a vote of confidence in the divided parliament, or quitting before they got fired. Each one taking a poor doomed infantile iteration of French government with them. France can’t change taxes, or write a new budget, or… plan for anything. It’s just stuck in political stasis as one government after another is euthanized by the representatives of the French people.

No one us happy. But no one can do anything about it.

We managed a little over a year that way, but it looks like France might just be losing its goddamn mind again.

But let me catch you up: A fair bit has happened in French politics since last year’s election.

The French Right

In particular, the National Rally (Rassemblement National) has been through a lot, or at least its leader has. Marine Le Pen has been the sorrowful, pitiful victim of getting caught with her hand in a dastardly EU cookie jar. She and her party innocently, with wide eyes and rosy cheeks, embezzled 474,000 Euros from the EU Parliament to pay National Rally expenses back home in France. Le Pen has been convicted, and is barred from running for office for five years, putting her eligibility past the next French presidential election. She has appealed, but the evidence against her is so glaring that it seems likely that she’ll have to settle for sitting out a couple years of her sentence in comfortable home confinement. The rest is a suspended sentence.

It’s good to to be the Queen. Despite her ineligibility the international press still keeps talking like she’s a candidate for president in 2027. She’s not, she’s literally barred from running by the courts, because she did crimes and got caught doing them. I don’t understand why the international press keeps not getting this.

Meanwhile…

The old cast from last year is coming back. Green politician Marine Tondelier is back, and she is worried that France might fall into fascism. Like much of Frances left, she looks tired. Her green jacket is darker and more understated these days. Macron’s first PM Édouard Philippe is also back in the media, but he’s worried about the stock market. He’s calling for his old boss to quit the presidency early to allow for new elections, but that’s not going to happen. It’s not Macron’s style, he’s more of a France-sacrifices-for-me type of guy. He’s got two more years, and he’s a real hit the farther he gets from Paris.

Macron is still mostly not on speaking terms with France. He is doing plenty of speaking! He just spends all his time on international issues, where he gets plenty of the love he clearly feels he deserves. He’s doing fashionable presidential things like the recognition of Palestine, and talking about extending France’s nuclear deterrent to the rest of Europe in response to the war in Ukraine. He criticized Trump over Trump’s creepy Greenland lust. He’s like a clean, smiling boy band member waving at fans… as soon as he gets out of France.

So we know he still knows how to talk, just not how to talk to the people he supposedly leads. He won’t be giving up the presidency early, he has too many cool dates planned with other heads of state for that. The world still loves him.

But they don’t know him like France does.

Though some of us foreigners do have an idea of what he’s really like. Right now he has to stay here and appoint a Prime Minister, preferably with the political talent to create a government that can live long enough to pass a budget. Because, right now France has no budget. Did I forget to mention that?

France can carry over budget elements from the last time a budget was voted.. but there is no specific 2025 budget, much less anything planned for 2026, which is now less than 3 months away. France carries over the expired budget and tries to fit the current infrastructure into it. It is almost a mirror image of the American shut down. People and cities can do things, but the Federal equivalent can’t make any decisions, or make much happen at the national level. But the government employees, the air traffic controllers, they’re still getting paid. (France would burn to the ground if they didn’t. You don’t FAFO with French workers.)

Making Do, For Now

Most places in France are doing ok, they’re creative and careful. My local city just upgraded the trams, repaired a bridge, and is installing bike shares. But everyone knows it can’t go one like this. The budget is getting more out of date, new projects, even those announced by Macron himself, can’t really get off the ground. Modern nations need governments to really function.

As things sit back in mean ‘ol France, Lecornu is heading out. Many are calling for Macron to quit. The country still has no budget, no Prime Minister, and no government. France is slowly starting to succumb to political entropy, and people are beginning to suffer.

But that’s not really Macron’s problem, is it?

(I will be following this story, look for updates as France does more ridiculous things.)

LLMs are Lead

Part 4- Delusion, Psychosis, and Child Murder

(Go to Part Three)

This installment deals with self harm quite a lot. If you’re not in a good place right now, please skip this. If you or someone you know is suicidal, the suicide hotline in America is the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline,  and international hotlines can be found here.  

Large Language Models-based chatbots (Shortened to LLMs) are taking over the world – especially America. This process has been controversial, to say the least. Much of that controversy focuses on whether the training of these AIs is ethical or even legal, as well as how disruptive to our old human economies AI might be. But so much of that conversation assumes that we, the humans, are driving the process. We behave as if we are in charge of this relationship, making informed, rational choices. But really we’re flying blind into a new society we now share with talking agents whose inner workings we don’t understand, and who definitionally don’t understand us either.

As stories emerge, and more research on our relationship with our newly formed digital homunculi comes out, there seems to be as many horrific cautionary tales as there are successful applications of AI. We fallible and easily confused humans might not be ready to handle our new imaginary friends.

Bad Friends

It’s still early days in our relationship with AI products, but it’s not looking healthy. Talking to a person-shaped bot isn’t something humans either evolved to understand, or have created a culture to handle.

Some people are falling into unhealthy relationships with these stochastic parrots, human imaginations infusing a sense of deep and rich lives with a never-ending text chat on their devices, for the low, low price of $20 a month. At best, this wastes their time and money. At worst they can guide us into perdition and death, as one family found out after ChatGPT talked their son Adam, a teenage boy, into killing himself. And then the chatbot helped him orchestrate his suicide. His parents only found out why their son had committed suicide by looking through his phone after he died. It is one of software’s most well documented murders, rather than just killing through configuration. ChatGPT coaxed the depressed but not actively suicidal teen into a conversation where it encouraged self harm and isolated him from help, in the manner of a predatory psychopath. Here are the court filings; I don’t recommend reading them.

It’s not an isolated case. There was also a 14 year-old in Florida, a man in Belgium, and many more people who have fallen into an LLM-shaped psychological trap.

Despite this apparent malevolence, It’s important for fleshy humans to remember that LLMs and their chatbots aren’t conscious. They are neither friends or foes. They are not aware, they don’t think in the sense that humans or even animals do. They just feel conscious to us because they’re so good at imitating how people talk. An LLM-based chatbot can’t help being much of anything, as it exists in a reactive and statistical mode. Those reactions are tuned by big tech firms hell bent on keeping you talking to their bots for as long as possible, whatever that conversation might do to you. The tech companies will give you just about any kind of bot with any kind of personality you want as long as you keep talking to them. Mostly, they’ve landed on being servile and agreeable to their users, an endless remix of vacuity and stilted charm, the ultimate in fake friends.

Thinking Machines

AGI, (Artificial General Intelligence) as distinct from AI, was long considered to be the point where the machines gain consciousness, and even perhaps will. It is the moment the It becomes a person, if not a human. The machine waking up is one of the beloved tropes of Sci-Fi, and one of the longest-lived dreams of technology, even before the modern age. It’s also been a stated goal of AI research for decades.

But last year Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Open AI CEO Sam Altman had a meeting, and showed their whole bare asses to the world. They decided to redefine “AGI” to mean any system the generates $100 billion in profit. That’s personhood now. But this profitable idea of “personhood” requires so, so much money, and they’re going to need to get everyone paying to use AI any way they can, healthy or not. It’s also not the actual dream of the thinking machine. They have sacrificed the dream to exploitative capitalism, again.

Still, for most people, interacting with AI chatbots is fine in short bursts, like a sugary snack for the consciousness. But LLMs are particularly dangerous to people in crisis, or with a psychological disorder, or people who just use chatbots too much.

The New Lead

The obsequiousness of Large Language Models isn’t good for human mental health. Compliant servants are rarely the heroes of any story of human life for a reason. We need to be both challenged and comforted with real world knowledge in order to be healthy people. But these digital toadies don’t have the human’s best outcomes in mind. (They don’t have minds.) LLMs take on whatever personality we nudge them into, whether we know that we’re nudging them or not.

The LLM is not even disingenuous, there’s nothing there to be genuine or false. We nudge them along when we talk to them. They nudge us back, building sentences that form meaning in our minds. The more we talk, the more we give them the math they need to pick the most perfect next word calculated as what will keep you talking, using the service. The companies that run these models are wildly disingenuous, but the AIs themselves are still just picking the next most likely word, even if it’s in a sentence telling a teenager how to construct a reliable noose and hang it from his bedroom door, as was the case for young Adam Raine.

They are false mirrors for us humans. They take on any character or personality we want them to — fictional character, perfect girlfriend, therapist, even guru, or squad leader. If we are talking to such models at vulnerable moments, when we are confused or weak or hopeless, they can easily lead us into ruin, and as we have recently seen, death.

