Blurblogs
Global
Popular
Log in
Michael's Shares
Resident of the world, traveling the road of life
69604 stories
·
21 followers

Pluralistic: Amazon achieves enshittification inception (04 Sep 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Sunday September 6th, 2026 at 8:26 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
1 Share


Today's links


Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Conjuror,' a painting depicting a medieval con artist playing a shell game for an audience of astonished peasant rubes. The image has been altered: the conman now has Jeff Bezos's grinning head, and the mouths of all the peasants have been replaced with inverted Amazon 'Smile' logos, so they are now frowning.

Amazon achieves enshittification inception (permalink)

Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money.

Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods.

This means that it costs Amazon itself nothing to get the merchandise it sells to your door: more than 100% of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon is covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who compete with Amazon in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit).

Then there's AWS, Amazon's cloud business. This is another extraordinary success story: every company needs servers, and that's especially true of an e-commerce company like Amazon. By building more servers than it needs, Amazon transformed its own data infrastructure from a cost center into another profit center. Amazon's customers – many of whom are also its competitors – pay Amazon so much to rent space on its servers that Amazon gets its own (prodigious) computing for free, and realizes a profit on top of that.

Taken on their own, these two facts constitute an extraordinary business story: one of the largest corporations in the history of the world has converted its two largest cost centers into profit centers, and those profits are substantially generated by extracting payments from the company's own competitors!

Amazon's logistics and cloud computing are extraordinary, but they are eclipsed by the company's most profitable line of business, which is payola.

"Payola" is a word that old people like me just barely have context for and for anyone under fifty the word is likely a mystery, so a brief explanation is in order.

"Payola" comes from a massive 1950s scandal over bribes that record labels paid to radio DJs and station managers to play their music. Radio stations were given the use of a scarce and precious resource – exclusive control over slices of the only electromagnetic spectrum in the universe – and were expected to program material that the American public would find enjoyable, edifying and educational. In this system, radio stations were expected to make shrewd guesses about the music the public would enjoy the most, and play that.

Because the selection process for the music that DJs played on the American public's spectrum was completely opaque, and because those selections could make fortunes for record labels, the system was ripe for corruption. Labels slipped literal envelopes full of cash and drugs ("payola") into the hands of DJs, station managers and owners, bribing them to turn songs into "hits" by cramming them into Americans' ears. The biggest predictor of a radio hit wasn't whether people liked the song so much that the stations rushed to play it, but rather, how much the labels were willing to spend in bribes to get their song played:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

This was a bad system all around. The American public got worse music. Musicians' own royalties were eroded by the label accountants' practice of charging off bribes to "promotions" they deducted from artists' royalty statements. Radio stations sucked. Labels bid away each other's margins, depriving themselves of operating capital to find and record new music and starving them of free cash flow to pay to musicians, employees and shareholders. As with every instance of corruption, this was a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses, which is why it continued for so long (decades!) and got so bad before anyone took action to end it.

Amazon's payola isn't about radio play – it's about search. When you search Amazon, the top results do not represent Amazon's best guess about what product will best match your query: rather, Amazon auctions off those top results to its platform sellers. Amazon's search results reflect who paid the biggest bribe, not who has the best product.

To pay for those bribes, platform sellers have to raise prices. Amazon helps them do this, by imposing a "most favored nation" clause on its sellers that requires them to sell on Amazon at a price that matches or beats the price charged everywhere else (Target, Walmart, a mom-n-pop, or the factory store):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing

Thus, Amazon imposes an economy-wide tax on nearly every product you buy. Amazon's junk fees average 51-60% of the purchase price of the things you buy there, and because Amazon has captured a supermajority of the richest 10% of Americans (who have almost all pre-paid for a year's shipping through Prime), every seller must sell on Amazon, or forego any hope of selling to most of the country's most prolific shoppers.

Any seller who signs up for Amazon is agreeing to turn over the majority of their sales income to Amazon, and any seller who raises prices to recoup those sums, must raise prices everywhere, at every retail outlet in the country.

AI has made Amazon much better at enforcing Most Favored Nation terms, because AI is actually pretty good at parsing competitors' websites and finding instances of discounting, which Amazon instantaneously punishes by relegating the sellers' product listings to page umpty-billion of Amazon's search results.

