Over on Bluesky, where I spend quite a lot of time these days, because it’s an instance of social media not owned by a billionaire and/or ruled by algorithms intended to push vaguely-to-explicitly fascist thoughts and memes into my face every time I look at it, there’s a contingent of folks who have declared — not unreasonably! — that now is the time to be boycotting the billionaires who have explicitly supported Trump, and all of their businesses. There is one particular billionaire who stands out here, that being the odious Elon Musk, but Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are others, and the genuinely committed have a full list of billionaires and their companies to avoid.

And with every attempted boycott, there is some backlash, and backlash to the backlash. In my neck of the professional woods, a proposed boycott of Amazon has caused some indie authors to complain that their livelihoods would be directly impacted, since their bread and butter comes packaged in the box labelled “Kindle Unlimited,” and Amazon is the single largest venue for indie author sales. This caused others to grouse that if an indie author is wholly dependent on the largest retailer in the US, how “indie” can they be, etc.

I have thoughts on all of this, and here are some of them in no particular order:

1. Boycott if you want (and even if you don’t want, but feel you must): It’s actually true that if you want to hurt a billionaire (eventually), the way to do it is to punch him in the wealth. That means hurting their businesses and driving down their stock prices. Boycotts can do that (eventually), and in the meantime you get the satisfaction of telling the billionaire “fuck you” in the only way they care about. From a protest point of view, there is no downside to boycotting a billionaire or their businesses.

You don’t even need to call it a boycott. You can just… not use the specific goods and services of the people and companies whose stances you abhor. I’ve never once been in a Chik-fil-A, for example; I’m not a huge fan of chicken sandwiches in any event, so it’s never been a consideration for me when I’m wondering which fast food joint to visit. That I dislike the founder’s social positions is secondary to this when it comes to meal choices. In my brain it’s not an active boycott, it’s a food preference with an ethical rider attached. Chick-fil-A doesn’t see a penny from me either way.

On this same line of thinking:

2. Some billionaires/companies are easier to boycott than others: Elon Musk is an oily bag of brain rot in barely human form, who richly deserves the scorn of history, but he did us all a real solid by having his companies be ones that you sort of have to go out of your way to interact with. Unless you’re buying a car, you don’t need to consider purchasing a Tesla; now that Bluesky has a critical mass of users, the former Twitter is delightfully leaveable; Starlink is a second-best internet choice in nearly all markets; and the offerings of SpaceX are ones that nearly no one outside of the aerospace industry need to think about on a consumer basis. Boycotting Elon Musk? Shit, I was already doing that!

Other billionaires are trickier because they are better connected into retail and other public-facing goods and services, and when they are not, their ownership tendrils are more difficult to discover and avoid. You might not know, for example, that Amazon owns Whole Foods, or Zappos, or AbeBooks. You will need a chart to figure this all out.

Even then you may find yourself contributing to the bottom line of a company you intended to boycott. If you ditch The Washington Post (not owned by Amazon, but owned by Jeff Bezos) and subscribe to The Guardian instead, you are still putting money in Bezos’ pocket, because The Guardian uses Amazon Web Services to stay online. Ditching Amazon’s streaming services for Netflix? Same problem. And so on. Note well that Amazon Web Services is actually the biggest division of the company and the largest contributor to its operating revenue… and is not public-facing in any meaningful sense. It’s merely the backbone of a third of the commercial internet.

This is not to dissuade any one who wants to boycott Jeff Bezos and/or Amazon (as one example). It is to make the point that some people/companies take more work to boycott than others, and the average person might not know how to do a blanket boycott, or may discover it’s a lot more difficult than they thought.

Which brings us to the next point:

3. Boycotts aren’t supposed to be easy for anyone: Boycotts are very often a real pain in the ass! They bring economic pressure on the billionaires and companies they run and own, yes, but in the meantime, there’s a real world pain endured by people who rely on those companies in one way or another. To pick on Amazon again, the indie authors worried about their incomes in the wake of a push to boycott Amazon are not wrong: If the boycott is effective, they will feel it, and they will definitely feel it sooner than Jeff Bezos. Likewise, people who have relied on the fact that Amazon is basically a frictionless consumer experience (you order something! Two days later it is at your house!) will have to find new and probably less convenient ways to do the things they are used to doing. It often means giving up things — all those Amazon exclusives — which may or may not have replacements elsewhere.

Also, boycotts almost always take time. The famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, the one everyone points to as a model of effective (or at least well-known) boycotting, went on for a year, and while it went on, it was a profound inconvenience for everyone who was boycotting the bus system. This might be a problem for a couple of generations of people trained to believe that “internet activism” is sufficient action. If you thought turning your account icon green or using a hashtag a few times was effective activism in and of itself, the idea of months or even years of a boycott might not be intuitive.

Boycotts are a fuckin’ slog, y’all. For everyone, not just the people and companies they are aimed at. You have to be ready for that. They can be effective! Look at how much The Odious Musk is panicking these days! Man, that’s a delight to watch. But be aware billionaires can wait you out. For a long time. Boycotts aren’t simple or easy or painless. They’re advanced protest tactics, and should be regarded as such.

And then there is this:

4. “No ethical living under capitalism” is a real thing: So, let me talk about me, and use Amazon (again!) as an example. As you may or may not know, I have a long-term deal with Amazon subsidiary Audible, that mirrors my deal with Tor; basically, as long as Tor publishes my novels, Audible will be publishing my audiobooks. Now, this was already a sore spot for many folks, since Audible (following Amazon’s general practices), doesn’t really publish outside its walled garden, and now there’s Bezos’ recent(ish) heel turn into consider. Some folks don’t want to support Amazon products, which is fair, and I suspect some of them hope there is some way I can wiggle out of my contract with Audible, because, you know, fascism.

It’s not possible (nor could Audible dump me, except by mutual agreement, the deal is pretty solid), but even if I could, that would just mean that my audiobooks, like my print and ebook novels, would be published by a conglomerate founded by an actual fucking Nazi, which got its break publishing Nazi literature, a point which was unsurprisingly obfuscated after the war. If I took my bat and ball and went to a different “Big Five” publisher, my choices would be another publisher who was quite tight with the actual fucking Nazi party, a publisher owned by fucking Rupert Murdoch, a publisher whose conglomerate just scrapped its DEI initiatives and cravenly settled a defamation suit filed by Trump, or Hachette, for which a cursory examination does not show historically poor behavior, either past or current, but I’m willing to entertain the notion that is an artifact of my cursory examination, and not because as a conglomerate they have always been on the side of the angels.

To be clear, I do not think that the current generation of the Holtzbrinck family (which owns Tor, via many mergers) is planning to revert into its predecessors’ eminently regrettable politics. Also, I really like working with Audible; they’re a great publisher for me. The point is that pretty much all of capitalism above the level of an Amish produce kiosk is besmirched, and if you don’t want to live in a hut, eating from your own garden and drinking nothing but rainwater, you have decisions to make, both as a creator and as a consumer.

Some decisions are easier than others, for all sorts of reasons. But not every decision you’ll make will be a pure one, because very few things in the world are pure. Don’t worry, the people who criticize you for your decisions have their own baggage. Some of the people who might criticize me for keeping my contracts with Audible might have Substack newsletters, as one example, or might still have active accounts on X. As far as I see almost everyone is still on one flavor of ZuckMedia or another, if for no other reason than everyone’s elderly relatives are stuck to them like barnacles.

At the end of the day, you will inevitably be complicit, because systemically it is all but impossible not to be. Does this mean you should just throw your hands up and think nothing you do matters? No.

Which brings us to the next point:

5. Strategy matters: Boycotts can work. The protests against Elon Musk and the boycott of Tesla are working; there’s a reason, after all, that President Trump did Musk’s bidding and filmed an infomercial for Tesla in the White House driveway yesterday. There’s no reason not to keep at it. Likewise any other boycott or protest that you might choose to do. Do them, keep at them, and realize that you’re working toward a long-term goal. If you can’t boycott every single thing a company does, you can still boycott the parts of it you interact with; it doesn’t have to be either/or. Realize also that when a boycott or other avenue of action is not feasible for you — and it may not be! Life is life! — you still have other options available.

To use myself as an example, I am delighted to be boycotting Musk and his various companies. This is not a passive thing for me, as I recently turned down an opportunity that had Musk money attached, and I decided I wanted no part of it. In other cases, some portion of the money I’ve received from companies that are performing various levels of ethical fuckery goes right back out the door to support organizations and causes that directly combat ethical fuckery. We can argue whether my accepting the money in the first place is itself an ethical act, and that’s fine. I know the organizations who get my money are glad to have it, and with their experience and staffing can much better combat that ethical fuckery than I could on my own. Regardless, the larger point — use what tools are available to you and will be most effective in light of your own circumstances and situation — stands.

6. There is no perfect way to do any of this: You will get shit from some people if you boycott. You will get shit from some people if you don’t boycott. You will get shit from some people if you boycott one company or billionaire and not another. You will get shit from some people if you talk publicly about this stuff. You will get shit from some people if you don’t talk publicly about this stuff. Whatever you do or don’t do, you will get shit from some people.

If and when that happens, remember: It’s your own life, you know best for yourself what you can and can’t do, and none of the people giving you shit are performing any of this more perfectly than you are. If they get particularly obnoxious about it, you can probably tell them to go fuck themselves. As long as you’re examining your own situation and personal ethics, and are making the choices you can live with in the long run, you’re probably doing all right.

On my end, I’m mostly happy with the choices I’m making, making some changes in the places where I can (and where I think I should), and re-evaluating as events warrant. As a creator, I’m also accepting of the fact that some of the choices others are making regarding boycotts will affect my own bottom line. Those are their choices! They made them through their examination of their own situation. I would not begrudge them their choices in this time, and in these circumstances.

If as a side effect I suffer some, well, look at the world. There are a lot of people suffering worse than me, in the US and out of it. All of this is for them.

— JS

It’s been a rough ass three weeks, and we could all use some levity. To that point, I bring you an absolutely hilarious and delightful press release from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s union, all about a visit they received from the incels of DOGE.

The entire thing straight up disappeared from the site not long after it was published — coincidentally right around the same time that the wee DOGE employees came back a second time and started screwing with everything again.

So let’s just read it all in full, shall we?

On the evening of February 6, three minions of professional Twitter poster and Jeffrey Epstein confidant Elon Musk appeared in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) internal staff directory.

The three underlings are Chris Young, a lobbyist for Big Pharma and past field organizer for former Gov. Bobby Jindal, and Elon fanboys Nikhil Rajpal and Gavin Kliger. Rajpal led a libertarian students group at public land-grant university UC Berkeley, and worked at auto-lender Tesla and wannabe-payment-processor Twitter. Kliger interned at Twitter, claims he owns a Tesla, and graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020. When he's not stealing Americans' private information with DOGE, Kliger enjoys writing lengthy essays defending rapists and retweeting white supremacists. Kliger's lawyer daddy works at Experian which is the same company CFPB sued in January for covering up errors on credit reports with sham investigations. While alleged coder Kliger made between zero to three git commits in the last year, workers at the CFPB returned $1.3 billion to scammed Americans in that time.

The unelected Musk recently announced plans for a new payments platform run jointly by Visa and “X” (formerly Twitter). Now, he’s moved his power grab to the CFPB, in a clear attempt to attack union workers and defang the only agency that checks the greed of payment providers, as well as auto lenders like Tesla.

CFPB Union members welcome our newest colleagues and look forward to the smell of Axe Body Spray in our elevators. While Acting Director Bessent allows Musk's operatives to bypass cybersecurity policies and wreak havoc with their amateur code skills inside CFPB's once-secure systems, CFPB Union members fight to protect our jobs so we can continue protecting Americans from scammers with conflicts of interest like Musk.

###

The National Treasury Employees Union organizes federal employees to work together to ensure that every federal employee is treated with dignity and respect. CFPB Union NTEU Chapter 335 was chartered to represent employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). CFPB workers have returned over $20 billion to millions of American consumers who've been preyed upon by greedy hucksters like Musk.

CFPB Union NTEU 335

10/10 no notes.