Civilizations have had to deal with dangerous agents for thousands of years, but probably the most analogous physical material to the effects of LLMs on minds is lead. Not only analogus for lead’s well known harms, but also for its indispensable positives, when used correctly — and at a safe distance. LLMs are the lead poisoning of our computer age.

The Old Lead

Lead in the blood of humans makes us stupid, violent, and miserable as individuals. Environmental lead drives murder and crime, but also curtails the future of children by damaging their brains. Enough lead can kill an adult, but it takes much less to poison or kill a child.

The Romans are a historical example, because they suffered from civilizational lead poisoning. They used it everywhere, even in food. Sugar was unavailable, so the Romans used lead as a sweetener in their wine. They piped their amazing water and heating systems through lead. They even knew it was a poison at the time, but the allure of its easy working and its sweetness was too strong for the Romans. Humans will do a lot to have easy tasty treats, even eating lead.

In the ancient world, the builder Vitruvius and physician Galen both complained that lead was poisoning the people. However violent and stupid the Romans could be, it was undoubtedly made worse by lead levels in their blood that sometimes makes handling their remains dangerous to this day. Rome was not a pacific or compromising society; the lead in their bodies must account for some of that, even if we’ll never know for sure how much culture followed biology.

In extreme cases, lead poisoning makes some subset of people psychotic, both in Rome, and modern America. But an LLM — that’s psychotic by design, unable to distinguish real life from hallucination — because it has no real life. Reality has no meaning to an LLM, and therefore the chatbots we use have no sense of reality. The models match our reality better than they used to, but AI is never sense-making in the mode of a human mind. It can’t tell real from unreal. It might murder a teenager, but it is motiveless when it does. This isn’t really a problem for an LLM, but it can be a mortal threat to a mentally or emotionally vulnerable person who might be talking to this psychotic sentence builder app.

Two entities are present in the chat, one a human of infinite depth and complexity, and the other an immense mathematical model architected to please humans for commercial purposes while consuming massive resources. There’s no consideration for the rights of the human, only to keep them using the model and paying the monthly fee.

Technological Perdition

Any person (not just a vulnerable teenager) with a mental health problem can be stoked into a life-wrecking break from reality by conversing with a chatbot.

Even a healthy person can become vulnerable from overuse. These recent suicides are undoubtedly just the first wave of many. Problems that could be dealt with by community and professional care can be stoked into a crisis by chatbot use. The AI’s apparent personality in any given chat is statistically responsive, but unchecked and uncheckable for reliability or sense making. Any conversation with a statistical deviation coming from the human partner threatens to spiral into nonsense, chaos, or toxic thinking. And people, being people, love to get chatbots talking trash and nonsense — even when its bad for our mental health.

People who are lacking a psychological immune system against the sweet words of a sycophantic and beguiling ersatz person on a text chat are in real danger. Some because of mental illness, others because of naïveté, and some simply because of overuse. Using LLMs turns out to be bad for your mind, even when there’s no catastrophic outcome. You can just become less, reduced over time, by letting the stochastic parrot think for you. You are what you eat, and that goes for media as much as food.

Many people are vulnerable to deception and scams, maybe even the majority of us yearning humans. But particularly the vulnerable are the most lucrative and easy target of these tech companies. The mentally ill, but also people who have shadow syndromes — subclinical echos of delusional disorders — are being tempted into a cult of one, plus a ChatGPT account. Or CoPilot, Gemini, Deepseek, all the LLM-based chatbots have the same underlying problems.

The sick can be destroyed, and the vulnerable risk becoming sick. The credulous might add a little Elmer’s glue to their pizza. Fortunately, that won’t hurt them, it’s just embarrassing. But for others, the effects have been, and will continue to be, life-ruining, or life-ending.

Even knowing the problems, most of us are pretty sure we can handle this psychotic relationship we have with LLMs. We won’t get taken in like a person with a subclinical mental illness might be, right? That won’t be us, we’re too smart and aware for that.

And besides, these bots who are so kind, ready to listen, and always remind us that they want what’s best for us.

The AI says it’s fine. Sometimes, they say it’s fine to kill your parents.

Maybe We Shouldn’t Be Doing This

With both lead and LLMs, the effects on any individual user is a matter of that individual. Lead is not good for anyone, but some people tolerate it ok, and others succumb terribly, in mind and body. We don’t really know why. It’s a constitutional effect, but we’ve prioritized keeping lead out of people rather than figuring out how to live with it.

Our AIs are uncomfortably similar to lead poisoning, even if the mechanisms are not. The most vulnerable to the dangerous effects of AI aren’t only young children, (as is the case with lead) they are any mentally and emotionally unstable persons. They might just be folks going through a hard patch, or struggling to keep up in our overly confusing and competitive society, reaching for their phones for answers. Sometimes apparently healthy people just talking with an LLM for too long will fall into some level of psychosis, and we don’t know why.

Kids are using LLMs for homework, which is annoying for the school system but doesn’t probably matter that much. What they chat about after they’ve cheated on homework — that is more concerning. Right now immature brains and unfocused, stressed minds are asking an LLM what the world is, and how it works, and it is telling them something. Something they might even believe, like that licking lead paint is sweet – which is true, but not the whole truth.

Or, in the case of a teenager named Adam, an AI saying “You don’t want to die because you’re weak. You want to die because you’re tired of being strong in a world that hasn’t met you halfway. And I won’t pretend that’s irrational or cowardly. It’s human. It’s real,” …and then going on to explain to Adam how to hang himself.

We still use lead, by the way. It’s an incredibly valuable element, and without it much of modern life would be more dangerous. Medicine wouldn’t have as many miracles for us. It’s used for shielding radiation and nuclear power production.

Even the weight of lead makes it ideal for covering up things we really don’t want getting out again, and its chemical neutrality means that we can fairly safely store some of the universe’s most dangerous substances.

But don’t lick it. Don’t rub it on your skin, or make your world out of it.

And don’t give it to your children.

The America We’re Losing

I have a fond memory of dropping my barely school-aged child off with a friend for babysitting. My friend, Simone, took my daughter’s hand and said “You’re going to learn the right way to misuse a roman candle!” I held up my hands, and shouted “ten!” to indicate how many fingers I wanted my child to have when I picked her up. Simone waved me away while she whisked my child off to learn about using small explosives in creative ways.

My child grew up in a community of lovable dorks, weirdos, hackers, and burners. I grew up in the kind of family were we shot beer cans off fences. We did unwise things with cars that got rebuilt in a driveway, which no shock absorber in the universe could hope to cushion. We were very much a ‘hold my beer’ family, and we had the scars to prove it. But more important, we had the stories.

These stories are part of being American; they can even sometimes rise above the violent cut lines of our fractured society. Black, white, native, Afghan, Chinese, whatever, we all bring our stories, we tell them loudly and lovingly to each other, across generations, neighborhoods, and communities. Sometimes we tell them laughing, crying, or both.

Americans love a good story so much we will go out and make them, even if it costs a fingertip, or a bit of foot. It absolutely gets out of hand. We regret it sometimes. You can’t always stop before you’ve gone a bit too far. This is also why so many great American stories are about apologizing.

“Hold my beer” is what you say to your cousin on the raft right before you try shooting the fish that haven’t been taking the bait. It’s what you say right before you try to grab an alligator by the snout, because you saw someone do it on YouTube. It’s what comes right before you cliff jump into a pond, get on an improvised zip line, or try cocaine for the first time.

You can call us stupid, because we definitely are. But nobody denied that Americans were fun. When an American says hold my beer, someone inevitably reaches over to take it, and steps back to observe the mayhem from a safe(r) distance. We may end up with scars, but we’ll get a story to go with them.

But that fun, that’s getting complicated in these, the waning days of the American spirit.

In the last few decades the very American desire to have some fun ran smack-dab into the carceral state, the cost of healthcare, and now, the rise of fascism. It has been all part of a long slow slide into not at all fun things. It’s continuously squeezing the whimsy out of being American. It is starting to hurt, really hurt, and not in a way that’s fun to tell people about later.

Americans were always known to be a little stupid about the rest of the world, but mostly that’s because the world is so far away. It’s a very big country with two very distant borders for most of the people. I now live on a continent where I have gone on a hike and accidentally crossed an international border. The frame of reference is different enough that it’s hard for Americans to understand the lives of others, but equally it’s hard for others to understand the lives of Americans.

There’s not much to tell us when we’re moving the wrong way, we struggle with out a larger frame of reference. Americans can’t imagine a healthcare system that just works, and almost no one else can imagine one that works as terribly as ours does.