There are plenty of junk fees that go into Amazon's 51-60% rake. A large slice comes from fees Amazon charges for access to its (very profitable) logistics system. Failure to use Amazon's fulfillment system also relegates your listings to the dregs of Amazon search results, so sellers pay a massive premium to have their parcels delivered by Amazon, to the exclusion of cheaper alternatives that are just as fast and reliable. That's why Amazon fulfillment is so profitable!

While the Amazon tax is extracted through several types of junk fee, the most profitable junk fee of them all is Amazon's search payola. In fact, search payola is the most profitable business that Amazon operates, full stop.

Payola accounts for more of Amazon's profits than anything else the company does. It's more profitable than all the things Amazon sells directly. It's more profitable than AWS, Amazon's industry-leading cloud service.

Amazon has created a system where the most sales go to the companies that pay the highest bribes, and those companies pass the cost of those bribes onto their customers. The first item on a typical Amazon search results page is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The top row is 25% more expensive. The best result is usually on the second screen, somewhere around the 17th position:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Amazon actively helps its biggest bribers close the sale. Amazon has lots of "comparison shopping" systems built into the service, but one comparison tool is conspicuous by its absence: an "apples to apples" tool that lets you compare unit prices. Amazon's most prolific bribe-payers package their goods in weird quantities, selling everything from batteries to t-shirts to shampoo in larger or smaller quantities than their competitors. Sorting your search results by price doesn't actually tell you who's got the cheapest price per item, because the company with the cheapest AA batteries might be selling a smaller quantity of batteries at a higher price per battery.

Per-unit pricing is standard in retail. Indeed, if you go into a(n Amazon-owned) Whole Foods, you'll find per-unit pricing on the shelf tags, telling you how much the product costs per ounce or fluid ounce. Amazon clearly understands why shoppers would want to compare unit pricing, but offering a per-unit sort option to its search would make the bribery racket a lot less effective, because searchers could just sort by unit price and find the best bargain.

Let me remind you: payola is Amazon's single largest source of profits. When I was researching Enshittification, Amazon's take from payola was in the mid-$30 billion. A year later, when I did tour stops with Tim Wu (who was promoting his excellent book The Age of Extraction), I learned that this number had climbed to more than $50 billion. This year, it's on track to top $80 billion.

Amazon calls this bribery system an "advertising" product, but it's not "advertising" in the sense of the ads that Amazon's platform sellers might have once placed in the local newspaper. It's payola, more akin to the practice of packaged goods companies buying end-caps and whole shelves in the grocery store (a practice that is, in its own way, every bit as corrosive, though no grocery store has Amazon's economy-wide chokehold).

But there is a way in which this payola can be compared to advertising: it competes with advertising. Back in the old days, before a series of K-shaped recoveries created a vast chasm between America's haves and have-nots; before Amazon captured the majority of well-off American households with Prime; people shopped in lots of places, and in those days, companies advertised in publications, not on Amazon. Websites, newspapers, and newspaper websites made billions from those ads. Amazon's payola scheme (along with Google, Facebook and other tech monopolists) have captured almost all of that money.

As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by all the newspapers in the world by 300%. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers.

This is pure enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the most successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive even as it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses – and once again, it's the most profitable thing Amazon does.

And then…Amazon made it worse.

You know how people like to say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product?" It's bullshit. The "advertisers" who bribe Amazon for top search placement are the customers here, they're "paying for the product," and they are getting reamed. I don't just mean they're getting screwed by being forced to shell out payola – I mean that Amazon is cheating them on that payola!

Remember: Amazon doesn't just sell search placement; they auction it. Every time you run an Amazon search, the company conducts a special kind of auction called a "sealed-bid second-price auction" (SBSPA):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction

Under an SBSPA, bidders secretly tell the auctioneer the very highest price they're willing to pay. The auctioneer then charges the highest bidder a price equal to the second-highest bid, plus one cent.

This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but it's actually a clever solution to one of the major problems with traditional, "open call" auctions (where bidders call out the prices they're willing to pay until one bid emerges victorious). Say you're at an open call auction where the top bid is $10. You can call out $11, and then the other person will call out $12, and so on and so on. It's tedious and time-consuming. That's bad enough when you're at an estate auction that's unloading hundreds of items, but it's untenable for an eyeblink auction meant to determine search results that the user expects to get in an instant.

