Prepare For A New Dodgy Trump-Era Tax On Netflix And Other Streaming Services
from the just-pay-me dept
Two weeks ago the Supreme Court rejected an effort by a dodgy right wing activists to destroy an $8 billion FCC program that connects poor and rural communities to the internet. The plaintiff in the case, a fake right wing “consumer group,” had tried to argue that the bipartisan subsidy (the Universal Service Fund, or USF) was an “illegal tax” the FCC lacked the authority to charge. They lost the case.
But why did the Supreme Court majority, an agency that’s been on a tear destroying regulatory protection and corporate oversight, keep this particular program alive? It’s because Republicans and telecom monopolies want to repurpose the USF into a poorly managed slush fund paid for by U.S. tech giants (or more accurately you, their customers).
The long-bipartisan USF helps fund broadband connections to rural schools, libraries and communities. It is primarily funded by a monthly fee imposed on traditional phone lines. But given the death of the traditional landline, the contribution base for the program has shrunk. To keep the program alive, it genuinely does need new funding.
The most obvious way to do that would be to impose a small fee on broadband and wireless connections. That contribution base is so massive, the fee wouldn’t need to be onerous. To do this correctly, you’d need to ensure that government oversight of telecom subsidy collection and spending was competent, something that’s never been our strong suit.
Telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast obviously don’t want that. Instead, they’ve long been proposing a new tax on video streaming providers and tech companies. To sell this idea, telecom lobbyists have long (falsely) claimed that companies like Google and Netflix get a “free ride on the internet,” so it’s only right that they pay “their fair share” in funding broadband expansion.
The Supreme Court’s protection of the USF creates the perfect platform to relaunch this effort. In fact, I suspect the USF is only alive today because of AT&T’s ambitions to create a new slush fund paid into by streaming video customers already annoyed by soaring streaming video prices.
The problem(s)
It shouldn’t take a scientist to see why a major new subsidy proposal cooked up by the monopolists at AT&T and managed by the Trump administration might not be a success story.
AT&T has a long history of defrauding federal subsidy programs (including the USF), but routinely dodges accountability due to its favored role as a domestic surveillance ally. At the same time, the Trump administration has a long history of mismanaging federal subsidy programs and doing an exceptionally terrible job ensuring that telecoms follow up on subsidy deployment promises (see: the FCC’s RDOF).
Having tech companies pay into broadband deployment isn’t foundationally a bad idea. And there are some good faith consumer groups that support it as a way to keep the USF alive.
The problem is there’s genuinely no real indication that a new tax on streaming video would actually go toward broadband expansion under the guidance of unethical, corrupt government. It’s far more likely that money would be funneled from streaming video consumers into AT&T and Comcast’s back pocket, permanently.
At the same time, throwing more taxpayer subsidies at regional broadband monopolies doesn’t fix the real problem with U.S. broadband.
The reason U.S. broadband remains spotty, sluggish, and expensive in 2023 is concentrated monopoly power and the corrupt politicians who protect it from real oversight and competition. Yet somehow when it comes time for the FCC to shore up the USF and expand access to affordable broadband, cracking down on consolidated monopoly power never even enters the conversation.
Another reason U.S. broadband remains spotty is the federal government refuses to hold telecom giants accountable for taking billions in taxpayer dollars in exchange for fiber networks that are routinely only half deployed. A serious effort to shore up broadband expansion would need to involve further policing major provider subsidy fraud. We simply don’t do that here in the U.S.
Prepare For A Lot Of Bad Faith Lip Service About “Bridging The Digital Divide”
Ignoring all of this, the proposals to impose this new tax on Netflix and other streaming services will be portrayed as a good faith effort to “bridge the digital divide.” AT&T’s already got one such preferred law winding its way slowly through Congress.
The Lowering Broadband Costs for Consumers Act of 2025 (S. 1651), sponsored by Senators Markwayne Mullin, Mark Kelly, Mike Crapo, and Kevin Cramer, was introduced back in May. Contrary to the bill’s name it wouldn’t “lower broadband costs.” It would, however, impose a new tax on streaming video service customers that the Trump administration would then funnel to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Charter.
Who gets this funding will be a point of contention. You can guarantee that under Republican leadership this expanded subsidy base won’t be going toward community-owned broadband networks, cooperatives, or city-owned utilities driving new competition to market. It will, primarily, be dumped in the laps of telecom monopolies with rich histories of subsidy fraud. And to Elon Musk.
With the Supreme Court case settled, prepare for a new push on this front this summer and fall. The tell-tale sales pitch will be replete with claims this new tax is necessary because “Big Tech” gets a “free ride” on the internet. FCC Trump boss Brendan Carr has been pushing for this for years (he wrote a Project 2025 chapter about it). From a 2021 Newsweek Op/Ed:
“Big Tech has been enjoying a free ride on our internet infrastructure while skipping out on the billions of dollars in costs needed to maintain and build that network. Ending this corporate welfare is more than fair.”
That’s of course never been true — companies like Netflix and Google invest billions in bandwidth, transit, cloud storage, undersea cables, and even last-mile broadband access. When it comes to a U.S. telecom industry dominated by politically powerful monopolies, nobody gets a free ride. And Carr has never cared about the “corporate welfare” involved in dumping billions in AT&T and Comcast’s lap.
Consumers are already getting fed up by the soaring prices and sagging quality being caused by mindless media and telecom consolidation, which will get dramatically worse under Trump. An additional tax on streaming likely results in even greater annoyance, and a greater shift of viewership back to free options like piracy, which the industry will blame on everything but themselves.
I’ve written extensively on why Carr and AT&T’s call for a “big tech telecom tax” isn’t serious adult policy, but I’m still not entirely sure that “big tech” execs fully understand the scope. In the EU, telecoms have pushed proposals that would charge any internet service that accounts for over 5 percent of a telco’s average peak traffic billions of dollars in additional extra-government surcharges “just because.”
One such proposal even removed government from the equation entirely, and simply demanded that big tech companies funnel billions of dollars to big telecom companies without oversight.
