"For proponents, the initiatives offer the opportunity to address all that they believe has caused a decline in American dynamism, from monetary policy to taxation. San Francisco, in particular, has for years been affected by high levels of homelessness and crime, prompting an exodus of tech workers during Covid.

“It’s young people being dissatisfied with stagnation, corruption and isolation,” says Amjad Masad, chief executive of AI coding company Replit, who has observed the rise of the network state movement. Last year, he moved Replit to Foster City — a master-planned city built in the 1960s on marshlands near Silicon Valley — to escape what he described as the “suffering on the streets” of San Francisco. “Young people are clearly yearning to discover new ways of living and building through technology,” he adds.

But the movement’s toughest critics — of whom there is no short supply — cast it as either a bid to play god or an attempt to avoid red tape, more opportunistic than idealistic. Others argue it is part of a broader rise in techno-fascism, or a form of authoritarian rule by technocrats. Either way, they assert, the movement is born from an elite victim complex.

Thiel, who has a net worth of $27bn and is one of the biggest funders of the space, gave a series of Manichaean lectures in recent weeks about the “Antichrist”. In between arguing that AI sceptics and Greta Thunberg were Satan, he complained that wealth gives the “illusion of power and autonomy but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment”.

“Can you imagine being that rich and that miserable?” says Olivier Jutel, a lecturer at the University of Otago in New Zealand and an expert in cyberlibertarianism. “They think they are the grand solutionists that can fix all the problems, but it’s so insular. But just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean it won’t inherit the Earth.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/b127ee7a-5ac4-4730-a395-c9f9619615c7?shareType=nongift

#Cyberlibertarianism #SiliconValley #NetworkStates #Technocracy #Technofeudalism

The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. | Aaron Bastani Meets Cory Doctorow

Novara Media

#enshittification #BigTech #monopolies
#technofeudalism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY

Some months ago I decided that migrating my systems from Microsoft to a Linux OS is the next step in my quest to loosen techno-feudalism's grip on my life. Thought I'd start small with my ancient Netbook so as not to be without (read: screw up) my desktop for too long...

So, after a morning down the Linux rabbit hole, I'm facing an install (correct term?) of a tiny dispo (learning new words) that'll run on my 32-bit, 1.00 GB system. I figure, if I can make that work, migrating my newer desktop system will be a cinch.

#enshitification #technofeudalism #linux #noob #noobs #escapefrommeta #escapegoogle

Destroying Autocracy – December 04, 2025

Welcome to this week’s “Destroying Autocracy”.

It’s your source for curated news affecting democracy in the cyber arena with a focus on protecting it. That necessitates an opinionated Butlerian jihad against big tech as well as evangelizing for open-source and the Fediverse. Since big media’s journalism wing is flailing and failing in its core duty to democracy, this is also a collection of alternative reporting on the eternal battle between autocracy and democracy. We also cover the cybersecurity world. You can’t be free without safety and privacy.

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ’em.

The Programmer’s Fulcrum is the future (and smaller) home for a fusion of Symfony Station and Battalion. Its tagline is Devs Defending Democracy, Developing the OMN.

You can sign up now and for 2025 get an email with links to each week’s Symfony Station Communiqué and Battalion “Destroying Autocracy” post along with their featured articles. And you’ll be set with TPF after the fusing in January.

We are posting on the Fediverse now at @thefulcrum @thefulcrum.dev and original website content will start next month.

Featured Item(s)

Hamish Campbell writes:

ActivityPub is a shared vocabulary, a public language for moving meaning and connection across the open web. It gives you nouns and verbs, and the community defines the grammar through lived use.

This is why the OMN works with ActivityPub, a metadata and meaning layer, not a platform, flows, not silos. ActivityPub is the widely deployed 4 Opens protocol that treats publishing as a flow, a conversation.

Unlike the more vertical stacks (ATProto is a good example), ActivityPub doesn’t force a worldview. It doesn’t tell you, “this is how your network must be structured.” It doesn’t enforce hierarchy or lock you into one interpretation of identity, authority, or workflow. It’s a KISS path – here’s a shared language, verbs for publishing and receiving, express objects, updates, relationships. The rest is up to the commons.

This flexibility is exactly why the OMN can become a part of this flow.

Why the OMN works with ActivityPub – And why we need a bridge to p2p

We start and end with good news to make the middle bearable.

The response to Russia’s War Crimes, Techno Feudalism, and other douchebaggery

DDEV has:

Power Through Blackouts: How DDEV Community Helped Me in Ukraine

TechPolicy Press shares:

How to Test New York’s Algorithmic Pricing Law

The EU’s Digital Omnibus Must Be Rejected by Lawmakers. Here is Why.

