"37-39. Please stop seeing every precious and beautiful aspect of life on earth as a commodity to be controlled and exploited for wealth. Now, see, this is a tough one. It’s so tough that I’m giving it three entries. It’s tough because I know you know you fucked up. You’re aware that much of the world has soured on you. You’ve seen a fleet of headlines like “AI Companies Know They Have an Image Problem” and “AI Has a Message Problem.” You’re aware that the loathing people feel for AI is making them look again at the other products you’ve inserted into every corner of their lives and realize with fresh disgust the many, many ways in which those products represent broken promises. They don’t work as they’re supposed to. They make life more frustrating, stressful, competitive, and alienating rather than easier and more connected. You’re using them to spy on your customers, whom you view as vessels of monetizable data more than as people, and whom you hold in increasingly palpable contempt. You see that we see this, and you’re surely hard at work on ways to fix the problem.

But this is where things get tricky, because I don’t think you want to fix the problem, not really. I think that, to you, “fixing the problem” means fixing the image that conceals the problem. I think you want to keep doing all the same stuff while selling us a better story so that we’ll let you get away with it. And that doesn’t fix anything at all.

Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem."

https://www.theringer.com/2026/05/28/tech/pope-leo-xiv-ai-encyclical-tech-industry-problems

#BigTech #TechIndustry #Capitalism #Monopolies #Oligopolies #PopeLeon

"WeLib describes itself as an “endless library” founded on the principle that “education and literature belong to everyone.” The publishers, however, clearly don’t agree with the library framing, noting libraries can be trusted; pirate sites not.

“Libraries are trusted institutions that serve the communities that fund them by lending books and other publications they have lawfully acquired. Using this label for WeLib explicitly misleads the public and allows WeLib to hijack the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.”

“WeLib is no more than a pirate website that reproduces and distributes works of authorship owned by others to users for a profit, without authorization from or compensation to the copyright owners,” the complaint adds.

The complaint notes that WeLib’s operators made efforts to keep their identities hidden. However, the site itself quickly became a go-to portal for many book pirates.

The complaint notes that, by WeLib’s own account, its collection includes 43 million books and 98 million articles. The site reportedly has over 80,000 active monthly users who accessed more than 51.7 million books and downloaded 14.5 million files last month."

https://torrentfreak.com/major-publishers-sue-welib-a-pirate-site-built-on-annas-archive-code/

#AnnasArchive #Copyright #IP #Piracy #Monopolies #Rentism #Feudalism

RE: https://masto.deoan.org/@jsonstein/116754340590435892

50+ years of deregulation means there is no entity or government agency that can protect us from price gouging. Remember how prices soared during COVID because of supply chain issues? I do.

And then when the supply chain issues smoothed over and returned to somewhat normal, did the prices coming back down? Nope. Companies now kept prices high because they could.

#monopolies

🇨🇦 Canadians were promised the Rogers-Shaw deal would benefit all of us. 3 years in, Rogers is falling short on jobs, 5G, prices, and service.

💥 Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) has done nothing! Tell Minister Joly to act on what the government promised.

👉 https://openmedia.org/CallOutRogers

#CDNPoli #monopolies #Canada @OpenMediaOrg

"The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.

So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics.

What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:
(...)
Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org.
(...)
Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.

Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/11/lapsarianism/
#Politics #Oligopolies #Monopolies #Capitalism

the audacity of selling #privacy as a feature yet not allowing regulators audit their technology to verify their claims.

this is a toot about #Apple #iOS

#NBAFinals2026 #ABCtv #Disney #monopolies

Demand Is Booming for New #NoTech, #Repairable #Tractor

"There is consumer pressure to back away from technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks."

by Jason Koebler
Jun 3, 2026

"The secondary market for decades old, low-tech #JohnDeereTractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, 'no-tech' tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers?

"Alberta’s #UrsaAg says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare. We have for years covered the frustration that farmers have felt as they have been locked out of their Deere tractors with digital rights management systems that prevent them from fixing their machinery, tractors that won’t run because of minor sensor failures, and crops that literally die on the vine as they wait for an 'authorized' repair person to fix tractors during critical harvesting periods.

"Ursa Ag markets its tractors as '#NoFrills' and 'built to last.' Ursa Ag’s Doug Wilson told me that the company designed the tractor because of a need in the marketplace for a new machine that isn’t loaded with tech and is easy to maintain. The company follows in the footsteps of consumer electronics companies like #Fairphone, which makes a repairable smartphone and #Framework, which makes modular, repairable #laptops. The demand Ursa Ag has seen is part of the backlash to manufacturer repair #monopolies and the injection of #technology and #InternetConnectedSensors and terms of use into even the most basic of gadgets.

" 'I talk to farmers every day and I hear from farmers every day about how they went out and bought machinery from 1987 so that it wouldn’t have a computer on it,' Wilson said. 'All of this came from a simple discussion with a customer who wanted to be able to turn [the tractor] on at the start of the day, to use it, and shut it off at the end of the day. It needed to work, so that’s what we built.'

"Ursa Ag’s tractor has been hyped in agriculture circles after Wilson showed the tractor off at a Canadian farm show and it was featured by Farms.com. Wilson said more than a thousand farmers have contacted him after that show, from roughly 30 countries. 'I got a handwritten letter from a farmer in France who doesn’t own a computer and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors,' he said."

Read more:
https://www.404media.co/demand-is-booming-for-ursa-ag-new-no-tech-repairable-tractor/

#SolarPunkSunday #LowTech #LoTech #RightToRepair #Farmers