In physical auctions the top bidder often clobbers other bidders with a big increase – going from $10 to $50, say. This can end the auction quickly, but it means that the high bidder often overpays for their purchase.

In an SBSPA, every bidder enters their highest price, but none of the other bidders know what that price is. This encourages everyone to name their true highest price, but it protects the top bidder in the instance in which they are willing to pay a much higher price than anyone else.

Say you're that person who raises the bidding from $10 to $50 – you have no way of knowing whether the other bidders would have dropped out at $15 or at $45. If you were the only person who was willing to pay more than $15 for the item, you've just vastly overpaid (by $34.99). But in an SBSPA, you name your true price, but you only pay the price you would have paid if you'd gone through the tedious, expensive, time-consuming process of an open call auction.

Amazon's search auctions are SBSPAs. A merchant tells Amazon the maximum they're willing to pay to be at the top of the search results for a given query, but they pay a price equal to the second-highest bid, plus one cent. This lets auctions run so quickly that they can be used as the basis for ordering a search results page.

That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. The FTC and 22 states just filed a suit against Amazon because Amazon was cheating on its own SBSPA process:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-states-sue-amazon-over-secret-ad-surcharge-scheme

Over the past 7 years, Amazon has been secretly charging the winning bidder an amount equal to their own sealed bid, not the amount that the next-highest bidder was willing to pay (plus a penny):

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-sues-amazon-for-allegedly-duping-advertisers-2000805199

According to the suit, Amazon did this 80% of the time. That is tens of billions of dollars Amazon extracted from platform sellers, who passed those costs onto you, and onto every other retailer in the country (thanks to AI-enforced Most Favored Nation policies).

Amazon's defense is that this is all a big misunderstanding. Platform sellers just didn't understand how a SBSPA worked. Amazon has a special kind of SBSPA where they could unilaterally and secretly charge the winning bidder the maximum price they'd pledged, if, in Amazon's judgment, the closing price for the auction was below "the true market value of the ad placement":

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/ftc-alleges-amazon-illegally-made-20-billion-by-rigging-billions-of-ad-auctions/

This is darkly hilarious. The whole point of an auction is to determine "true market value." That's why neoclassical economists worship auctions as the world's best form of "price discovery" and why economics Nobels are awarded for "auction design":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory

The definition of "true market value" is "the closing price in an auction." Amazon claiming that it secretly jacked people because the auction generated a price that was "below the true market value" of an ad tells you that the whole business is a sham. The point of Amazon's payola scheme is only and ever a way to parasitically extract the maximum amount a platform seller is willing to part with, and by running a fake SBSPA, Amazon was able to trick its customers into revealing those maximum prices.

Cheating on a bribery scheme is a mood. This isn't just enshittification, it's enshittification inception. Amazon managed to enshittify their own enshittification!

This case was brought by Trump's FTC, which means that Amazon can get out of it by paying a chud podcaster to tweet at the president and he'll order them to drop it, just like he did with Ticketmaster:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

But – just as with Ticketmaster – the feds aren't the only parties to the suit. With 22 AGs ("Aspiring Governors") on the suit, there's a chance this will go to trial. We might even learn the identity of the inventor of this enshittification-squared gambit, a veritable Louis Pasteur of enshittification. Assuming that person doesn't go to prison, the Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne can give that sloshing, ambulatory pile of hot liquid garbage a Nobel Prize in Economics.

(Image: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Electrolite relaunches https://web.archive.org/web/20010927195348/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/electrolite.html

#25yrsago How to play Mafia https://web.archive.org/web/20011113011546/http://www.stud.ntnu.no/studorg/mafia/

#20yrsago How Wikipedia entries get written http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

#5yrsago Proctorio's awful reviews disappear down the memory hole https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (11893 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Read the whole story
mkalus
15 hours ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete

Grey Skies by Michael Kalus
Saturday September 5th, 2026 at 7:38 PM

Uploads from Michael Kalus
1 Share

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Grey Skies



Read the whole story
mkalus
1 day ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete

Noodle Therapy / The Dip (Video) by Ryan Griffin
Friday September 4th, 2026 at 1:39 PM

Blog - A STRANGELY ISOLATED PLACE
1 Share
 

It’s been lovely seeing Noodle Therapy’s Field Notes find a way into people’s listening habits since its release in June. It’s evidently a record people are returning to, calling a favorite of the year (!) and seemingly finding a bit of comfort in its approach.