Singapore announced an:

Issuance of Implementation Directives to Apple and Google Under the Online Criminal Harms Act

The MIT Press Reader has:

The Secret History of Tor: How a Military Project Became a Lifeline for Privacy

The Guardian reports:

Irish authorities asked to investigate Microsoft over alleged unlawful data processing by IDF

Elon Musk’s X fined €120m by EU in first clash under new digital laws

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

After Years of Controversy, the EU’s Chat Control Nears Its Final Hurdle: What to Know

FSFE announces:

Opening the cage: the FSFE flies away from X (Twitter)

Better late than never and what anyone with any morality should do.

Signal announces:

Major expansion of Signal for Linux, announces AppImage

TechCrunch reports:

Chicago Tribune sues Perplexity

The Center for Democracy and Technology announces:

A Framework for Assessing AI Transparency in the Public Sector

Collabora announces:

Collabora Online now available on Desktop

Neutral

TechPolicy Press reports:

What the European Commission and Civil Society Both Get Wrong on the Digital Omnibus

Why Platforms Don’t Catch Climate Misinformation — and How to Change That

EuroNews asks:

Which European countries are building their own sovereign AI to compete in the tech race?

Numerama reports:

Mistral AI dévoile Mistral 3 et Ministral : des modèles qui replacent la France sur la scène open source

TechCrunch reports:

Mistral closes in on Big AI rivals with new open-weight frontier and small models

Wired reports:

The Age-Gated Internet Is Sweeping the states. Activists Are Fighting Back.

The Evil Empire (AKA Autocracy) Strikes Back

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They’re Doing

EDRi has:

Promises unkept: The EU-US Data Privacy Framework under fire

404 Media reports:

Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers to Build its Surveillance AI

TechCrunch reports:

Sanctioned spyware maker Intellexa had direct access to government espionage victims, researchers say

Pariah States

DarkReading reports:

Tomiris Unleashes ‘Havoc’ With New Tools, Tactics

DPRK’s ‘Contagious Interview’ Spawns Malicious Npm Package Factory

Student Sells Gov’t, University Sites to Chinese Actors

TechPolicy Press reports:

The Gulf’s AI Rise and the Risk of Entrenching Authoritarianism

The Register reports:

Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware

China using AI as ‘precision instrument’ of censorship and repression, at home and abroad

Big Media

Axios reports:

Fox News hires Palantir to build AI newsroom tools

Big surprise.

Nieman Lab reports:

Publishers will finally learn to truly value news creators

The OMN can greatly influence this trend.

The Ecologist shares:

‘We need a media consumers union’

This times 1,000.

Big Tech

The Guardian reports:

How big tech is creating its own friendly media bubble to ‘win the narrative battle online’

More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate

Anti-immigrant material among AI-generated content getting billions of views on TikTok

The question isn’t whether the AI bubble will burst – but what the fallout will be

BleepingComputer reports:

Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

Big surprise here. But, if you’re amoral enough to use it, you deserve all the privacy invading ads you get.

Google deletes X post after getting caught using a ‘stolen’ AI recipe infographic

Nature reports:

Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI

Wow.

404 Media reports:

Scientists Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Sway Elections

Current Affairs reports:

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself

Time reports:

Court Filings Allege Meta Downplayed Risks to Children and Misled the Public

National Review reports:

Meta Researchers Privately Compared Instagram to Addictive Drug, Bombshell Court Filing Shows

Wanna-be Big Tech

OMG Unbuntu has:

Mozilla’s ‘Rewiring’ to AI – Saving the Web or Saving Itself?

Cybersecurity/Privacy

TechCrunch reports:

European cops shut down crypto mixing website that helped launder 1.3B euros

DarkReading reports:

New Raptor Framework Uses Agentic Workflows to Create Patches

Bleeping Computer reports:

Fake Calendly invites spoof top brands to hijack ad manager accounts

The Register reports:

Microsoft quietly shuts down Windows shortcut flaw after years of espionage abuse

Fediverse

Coywolf has:

Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse

Ben Werdmuller shares:

Introducing Roundabout

Sean Coates explores:

The Fediverse and Content Creation: Monetization

Great and important stuff.

Ploum asks:

Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?

Wouldn’t the fix to this would be to show a larger version of a user’s profile image with text posts?

Connected Places has:

Fediverse Report – 145

FediForum shares:

FediForum/Fediverse Track at SFSCon, November 2025, in Bolzano, Italy

SVDJ has:

‘Stapje voor stapje de controle terugpakken’: hoe media hun publiek kunnen heroveren op Big Tech

Beautiful site design for a news website, btw.