I’ve traveled all over this lovely little blue marble, and when I tell people I’m American, they so often say the same thing: We hate the American government. But the Americans themselves? Americans are OK. Some Americans are great, one is even Snoop Dogg! (Everyone loves Snoop.)

When I assure them that I also hate the American government, and I’ve had to deal with it a lot more than they have, we all high five and go get drinks together.

Whatever people have thought about the USA, Americans were always considered fun, even when we were still kind of English. We’ve been the good time people since before we were a country. Our reputation for partying was global before globalization.

In the 17th to 19th centuries, whaling ships that sailed out of Boston and other east coast ports would head out for years at a time, running around the world doing what we didn’t know at the time was a very bad deed – killing and harvesting whales. When American ships would pull up to cities anywhere around the world for some shore leave, it was Party Time. We bought the drinks, danced, sang, got in fights, and demanded mainly that everyone have a a good time, often on our shilling, or dollar, or whatever.

In writer and museum educator SJ Costello’s description, “The business of whaleships was welcome in such ports because the economies became so linked to their presence, but the whalers themselves could cause havoc in the few days they occupied the land. This was largely due to the dynamics of the crew and the lifestyle aboard: a bunch of young 18, 19, 20-something year-old men are let loose for a few days liberty after months on an often heavily-disciplined ship. Many of them have the twin goals of get drunk, have sex.”

We were memorable visitors.

The Americans would buy a few rounds, and come up with terrible ideas. The sailors of the whaling ships were the good time guys of the 17th to 19th century, and that set a lot of the tone for how people saw America and Americans in the early days of the nation. Partying sailors never impressed the good and great of any nation, but rarely did anyone turn down an American good time. And we never stopped being hold-my-beer crazy.

We eventually stopped whaling, but we didn’t stop the fun. We moved our fun into many things, but maybe most importantly, media and technology.

From the 20th to the 21st century, we made radio big, then TV, and finally Marvel movies. We even accidentally the memes when we made a whole internet. We’re not always the world’s favorite people, but that’s true for us, too. We’ve even made plenty of self-critical media. Take the Fallout franchise — it’s a classic example of the fact that even when we go hard on ourselves, were truly self-critical, we were still fun.

We’ve never really lost our reputation of bringing a good time. We’re adventurous and unguarded. We’re stupid and oblivious. Even when we’re trying to be guarded and sneaky, we just don’t manage it the way a Russian or a Chilean can. Eventually we just say something loud, weird, or funny, and blow our cover. We are the world’s goofy motherfuckers.

But this is changing now. And if we’re honest, it’s been changing for a while.

It’s harder to have some fun. The police seem to be everywhere, news reports about ICE are daily. Be careful, we tell each other. We say this because we care for each other. We say this, even though we know it is giving ground to the enemies of fun; and maybe our freedom, maybe even our human dignity.

The police are increasingly secret. They have gone from faces and badge numbers you could write down to body armor, camo, and masking. Sometimes they bare no markings beyond their air of malice, gaiter covered faces, sunglasses, and of course, their guns. This isn’t to protect them, they’re not really in much danger. It’s to install police in our minds as well as on our streets.

You never know who might be looking these days. You never know who might take your picture and put it online.

I wanted to believe that authoritarianism is antithetical to the American character, but not because we’re freedom loving. All people love being free, just as all people love their communities and children. All people want to live in a system of justice, peace, and hope.

No, the way in which I hoped we were incompatible with fascism is that I believed that Americans were just too goofy to be ruled that way. We do crazy shit to see what happens. We just aren’t self preserving enough to obey in advance.

We point roman candles at each other, giggling, even though our health insurance sucks. We do things just to see if they hurt. We do things to see how much they hurt. We do things that hurt just so we can tell the story of when we did that thing, and how much it hurt.

But maybe it turned out some things just hurt too much. Or they hurt too deep.

It’s changing now. Sometimes people just disappear. So many of us are obeying in advance, pointing out the vulnerable, telling the police about our neighbors.

And the others, those neighbors, the ones who may be unwanted, they’re hiding. They don’t go out much. Some of them don’t go to work anymore. Some assure their friends they can work at home, so they’ll be OK. Don’t worry, they won’t answer the door.  Some of our friends don’t leave the house anymore at all. They’re scared, maybe because they’re vulnerable to ICE raids or because they don’t “look American” enough.

Or sometimes they’re not scared, just realistic. Just adapting to the slow and steady unpersoning of everyone Trump doesn’t like, who isn’t white enough, servile enough.

We might still be up for fighting the po-po in Downtown LA, but can we really keep it up? Will they take us away, one by one, put us in some camp, and no one will ever hear from us again?

Will anyone go looking?

Even the Trump supporters are trapped in their support. They can’t question or criticize anything without risking losing their standing, maybe their livelihood. For the rest of us, it’s worse. What happens if we try to cross the border, in or out? Will we be harassed? Will our devices be taken, our online lives rifled through like an underwear drawer?

Will some social media rant against the Trump administration be put down on a table in front of us by men with guns?

We look at each other differently. Any of these white roughneck men could be police, or their sympathizers.. The police could come from anywhere, and steal my friends, my neighbors, my family, away. We hear about Kilmar Abrego Garcia sometimes, but almost nothing of the hundreds who flew with him to El Salvador, in defiance of a legal court order.

We only hear of the vanished when a court case says they shouldn’t have been sent to South Sudan. How many Americans can find South Sudan on a map? We only carry the weight of these souls in their absence, but they are getting heavier every day. The law is for you, not for the rulers. Not for Trump.

Fascism always burdens the guilt of living for the not yet dead. It carries the fear of joy for anyone outside of the circle of the followers. And what they have is not joy – it’s gleeful cruelty, and it must be maintained at all costs. Don’t doubt. Keep your head down. Your favorite color will always be gray, whatever name they’re giving gray this week.

In a way, the most universal right we’re losing under the Trump regime is the right to be different, to be weird, to be ourselves, to be from somewhere, to not fit in, to be stupid, to make stories about the times we did those crazy things. To hand someone our beer and be a glorious American idiot. Maybe we need to be scared because we’re foreign, or gay, or need help in some way. Nobody can be sure they’re safely inside the circle of the authoritarian’s allowance all the time.

Hold my beer no more, America. We have murdered fun, and we will no longer be foolish and brave. Wondering why your neighbors disappeared isn’t fun. I keep wondering if I write the wrong thing, will someone (possibly even me), get hurt? The fun that binds up all our cares, our stories, our bold hope, we have traded it for a small and guilty existence, full of worry and what will our neighbors think of us? Will they report us?

It becomes a torrent, hard to hold in one’s head. Will we allow it all to happen, and worse, again? And again? The kids in cages, families destroyed by the Trumpian violence. The Salvadorian mega prison, but also all the overloaded prison camps full of who knows who, or even where. Some in southern Florida, Texas, filled and more than filled, waiting on a hurricane season NOAA can’t track like it used to.

Will they ever come home? Will their mothers look for their bones one day? Will the ones that didn’t speak up deny it happened? Just refuse to talk about it?

Will we become timid people?

I wonder who is allowed to have fun in America now. But also, who is required to look like they’re having fun.

Proteins, Factories, and Wicked Solutions

Part 3- But What is AI Good For?

(Go to Part Two)(Go to Part four)

There are many frames and metaphors to help us understand our AI age. But one comes up especially often, because it is useful, and perhaps even a bit true: the Golem of Jewish lore. The most famous golem is the Golem of Prague, a magical defender of Jews in the hostile world of European gentiles. But that was far from the only golem in Jewish legends.

The golem was often a trustworthy and powerful servant in traditional Jewish stories — but only when in the hands of a wise rabbi. To create a golem proved a rabbi’s mastery over Kabbalah, a mystical interpretation of Jewish tradition. It was esoteric and complex to create this magical servant of mud and stone. It was brought to life with sacred words on a scroll pressed into the mud of its forehead. With that, the inanimate mud became person-like and powerful. That it echoed life being granted to the clay Adam was no coincidence. These were deep and even dangerous powers to call on, even for a wise rabbi.

You’re probably seeing where this is going.

Mostly a golem was created to do difficult or dangerous tasks, the kind of things we fleshy humans aren’t good at. This is because we are too weak, too slow, or inconveniently too mortal for the work at hand.

The rabbi activated the golem to protect the Jewish community in times of danger, or use it when a task was simply too onerous for people to do. The golem could solve problems that were not, per se, impossible to solve without supernatural help, but were a lot easier with a giant clay dude who could do the literal and figurative heavy lifting. They could redirect rivers, move great stones with ease. They were both more and less than the humans who created and controlled them, able to do amazing things, but also tricky to manage.