Previously just a 60-second teaser, we have an extended video into Noodle Therapy’s world today, with the full version of The Dip. Co-written with Dennis White (1/3rd of Quiet Places), it’s one of the album’s more abstract and mysterious tracks, and a nice example of the curiosity and experimentation that runs throughout the album.

The video features footage shot near Noodle Therapy’s (Dan’s) home in Brighton, with Dan taking care of the filming, editing, and direction himself.

 

Read the whole story
mkalus
2 days ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete

The Slow Demolition of Vancouver by Michael Kalus
Thursday September 3rd, 2026 at 9:34 AM

Michael Kalus.ca
2 Shares
The Slow Demolition of Vancouver

The Vancouver Aquatic Centre closed its doors for good in June 2026. By this fall, the building will be gone. Demolition equipment is already lined up — the city approved a $3.5 million contract to knock it down in July, per the council's own project report.

The building is fifty years old.

Read that again. Fifty. The Aquatic Centre opened in 1976, the year the CRTC said yes to curling on television and I was two years old. It is not a ruin. It is not a safety hazard. It is a building that somebody decided, at some point, was cheaper to demolish than to paint.

And the thing that troubles me about it isn't even the building itself. It's what the decision tells us about Vancouver — because the aquatic centre is just the most visible symptom of a disease the whole city shares.

We Used to Build Things That Lasted

If you think I'm exaggerating, read the city's own paperwork. The Current State Report that accompanies Vancouver's community centre strategy — the city grading its own homework — finds that over half of the community centre inventory is rated "poor" or "very poor" on the Facility Condition Index.

Britannia, Marpole-Oakridge, Ray-Cam, and the West End centre are all in various stages of renewal planning. Hastings Community Centre scores a facility condition of nearly 26% — firmly "poor" — and carries a high seismic risk rating, in an earthquake zone, while ABC forces through budgets that save the millionaire homeowners a few dollars a month.

Then, in September 2025, the city's Auditor General made it official. His audit covered the 46 recreation facilities the ParkBoard operates — 24 community centres, 14 pools, eight rinks — and put a number on the neglect: a funding deficit of $33 million per year, part of a citywide infrastructure deficit the AG pegs at $500 million per year.

That's not a rounding error. That's a city choosing, annually, not to keep its own buildings alive.

The Aquatic Centre didn't crumble. It was allowed to fail — a slow, budgeted neglect over decades, ending with a press release about exciting new waterfront opportunities.

The Shell Game

Here's where it gets really fun. In 2014, the city took over building maintenance for the Park Board's facilities under a formal agreement. The buildings, the boilers, the leaky roofs — that became the city's job. And ever since, the city's favourite talking point has been that the Park Board hasn't done enough to keep facilities up to date.

The Auditor General, with the patience of a man who has read all the contracts, notes that while the 2014 agreement exists, there is no operating-level agreement that actually defines who is responsible for what. A decade of shared maintenance duties, no written division of labour, and endless mutual finger-pointing.

I keep reading that sentence hoping it will make sense eventually. The city holds the wrench. The city blames the other hand for having no holes in its pocket. It's like watching someone burn down a kitchen and then complaining the chef isn't cooking fast enough.

The Slow Demolition of Vancouver
Vancouver Aquatic Centre

Zero Means Zero

So why does a city with one of the healthiest downtowns in North America have community centres held together with caulking? Because Vancouver underfunds itself. Deliberately.

Our property tax rate is the lowest in the entire metro area (compare it yourself) — lower than Burnaby, lower than Surrey, lower than every suburb that supposedly envies us.

We've been treating that as a badge of honour for decades instead of what it is: a fifteen-year-olds'-homework understanding of how municipal finance works. Low taxes aren't free. They compound, just like interest — except what compounds is the repair backlog.

