USA, March 2026.

Photo by Etienne Laurent / AFP / Getty

LAPD officers arrest a protester dressed as Lady Liberty in chains during the “No Kings” national day of protest in Los Angeles on March 28, 2026.

#USpol #Liberty #Photography #NoKings

One thing that continues to grate on my conscience about #AI is how artists and writers consistently feel that the technology has STOLEN from them. We all know that web scraping is (and should be) a perfectly legal and acceptable use, because preventing it also prevents all sorts of beneficial behaviors—the Internet Archive wouldn’t be able to exist, for one thing.

But yet, the very nature of AI takes scraped content and regurgitates it as a pink-slime extrusion that it feeds back into the web. And to creators, that just FEELS WRONG; it feels like stolen valor, it feels like exploitation.

And it’s something I can’t (and shouldn’t) shake from my mind each time I see something made by AI. Just because something is LEGAL doesn’t mean it isn’t ABUSIVE and UNETHICAL. Scolding people who complain about AI by telling them that web scraping is good, actually, doesn’t address the main complaint: that somehow, these AI assholes have EXPLOITED A COMMON GOOD and we can’t quite figure out how to stop it.

RE: https://sfba.social/@drahardja/116311524946860153

the recent “clean room implementation” tools really hammered this home for me.

generated images always felt icky because visual. code felt more diffuse and less emotional for me. even though the process is the same.

but now #FOSS projects can be targeted and stripped of author, copyright, and effort with a single command.

Economic cargo cults

One thing that never ceases to fascinate me:

Small, thoroughly unremarkable companies try to emulate wildly successful ones by copying some tertiary, sometimes even actively annoying property.

Take Apple and its near-religious obsession with packaging. Their boxes are sturdy, elegant, and engineered with the kind of care normally reserved for spacecraft or Swiss watches.

So naturally, companies selling $9.99 gadgets have concluded that this is the secret sauce. Not the product. Not the ecosystem. Not the brand. No, clearly it’s the box.

What they fail to realize is that I keep an iPhone box because the device inside retains resale value. The packaging is essentially a reusable shipping container with aspirations.

The cheap gadget, on the other hand, has the resale value of an expired, half-eaten sandwich. Its box is therefore not a feature but a long-term storage problem. A nearly indestructible one. I suspect some of these packages will outlive civilization and be excavated by future archaeologists, who will conclude that we worshipped mediocre Bluetooth speakers.

Another favorite is the imitation of Google’s customer interaction model, or rather, the strategic absence of it.

Companies observe that Google doesn’t talk to its customers and infer that this must be part of the winning formula. What they miss is that Google succeeds despite this, not because of it. When you control half the internet, you can afford to be aloof. When you sell niche SaaS to 50 customers in a easily offended corner of Germany, less so.

Yet here we are, with companies proudly offering the full “Google experience”: no support, no accountability, and a contact form that disappears into a small, silent void, presumably to be studied later by theoretical physicists.

It’s a bit like copying the table manners of a king while lacking both the kingdom and the food.

I suppose this is the corporate equivalent of a cargo cult: build the runway, light the torches, and hope that success will land.

Do you see those as well?

It's not getting enough attention that the Trump administration has banned the sale of ALL WiFi routers made outside of the US. It's one of the first steps required to control Americans' use of the Internet, to spy on what you're doing online, to suppress information they don't want you to see and to even turn off the Internet at their discretion.

This is looking increasingly like a trap.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/trump-fcc-prohibits-import-and-sale-of-new-wi-fi-routers-made-outside-us/