You’re going to see a major new push to revisit variations of this idea in the summer and fall, replete with oodles of bullshit and a lot of empty rhetoric about the “digital divide” from people who routinely demonstrate they don’t actually care about broadband consumers. It’s another story the easily exploitable tech press will fail to cover with any accuracy or nuance. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Filed Under: fcc, streaming, streaming tax, telecom, usf, video
The Magical Thinking That’s Killing Our Humanity
from the humanity-recognizes-complex-problems dept
There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront reality. Because reality is scary.
This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid the difficult truths about what it will actually take to preserve human dignity, meaning, and freedom in the face of forces designed to eliminate all three.
We live in the most dangerous moment in human history—not because of nuclear weapons or climate change, though both threaten our survival, but because we are creating systems that threaten something deeper: our capacity to remain human. To make meaning. To experience genuine choice. To live lives worth living rather than optimized lives managed by algorithms and administered by bureaucrats.
And our response to this existential crisis? Magical thinking. The comfortable delusion that simple solutions exist for complex problems, that we can have technological progress without existential consequences, that we can avoid difficult choices by pretending they don’t exist.
This is not just political failure—it’s the systematic abandonment of what makes us human in the first place.
Human beings are meaning-making creatures. This isn’t a nice feature of consciousness—it’s what consciousness is for. We don’t just process information like biological computers; we create significance, purpose, and value through the active engagement of our minds with reality. We transform raw experience into narrative, chaos into order, suffering into wisdom.
But meaning doesn’t emerge from comfort or certainty. It emerges from tension—from the creative friction between what is and what might be, between constraint and possibility, between self and world. Meaning is born in the space where we must choose, where we must struggle, where we must actively participate in creating our own understanding rather than passively receiving it.
This is precisely what many of our technological systems are designed to eliminate. Social media algorithms don’t enhance human connection—they replace it with engineered engagement designed to maximize screen time rather than genuine relationship. They don’t help us make better choices—they manipulate our choices through carefully calibrated dopamine hits that bypass conscious decision-making entirely.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to augment human creativity in remarkable ways—providing new tools, expanding possibilities, enabling forms of expression previously impossible. But it also threatens to replace human creativity entirely when we mistake sophisticated pattern recognition for genuine innovation. When machines can generate art, music, and writing that satisfies human aesthetic preferences while eliminating the human struggle that makes creativity meaningful, we face a crucial choice: do we use AI as a tool that enhances human capacity, or do we allow it to substitute for human agency altogether?
The same tension exists across all technological development. Systems designed to make life more efficient can either free us for more meaningful pursuits or eliminate the need for meaningful pursuits entirely. The question isn’t whether efficiency is good or bad, but whether we remain conscious agents directing our tools toward human purposes, or become passive recipients of automated optimization.
The magical thinking here is that we can have all the benefits of technological optimization without making conscious choices about what we’re optimizing for. That we can make everything more efficient, more predictable, more frictionless—and somehow preserve the friction that makes human life worth living, without ever having to choose between them.
But meaning doesn’t emerge from efficiency alone. It emerges from the necessity of choosing, of struggling, of creating order from chaos through conscious effort rather than algorithmic processing. When we eliminate that necessity without replacing it with something equally meaningful, we don’t liberate human consciousness—we make it redundant.
Every system we build now tends toward a single principle: optimization. Maximize engagement. Minimize friction. Increase efficiency. Reduce uncertainty. Streamline processes. Eliminate waste—including the “waste” of human agency, human choice, human unpredictability.
This optimization imperative extends far beyond technology into every domain of human experience. Education becomes optimized for measurable outcomes rather than genuine learning. Healthcare becomes optimized for statistical improvements rather than individual healing. Politics becomes optimized for electoral efficiency rather than democratic deliberation.
The result is systems that work perfectly for their designed purposes while destroying the human experiences they were supposedly created to serve. Consider dating apps that optimize matching algorithms to increase user engagement—not to help people find genuine connection, but to keep them swiping. Consider social media platforms that optimize content delivery to maximize time spent scrolling—not to inform or connect users, but to generate advertising revenue. Consider recommendation systems that optimize for consumption—not for satisfaction or growth, but for continued consumption.
Each system achieves its optimization goals while systematically undermining human agency, human choice, and human meaning-making. They work exactly as designed—which is precisely the problem.
The magical thinking is that optimization and human flourishing are automatically compatible goals. That making systems more efficient automatically makes human life better. That eliminating friction eliminates suffering rather than potentially eliminating the experiences that make life meaningful.
But human flourishing isn’t simply optimizable. It emerges from the irreducible complexity of conscious beings navigating an uncertain world through choices that matter. When we optimize that complexity away without conscious consideration of what we’re preserving, we risk creating managed human existence that resembles life while lacking its essential qualities.
Nowhere is magical thinking more dangerous than in our approach to conflict and justice. The position that says “I’m pro-peace” without a conception of justice represents one of the most insidious forms of reality avoidance—it sounds moral while being fundamentally amoral.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood this: “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” Peace without justice isn’t peace—it’s imposed order. It’s the peace of the graveyard, the peace of submission, the peace that comes when one side stops fighting because they’ve been crushed.
We see this magical thinking everywhere in contemporary discourse. When Russia invades Ukraine, the “pro-peace” position says: “Just stop the fighting. Negotiate. Find compromise.” As if there’s meaningful compromise between a people defending their homes and an empire trying to erase their existence. As if Ukrainian surrender would create peace rather than eliminate Ukraine.
When authoritarian regimes systematically oppress their people, the “pro-peace” position says: “Intervention causes more violence. We should focus on diplomacy.” As if the absence of visible international conflict somehow eliminates the violence of systematic oppression. As if the peace of the concentration camp is morally preferable to the disruption of liberation.
When democratic institutions come under assault, the “pro-peace” position says: “Both sides need to calm down. We need unity, not division.” As if there’s meaningful unity between those who defend democratic norms and those who systematically violate them. As if the peace of authoritarian control is preferable to the tension of democratic resistance.