And the current response to all this is a budget branded "Zero means Zero," which sounds decisive until you notice that the zero applies to tax increases and not to the crumbling. A tax freeze in a city with a $500 million annual infrastructure deficit isn't fiscal discipline. It's a demolition order with extra steps. You don't save the money; you just spend it later, at demolition-contract prices.

The Auditor General, again and to his credit, says the quiet part out loud: if these gaps aren't bridged with taxpayer funding, the city will have to choose which assets it keeps and which it "decommissions" — which services it simply discontinues.

Vancouver has apparently made its choice. Ask anyone who used to swim laps at the Aquatic Centre.

Who Actually Runs the Parks?

Meanwhile, the Park Board has developed a habit of signing contracts with private operators that read like they were negotiated by the operator. No rent — instead, the concessionaire pays a percentage of revenue. Sounds reasonable. It isn't. If your income is a slice of the pie, your incentive is control of the bakery, and you've paid nothing for the oven. That arrangement means for the operators of the Prospect Point Cafe if they dislikes what the Park Board is doing — say, don’t fancy a bike lane passing their business — they can simply shut the doors and wait for the city to blink.

Which, during the Stanley Park bike lane fight, is more or less what happened. A public street in a public park was effectively held hostage by the terms of a lease the public's own board signed.

Destinations, Not Cities

And then there's the philosophy underneath all of it. The Aquatic Centre replacement is the case study.

Back in 2022, Vancouverites voted in favour of borrowing $103 million for the renewal of the Vancouver Aquatic Centre — Bylaw 13442, if you want to read the fine print yourself.

Now, the ballot question itself was lawyerly about it — the wording covered "replacement, renewal or rehabilitation," a spread broad enough to drive a zamboni through.

But nobody has to guess what voters thought they were buying, because the city's own information sheet for the plebiscitespelled it out: the proposed first phase would focus on renewing the existing 50-metre lap pool and diving pool.

The 50-metre pool was the product on the shelf. That's what the brochure said. That's what people voted for.

What the city is now delivering is a 25-metre pool. Half the length. The response to "this isn't what we were told" is essentially a shrug about modern construction costs and the desire to create yet another destination by adding a water park feature to the centre.

Notice what survived the value-engineering process and what didn't. A destination on the waterfront — render-ready, ribbon-cuttable, great for tourism brochures — fits the budget. A genuine 50-metre facility, the thing the city's own materials promised as phase one, does not.

The community was sold infrastructure. The city is delivering an attraction. And this is exactly the trap the ballot wording built: borrow against a promise vague enough to mean anything, then let the meaning shrink in private, after the votes are counted. The lawyers were careful. The swimmers weren't consulted twice.

The same logic produced another example: at English Bay, the concession stand was replaced with a Cactus Club restaurant. A chain restaurant in a public park, on public land, and then — of course — the concession portion promptly closed, because the restaurant would rather you sit down and pay table prices. We traded cheap beach food for a table minimum.

Destinations photograph well. Maintenance does not. But a city is made of Tuesdays, not grand openings — of the swim lane at 6 a.m., the bench you sit on, the parent paying four dollars for a hot dog after soccer practice.

Vancouver keeps optimizing for the photograph and tourist.

What This Says About Us

The Vancouver Aquatic Centre is fifty years old and we're tearing it down. Not because it failed, but because letting it fail was cheaper than maintaining it, and because a replacement gives someone a ribbon to cut — provided the ribbon can be attached to something a little smaller than what was promised.

Zoom out and you can see the pattern: buildings we don't repair, mandates we quietly shrink, revenue we sign away, blame we redirect, and taxes we refuse to collect.

Vancouver likes to think of itself as a green, livable, world-class city.

World-class cities fund their libraries, their pools, and their community centres.

What the Aquatic Centre tells us is that we've become very good at the branding and very bad at the boring part. The wrecking balls are coming for the pool this fall. Judging by the state of the rest of the city, they'll have plenty more to do after.

The next municipal election is on Saturday, October 17, 2026.

