January's Linkdump!

Well, January has been quite a month. Here’s a few links I picked up over the month that I thought were worth sharing. Starting with Marina Hyde’s merciless take on the state of the US tech oligarchy’s capture by Trump.

The Verge were on a tear, publishing this beautiful piece (which I couldn’t finish) about Alex Pretti and this ingenious response to people asking them to be less political and focus on the text. What a perfect middle finger.

The Onion published this brutal article: ‘Dad’s Under A Lot Of Pressure At Work,’ Says Woman Of Husband Who Spends Half Day Playing ‘Clash Of Clans’, which is not true of me! (both the pressure and the Clash of Clans) but I am aware that a lot of people see me working (actually hard!) making games and may assume something similar about me 😅.

There was a lot of great writing about this brutal month in the US:

• Stephen Miller wants us to fear him @ The Guardian
• Trump press secretary launches tirade against reporter who asked about ICE @ The Guardian
• Disney deleted a Thread because people kept putting anti-fascist quotes from its movies in the replies @ The Verge
• When Will They Kill Us? @ Nicholas Decker
• Microsoft handed the government encryption keys for customer data @ The Verge
• Yes, It’s Fascism @ The Atlantic
• Death Squads Execute Second Dissident @ How To Survive The Broligarchy
• Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong @ The Atlantic
• Believe Your Eyes @ The Atlantic (this is great)

And some amazing commentary about the broader implications of Trump’s overt threats to seize land of a NATO ally by force, and to obliterate the Western Alliance and Pax Americana.

• Europe must now tell Trump that enough is enough – and cut all ties with the US @ The Guardian
• Davos is a rational ritual @ Programmable Mutter

There was also a renewed push to break Big Tech’s chokehold on our lives, spurred in no small part by Elon Musk gleefully pumping thousands if not millions of sexualised images of children into the world.

• The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification @ Cory Doctorow
• Under Musk, the Grok disaster was inevitable @ The Verge
• Ed Zitron on big tech, backlash, boom and bust: ‘AI has taught us that people are excited to replace human beings’ @ The Guardian
• Advocacy groups demand Apple and Google block X from app stores @ The Verge

My favourite writing on this topic came from The Verge’s policy reporter, Elizabeth Lopatto: “Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards”:

It is genuinely unbelievable to me that I wasted hours of my actual life on a court case where Apple explained it needed total control of its App Store to protect its users. Total control of the App Store was Apple’s main argument against antitrust enforcement: The company insisted that its monopolistic control of what users could install on their phones was essential to create a walled garden where it could protect children from unsafe content.

Ha! Ha ha ha!!

There was also this merciless take from The Gist: “The Abuse Factory”:

Sure that factory has been making an industrial quantity of child sex abuse images, but the Government also gets some leaflets printed there. So, you know, let’s not jump to any conclusions as to whether the Irish State should keep giving it the content which underpins its business.

While we’re shifting focus to Ireland, our erstwhile and future Taoiseach has started a substack and published this disgusting attempt to redirect ire away from his party’s failures in housing to blame the voiceless and vulnerable. Cool guy.

It wasn’t all doom though, some people were still making the effort to have fun.