This isn’t pacifism—pacifism at least acknowledges moral stakes while choosing non-violence as a strategy. This is conflict avoidance disguised as moral principle. It mistakes the absence of visible resistance for the presence of justice, when often the absence of visible resistance just means the resistance has been successfully crushed.
Real peace requires justice. Justice sometimes requires resistance to injustice. Resistance sometimes requires confrontation, sacrifice, and yes—the willingness to fight and even die for principles that make life worth living. The magical thinking says: “If we just avoid conflict, there will be no more conflict.” Reality says: if only one side avoids conflict while the other side pursues it systematically, the aggressive side wins. And when the side that wins is committed to eliminating human dignity, “peace” becomes complicity with that elimination.
Human dignity is worth fighting for. When someone attacks human dignity systematically—whether through invasion, oppression, or the systematic elimination of human agency—opposing them isn’t the failure of peace. It’s the requirement of peace.
Another manifestation of magical thinking is the belief that vulnerable institutions will protect themselves through their own momentum rather than through conscious defense and reform. We see this in the faith that democratic institutions will somehow resist degradation without active maintenance and vigilance.
The magical thinking says: “The system will correct itself. Institutions are resilient. Norms will hold.” As if institutions possessed independent moral agency rather than being tools that serve whoever controls them.
When the Supreme Court’s legitimacy is undermined by ethical scandals and decisions that appear more political than legal, the magical thinking says: “Respect the Court. It will self-correct.” When electoral processes face manipulation through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and disinformation campaigns, the magical thinking says: “Trust the process.”
When regulatory agencies become vulnerable to capture by the industries they’re supposed to regulate, when intelligence capabilities risk being turned toward partisan purposes, when aspects of the justice system show signs of political influence—the magical thinking insists that somehow, if we just maintain faith in these institutions, they will automatically return to their proper function.
But institutions don’t have independent moral agency. They’re tools that work well when designed and maintained properly, but they require active defense against those who would corrupt their purposes. Institutional resilience comes not from magical self-correction but from citizens who understand their principles and actively work to preserve their integrity.
Real institutional preservation sometimes requires acknowledging when institutions are being corrupted and taking action to restore their proper function—through reform, oversight, and the willingness to hold officials accountable to the standards their positions require. It requires distinguishing between legitimate institutional authority and illegitimate abuse of institutional power.
Climate change represents perhaps the starkest example of how magical thinking prevents us from confronting reality. The magical thinking takes multiple forms, but all serve the same function: avoiding the necessity of fundamental change.
One version says: “Technology will save us.” Electric cars, renewable energy, carbon capture—if we just innovate fast enough, we can maintain current consumption patterns while eliminating their environmental impact. This ignores the reality that technological solutions require massive coordination, sacrifice, and economic disruption to implement at the necessary scale and speed.
Another version says: “Individual action will save us.” If enough people change their consumption habits, bike instead of drive, buy sustainable products—the collective impact will solve the problem. This ignores the reality that individual consumption changes, however admirable, cannot address systemic problems that require systemic solutions.
A third version says: “It’s not really that bad.” Climate change is natural, exaggerated, or manageable through adaptation rather than prevention. This ignores overwhelming scientific evidence and the accelerating pace of environmental breakdown.
All these forms of magical thinking serve the same purpose: avoiding the uncomfortable reality that addressing climate change requires coordinated global action that will disrupt existing economic, political, and social arrangements on a scale that makes World War II mobilization look modest by comparison.
The magical thinking allows us to believe we can address an existential threat to human civilization without fundamentally changing how human civilization operates. That we can have infinite growth on a finite planet, that we can maintain current consumption patterns while eliminating their environmental impact, that we can solve collective problems through individual solutions.
But reality doesn’t care about our comfort or our preferences. Climate change is a collective action problem that requires collective solutions implemented through legitimate authority backed by the willingness to override short-term interests for long-term survival. No amount of magical thinking will change the physics of atmospheric chemistry or the mathematics of exponential change.
Perhaps the most pervasive form of magical thinking in contemporary politics is the belief that democracy can be preserved without defending it—that democratic institutions will somehow maintain themselves through their own momentum rather than through the active commitment of democratic citizens.
This magical thinking manifests in the faith that “the arc of history bends toward justice” without human effort to bend it. That progress is automatic rather than the result of struggle. That freedom is the natural state of human affairs rather than an achievement that must be constantly renewed.
We see this in the shock and disbelief when democratic institutions prove vulnerable to authoritarian pressure. “This can’t happen here.” “The system will protect itself.” “Cooler heads will prevail.” As if democracy were a natural law rather than a human agreement that requires constant maintenance and defense.
But democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires citizens who understand its principles, institutions that serve its purposes, and the willingness to confront forces that would undermine both. When citizens become passive consumers of political entertainment rather than active participants in democratic governance, when institutions become vulnerable to partisan manipulation rather than serving democratic principles, when anti-democratic forces operate without serious resistance—democracy doesn’t gradually weaken. It collapses.
The magical thinking says: “Democracy is resilient. It will survive.” Reality says: democracy survives only as long as enough people are willing to defend it against those who would destroy it. And that defense requires not just voting or peaceful protest, but the full spectrum of democratic action—including the willingness to confront authoritarianism with the force necessary to stop it.
To remain human in an age of systematic dehumanization requires rejecting the magical thinking that makes dehumanization comfortable. It requires acknowledging that preserving human dignity, human meaning, and human agency will not happen automatically. It will require conscious choice, sustained effort, and the willingness to defend what makes us human against forces designed to eliminate it.
Rejecting magical thinking is not enough. We must also build alternatives that align with human flourishing rather than algorithmic optimization. This requires conscious choices about how we design systems, how we engage politically, and how we live daily life.
What does technology designed for human flourishing rather than engagement optimization actually look like? It starts with platforms that prioritize genuine connection over screen time, that enhance human creativity rather than replacing it, that preserve the friction necessary for meaningful choice. This means choosing technologies that require human judgment rather than automating it away. Educational software that preserves intellectual struggle rather than gamifying learning into dopamine hits. Social platforms that facilitate real conversation rather than performative broadcasting. Professional tools that augment human creativity rather than generating content automatically.