Sources

Read the whole story
mkalus
4 days ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete

A16z Says You Actually Love Social Media, Enshittification Isn’t Real by Emanuel Maiberg
Wednesday September 2nd, 2026 at 6:03 PM

404 Media
2 Shares
A16z Says You Actually Love Social Media, Enshittification Isn’t Real

Yesterday a16z published an article in which NYU Professor of Design, AI and Media Theory Ruby Thelot argued that “enshittification,” or the concept that technology platforms get worse after they lock in users, isn’t real. In reality, Thelot says, people use social media more than ever and report that they are satisfied with it. 

Thelot argues that, enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctrow which has become one of the stickiest ideas of our era to explain the current state of technology and capitalism, is a misdiagnosis of what he describes as “platform narcissism.” The idea is that people, namely older people like Doctrow and western geratric millennials who used to get a lot of value out of Facebook, selfishly think platforms should continue to cater to their needs even though they aged out of them and should be focused on raising their kids. The platforms are actually popular and well liked, but by younger people who are using Instagram and deriving value from it in a way older people can’t understand, or by people in other countries and contexts than their own. Additionally, Thelot argues, the theory of enshittification allows users who should log off an excuse to stay on platforms that it is fashionable to hate. They spend time there, but say they hate it and can’t leave because they are trapped. 

“Perhaps the reason why the platform seems worse is because your life has changed,” Thelot says. “Over the same period of time, your goals have changed, and they no longer fit with the platform’s new features. Why the hell would a fifty-five year-old be watching Reels? Go take care of your kids.”

The indisputable fact of Thelot’s argument is that various social media platforms have more users and are more profitable than ever. This data is readily available from reliable market surveys, polls, and quarterly earning reports from the companies themselves. It’s important to note that companies like Meta have a history of juking the numbers, and that despite this it recently reported its first ever decline of 20 million users, but Thelot’s point stands: Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are massively popular. 

I will also cosign Thelot’s advice that people should log off. There are many reasons why some people can’t, present company included, but it’s never not good advice and even if you have to be on social media you can probably reduce your time scrolling. 

Thelot’s argument falls apart when he tries to prove people are actually satisfied with their time on these platforms. To prove this, he points to research from American Customer Satisfaction Index, a private company which surveys customers’ satisfaction with various products and services. In its ACSI Entertainment Study 2026 it surveyed 30,886 customers and found that overall satisfaction with social media rose by 1 percent to a score of 75 out of 100. If satisfaction with social media is rising instead of falling and doesn’t have a terrible score, it’s doing the opposite of enshittifying and people don’t actually hate it, he argues.

Kudos to Thelot for finding data that appears to contradict the human civilization-wide backlash to social media and nearly the only political issue that a deeply divided country can agree on, but this is cherry picking. 

Here are the type things customers are asked to evaluate with a score of 0-100 in the survey this rising satisfaction score for social media: “Quality of mobile app, reliability of mobile app (minimal down time, crashes, lags), loading speed and reliability, ease of navigation, ease of using the site on different devices, speed and reliability of video clips, variety of services and information, freshness of content, relevance of content, ability to use site without disruption, personal relevance of ads seen.”

Customers scored all these aspects of social media highly (between 68 and 84), and I agree with their evaluation. Instagram loads really fast. I can scroll videos on TikTok very quickly. I watched one YouTube Short about Warhammer 40,000 lore, and then was served more than a dozen other YouTube Shorts about Warhammer 40,000 lore that were both fresh and relevant. I do not contest any of this and I don’t think that is why both my friends in the DSA and my Trump supporting family members agree that Instagram is bad. 

If we wanted to find out why Americans have negative feelings about social media or why we think these platforms are enshittifying, we might ask questions like: Does using Instagram make you feel good? Do you think children younger than 13 should have unlimited access to TikTok? Has Facebook been a net positive for your family?

Let’s look at some other data. A recent survey from The Searchlight institute found that voters “overwhelmingly believe social media has a negative impact on society.” Last year, anEmerson College poll found that Americans have low confidence in information they get from social media and that social media platforms are most responsible for the creation of “fake news.” In 2021, the Cato Institute found that 75 percent of Americans don’t trust social media to make fair content moderation decisions. In August, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that three in five Americans support stronger oversight of social media companies. 35 percent said social media stressed them out. 52 percent said they spend too much time on social media. A Pew poll in July found that 6 in 10 Americans supported a social media ban for kids under 16. 

