July 28, 2025

2025-07-28 📡

Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies

---

🖋️

---

👂

---

📚

SF-Based Internet Archive Is Now a Federal Depository Library. What Does That Mean?

SF-Based Internet Archive Is Now a Federal Depository Library. What Does That Mean? | KQED

The Internet Archive, thanks to its designation by California Sen. Alex Padilla, joins a network of over 1,100 libraries that make government documents accessible to the public.

Under federal law, members of Congress can designate up to two qualified libraries for federal depository status.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said that while the nonprofit organization has always functioned as a library, this new designation makes it easier to work with the other federal depository libraries. That, he said, is a service to everyone.

Against The Grain: Derek Walmsley on how Spotify distorts genre histories

Against The Grain: Derek Walmsley on how Spotify distorts genre histories - The Wire

Spotify’s partial catalogue of underground genres such as grime and jungle distorts listeners’ understanding of their history, argues Derek Walmsley

Regular listeners to streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon will recognise the sensation of songs served up on auto-play getting steadily more generic from one track to the next, offering crowdpleasers in the hope of keeping people on the app. While services like Spotify give the appearance of infinite choice, in operation they revert to the familiar.

When this is applied to an underground movement such as drum ’n’ bass, important parts of its history go missing or get mixed up. Ragga jungle hits like Uncle 22’s “Six Million Ways To Die” or Trinity’s “Gangster” are elusive. Searching for Shy FX and UK Apachi’s landmark anthem “Original Nuttah” points you to an inferior 25th anniversary remake on a different label. The work of many innovators such as Danny Breaks, Krust, DJ Crystl and Peshay is often listed with a release date well after it first dropped, giving the impression that drum ’n’ bass rose to prominence years after it actually did.

Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance

Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices. Not only is the company reintroducing new versions of old features which would allow police to...

Why now? It is hard to believe the company is betraying the trust of its millions of customers in the name of “safety” when violent crime in the United States is reaching near-historically low levels. It’s probably not about their customers—the FTC had to compel Ring to take its users’ privacy seriously. 

No, this is most likely about Ring cashing in on the rising tide of techno-authoritarianism, that is, authoritarianism aided by surveillance tech. Too many tech companies want to profit from our shrinking liberties. Google likewise recently ended an old ethical commitment that prohibited it from profiting off of surveillance and warfare. Companies are locking down billion-dollar contracts by selling their products to the defense sector or police.

The Enshittification of American Power

The Enshittification of American Power | WIRED

First Google and Facebook, then the world. Under Trump 2.0, US statecraft is starting to mimic the worst tendencies of Big Tech.

Ever since Trump retook office in January, in fact, rapid enshittification has become the organizing principle of US statecraft. This time around, Trumpworld understands that—in controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security—it has vast machineries of coercion at its disposal. As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, recently put it, “The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.”

So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network. And like the countless startups that have attempted to create an alternative to Twitter or Facebook over the years—most now forgotten, a few successful—other allies are now desperately scrambling to figure out how to build a network of their own.

Two Days Talking to People Looking for Jobs at ICE

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/two-days-talking-to-people-looking-for-jobs-at-ice/

The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust. My conversations with prospective Enforcement and Removal Operation officers tended to follow the familiar script of engagement with the most banal people on Tinder, the kinds of people who post airplane emojis in their bios. Granting that the banality of evil, as an explanation, has itself become banal, it was hard to know what else to make of all this. The US is filled with “pretty nice guys” who are ready to inflict, who have already inflicted, senseless and life-shattering violence on innocent, impoverished people.

Deadly Slop

Deadly Slop | Sophia Goodfriend

AI-generated slop is also the correlate and counterpart of contemporary warfare.

Yet many of these essays also strike me as incomplete. Slop is certainly characteristic of our present political moment, in which tech moguls are capitalizing on AI applications that allow creators to flood social media platforms with AI-generated content. But slop is also the correlate and counterpart of contemporary war. Across the world, rising authoritarians are hurtling into intractable military conflicts with the assistance of artificial intelligence, which is busily churning out both an endless supply of questionable military targets and low-grade memes—a deadening and deadly mess of synthetic material saturating battlefields and content streams alike.

US court strikes down ‘click-to-cancel’ rule designed to make unsubscribing easier

US court strikes down ‘click-to-cancel’ rule designed to make unsubscribing easier | US news | The Guardian

Rule would have kept businesses from forcing customers through lengthy chats or other barriers to cancellation

The vacated rule meant to go into effect on 14 July would have covered all forms of negative option marketing – programs that allow sellers to interpret customer inaction as acceptance of subscriptions, often leading to unintended charges. The FTC’s original 1973 rule only covered limited forms of these practices.

It would have also stopped businesses from forcing customers through lengthy chat sessions with agents or creating other barriers to cancellation.

The decision represents a major victory for businesses that challenged the FTC’s authority to modernize consumer protections without following what they argued were mandatory procedural requirements.

---

📹

I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

sapf: New Music Language Inspired by Supercollider, APL, and Forth (Sound as Pure Form)

1‑Hour Tempura Rush: 400 Plates, Clam Shells on the Floor!"

Arone Dyer’s Dronechoir // Live at Roulette

How To Sound Design Insects

the dream music player, finally.

Talking Heads - Psycho Killer (Official Video)

How We Conquered the Whomp’s Fortress Tower

---

🕹️

Bluejewled is “a mod for bejeweled 3 to add more blue” (lol)

Abiotic Factor review

Abiotic Factor review | PC Gamer

Abiotic Factor is an instant survival classic, and one of the best games I've played in years.

I'm not usually one to play games before they hit 1.0, but Abiotic Factor's premise was too good to pass up when it first hit Steam last May: You play as scientists trapped in a secret underground facility amidst a Black Mesa-style disaster in the year 1993. That's some potent PC gaming catnip, but the Half-Life trappings aren't just wallpaper. Deep Field Games takes the survival framework of Valheim and Project Zomboid and fully commits to the idea of nerds with zero survival skills and male pattern baldness thwarting an interdimensional apocalyptic invasion with nothing but office equipment, PhDs, and gallons of coffee.

---

😎

Been up to all kinds of stuff! We got:

• A bunch of episodes of Never Post, including a bunch of extended segments that we’ve been backed up on for a little while

• Episode 56 of Fun City came out last month

• Me and some of the FC crew also put out a new Sidegame™ Boncone™ played in Free League’s Mork Borg cyberpunk reskin CY_BORG. Alongside Fun City, and Filth Village, we now also have our first installment of Sunken City.

---

✌️

That’s all I got for now. Hope you’ve been well – all things considered – and hopefully I’ll have more for you sooner rather than later.

xo
-M