It means choosing applications and services that respect human agency—that give you control over algorithms rather than being controlled by them, that present information clearly rather than manipulating attention, that enhance your capacity to think rather than thinking for you. Most importantly, it means insisting that technological development serve human purposes rather than treating humans as inputs to be optimized. When we encounter systems designed to manipulate our behavior, extract our data, or automate our judgment—we have the choice to refuse participation, to demand alternatives, to build better options.
Defending democracy requires abandoning the fantasy that democratic institutions will protect themselves through their own momentum. It requires acknowledging that when institutions become corrupted or captured, working within those institutions can become complicity with their corruption. This means supporting constitutional reforms when existing frameworks enable rather than prevent authoritarian capture. It means building parallel institutions when existing ones are corrupted, creating new mechanisms of accountability when traditional ones are subverted.
It means the willingness to bypass corrupted institutions when they serve anti-democratic purposes—using state and local authority when federal institutions are compromised, supporting grassroots movements when official channels are blocked, creating alternative spaces for democratic practice when traditional ones are eliminated. Political realism also means acknowledging that democracy requires not just institutional mechanisms but democratic culture—citizens who understand democratic principles, who participate actively rather than consuming passively, who defend democratic norms even when doing so disadvantages their preferred political outcomes.
Building institutions that serve human flourishing rather than mere optimization requires rethinking fundamental assumptions about efficiency, measurement, and purpose. Instead of optimizing for metrics that can be gamed, we must design for outcomes that matter even when they’re difficult to measure. In education, this means preserving intellectual challenge, genuine assessment, and the development of critical thinking—schools that require sustained attention, deep reading, original thinking, and moral reasoning.
In healthcare, this means treating patients as whole human beings rather than collections of symptoms to be processed through algorithmic diagnosis and standardized treatment protocols. Medical systems that preserve the doctor-patient relationship, that integrate mental and physical health, that prioritize healing over metrics. In governance, this means structures that facilitate genuine democratic deliberation rather than just electoral efficiency. Town halls that require real engagement, representatives who remain accountable to constituents rather than donors, decision-making processes that preserve space for minority voices and dissenting opinions.
Critics will argue that optimization has genuinely improved human life in countless ways—that efficiency isn’t inherently dehumanizing, that some friction is just unnecessary suffering, that this argument sounds like romantic anti-modernism that would return us to pre-technological hardship. They’re right that optimization can make our lives better. The question isn’t whether to optimize, but who decides what to optimize for and how those decisions are made.
The problem isn’t efficiency itself—it’s optimization imposed by algorithmic systems or corporate interests without democratic input about what human values should guide that optimization. When we optimize transportation, do we prioritize speed, safety, environmental impact, or community connection? When we optimize education, do we focus on test scores, critical thinking, creativity, or civic engagement? When we optimize healthcare, do we emphasize cost reduction, patient outcomes, doctor-patient relationships, or population health?
These aren’t technical questions with objectively correct answers—they’re moral and political questions that require democratic deliberation. The current system optimizes for metrics that can be easily measured and monetized, often at the expense of human values that are harder to quantify but more important to preserve.
Real progress means optimization guided by democratically determined human values rather than algorithmic efficiency alone. It means distinguishing between improvements that enhance human agency and those that eliminate it. Between systems that serve human purposes and those that treat humans as obstacles to optimization.
Consider the difference between GPS navigation that helps you reach your destination and GPS that tracks your every movement for advertising purposes. Between medical technology that enables doctors to heal more effectively and medical algorithms that replace doctor judgment entirely. Between communication tools that facilitate genuine connection and engagement platforms designed to maximize addiction.
The issue isn’t friction itself, but the elimination of meaningful friction—the struggles that generate growth, learning, and purpose—while preserving useless friction that serves no human end. We want to eliminate the friction of poverty, disease, and genuine oppression while preserving the friction of choice, challenge, and moral responsibility. This isn’t romantic anti-modernism but conscious modernism—technological development guided by human values rather than optimization metrics alone. It’s the recognition that efficiency is a tool, not an end in itself, and that the most efficient system is often one that destroys the very purposes it was designed to serve.
The argument for preserving meaningful struggle must be distinguished from justifying unnecessary suffering. Not all difficulty generates meaning—some struggles are simply destructive, some challenges are purely wasteful, some friction serves no purpose beyond perpetuating injustice. The task is learning to distinguish between suffering that diminishes human dignity and challenge that enhances it. Between obstacles that prevent human flourishing and resistance that enables it. Between systems that create artificial scarcity to maintain control and natural constraints that generate creative response.
Poverty, for instance, is not meaningful struggle—it’s systematic deprivation that prevents people from engaging in the kinds of challenges that actually generate growth and purpose. But the elimination of poverty should not require the elimination of challenge itself—people freed from economic desperation should have access to meaningful work, creative expression, and moral responsibility. Similarly, eliminating discrimination doesn’t require eliminating standards or expectations. A just society removes barriers to human development while preserving the challenges that make development possible.
Beyond systemic change, remaining human requires daily choices that resist the optimization of human experience. These practices begin with attention—choosing what deserves your conscious engagement rather than allowing algorithms to make that choice for you. This means reading books that require sustained attention rather than consuming only bite-sized content optimized for engagement. Engaging in conversations that risk genuine disagreement rather than staying within filter bubbles that confirm existing beliefs. Choosing activities that require skill development rather than providing instant gratification.
It means supporting businesses, artists, and creators who prioritize human values over optimization metrics. Buying from companies that treat workers as human beings rather than efficiency units. Consuming media that challenges you to think rather than simply triggering emotional responses. Participating in communities that require genuine contribution rather than passive consumption.
It means practicing the skills that artificial intelligence cannot replicate—moral reasoning, creative synthesis, emotional intelligence, the capacity for genuine relationship. These aren’t just personal benefits but acts of resistance against systems designed to make these capacities irrelevant.