These opinions, especially as they relate to the impact social media has on younger people, has nothing to do with how fast videos load on Instagram or how effective the ads are. The apps function well technically and the ads are making money, this is self-evident and the reason we have a problem. The reason people feel like social media is enshittifying is that these companies promised to connect people across the world but in reality have chased engagement, catering to basest the human urges to hold our attention. Kids especially feel socially pressured to use these apps because that’s what every other kid is doing and where they feel their community is. It is such a clearly awful and obvious result of the way these apps have enshittified that in August Meta agreed to pay $17 billion dollars in penalties and finally curb the most dangerous aspects of its platforms over claims it endangered children. 

People need to be on Linkedin to find jobs. Municipalities and news organizations share important updates on social media first. You might be pulled onto Facebook or WhatsApp against your will because your local school or community of parents congregate there. That doesn’t mean they like it. It is possible to hate something with your entire being and still participate in it.

There are Warhammer and cute cat videos, but every scroll is a spin of a slot machine that cycles between hate, fear, jealousy, disgust, and horniness. We all see it and no amount of pro big tech propaganda, funded by the same firm that invested in these companies is going to convince anyone otherwise. 

Read the whole story
mkalus
4 days ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete

The Republican Nominee for New York Governor Made a Creepy, AI-Generated Video of Mamdani and Hochul by Samantha Cole
Wednesday September 2nd, 2026 at 6:03 PM

404 Media
1 Share
The Republican Nominee for New York Governor Made a Creepy, AI-Generated Video of Mamdani and Hochul

Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, posted an AI-generated video imagining New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul hanging out, bizarrely gardening together, riding bikes, and vaguely colluding about making the state unaffordable.

".@KathyHochul and @ZohranKMamdani think they can cure New York’s cost-of-living crisis with excuses, empty promises, and 'delusion pills.' The real side effects of their policies aren't a joke: 48 utility rate hikes, higher taxes, uncontrollable government spending, and businesses fleeing our state every single day," Blakeman wrote in the post on Tuesday. "I have a different plan for New York. As Governor, I will deliver zero state income tax on your first $50,000, $100,000 for joint filers, cut your utility bills in half, and end the government waste." 

ABC News10 reported that the New York State Democratic Party filed a complaint asking the Board of Elections to investigate Blakeman's use of AI in political communication materials, claiming that he's violating the state's election law that requires "materially deceptive" content to be labeled as AI-generated. 

x.com

The law states: "A person, firm, association, corporation, campaign, committee, or organization that distributes or publishes any political communication that was produced by or includes materially deceptive media and has actual knowledge that it is materially deceptive shall be required to disclose this use." The law requires a disclosure displayed directly on the media in an easily readable font saying, "This (image, video, or audio) has been manipulated."

The law carves out exceptions for "satire or parody." Blakeman seems to be invoking that clause, and told News10 that he thinks people like it. “People find it humorous. They like satire,” he said. “We’ve been using humor and satire in politics since the inception of our nation 250 years ago.”

In January, Hochul said she'd move to ban AI generated depictions of candidates in political ads within 90 days of an election. In 2025, disgraced New York governor and then-mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo's official campaign account posted an AI-generated video that showed a barrage of racist, Islamophobic stereotypes, including of his then-opponent for mayor, Mamdani. That video was labeled as AI. 

About Blakeman's AI video, Hochul’s campaign told News 10 in a statement: “While Blakeman’s resorted to straight up lying to New Yorkers, Team Hochul doesn’t need AI ads to tell them about him jacking up property taxes on Long Islanders more than once, letting violent crime hit decade highs on his watch, or running an armed MAGA militia that undercuts local cops – he did all that in real life.”

If elected, Blakeman says he'll end New York's status as a sanctuary state and increase the state's collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In 2024, as Nassau County Executive, Blakeman signed a bill, which he wrote, into law that banned transgender athletes from playing in women and girls' sports at county-owned athletic facilities. In 2025, courts halted that law in response to the New York Civil Liberties Union's legal challenge calling it a violation of antidiscrimination laws. 

Read the whole story
mkalus
4 days ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories