Before you read this post, I want you to try to recall the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard someone say. Go ahead and hold that memory in the back of your head. Perhaps by now you’re tiring of all of these posts on America’s measles problem that we’ve endured for over a year now. This […]
ICE has been invading U.S. cities, targeting, surveilling, harassing, assaulting, detaining, and torturing people who are undocumented immigrants. They also have targeted people with work permits, asylum seekers, permanent residents (people holding “green cards”), naturalized citizens, and even citizens by birth. ICE has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance technology to spy on anyone—and potentially everyone—in the United States. It can be hard to imagine how to defend oneself against […]
You might recall how Republicans (with help from Democrats) suffered a three year embolism over the national security, privacy, and propaganda problems inherent with TikTok — only to turn around and let Trump sell the platform to his technofascist billionaire friends. Who are now already hard at work preparing to do all of the stuff […]
Unexpected, but in the most delightful sense of the word — the sort of thing we’ve rarely seen since January 2025. Gregory Bovino has been removed from his role as Border Patrol “commander at large” and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to […]
Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, which was inspired by my “Protocols, Not Platforms” paper. But this post isn’t about Bluesky the app. It’s about the underlying protocol and what it enables for anyone who wants to build technology (even competitive to Bluesky) that actually respects users. Last month, I helped release the Resonant […]
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The thing with an invasion is that it makes enemies of everyone being invaded, even those who may nominally support the end goal. Law enforcement officers and officials are no exception, especially when they see the invading force creating problems they shouldn’t be expected to solve. Trump has treated multiple American cities like war zones. […]
For more than fifty years the U.S. right wing has accused academia, journalism or science of having a “liberal bias” if it reveals absolutely anything the right wing doesn’t like. It’s an easy way to quickly discredit any critics of your worldview without having to engage in thinking, introspection, or debate, and it’s been on display for longer […]
In my previous posts about the use of generative AI tools in the video game industry, I have tried to drive home the point that a nuanced conversation is needed here. Predictably, there were many comments of the sort of stratified opinions that I was specifically attempting to avoid, but I always knew they’d be […]
If you want to understand how little the current administration cares about the First Amendment, look no further than a pre-dawn FBI raid on a journalist’s home—conducted in apparent violation of a federal law specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of thing. Last week, FBI agents showed up at the home of Washington Post […]
Alex Jeffrey Pretti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. He spent his days caring for American veterans—the men and women who served this country and came home broken in body or mind. He wanted to make a difference in this world. That is what his parents said, in a statement released hours […]
If you’re not aware, America’s unholy alliance between U.S. corporations and the right wing grifter economy has an elaborate public messaging and manipulation system that continues to demonstrate its influence and power. The latest case in point: K Street policy and lobbying firms appear to have leveraged a bunch of right wing influencers to launch […]
First, there’s the lies: the immediate, reflexive flurry of posts meant to portray anyone federal immigration officers kill as a threat to public safety. When an officer murdered Renee Good, the administration claimed she was a terrorist who was trying to run over the officer that killed her. Recordings proved this was all a lie. […]
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Two weeks ago, ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good in cold blood. I said then that we had to abolish ICE and impeach Trump & Noem before they incited another murder. As more details have emerged, it’s only looked worse. Multiple angles of video showed Good was trying to avoid hitting anyone. Ross, […]
Last year the fraud-prone Trump organization announced a half-assed wireless phone company. As we noted at the time, calling this a “phone company” is generous; it was just a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service. So basically just another lazy […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the idea from DHS that it’s un-American to refuse to house federal officers: Except for the fact that we literally have an amendment in our constitution that says nobody has to house soldiers. These people really are […]
We’re nearing the end of January, and you know what that means: we’re on the home stretch of the latest installment of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! We’ve already gotten some intriguing submissions, and we expect to get plenty more before the deadline of January 31st, but just because time […]
Every year, a little after New Years, I do a post about the previous year of Techdirt traffic and comments. You may notice that we skipped last year’s for 2024. 2025 was so crazy with everything happening, we just didn’t get around to it, and I kept saying I would and then I looked up […]
We are being led by deeply unserious people. Not only that, but people who are manufacturing cruelty upon their very own constituents. That’s how bad this has gotten. This week, the DOJ arrested three people in Minnesota for protesting ICE’s goonish activity in a local church, where the pastor there also heads up the local […]
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