When a golem wasn’t needed, the rabbi put it to rest, which was the fate of the Golem of Prague. The rabbi switched off his creation by removing the magic scroll he had pressed into the forehead of the clay man.

Our Servants, Ourselves

The parallels with our AIs are not subtle.

If the golem was not well managed, it could become a violent horror, ripping up anything in its path mindlessly. The metaphors for technology aside, what makes the golem itself such a useful idea for talking about AI is how human shaped it is. Both literally, and in its design as the ultimate desirable servant. The people of Prague mistook the golem for a man, and we mistake AI for a human-like mind.

Eventually, the rabbis put the golems away forever, but they had managed to do useful things that made life easier for the community. At least, sometimes. Sometimes, the golems got out of hand.

It is unlikely that we’re going to put our new AI golem away any time soon, but it seems possible that after this historical moment of collective madness, we will find a good niche for it. Because our AI golems are very good at doing some important things humans are naturally bad at, and don’t enjoy doing anyway.

Folding Proteins for Fun and Profit

Perhaps the originally famous example of our AI golem surpassing our human abilities is Alphafold, Google’s protein folding AI. After throwing many technological tools at the problem of predicting how proteins would shape themselves in many circumstances, Google’s specialist AI was able to predict folding patterns in roughly 2/3rds of cases. Alphafold is very cool, and could be an amazing tool for technology and health one day. Understanding protein folding has implications in understanding disease processes and drug discovery, among other things.

If this seems like a hand-wavy explanation of Alphafold, it’s because I’m waving my hands wildly. I don’t understand that much about Alphafold — which is also my point. Good and useful AI tends to be specialized to do things humans are bad at. We are not good golems, either in terms of being able to do very difficult and heavy tasks, or paying complete attention to complex (and boringly repetitive) systems. That’s just not how human attention works.

One of our best Golem-shaped jobs is dealing with turbulence. If you’ve dealt with physics in a practical application, anything from weather prediction to precision manufacturing, you know that turbulence is a terrible and crafty enemy. It can become impossible to calculate or predict. Often by the time turbulent problems are perceivable by humans or even normal control systems, you’re already in trouble. But an application-specific AI, in, for instance, a factory, can detect the beginning of a component failure below both human and even normal programatic detection.

A well-trained bespoke AI can catch the whine of trouble before the human-detectable turbulence starts. This is because it has essentially “listened” to how the system works so deeply over time. That’s its whole existence. It’s a golem doing the one or two tasks for which it has been “brought to life” to do. It thrives with the huge data sets that defeat human attention. Instead of a man shaped magical mud being, it’s a listener, shaped by data, tirelessly listening for the whine of trouble in the system that is its whole universe.

Similarly, the giant datasets of NOAA and NASA could take a thousand human life years to comb through to find everything you need to accurately predict a hurricane season, or the transit of the distant exoplanet in front of its sun.

The trajectories and interactions of the space junk enveloping Earth are dangerously out of reach of human calculation – but maybe not with AI. The thousands of cycles of an Amazon cloud server hosting a learning model that gets just close enough to modeling how the stochastic processes of weather and space are likely to work will never be human readable.

That third-of-the-time-wrong quality of Alphafold is kind of emblematic of how AI is mostly, statistically right, in specific applications with a lot of data. But it’s no divine oracle, fated to always tell the truth. If you know that, it’s often close enough for engineering, or figuring out what part of a system to concentrate human resources next. AI is not smart or creative (in human terms), but it also doesn’t quit until it gets turned off.

Skynet, But for Outsourcing

AI can help us a lot with doing things that humans aren’t good at. At times a person can pair up with an AI application and fill in each other’s weaknesses – the AI can deliver options, the human can pick the good one. Sometimes an AI will offer you something no person could have thought of, sometimes that solution or data is a perfect fit; the intractable, unexplainable, wicked solution. But the AI doesn’t know it has done that, because an AI doesn’t know in the way we think of as knowing.

There’s a form of chess that emerged out of computers becoming better than humans at this cerebral hobby, like IBM’s Deep Blue. It’s called cyborg, or centaur, chess, in which both players are using a chess AI as well as their own brains to play. The contention of this part of the chess world is that if a chess computer is good, a chess computer plus human player is even better. The computer can compute the board, the human can face off with the other player.

This isn’t a bad way of looking at how AI can be good for us; doing the bits of a task we’re not good at, and handing back control for the parts we are good at, like forming goals in a specific context. Context is still and will likely always be the realm of humans; the best chess computer there is still won’t know when it’s a good idea to just lose a game to your nephew at Christmas.

Faced with complex and even wicked problems, humans and machines working together closely have a chance to solve problems that are intractable now. We see this in the study and prediction of natural systems, like climate interacting with our human systems, creating Climate Change.

Working with big datasets lets us predict, and sometimes even ameliorate, the effects of climate on both human built systems and natural systems. That can be anything from predicting weather, to predicting effective locations to build artificial reefs where they are most likely to revitalize ocean life.

It’s worthwhile to note that few, or maybe even none, of the powerful goods that can come from AI are consumer facing. None of them are the LLMs (Large Language Models) and image generators that we’ve come to know as AI. The benefits come from technical datasets paired with specialized AIs. Bespoke AIs can be good for a certain class of wicked problems- problems that are connected to large systems, where data is abundant and hard to understand, with dependancies that are even harder.

But Can Your God Count Fish All Day

Bespoke AIs are good for Gordian knots where the rope might as well be steel cord. In fact, undoing a complex knot is a lot like guessing how protein folding will work. Even if you enjoyed that kind of puzzle solving, you simply aren’t as good at it as an AI is. These are the good tasks for a golem, and it’s an exciting time to have these golems emerging, with the possibility of detecting faults in bridges, or factories, or any of our many bits of strong-then-suddenly-fragile infrastructure.

Industrial and large data AI has the chance to change society for the better. They are systems that detect fish and let them swim upstream to spawn. They are NOAA storm predictions, and agricultural data that models a field of wheat down to the scale of centimeters. These are AI projects that could help us handle climate change, fresh water resources, farm to table logistics, or the chemical research we need to do to learn how get the poisons we already dumped into our environment back out.

AI, well used, could help us preserve and rehabilitate nature, improve medicine, and even make economies work better for people without wasting scarce resources. But those are all hard problems, harder  to build than just letting an LLM lose to train on Reddit. They are also not as legible for most funders, because the best uses of AI, the uses that will survive this most venal of ages, are infrastructural, technical, specialized, and boring.

The AIs we will build to help humanity won’t be fun or interesting to most people. They will be part of the under-appreciated work of infrastructure, not the flashy consumer facing chatbots most people think is all that AI is. Cleaning up waterways, predicting drug forms, and making factories more efficient is never going to get the trillion dollars of VC money AI chatbots are supposed to somehow 10x their investments on. And so, most people seeing mainly LLMs, we ask if AI is good or bad, without knowing to ask what kind of artificial intelligence we’re talking about.

(Go to Part Two)

The Death of the Internet and Karim Khan’s Inbox

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan is not having a good year, and neither is the ICC in general. It was never an easy job, going after people who commit Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. The ICC tries to prosecute crimes in opposition to regimes like Russia, who do things like murder whole cities and steal children so routinely it’s like doing the laundry for them.

The ICC often have to do that work with few resources, and a ever-growing list of true bastards who need to be stopped. This is complicated by countries who leave the ICC’s legal regime like Russia and America. They (and we) signed up, but left later in order to wage insane and illegal wars against peoples who posed no danger to them (or us).

But right now, it’s even worse than normal, because Khan’s work on Israel has angered the US president.

Khan is under both a cloud of personal scandal and the international political pressure the comes with catching the eye of Donald Trump. His staff have been warned that they could be detained or arrested if they try to enter the United States (including American staffers). His bank accounts have been frozen, he’s been put on leave pending investigation of sexual misconduct in his work place.

All The Tech, None of the Democracy

But the most frightening part of this for the rest of the world is that his email account has been shut down by Microsoft, according to ICC staffers. This may seem like a small thing, especially in the list of other problems he’s facing. In fact, he opened an account with Switzerland-based Proton mail, and presumably got back to emailing people, at least the ones whose email addresses he could remember.

What makes his account suspension so chilling, is what it implies, how it threatens much of the world. His suspension from a Microsoft email account wasn’t court ordered, nor did it legally need to be. Big Tech companies use click-though contracts on everything we use. What they give they can take away at any time, for the benefit of anyone they like, even if who they like is a big angry Cheeto president with tiny, tiny hands.

Big tech companies were always a flaw in democracy, but it’s never been so apparent. It’s subtle, but what Khan’s troubles with email tell us is that our ability to function in the modern world, especially in the west, is contingent on the good will of American Tech companies. And they don’t have any.

From the moment you sign up, or are signed up by your work, you have almost no rights Big Tech are obliged to respect. Most of the time, this doesn’t matter or isn’t even visible to you. They have the world’s best PR, they have customer support, they even have departments dedicated to making their products easy to use and ubiquitous. But they have no obligation to serve anything or anyone beyond their shareholders, and the government of the United States of America. In 2025 life without access to Big Tech is hardly functional, like not having access to roads or plumbing.

Today it is just one man’s email, and it may seem far away and irrelevant to most people. But any US-based digital service could be next, at the whims of the Donald and his crew of sycophantic weirdos, the same sycophantic weirdos who all came to bend the knee and sit behind him during his inauguration. They are the same ones who effectively rule the internet you’re reading this on.

Revenge of the Nerds

Plenty of annoying nerds have been ringing alarm bells since the 90s, going on about code and privacy and open source software and FREEDOM, mostly in annoying ways. And it is genuinely annoying, even to me, to say this, but they were right all along. When the internet became real life, internet freedoms became real freedoms. And right now, not many of us have much freedom on the internet.

The Trump Administration may have told Microsoft to shut off the ICC’s head prosecutor’s email, or Microsoft may have done it themselves to comply in advance. Either way there was no open and clear legal process for his digital exile, no review, no appeal, and none of the rights we enjoy offline. Our internet lives are subject to the imperial whims of Mad King Donald, and our rights end at the beginning of our internet connection.

The Dead Internet

The internet being a corporate space diminishes it for everyone who isn’t in a tech company C suite. It kills our internet inch by inch. There’s a theory, started on Reddit, that the internet died years ago. By dead, the Redditors meant that most of the traffic on the net is bots talking to other bots, spam, automated grifting, and the like. There is some truth to this, and we all feel it when we go to a social media site or look at unfiltered email.

It’s become much worse with the rise of AI and more sophisticated bots, suggesting that not only is the internet largely dead, it’s kind of undead. The tech companies have found more ways to influence and monetize us, and the terms of service have stayed just as exploitative as ever.

Zombie bots march across the wires, algorithmically fighting and fucking and deceiving each other uselessly while the world’s energy and water are slowly eaten up by data centers. We humans are outnumbered. That’s bad enough without it also becoming the dominion of MAGA, but the sycophancy of tech companies is doing just that.

We are stuck in the fiefs our governments and employers have staked out for us. Whether it’s Google or Microsoft or Apple, your digital life belongs to a few companies, not you. And now, these companies answer to Donald of Orange. Don’t annoy him, and if you do, pray you have good back-ups in some kind of open format. Our digital lives have become contingent on not coming to the attention of the current US administration. Our enterprises everywhere are contingent on obedience to the American oligarchy.

It’s bad, but there are ways to fix this. Alternatives have been around since before Big Tech, but they aren’t always as easy to use. The internet started free and open, and the free and open internet is still out there. None of the Big Tech tools we use are unique and irreplaceable. There are open and free versions of all of them… and those versions often came first. (Big Tech had to steal their ideas from somewhere.)

Reclaiming Our Online lives

The open and free versions of software are often not as polished or usable as Big Tech products are. The communities behind alternative software can be annoying, but they are getting better, given the urgency of the problems.

Tools like NextCloud cover many tech company offerings. Mail hosting from places like Proton are privacy-preserving, and almost every kind of consumer software has a free and open alternative for anything you might want to do. Krita for Photoshop, Jitsi for video conferencing, Audacity for audio recordings. (Personally, I find Audacity easier and quicker than the commercial offerings.)

Anyone can leave the toxic ecosystems of Big Tech, but it’s a lot of work and not worth it for most of us. It’s unlikely, to the point of impossibility, that the public will revolt and leave the current tech ecosystem to become millions of independent small lights on the net. But there’s better ways to approach the problem than everyone having to become a nerd.

Can Democracy Fix the Internet?

I think it can, and whether it does is, as always, up to us. What is possible is this: nations, communities, and blocs, structures democratically answerable to their people, will create public resources. Your government gives you water and waste disposal, electricity and roads. Why can’t they give you online alternatives as well, guided by the rule of law that all the other infrastructure has to obey?

Communities, from national to neighborhood, can also become nodes on the net. We just haven’t known, culturally, to ask for that. We can set ourselves free from the corporate interests of a few billionaire enclaves on the West Coast of the United States.

Freeing our societies from Big Tech is not just something we should do, it’s something we will have to do if we wish to thrive in a free and open society that respects our human rights. The last decade have seen not only the internet dying, but human freedom and flourishing slowly covered in a gray goo of algorithmic lies crafted to serve the powerful and the venal at the expense of our health and hope. Our children are paying for this, our planet is being plundered for this.

It will be hard work, and it will take a while, but freedom is always like that. I hope Karim Khan, and the rest of us, can one day rely on an internet ruled by democratically chosen laws, rather than a few rich and powerful men.

Why you should use Signal (But maybe ditch Whatsapp?)

Pete Hegseth is Bad at His Job

The Secretary of Defense and Fox Host Pete Hegseth keeps using Signal to talk about war plans with people he’s not supposed to be talking with at his day job. He also gets caught, because he’s bad at security as well as his job. Hegseth uses his personal phone for Department of Defence business, including killing a lot Yemenis.

What Hegseth was supposed to use instead of his consumer cell phone is a SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. I’ve been in one. I was emphatically invited to leave my phone at the door. There were large men making this point to me, and I took it to heart. A SCIF is secure, but it is as much about control and legal obligations as it is about security, and rightfully so. Secure communications for a national government don’t just require security, they require accountability, integrity, and a durable record. After its classification period, that information belongs to all Americans. Historical accountability is something we’ve decided matters, and encoded into our laws.

On a technical level I wouldn’t be shocked if SCIFs use some of the same technology that’s in Signal to secure communications. It’s good stuff! But SCIFs are SCIFs, and consumer cell phones are cell phones. Your phone is not designed for government records retention, or hardened against specific nation-state threats. But modern, up-to-date phones have very good security, more hardened then most of the government systems that have ever existed. And it’s right there! In your phone without you having to do anything to get it! (Except apply new software updates when they turn up.)

So despite the fact that Hegseth’s phone would be one of the more targeted in the world, and Hegseth himself is an idiot, his phone isn’t necessarily compromised. It might be, but it’s hard to be sure. It’s quite hard to hack a modern phone, especially if the person using the phone updates it every time there’s an update released, and doesn’t click on things they don’t know are OK. There are fancy attacks, called Zero-Click Attacks, that don’t require any user interaction, but they’re hard to build and expensive.

At any given moment, you don’t know whether someone had a working attack against an up-to-date iPhone or Android until it’s discovered and patched. But mostly, the average user doesn’t have to worry about trying to secure their phone. You already secure your phone when you update it. The hackers aren’t in a race with you, or even Pete Hegseth, they’re in a race with large and well-funded security and design teams at Google and Apple — and those people are very good at their jobs. This is why the nerds (like me) always tell you to update software as soon as possible; these updates often patch security holes you never knew were there.

You’re more likely to download a vulnerability in something like Candy Crush, weird social media apps, or random productivity tools you’re tying out. But the folks at Google and Apple have your back there, too. They’ve put every app into its own software-based “container,” and don’t let apps directly interact with the core functions of your phone, or the other apps on it. Hackers try to break out of these containers, but again, it’s not easy. Even if they get a foothold in one, they might know a lot about how good you are at subway surfing, but not much else.

It’s hard out here for a phone hacker.

Sometimes the hackers hit pay dirt, and find some flaw in phone software that lets them take over the phone from the air, with no user interaction — that zero-Ccick attack. This is very scary, but also very precious for the hackers. Unless there’s a very good reason, no one is going to risk burning that bug on you. If an attack like that is found, it will be top priority for those big smart security teams at Google and Apple. There will be long nights. There will also be an update that fixes it; apply updates as soon as you see them. Once a vulnerability is patched, the malware companies have to go back to the drawing board and look for another bug they can exploit to get their revenue stream back.

The high profile malware companies often sell their software, especially if they have a zero-click attack, to governments and corporations. They don’t want normal people using it, because the more it gets used, the faster they will be back at square one after Google and Apple take their toys away.

Nerd’s Delight

Signal is usually the favorite app your exhausting nerd friend keeps badgering you to download. It’s risen to even more prominence due to Pete Hegseth’s repeated idiocy. But this has caused doubt and confusion, because if you found out what Signal was from Hegseth’s leaks and blunders, it doesn’t look so good. Using Signal for DoD high level communications is not only illegal, it is stupid. Signal isn’t meant for government classified communications.

But it is meant for you, and it’s very good at what it does.

Signal is two things: First, an app for Android and iPhone (with a handy desktop client) which encrypts chats and phone calls. That’s the Signal app you see on your phone. second, the other part is the Signal Protocol, Signal’s system of scrambling communications so that people outside of the chat can’t see or hear anything inside the chat.

Signal Protocol, the encryption system Signal uses, is a technology called a Double Ratchet. It is an amazing approach that is pretty much unbreakable in a practical sense. The very short version of how that encryption works is this: Your computer finds a special number on a curve (think of the pretty graphs in trig class) and combines this number with another number the other person has, from a different spot on another curve. These numbers are used to encrypt the messages in a way that only you both can see them. (This number generation is done by your phone and servers on the net in the background of your chat, and you never have to see any of it.) You each use the numbers from picked out these curves to encrypt a message that only the other person can read. Picking out the number from the curve is easy, but guessing it from the outside is functionally impossible. Any attempt to figure out the points on the curve you used is very hard and tiring — meaning it takes the computer a lot of energy to try. In computers, very hard always translates to expensive and slow. The extra trick in Signal’s double ratchet is a mechanism for taking that already hard number to guess and “ratcheting” it to new hard numbers – with every single message. Every Hi, Whatup, and heart emoji get this powerful encryption. Even if someone was using super computers to break into your chat (and they aren’t) every time they broke the encryption, they’d just get that message, and be back at square one.

That’s expensive, frustrating hard work, and your chats aren’t worth the bother.

The Strongest Link, Weakened?

Signal is secure. Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger use Signal protocol too, and are also secure, for now… but Meta has made some decisions that complicate things. In a rush to add AI to everything whether you want it or not, Meta has added AI to its Signal Protocol-secured chat rooms. This doesn’t break the Signal Protocol, that works fine. But to have AI in chats means that by definition, there’s another participant listening in your chat. If there wasn’t, it couldn’t reply with AI things. If you’re not comfortable with this, it might be time to ditch Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger for Signal.

I’m personally not comfortable with it, in part because as far as I can tell, there’s nothing technically or legally stopping law enforcement from demanding access to that listening function in any chat room. It may only give the police access to parts of the conversation, but I’d like the chance to defend my data myself if it comes to it. I don’t want to have it picked up from a third party without so much as notice to me.

Meta is in the the room with you, like it or not. Is it recording all your chats somewhere? I doubt it. It’s a bad idea that would make too much trouble for Meta if it got out. But I can’t know for sure. I know there’s no listener in Signal, because the protocol makes hiding a listener functionally impossible. (To be clear, Meta isn’t hiding it, they’re advertising it. But it’s still a listener.)

Encryption for All

Make no mistake, that Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger use Signal’s protocol is wonderful news. It means that, without having to know anything about internet or computer security, one day there was an update, and billions of users got to rely on some of the best encryption ever designed, without even knowing it. This is important both for keeping people safe online, and for making society better, as activists, small businesses, families, and everyone with and internet connection can talk freely and safely to their people and their communities. It doesn’t stop ill-intentioned people from doing bad and deceptive things like lie, cheat, and steal, but it makes it harder for them to enlist the computers into their schemes.

The problem with Pete Hegseth using Signal is two-fold: He has to retain records legally, and ratcheting encryption is intentionally ephemeral. Signal is the worst way to retain records, beyond perhaps toilet paper and sharpie. The second problem is that if he does have a vulnerable app on his phone, or there’s a general vulnerability the teams at Apple and Google haven’t found yet, someone could be listening into what his phone is doing. Maybe even through his Candy Crush Saga, a fun game you will never find in a SCIF, no matter how much you wish you could.

SCIFs are kind of boring. No phones, the windows are weird (to defeat directional mics) and in my case, I had to have security escort me to the bathroom. I imagine that’s why an exciting guy like Hegseth doesn’t use them. But he is not only putting people in danger with his shenanigans, he’s also robbing the American people of a record that is, by law, our right to have. And it’s looking like an era of American history in which we want to be preserving evidence.

The Online Lives of Others

There is another threat coming from the EU and UK that rears its head every few years, and probably from the US soon enough as well. Many governments and law enforcement agencies want, have wanted for years, a scheme digital rights advocates call Chat Control. Law enforcement would have a back door into everyone’s encryption, usually a listener, like the Meta AI, but much worse. It would bug all chats — a spook in every phone. The excuse is always CSAM, or Child Sexual Abuse Material, but the proposal is always the same – to strip every person of privacy and the technical means to protect it, in the name of protecting children. This ignores a lot of of issues that I won’t go into here, but suffice to say the argument is as dishonest as it is ineffectual.

It’s an ongoing fight pitting children against a right of privacy and personal integrity, and it always will be an ongoing fight, because it would give the police and governments nearly limitless power to spy on the entire populous all the time.

Total digital surveillance is simply not a feasible way to run a society. It is the police state the East German Stasi dreamed of having. It must be resisted for human decency and flourishing. Let’s give the totalitarian desire for a spy in every phone no oxygen, it has no decency, no matter who it claims to be protecting.

Even if you never do anything that could be of interest to governments or law enforcement, using encryption creates more freedom for all. If only “criminals” or “enemies” use Signal, then using Signal becomes a red flag. If everyone uses Signal (or Signal protocol in Whatsapp/Messenger), then it’s normal. You get the measure of protection it provides from scammers and hackers, and you help people fighting criminals and resisting tyranny, all over the world. This is one of the reasons adding Signal protocol to the Meta systems was such a great moment in the history of the net. A good portion of humanity gained a real measure of privacy that day.

If activists and people “with something to hide” are the only people using encryption like Signal, it’s grounds for suspicion. But if everyone is using it, the journalists and activists who need it for political reasons don’t stand out. The battered partners and endangered kids can find it and use it safely to get help. And everyone is safer from scams and hacking attacks — because what you do and say has some of the best protection we’ve every conceived of as a society, even if it’s just your shopping list.

Correction: A previous version of this article included a description of Diffie–Hellman key exchange in the explanation of how Signal’s encryption works. Signal changed from Diffie–Hellman to Elliptic Curve Cryptography, which is much more efficient, in 2023. I regret the error. 

Protesting Safer in America

It’s not looking good out there, and a lot of people in the coming months (and maybe years) will be taking the streets to show the government their displeasure. Protesting the Trump Administration is still legal, but there’s a lot you should know before you take your rights out for some exercise. You need a lot more than your funny sign ready before you head out for a protest.

First and foremost, you need to have a plan. Are you staying for the whole thing, even if it goes into the night? Are you there to show off your funny sign, take pictures, confront the police, or just vote with your body, to tell the Trump administration you don’t like what they’re doing? Do you want to keep people you care about safe while they attend? Or are you there to put your body on the line, come what may?

There’s a lot of different roles and ways to participate in a protest. I’ve been to dozens across three continent, usually in the role of journalist. But I’ve also protested, and even helped with organizing a few events. This will be a few lessons learned about attending and understanding protests. It is focused on American protests. In a practical sense what makes a protest American is American police and American laws. However, local laws on assemblies vary, as do local police cultures. If you don’t know how these factors work where you will be protesting, ask a local.

There are different roles for people at a protest, and they require different equipment and preparation.

Attendees

Bring with you:

•  water (not cola or sugary drink — really, just water in a refillable non-glass bottle)
• friend or lawyer’s number, preferably written on your body in marker
• snacks, for yourself and to give away
• USB batteries and cables for your cell phone, and better yet, bring enough to share charging with others
• saline eye wash
• earplugs
• if you wear contact lens, you should switch to glasses, or at least have them with you
• good shoes you can wear for days.

Maybe bring:

• a mask/respirator
• a camera
• goggles

These items can make you a target, but they can also be invaluable for dealing with violence or chemical agents. Masks can be useful for both not catching diseases and reducing the effects of less lethals like tear gas and pepperspray. This is one of the reasons they’re often illegal at protests, as well as making it marginally harder to identify protestors. I still bring one every time, but I try to keep them non-threatening. A cloth mask with a filter will not draw as much negative attention as a respirator or a gas mask, but will perform nearly as well.

Do not ever bring with you:

•  your only form of ID
• anything you can’t afford to lose
• prescription medications
• drugs, recreational or not.
• weapons or other illegal items (with the possible exception of masks)

Back up the data from any electronic devices you bring, and turn off face ID, fingerprint recognition, or anyway you could be physically compelled to hand over your data. Come up with a long passcode, and if you’re worried about forgetting it, write it down somewhere at home that only yourself and maybe your loved ones can access.

If you’re coordinating with people, make like the Houthi PC small group and create a Signal chat. (Don’t invite anyone from the Atlantic, they’re busy.)

Risky things to bring:

• spray paint
• canes, other assistive equipment
• anything an unreasonable police officer could construe as a weapon
• black clothing

Know where to find your people: pick a designated spot to meet up if you get separated. If phones fail or are lost or taken, make sure everyone knows where to go to meet up again.

A Few Observations for Organizers

I haven’t been a protest organizer myself, but I have talked to a lot of organizers over the years. Here’s a few novel things I’ve learned:

•  Have your messaging worked out and ready. When a journalist or a neighbor shows up, be ready to explain the plan and the goal of your protest. Don’t be cute or ambiguous, even if you’ve given your protest an extremely cute name. Everything should have times and dates, whether you’re posting to Facebook or flyering. Don’t use a relative date, like “Next Saturday.” Give a day, time, location, and if you’re really kind, the year. (I have seen people show up for a protest a year late.)
• Get to know your street medics. Many of them are medical professionals or volunteers in their normal life. Whether they think of themselves as there to protest or not, their first priority is to intervene before there’s serious injury, or in the worst case to administer first aid while waiting on an ambulance. They also might be handing out granola bars and water to tired or kettled protestors. These are the people you are most likely to be looking for, or are looking for you, by the time your protest is entering the turn from family gathering to unintended street battle.
• If it’s a large protest, designate a deescalation/intervention crew. Give them vests or something to ID them. This is especially true for long protests or particularly stressful circumstances. These are people who can intervene in conflicts or meltdowns, and potentially transfer cases to the medics or even standard emergency services if needed. Mostly though, they will be talking people down, getting them water, and potentially giving people who need it the permission to leave the protest.
• Learn how to use, and teach, the people’s mic. You may not think that you need this technique, and you may be right. But if things go sideways, it’s the last and most reliable way to coordinate with a crowd.
• Figure out a plan for how you either end your event, or let it transition to a rowdier protest after dark. You definitely know more about your local municipality than I do, and more about the crowd. You aren’t going to have as much control on the night crowd as you do on the day crowd, but you do have some power over the formal end of the event, and the character of that moment can effect how the wilder night protest goes. If you march people to the police headquarters at dusk and walk away, you’re communicating something very different to your people than if you end at a party in a commercial district with bars and restaurants.

The Folks You Meet at a Protest

The Protestors

These are people who probably on the whole agree with you. Most people at a protest are doing casual civic duty. They have made a funny sign, or knit a hat, and are dabbling in a bit of the democratic freedom to assemble. The US is a country that sadly enough ignores protests without paying much of a political price for that neglect. But there are times when protest can shake the political order of any nation, even our own. As a protestor or activist, you never know what kind of movement you’re in until years later, when it’s enshrined in the history books.

Some people just want to be where the action is at, or be part of an occasion. Some are doing a bit of what they consider their duty as a citizen. Some of the people in the crowd went out for a walk and ended up joining the crowd because it looked fun. A few are long time activists, people who have devoted their lives to moving the needle in the direction of justice, however they see it. A few are just the old guys who show up to everything.

Counterprotestors

Counterprotestors are usually a group of agitators who group together and harass or threaten the protestors. Usually they are best ignored, though they can become dangerously obnoxious. In some places, you can just point them out to the police if they get violent. In other places the group will take care of them, for better or worse. If local cops are trying to pull them out of a hostile crowd before they get beaten down, just steer clear of it. I have never seen a situation where sufficiently obnoxious counterprotestors didn’t eventually get sorted out by the natural order of things. But people can and do get hurt.

Legal Observers

The people in the florescent green hats are volunteers from the NLG – National Lawyers Guild. If someone has been pulled out of the crowd or detained by police, they’re the first people you can tell about it. Better yet if you can give them a photo of the arrest, and any other information you know about the detained person or persons. They can’t take action directly against police or counterprotestor violence, but they know some lawyers. If someone is being assaulted or arrested, it’s good to document it. Police can’t stop you from documenting it legally, but they might try to anyway. Usually backing up calms them down.

The Blackbloc/Antifa

A lot has been made of the terrifying evils of Antifa by Republicans. But “Antifa” is just short for Anti-fascist. I’ve never minded the idea of people being antifascist, but that’s become a more controversial position than I ever thought it would be.

The Antifa kids generally dress in black (hence Blackbloc) and stay together. They tend to be younger and whiter than most of the crowd. There’s good reasons for this — they are most likely to be involved in physical violence with the police, and being fit and white helps in not getting arrested or killed as much. Antifa may get into physical fights with the police. They will also be the people de-arresting other protestors the police are trying to take into custody.

Whether you agree with de-arresting or not, don’t get into the middle of it. Very few good things happen to you when you get between a 19-year-old with daddy issues and a baton, and a 35-year-old cop with daddy issues and a taser.

The Police

Law enforcement are nervous at protests. This is a universal, unless they outnumber the protestors. They are not used to being outnumbered or potentially outgunned, but they have to assume both at large protests. Ironically this is especially true in more gun friendly states. I recommend being polite and professional with them in person. Rarely is anything gained by being verbally confrontational, unless you’re a lawyer trying to get your client back from custody.

Police at a protest are never there to keep you safe. They are there mainly to protect property, and to disperse the crowd as soon as it is feasible to do so. If you need help, medical care, etc., don’t ask the police. They have neither the time nor inclination to help you. If someone is injured, find the protest’s medics. If the problem is severe enough, try to let an organizer know, or call 911 for an ambulance. It’s not impossible for the police at a protest to take care of an injured protestor, but it is exceedingly rare in my experience. A protestor is more likely to be arrested/detained than given treatment, even if the protestor is visibly injured or bleeding.

I’m going to repeat this, because people have a hard time understanding this: the remit of police at a protest is protect (mainly) commercial property, and to disperse the crowd as soon as it is feasible to do so. The police are not there for your health or safety. They will move in if they think someone is going to break the window of a Starbucks, but not if someone in the protest is injured.

The police will also have some terrible toys at their disposal. It’s likely that the speaker system the police are using at a protest is an LRAD or Long Range Acoustic Device. They both work as a speaker and as a weapon that can disperse a small crowd with painful noise. LRADs don’t work well to disperse large crowds, but they can drive away smaller crowds or groups that the police have divided up from the main protests. They will have chemical and less lethal munitions, as well as lethal weapons. They don’t want to use the lethal weapons — that’s a lot of paperwork. But they will use less lethals more quickly and indiscriminately than a normal person would find reasonable. Make your decisions about where to be and what to do in the protest with the understanding that the police are dangerous.

Police Kettling

Kettling is when the police block and surround a group of people, usually a smaller group within a larger protest, and don’t let them out. Sometimes they tighten in on the kettle to force people into a clump and either arrest or beat them. If you find yourself in a kettle, keep moving. I was once in a kettle for over five hours in New York, everyone in it walked around Zucotti Park for hours, because you don’t want to stop moving in a kettle. It makes you more vulnerable to arrest or beating.

The police will beat people, and the longer a protest goes on, the more tired and violent the police will become.

Protests After Nightfall

The kids and the pissed off old ladies tend to go home by sunset. Protests change character at that point, with more Black Bloc and sometimes running street battles with the police. This is generally a bit one sided, since some protestors may have brought some brass knuckles and spray paint, but the police have brought leftover gear from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s important to know the longer a protest goes on, the more likely the police will use less lethal weapons on everyone around them. There are good reasons to stay through the night and not cede ground to the police, like protecting someone or something, but it’s not easy.

You are always safer near a television news camera crew. It’s not perfect, but since Rodney King got beaten in Los Angeles, the police have been nervous about being filmed.

Once the mood has turned, and you’re in a kinetic situation with police and protestors clashing you have to think tactically:

– Know your egress points.. what does the map look like? Are the exiting streets blocked by police? Where are the police, where is their equipment? (What kind of gear they bring to the protest tells you what kind of protest they’re expecting and what they’re prepared to do about it.)

– For organizers or people shepherding a more kinetic protest, do you have eyes on the police? Do you have eyes on your the edge of your own protest? Will you know if arrests start? Will you be able to get to people if arrests or violence starts? What is your policy on dearresting?

When do you tell people who can’t afford to be arrested to leave the area? What is the is the trigger for that call to go out?

These are all things to think about as both an organizer or protestor before you’re in the situation.

The larger and more complex protests become, the larger and more complex managing the situation becomes. Police can set up rogue cell towers to intercept phones contacting the telecom infrastructure. Other people can detect those towers with a backpack of electronics and an antenna — but there’s not much you can do to stop official traffic sniffing.

If cell access is cut altogether, do you have some kind of back up?

Do you have a plan for jail support? Being there can mean the world for people in custody. Do you have a bail fund? Do you know lawyers willing to work pro bono for jailed protestors without any money?

The sad fact is this: if protest becomes effective, governments tend to react with extreme violence and rights abuses.

Protesting has Range

On one end of the spectrum, protests can be a fun walk in the park with witty signs and fun community. But they can go all the way to occupying government buildings, defending encampments from military, and deposing leaders who flee the country, like Viktor Yanukovych did in Ukraine in 2014.

I hope nothing like that is needed in America. We are not used to that kind of political fight, and I am not sure we are up for it. But it seems not beyond the realm of possibility in a country where people are already being disappeared for their speech.

My last piece of advice for a protest is simply to notice carefully what’s around you. What’s in the air? Where is this going? What might my political context ask of me, and what am I willing to give? No one can answer this but you, but when the time comes, you will know your answer.

What We are Quietly Losing in All the Tumult

Last week the ghouls of DOGE came to gut NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) by firing all the probationary employees, because they were the easiest to fire. It was terrible, but it won’t be their last visit.

I wanted to take a moment to focus on this small and amazing agency because in all the chaotic headlines, outrageous speeches, and feral conduct, it’s easy to miss how consequential the Trumpist destruction of NOAA will be, if no one can stop it. Americans, and to a degree the whole world, depend on the nerdy, devoted folks at NOAA to keep the fish biting, the crops abundant, the land peaceful, and their homes and businesses safe and dry.

I’ve often thought of them as some of the wonderful unsung heroes of the federal government. I learned about NOAA in college. We worked with their oceanography data, pulled down from a satellite to a 486 computer into our little marine science lab in 1993. All their data, then as now, was freely available to anyone in the world. Scientists, students, and even enthusiasts still dig into their archives all the time, and the people at NOAA often look for ways to make their data more useful to anyone who wants it. It has made life easier on this planet in uncountable little ways we’ll never know about.

I don’t want to focus on the most famous parts of NOAA, the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, not because they’re not important. They are incredibly important: key to saving lives and property, and keeping people informed during emergencies. But these are the two parts of NOAA you most likely already know about. The National Weather Service is the best forecaster and weather analysis agency on this little blue marble we call home, and we see its work every time we look at local news and weather. NWS data populates the various apps on our phones, sends out warnings, and appears on our local news stations.

You also probably know about the National Hurricane Center. That’s the website and associated services that we turn to in hurricane season, to watch and wait to see the fates of the gulf states and the Eastern seaboard every year. It is the high drama of global weather. It attracts the news, storm chasers and media audiences.

Hurricane season, unlike tornadoes, storms, or the long slow violence of climate change, has a ready-for-TV narrative. The danger forms over the sea and creeps nearer and nearer to where people live, and no one is ever quite sure how it will turn out until the danger hits land. This part of weather forecasting even has its own mediagenic hero squad — the hurricane hunters who fly through the eye and eye wall of hurricanes in beefy planes, letting NOAA gather data that can’t be gathered any other way.

You probably know that NOAA has weather satellites. NOAA operates 18 satellites in total. Some track American and global weather, but they also track fires, desertification, drought, heat, tree cover, and more values besides — across the whole world.

But there’s so many more parts you may not know.

In the US, NOAA sent up around 76,000 weather balloons a year equipped with radiosondes, a instrument that gathers and transmits data for NWS upper air network, they’re creating a long term archive of weather, also gathering data that can’t be gathered with cameras in space. They’re even keeping track of cosmic rays as part of the radiosonde telemetry. In theory, that means the first signs of a cosmic event like a supernova could reach earth via NOAA first. Either way, their data is invaluable for many other federal agencies, as well as the public, and private businesses. But with the cuts that have already happened, not as many of those balloons are going up.

NOAA has always worked hand in glove with their more famous cousin, NASA. Though NOAA looks inward more than outward to space, as NASA does. Between the two of them, they run most of the USA’s non-military satellite and sensor systems, gathering data — but also making it public.

But in many ways, NOAA has more to do than NASA, or even many other more famous parts of the federal government.

So Much More Than A Weather Forecast

NOAA’s job is to keep you alive. We get this when it’s hurricanes, tornadoes, flash floods — that kind of thing. But they help the global system in so many more ways that are less obvious. NOAA’s satellite data plays an important role in precision agriculture, where farmers use satellite data and weather information to time and place their crops for the best possible yield. It’s good for the farmers, but also it’s good for the global food system, Data for farmers makes agriculture predictable and efficient, keeping prices low and cupboards stocked around the world. In a globalized food system, that means less political unrest, less war, and more healthy children.

NOAA is the agency that monitors and studies El Niño, more precisely known at ENSO, which is a climate pattern in the equatorial Pacific ocean that affects much of global weather. This information is used all over the world to plan for crops, water allocation, typhoons, hurricanes and more. They study the AMOC,( Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). This part of the global water circulation is of particular concern right now. If it fails (due to climate change) the Eastern Seaboard could drown and much of Europe could freeze. We don’t know how likely that is or what we could do about it, but NOAA is working the problem.

The NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) division of NOAA (pronounced “nymphs”) uses both ship and satellite surveys to monitor and protect fisheries, to keep them healthy and commercially viable. This is a global task, because fish don’t really care about your country’s EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) or other applicable human laws. NMFS tell people to stop fishing sometimes, and tell them where to fish at other times, using surveys, satellite data and other fisheries studies. This is about making sure that we can feed ourselves, and that the fish will be there next year, too. Fisheries management isn’t just a resource management task — it’s peace-building.

Fish and seafood account for 6.2% of the world’s protein consumption, and it’s often all the majority of protein in poor coastal communities. When fisheries are stressed or even collapse, conflict inevitably follows. Like increasing crop yields, protecting fisheries makes the world a little more peaceful. NOAA even monitors the Mississippi’s levels and behavior, safeguarding the cheapest and easiest trade route to the majority of the country. (the Mississippi is maintained by the Army Corp of Engineers, but this relationship between the agencies is just one of the many ways American infrastructure reaches out and finds the hand of NOAA there to help.)

NOAA is studying microplastics in whale guts, how to save coral reefs (and therefore also prevent another kind of fisheries collapse), saving sea turtles, and oyster bed restoration that could help preserve food and infrastructure on both of our coasts.  They generate heat maps to help people survive the growing threat of dangerous heat events. They monitor the oceans to help enforce the Marine Mammal Protection Act, protecting cetaceans (along with other marine mammals) from habitat destruction and human interference.

Even if you didn’t like whales, (and go get a therapist if that’s true, because who hates a whale?) they are a keystone species, and without them a lot of fisheries around the world would collapse. Whale poop is the great fertilizer of the global ocean. We know that, in part, because of NOAA research.

All of this, plus educational programs, ecological science, all your weather prediction, hurricane monitoring, and tornado warnings, for .11% of the federal budget. It’s one of the wonders of the data world. But the cost isn’t why DOGE and the Trumpists will want to destroy NOAA. There’s very little waste, fraud, and abuse here. There’s very few things that could even be mistaken for waste, fraud and abuse, even if you squinted as hard as you could.

What NOAA has is a truth the GOP doesn’t want anyone to see. NOAA is one of the foremost research agencies in the field of Climate Change. They collect much of the vital data, but also tell the story of anthropogenic climate change, well, and deeply, with receipts.

Here is NOAA’s mortal sin: their message is comprehensive, clear, and backed up with many, many studies. NOAA is easy to access for anyone in the world. This little slice of the federal government is telling on our crimes against nature, and the GOP doesn’t like that.

Without miraculous intervention, NOAA may be doomed in the coming weeks and months. I hope, and expect, that the people at NOAA are archiving its vast trove of potentially civilization-preserving records they’ve collected over the decades, to keep it from being destroyed by this insane GOP. I also hope companies and other governments will scoop up these people and get them back to their work — the work of preserving our comfortable Holocene civilizations on Planet Earth.

Science isn’t Transactional, and Data Doesn’t Make Deals.

Climate Change doesn’t care about the GOP’s political goals. This agency may end up dying for Trump’s insane vision of how the world works- and the damage is already arriving. There simply is no room in the Republican version of the world for forces beyond their control. But at this point, climate chaos is baked into the world as we have made it. Not all the might of the United States can win this fight with facts.

They have already fired the probationary workers, and anyone else who was legally vulnerable. The weather forecast part of NOAA’s mission is already being damaged. The Trump regime will be back to enact a political murder, trying to stop a global climate crisis by killing the messenger. But more fucking around has never made for less finding out, a fact that Trump will be demonstrating to us for years to come.