Individual practice is necessary but insufficient. Remaining human requires communities that support human values against systemic pressure toward dehumanization. This means creating and participating in groups that prioritize genuine connection over digital networking, that engage in meaningful work rather than optimized productivity, that practice democratic decision-making rather than algorithmic management.
Local politics becomes crucial—participating in governance at scales where individual voices still matter, where decisions affect real communities, where democratic practice can be learned and preserved. Town councils, school boards, neighborhood organizations where citizens can experience genuine agency rather than just electoral participation. Educational communities that preserve intellectual challenge—book clubs that tackle difficult texts, discussion groups that welcome disagreement, learning environments that require sustained attention and critical thinking rather than just information transfer. Creative communities that maintain the connection between effort and achievement—maker spaces, artistic collaboratives, skill-sharing networks where people create rather than just consume, where expertise is developed through practice rather than downloaded through tutorials.
At the policy level, choosing reality over magical thinking requires supporting legislation that prioritizes human agency over algorithmic efficiency. This means regulations that preserve human choice in automated systems, that require algorithmic transparency, that protect the right to human review of automated decisions. It means educational policies that preserve intellectual challenge rather than optimizing for standardized metrics. Curricula that require deep reading, sustained attention, original thinking—even when these are more difficult to measure and manage than algorithmic content delivery.
It means supporting democratic reforms that enhance genuine participation rather than just electoral efficiency. Campaign finance changes that reduce the influence of algorithmic micro-targeting, voting systems that require genuine deliberation, representation structures that preserve space for minority voices and dissenting opinions.
The threats to human agency are global, requiring coordinated response across national boundaries. This means international cooperation to regulate technologies that undermine human autonomy, to support democratic movements against authoritarian capture, to address existential threats like climate change that require collective action. It means distinguishing between globalization that serves human purposes and globalization that serves only efficiency optimization. Supporting trade relationships that enhance human development while opposing systems that treat humans as expendable inputs to global production.
It means recognizing that defending democracy in one country requires supporting democratic values everywhere—that authoritarian regimes attacking democracy abroad will eventually attack it at home, that surveillance technologies developed to oppress foreign populations will eventually be turned against domestic ones.
The choice to remain human is not a single decision but a daily practice requiring constant vigilance and continuous effort. It begins with the recognition that magical thinking serves not our interests but the interests of systems designed to eliminate human agency. But recognition alone is insufficient. We must build alternatives—technologies that enhance rather than replace human judgment, institutions that serve human flourishing rather than optimization metrics, communities that practice genuine democracy rather than algorithmic management.
This requires both individual resistance and collective action, both personal practice and policy advocacy, both local engagement and global cooperation. It requires the willingness to choose difficulty over comfort when difficulty serves human purposes, to choose reality over illusion even when reality is frightening, to choose agency over automation even when automation is more efficient.
The stakes are nothing less than what it means to be human. The time for magical thinking has passed. The time for conscious choice has begun.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the choice to remain human—to preserve meaning, agency, and dignity in systems designed to eliminate all three—is the most important choice facing our species.
Reality is difficult. But it’s also the only place where genuine human life is possible.
Choose reality. Choose consciousness. Choose to remain human.
Every minute of every day.
Remember what’s real.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Filed Under: complexity, humanity, magical thinking, pattern matching
America’s Measles Counts Surpass 2019 Outbreak, Highest In Over Three Decades
from the we-chose-this dept
We haven’t talked about the numbers in America’s measles outbreak in a couple of months, but that certainly doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. It was back in April that we wrote about how the numbers were on pace to eclipse the outbreak in 2019, which was largely driven by unvaccinated religious groups in New York State, in large part due to both the long-term advocacy against vaccination by people like RFK Jr. and his short-term time as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The result is likely to be the loss of elimination status of the disease in America, thanks to Kennedy’s staff and budget cuts, his crackpot theories about how to treat the disease, and his desire to blame the victims of the disease, casting them as undesirables of a kind.
Well, these assbags did it: America’s measles case count has continued to climb and has now eclipsed the 2019 numbers, becoming the highest count in a year in over three decades.
Over the weekend, the tally of measles cases reached 1,281, setting a new case record since the highly contagious viral disease was declared eliminated from the country in 2000. The previous record was set in 2019, when there were 1,274 cases and officials warned that the US had narrowly avoided losing the elimination status.
Overall, the current case tally is a 33-year high for the preventable infection, and the outlook for the country is bleak. Vaccination rates have only fallen since the pandemic, and the top health official in the country—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—is an unswerving anti-vaccine activist who has spent his short time in the position so far spreading dangerous misinformation about the measles vaccine—as well as peddling unproven treatments and downplaying the infection.
We are now more likely than not to lose the elimination status of measles in America. I’ll remind you that we’re only roughly half a year into this. While the infection rates thankfully don’t seem to be accelerating (yet), they also aren’t slowing down appreciably. And that is because, thanks to Kennedy and his fellow anti-vaxx advocates, many parts of America don’t have the 95% immunity status required for true herd immunity. Because people aren’t vaccinating themselves and their children. And, yes, it really is that simple.
The elimination of the disease in America was a massive undertaking by the federal government to make the MMR vaccine available and to campaign among the public for its adoption. The highest healthcare official in the land currently, however, is doing the opposite of that. He’s removing vaccination schedules from some Americans and growling nearly constantly about his own vaccine skepticism.
And if you think that Texas is the limit of the problem, you’re wrong.
Such is the case in Gaines County, Texas, where the largest outbreak this year has erupted. So far, that outbreak, which spans four states, accounts for at least 950 of the country’s 1,281 cases.
But, overall, there have been a whopping 27 outbreaks in the country just in the first six months. According to national data compiled by researchers at Yale School of Public Health, as of July 6, the 1,281 cases are across 39 states, with around 90 percent of the cases associated with one of the outbreaks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also reports a national measles case count but only updates its numbers on Wednesdays. According to the CDC’s latest data, at least 155 people have been hospitalized for the infection, and three people have died—two otherwise healthy young children in Texas and one adult in New Mexico. All three deaths were in people who were not vaccinated.