Deemlog has a bizarre experiment:

Git as Federation Transport — Rethinking How Small Social Networks Talk to Each Other

Jose Murilo shares:

“Museus no Fediverso” – Apresentação do Ibram-Museus no 1º WebSocialBR

RSS

Planet Codigo has:

Mi solución RSS con software libre y autogestionado

Slightly Decentralized Social Media

TBD

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

• That’s it for this week. Please share this edition of Destroying Autocracy.
• Follow me on the Fediverse. Or this site via the button in the footer. Or via RSS. Or even our future home in 2026, if you want a head start.

Keep fighting!

Ringleader, Battalion
Reuben Walker
Follow me on the Fediverse

#ActivityPub #AI #Autocracy #BigJournalism #BigTech #Democracy #Fascism #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Roundabout #RSS #StopChina #StopIsrael #StopRedAmerica #StopRussia #SupportUkraine #TechnoAnarchism #TechnoFeudalism #Threads

https://battalion.mobileatom.net/?p=4147

Once again, Varoufakis elides the main distinctive feature of capitalism: Being a mode production aimed at capital accumulation through the exploitation of human labor...

"From this perspective, just as the Soviet Union was a feudal-like industrial society pretending to be a workers’ state, the United States today is performing a splendid impersonation of a technofeudal state, with repercussions that extend to every realm of state activity, including health services, education, the tax office, our borders and faraway battlefields.

In Ukraine and Gaza, and along our militarised borders, cloud capital is trained to extend its reach. Amazon’s AI tool Rekognition is used by law enforcement, including ICE, while Palantir’s vast surveillance software runs on Amazon’s cloud. Through Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google provide the Israeli military with advanced cloud and AI capabilities, reportedly enabling rapid, AI-driven targeting in Gaza with minimal human oversight.

Let us briefly return to the comparison with the early 20th century’s original monopolist capitalists. Whether we admire or abhor the Magnificent Seven’s stock market valuations, it is helpful to keep this in mind: the old capitalist giants, the “robber barons”, actually produced things. The new technofeudal lords produce a new social order. They have replaced the invisible hand of the market with the visible, algorithmic fist of the cloudalist.

Free-market enthusiasts have nothing to celebrate and much to regret. But it will take a brave soul amongst them to stare reality in the face. Just like pro-Soviet Marxists remained in denial that the Soviet experiment had failed for many years after 1991, so free-market ideologues refuse to see that capitalism begat a form of capital — cloud capital — that replaced markets with something out of the Soviet past. In the process, it has killed capitalism."

https://unherd.com/2025/12/big-tech-are-the-new-soviets/

#BigTech #Capitalism #Feudalism #Technofeudalism #SovietUnion #USSR

Christian Stöcker (⁠@chrisstoecker⁠) wie so oft auf den Punkt, diesmal beim Thema: wie Fake-Accounts und Bot-Farmen die Demokratie attackieren.

»Die Regierung Trump versucht gerade mit extremem Druck , Europa dazu zu bringen, die eigenen Regeln für digitale Plattformen zu lockern. […] Die EU sollte sich hier keinesfalls erpressen lassen. […] Was in den sozialen Medien derzeit passiert, ist weder harmlos noch irrelevant. Unsere Gesellschaften werden angegriffen […]«

https://www.spiegel.de/a-33964199-ac0f-4206-bf30-c134cb45e200

#SocialMedia #FakeNews #Propaganda #Demokratie #TechnoFeudalism #Faschisierung

"Amazon is a technofeudal rentier owning the digital infrastructure on which privateers, states and societies depend. Thankfully, there are signs of a pushback. The campaign that brings workers and citizens together every Black Friday – Make Amazon Pay – recognises this transformation. What began as a fight for workers’ rights has grown into a coalition of unions, climate campaigners, tax justice groups, digital rights advocates and migrant and Palestine solidarity networks. They understand that Amazon’s reach extends across logistics, finance, governance, ecological destruction, surveillance and war.

Its demands – decent wages, safe workplaces, collective bargaining, climate action, tax justice, curbs on Amazon’s vast water consumption, an end to its entanglement with surveillance agencies and military operations – are integrated. Together, they map the much needed unified resistance to technofeudal domination.

In the early decades of industrial capitalism, cross-border worker solidarity was hard. Today, the resistance to cloud capital can use its own tools to coordinate at planetary scale. Campaigns such as Make Amazon Pay offer a glimpse of the alliances required to confront our new cloudalist overlords. It may be only a beginning – but it is a hopeful one."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/27/amazon-capitalist-era-free-markets-age-technofeudalism

#Amazon #Monopolies #TechnoFeudalism #Oligopolies #Competition #Capitalism