But, worse still, the entire website for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which has so far saved Americans $20 billion, and not by cutting off services anyone actually needs — is now offline. Surely there is nothing sketchy about that! Surely there is no reason to think that Musk and Trump want the CFPB gone so that they or their friends can have an easier time defrauding Americans. And they’re being cheered on by all kinds of idiots on Xitter who trust them pretty much exclusively because they are incredibly racist.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

This is a true story: in 2007, Ringtones were a billion dollar business.

The history of this industry is full of technological advances that – at least first – include a few (seemingly) inherently difficult things at the margins, and those rough edges give rise in turn to a sometimes large-ish service industry of companies that want to make that difficult thing simpler or easier, and make a few bucks doing it.

Sometimes – for a while, at least – there’s real money to be made in businesses like this. But soon those edges get sanded off; devices get a more powerful, their interfaces and designs settle out or standardize as user needs are better understood. The tools get easier to use and all the things that were difficult before become easier, sometimes trivial, for the uninitiated to navigate; pretty soon the market starts shrinking, and soon after that the market vanishes.

Earlier this week, a company called DeepSeek released new language model, in large and small sizes, that’s as good as either the big players’ and is claimed to have cost just six million dollars to make.

OpenAI’s current best model reportedly cost north of a hundred million dollars to train. Google’s Gemini, at least half that again.

Earlier this week, a company called DeepSeek released new language model in large and small sizes, that’s as good as either the big players’ and is claimed to have cost just six million dollars to make. If you’ve got a newish computer you can play with the DeepSeek model right now for free. The download is about the size of a DVD. Remember those?

Then, just a day later, a new – and this time fully-open-source model, open as in curated and consentfully-obtained training data, auditable and openly-licensed code, model weights, all of it – called Sky-T1 has hit the scene, with training costs claimed to be under five hundred dollars. You can run it on anything you’d call a decent gaming rig; even one of the higher-spec Mac Minis looks like plenty.

I say again: in 2007, ringtones – ringtones! Not even a whole song, just a few second of tinny audio carved out of a song! – were a one point one billion dollar business. They were ten percent of the entire music industry! And five years later that business model didn’t exist. Today you’d have a hard time convincing anyone under thirty that it had ever existed, the whole idea sounds ridiculous. I mean, does this chart make any sense at all to you?

One distinction in this whole exercise, obviously, is that people actually wanted custom ringtones. It was a market that existed because a technology was meeting a demand. Humans who wanted their interactions with a device to be a bit more pleasant paid money for something and received it. Artists got paid, if (as usual) likely not enough. The AI market doesn’t look anything like that, mostly because there isn’t an obvious way to use a ringtone as a weapon against the working class. But it’s a pleasant change of pace to see efforts to weaponize commodification against the working class and the forces of commodification themselves fighting each other for once.

Ringtones still have a place in the world; we don’t all always have our phones on silent. But that place isn’t a business, much less the industry it briefly was; the technology matured, the market evaporated and today custom ringtones are one bullet point on a long list of boring standard features, so universal they’re not even mentioned on the boxes of the cheapest phones you can buy.

There’s a place in the world for automatic pattern recognition and repetition, and mechanical translation, too. But that place also isn’t going to be an industry or a business; the technology is maturing fast, the market is evaporating just as quickly, and I think I know where the AI/ML space is going. These tools will be one bullet point on a list of features soon, one you build for a few hundred bucks with some carefully selected training data and a few dozen of last year’s graphics cards, because that’s all it takes.

Hiring really good librarians to curate your training data is going to be the hard part, good curators are expensive.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Have you noticed how effective San Francisco is at producing ways to drop out of reality through technology?

leebrontide:

coral-skeleton:

i-just-like-commenting:

cricketcat9:

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses:

mediocrity-uwu:

kuttithevangu:

Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato

For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!

I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.

There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼‍♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼

It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:

And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:

These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.

And it’s such a shame too, cause this was probably the most impotrant scientific effort in human history, it bought us the time to do everything else we do, to go from just trying to get enough calories every day to everything we do now, it game people the freedom to do other things with their lives, human society would not have existed as it is today without this

We need to appreciate our ancient food scientists

Everybody say thank you ancient food scientists!