We’re fortunate that we haven’t seen the death toll from this administration’s incompetence rise in several months… but that is unlikely to last. This disease kills. And it doesn’t even just kill directly, but tangentially as well, due to measles having a particularly insidious side effect of immunization amnesia for other diseases. That means getting infected with measles removes protections you might have for other diseases.
It is time for RFK Jr. to go. Quickly. Or this is going to keep getting worse.
Filed Under: health and human services, measles, rfk jr.
Crowd-Sourced ICE Tracking Alerts Aim To Provide Local Communities With Early Warning Of Immigration Raids
from the see-something,-tap-something dept
Techdirt has just written about how people are using Ring doorbell cameras to warn others in the area about the presence of ICE agents and the risk of possible ICE raids. That’s a good example of using existing technology to monitor the increasingly widespread and brutal activities of ICE teams. But driven by a desire to counter the US government’s moves, people are also coming up with new systems to warn people about what is happening in their community.
For example, the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network sends and receives warnings about nearby ICE activity using text messages. On its home page, it claims to have over 470,000 subscribers currently. That approach, while effective, might be a little basic for some people, and a number of smartphone apps have been created to meet the need for something more sophisticated. One of them is ICEBlock, which came to the notice of a wider public thanks to a CNN report on 30 June. Its developer, Joshua Aaron, told CNN that his free app was designed to be an early warning system for users when ICE is operating nearby. Its slogan is “See Something, Tap Something”:
Users can add a pin on a map showing where they spotted agents — along with optional notes, like what officers were wearing or what kind of car they were driving. Other users within a five-mile radius will then receive a push alert notifying them of the sighting.
Aaron says he does not want users to interfere with ICE’s operations directly, and when a user logs a sighting, the app warns: “Please note that the use of this app is for information and notification purposes only. It is not to be used for the purposes of inciting violence or interfering with law enforcement.” Aaron has also tried to minimize the risk that the platform is flooded with false reports:
Although ICEBlock has no surefire way of guaranteeing the accuracy of user reports, Aaron says he’s built safeguards to prevent users from spamming the platform with fake sightings. Users can only report a sighting within five miles of their location, and they can only report once every five minutes. Reports are automatically deleted after four hours.
Privacy for users is naturally a key concern:
ICEBlock doesn’t collect personal data, and users are completely anonymous, according to Aaron. It’s only available on iOS because Aaron says the app would have to collect information that could ultimately put users at risk to provide the same experience on Android.
Reassuring users of those privacy protections will likely be key to growing ICEBlock’s user base, given how the government is building a database to aid in its deportation efforts.
ICEBlock’s user base has already been given a huge boost thanks to the Streisand Effect. After the CNN report was broadcast, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about the app. As MSN reported, Leavitt replied:
I’ll have to watch the clip myself but surely it sounds like this would be an incitement of further violence against our ICE officers. As you stated, there’s been a 500% increase in violence against ICE agents, law enforcement officers across the country who are just simply trying to do their jobs and remove public safety threats from our communities.
Despite her use of a misleading statistic about assaults on ICE officers, Leavitt’s criticism of ICEBlock naturally led many people to investigate it. In fact, soon after her comment, ICEBlock became the top social networking app in the App Store — ahead of Threads, WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook — a position it still holds at the time of writing. In the CNN interview, Aaron said his app had more than 20,000 users, but thanks to Leavitt the number is more than ten times that. According to a story on Wired, ICEBlock now has over 240,000 users, and Trump administration officials have threatened to prosecute Aaron for creating the app, and CNN for reporting on it.
Another app that aims to report and share sightings of ICE activities is Hack Latino. On its GoFundMe page, which is no longer accepting donations, the organizer claims “30,000 app users and 50,000 website visitors”. As someone from Guatemala who uses the Hack Latino app explains in an article on the Rest of the World site, the app works like Waze, which provides live traffic updates: “It sends you a message saying there’s a Border Patrol ahead and that you need to turn back. Most migrants are protecting themselves with it.” However, the same article warns that the US government has taken note of the rise of these apps, and is already working to counter them. It quotes Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that supports migrants and refugees:
The U.S. government, said Rios, is hiring companies that can identify users who post information about raids on these platforms.
“Many of us no longer post all the information,” said Rios. Instead, details on immigration sweeps are “being shared on paper from person to person, or through photos and WhatsApp.”
And so the contest between the hunters and the hunted continues.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.
Filed Under: app store, facebook, ice, immigration, ios, karoline leavitt, privacy, quakers, raids, ring, streisand effect, telegram, text messages, threads, waze, whatsapp
Companies: amazon, apple, cnn, gofundme
Daily Deal: Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2022
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
Visual Studio Professional 2022 is a fully featured development environment that developers around the world know and love. The 64-bit IDE makes it easier to work with even bigger projects and more complex workloads. Enhance your productivity, write high-quality code, and re-imagine collaboration with an advanced suite of tools and built-in integrations to tackle the most challenging development workflows and deliver innovative apps. It’s on sale for $14.97 for a limited time.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
Trump Administration Sends In The Marines… To Do Paperwork?
from the this-is-my-pen,-this-is-my-gun dept
Martial law still appears to be the plan. The rollout has been limited, but the wholly unnecessary deployment of military troops to California sent a message our performative president wanted to get across.
Trump sent an even more explicit one days later, following up on DHS boss Kristi Noem’s quasi-declaration of war on this “democrat” state — one that is host to vehement protests against ICE, with any violence not directly attributed to law enforcement escalation relegated to a few blocks in downtown Los Angeles.
Several thousand National Guard troops are now engaging in law enforcement activity in the Los Angeles area, as well as in areas far removed from the city they were sent to. Marines, sent to Los Angeles by the order of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, have already been spotted detaining people until law enforcement officers can take over.
Florida isn’t a “democrat” state. But it is wholly receptive to the administration’s racist actions. The state has already passed an unconstitutional law that allows local law enforcement to engage in anti-immigrant actions. Now, because it’s so receptive to Trump’s push to eject non-whites from the country, it’s host to a couple of hundred Marines… for no apparent reason. Here’s the latest symptom of Trump’s martial law aspirations, as reported by Reuters.
The U.S. military said on Thursday it will send 200 Marines to Florida to provide administrative and logistical support to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Marines are the first wave of U.S. Northern Command’s support to the immigration enforcement agency’s mission, it said.
Let’s deal with the second sentence first. Apparently, this is just the beginning. While Florida hasn’t really seen nearly as much opposition to ICE as in other areas of the country, it’s nonetheless being given a few hundred Marines just because. If this is just the “first wave,” the administration obviously wants to keep sending military troops to any place that won’t challenge the deployment in court and/or any place Trump feels is filled with political enemies. Neither of these things are good — much less legal — reasons to deploy Marines.
Back to the first paragraph: when most people think about sending in the Marines, they think of a first wave of well-trained killers capable of clearing a path for their military inferiors. But that’s not what’s happening here, according to military officials, who claim the Marines will not be engaging in law enforcement duties. If they did, that would be illegal.
Instead, they’ll be doing the things no one considers Marines to be exceptional at doing: paperwork, filling vehicles with gas, looking at stuff posted on white boards, and sitting behind desks. In other words, they’ll be immediately redundant. “Administrative and logistical” support can be performed by anyone capable of hosting a Teams meeting. This is just some stupid muscle-flexing — a show of force that serves as a latent threat, rather than performing any useful or necessary task.
USNORTHCOM says Marines are forbidden from being in “direct contact” with anyone in ICE custody, as well as being involved in any part of the “custody chain.” So, Marines can’t arrest or detain anyone, but the military’s order don’t specifically preclude them from joining ICE in raids to provide an additional level of intimidation, much in the way the Marines and National Guard have in Los Angeles.
The water continues to be tested by this administration. And, so far, it seems to feel just fine. Once troops are everywhere Trump wants them (and that now includes Texas and Louisiana), it’s only a matter of time before they’re asked to go beyond the legal limitations of domestic deployment.
Filed Under: florida, ice, marines, martial law, mass deporation, trump administration
Comcast Forced To Retreat From Broadband Data Caps (Sort Of) Due To Competition From 5G Wireless And Community Fiber
from the hoisted-with-his-own-petard dept
Techdirt has always made it very clear that broadband usage caps on fixed-line broadband are bullshit.
The costly and confusing restrictions serve no legitimate technical function. They don’t help your ISP “manage congestion.” They exist simply as a way for giant companies like Comcast to nickel-and-dime captive customers in uncompetitive broadband markets. Market failure created by their own tireless efforts to kill competition and government oversight.
But there’s been a small wrinkle over the last few years. Trying to gain market share, wireless giants have been offering home 5G wireless connection for lower prices. We’ve also been seeing a rise in community-owned broadband networks and cooperatives offering cheaper gigabit fiber. The combination has resulted in Comcast losing a growing number of broadband subscribers in some markets.
So Comcast is trying something new. They’re retreating from broadband caps on the new service tiers being offered new customers. According to a press release, they’re offering to eliminate usage caps for new users who sign up for four new tiers of service:
“Following the successful launch and positive consumer reaction to Xfinity’s new 5-year guarantee, the nation’s largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) has launched its everyday pricing (EDP) structure with four simple national Internet tiers that include unlimited data and the advanced Xfinity WiFi Gateway for one low monthly price.”
This being Comcast, there are, of course, some caveats. For one, this is primarily being offered to new customers. And you have to sign up for Comcast’s WiFi gateway, which precludes you simply owning your own modem and router, making it easier (and more profitable) for Comcast to track you and monetize your online behaviors.
The company is claiming to reporters that existing customers can also sign up for these new uncapped plans, but Comcast historically says a lot of things that don’t wind up being true in practice.
It sounds like Comcast wants its cake and to eat it too; it wants to maintain some semblance of pointless caps to soak up extra profit in less competitive markets, but keep itself from losing customers in more competitive areas. It’s the sort of predatory bullshit you can get away with in a country so corrupt that it destroys its own consumer protection regulators for fun.
A more honest and serious approach would be to eliminate usage caps entirely. We’ll see if 5G wireless continues to provide competitive incentive. Wireless giants are temporarily selling 5G home service at a steep discount; but given the congestion-plagued nature of wireless, as those networks see subscription growth eventually those networks will see their own slowdowns and restrictions.
Still, it’s an indication that Comcast is finally being forced to acknowledge that usage caps are anti-competitive bullshit. Hopefully it’s a trend that accelerates for years to come.
Filed Under: broadband, cable, competition, high speed internet, network, overage fees, telecom, usage caps
Companies: comcast
CA Sheriff Who Ran As A Reformer Now Facing Removal From Office
from the oh-the-sort-of-reform-that's-just-a-different-kind-of-bad dept
Sheriff Christina Corpus is on the cusp of being an ex-sheriff and the first sheriff removed from office in San Mateo County via a county board vote. But her term as sheriff started a lot more promisingly. Running as a reformer, Corpus won the primary and the job, defeating Carlos Bolanos, who had definitely done little to earn the public’s trust during his extended term in office.
Her opponent, then-Sheriff Carlos Bolanos, had his years in office bookended by scandal. In 2007, when he was the undersheriff of San Mateo County, he and former Sheriff Greg Munks were briefly detained by police in a raid at a Las Vegas brothel. The raids were dubbed “Operation Dollhouse.” Five people were arrested, but Munks and Bolanos were not among them.
[…]
Fifteen years later, in one of his final acts in 2022, Bolanos sent four sheriff’s office employees to Indiana to raid a production facility that makes $210,000 Batmobiles, complete with flamethrowers to simulate the superhero vehicle’s jet turbine exhaust. The reason: A constituent complained that his car delivery had been delayed over a missed payment. Attorney General Rob Bonta declined to investigate Bolanos.
That is some wild stuff, even in terms of stuff sheriffs do because the office gives them so much power and almost zero accountability to the public. Sheriffs are pretty much kings in most parts of the nation. And Bolanos certainly seemed to believe he was above the laws he swore to enforce.
Maybe it’s the office that does this to people. Sheriff Corpus seemed like an improvement, but that illusion was shattered late last year and led directly to the multiple legal problems the sheriff is facing now.
Here’s part of what led to Sheriff Christina Corpus having the county vote to remove her from office last week. SFist’s reporting last November details what was found in a extremely long report that had absolutely nothing good to say about Sheriff Corpus.
The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors released a 400-page report based on the sworn testimony of 40 current and former employees of that county’s sheriff’s department detailing patterns of alleged abuse by Sheriff Christina Corpus. The Chronicle describes “that Corpus used slurs, including ‘n—,’” as well as referring to a lesbian city council member as “fuzz bumper,” and that she “engaged in retaliation and intimidation tactics.”
And that was the mild stuff. The report also alleges that Corpus created a new full-time department job for her alleged romantic partner Victor Aenlle at $246,000 a year. The report says Aenlle moonlights as real estate agent, and had conflicts of interest in picking properties and contractors for the department. It also accuses Corpus of approving Aenlle’s pay raises with requests submitted under other employees’ names.
Power corrupts, even if it isn’t absolute. These are allegations, of course, but they’re backed by 400 pages of findings, which suggests something far more solid than just some former employee firing off an angry, drunken email at 3 in the morning.
Sheriff Corpus said this in her defense during a press conference following the release of the report:
“I am shocked by the outright slander by two members of the Board of Supervisors this afternoon. No one will call me a racist or a homophobe. … Anyone who knows me knows I would not use racist words. I am not capable of that,” she said Tuesday night. “This is a hatchet job of an inquiry which was commissioned with a predetermined outcome in mind, and it was filled with lies.”
Ah, but they did call you a racist and homophobe. And pretty much anyone is capable of anything, even people who don’t consider themselves racist but still engage in racist behavior. Maybe Sheriff Corpus doesn’t think she’s either of the things she’s accused of being, but now she’s on the side of things rarely seen by most law enforcement officers: the “your word against mine” scenario, but this time it’s not the law enforcement officer who has the upper hand.
And this detail certainly doesn’t help Corpus on the corruption side of things, even if it’s completely free of racist and/or homophobic statements:
After she took office in January 2023, Corpus rehired Aenlle as a contractor making $92 an hour. She then created a full-time job of director of administration and hired him for the job that paid $246,000 a year. The job opening was not publicized, and there were no other applicants other than Aenlle.
Following this bombshell, the county actually offered a whole lot of money to the sheriff to walk away voluntarily. But Corpus refused the $1 million payout, along with a second offer that was even larger.
Now, it could be that Corpus is actually innocent and refused to take the buyout on principle. But it also might mean the power of the office is worth more than the San Mateo government was willing to pay. And it also might mean Corpus didn’t need the money because being sheriff was profitable enough already, especially if your alleged boyfriend is raking in a quarter-million a year.
Innocent or not, the sheriff probably should have taken the payout. Rather than walking away with a fat wad of taxpayer cash, Christina Corpus has been voted out of office by the Board of Supervisors.
The County of San Mateo Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 today to accept a recommendation to proceed with removing Sheriff Christina Corpus from office.
In accordance with the removal procedures adopted by the Board, John Keene, the County’s Chief Probation Officer, conducted a pre-removal conference, which the sheriff attended with her counsel at their offices. During this pre-removal conference, Chief Keene afforded the sheriff and her counsel the opportunity to respond to the allegations contained in the Notice of Intent to Remove, which was approved by the Board at its meeting on June 5, 2025 and provided to the sheriff.
Yikes. Though, that doesn’t actually remove her from office, as she has a series of appeals she can go through, though so far, the courts haven’t helped her.
And, once again, it might have behooved the likely soon-to-be ex-sheriff to walk away as quickly as possible from the office many people — including law officers working for her — felt she wasn’t fit to serve. On top of being removed from office by a process other than an election, Corpus is also facing possible damages stemming from a civil grand jury investigation. And, last Monday, the grand jury returned its accusation.
District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe’s office said the grand jury on Friday returned an accusation against Corpus that includes one count of conflict of interest in violation of the County Charter. The conflict of interest allegation stems from the hiring of Victor Aenlle, whom she allegedly had a close personal relationship with.
The grand jury also accused Corpus of three counts of retaliation over the termination of Assistant Sheriff Ryan Monaghan, the transfer of Capt. Brian Phillip and the arrest of Deputy Carlos Tapia, who is the president of the Deputy Sheriff’s Association.
Grand juries can indict ham sandwiches, as the saying goes. But they very rarely go after law enforcement officers, much less elected law enforcement officials. If this is a “hatchet job” conspiracy against Sheriff Corpus as she claims, it’s a very concerted effort that has managed to rope in plenty of her employees, the board of supervisors, a bunch of grand jury members, and multiple law enforcement officials and representatives who have already expressed their displeasure with the sheriff’s leadership, or lack thereof.
Sheriff Corpus isn’t unique. We’ve seen this elsewhere. Reformers claim they’re riding to rescue but end up just being bad in ways their immediate predecessors weren’t. Being uniquely corrupt or incompetent or whatever doesn’t make you better than the person you replaced. It just makes you a slightly different iteration of the person you replaced.
Law enforcement, for the most part, is an occupation that caters to self-selection. People who like power but dislike accountability tend to gravitate towards law enforcement because it gives them all the stuff they want and none of the stuff they don’t. Consequently, it becomes filled with the sort of people who can’t work anywhere else because no one in the private sector would put up with this sort of bullshit. Unfortunately for all of us, we still have to pay the salaries and deal with the repercussions of years of mildly varying inertia.
Correction: the original version of this article referred to the civil grand jury “accusation” as an “indictment” which would be what a criminal grand jury does. We’ve updated the language for accuracy and regret the error.
Filed Under: christina corpus, corruption, san mateo county sheriff, sheriff
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