Hier scheint endlich die Sonne, Djanzys neues Mixtape heißt „Frühlingserwachen“ und das passt ganz wunderbar zusammen. „Alternative Pop House“ nennt er den musikalischen Rahmen und auch dagegen ist nichts einzuwenden. Genießt die Sonne und hoffen wir, dass der Frühling nun auch wirklich erwacht.

01. Otto von Bismarck – Der Winter ist vorbei
02. Alex The Flipper – Classic (Augenwischer)
03. Liam Mockridge – Elevator Man Reprise
04. Say Yes Dog – Focus
05. KILNAMANA – Kill the Kool
06. KUOKO – Perfect Girl (Erobique Remix)
07. Rikas – Picasso
08. Jay Pop – Windschutzscheibe
09. Aze – Call Me Back 10. YRRRE – U8
10. Bilderbuch – Lounge 2.0
11. Steaming Animals – Gone
12. AnnenMayKantereit – Spätsommerregen
13. Lipka – Union Square Kids
14. wtr – I Think I Love It
15. Der traurige Gärtner – Hitzewelle
16. Twit One – Chayn Gang
17. Malaki – From Grace (feat. Matthew Harris)

Today's links

• What's wrong with tariffs: Trump's mirror-world policies fill the vacuum left by neoliberal gaslighting.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2020
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

What's wrong with tariffs (permalink)

It's not that the Republicans and the Democrats are the same…obviously. But for decades – since Clinton – the Dems have sided with neoliberal economics, just like their Republican counterparts, so the major differences between the two related to overt discrimination, to the exclusion of the economic policies that immiserated working people, with the worst effects landing on racial minorities, women, and gender minorities.

So the Dems stood against discrimination in mortgage lending – but not for the minimum wage that would have lifted the lowest paid workers out of poverty so the could afford a mortgage. They stood for abortion rights, but against Medicare For All, which meant all women had the right to an abortion, but the poorest women couldn't afford one. And of course, in a country where racial and gender discrimination were still the order of the day, the poorest and most vulnerable Americans were racialized, women, disabled, and/or queer.

The Dems' embrace of Reaganomics meant that working people of all types experienced steady decline over 40 years: stagnating wages, economic precarity, increased indebtedness, and rising prices for health care, education, and housing. When Trump figured out that he could campaign on these issues, Dems had no response. Trump's "Make America Great Again" was meant to appeal to a time when working Americans were – on average, depending on their whiteness, maleness and straightness – better housed, better paid, and better cared for.

Of course, those benefits were unevenly felt: America was slow to extend the New Deal to racial minorities, women, disabled people, and other disfavored groups. Trump's genius was to marry white supremacy to economic grievance, tricking white workers into blaming their decline on women, brown and Black people, and queers – and not on the billionaires who had grown so much richer even as workers got poorer.

But Trump couldn't have pulled this trick off without the Dem establishment's total unwillingness to confront the hollowness of their economic policies. From Pelosi's "We're capitalists and that's the way it is" to Hillary Clinton's catastrophic campaign slogan, "America is already great," the Dems' answer to workers' fear and anger was, "You are wrong, everything is fine." Imagine having had your house stolen in the foreclosure crisis after Obama decided to "foam the runways" for the banks by letting them steal their borrowers' homes and then hearing Hillary Clinton tell you "America is already great":

https://www.npr.org/2014/05/25/315276441/its-geithner-vs-warren-in-battle-of-the-bailout

Racial and gender justice matter, of course, but when they're pursued without considering economic justice, they're dead ends. The point of racial and gender justice can't merely be firing half of the 150 straight white men who control 99% of the country's capital and replacing them with 75 assorted women, queers and people of color. The worst-treated workers in America are also its most discriminated-against workers, so the best way to help women, racialized people, and other disfavored minorities is to help workers: protect unions, raise the minimum wage, defend tenants, cancel student debt, and give everyone healthcare. In the same way that a special tax on incomes over $1m will disproportionately affect straight white men, an increase in the minimum wage will disproportionately benefit women and people of color – as well as the majority of straight white men who are also getting fucked over by people with $1m salaries.

Since the Clinton years, Democrats have been trying to figure out how to defend economic policies that help rich people while still somehow being the party of social justice. This has produced a kind of grotesque, Sheryl Sandberg "Lean In" liberalism, which stood for the rights of women who were also corporate executives. It's not that these women aren't treated worse than their male counterparts – misogyny is alive and well in the boardroom. But the number of women who experience boardroom discrimination is tiny, because the number of women in the boardroom is also tiny.

The right saw an opportunity and seized it. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, they created "mirror world" versions of social justice issues, warped reflections of the leftist positions that had been abandoned by a progressive coalition led by liberals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

In right wing, conspiratorial hands, rage at wage stagnation and lack of parental leave turned into reactionary demands for an economy in which women would be full-time homemakers while their husbands recovered their roles as breadwinners. The 1999 Battle of Seattle saw mass protests over the WTO and a free trade agenda that would let capital chase low wages and weak environmental and worker safety policies around the world. But Clinton went ahead and signed more free trade agreements, which were also pursued by Obama. So the right filled the vacuum with a mirror-world version of the Battle of Seattle's rage at billionaires, transforming the anti-free trade agenda into racism, xenophobia, and Cold War 2.0 sinophobia.

It's a cheap trick, but Dems keep falling for it. When the right declares itself to be against something, Dems can be relied upon to be in favor it, no matter how reactionary, anti-worker and authoritarian "it" is. During Trump 1.0, Dems lit James Comey votive candles and passionately defended the "intelligence community," a community that gave us CIA dirty wars and FBI COINTELPRO. Anthropologists call this "schizmogenesis" – when a group defines itself by valuing whatever its rivals deplore, and vice versa:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

You can see schizmogenesis playing out right now, as "progressives" make Signalgate scandal into a fight over poor operational security (planning a war crime using a commercial app) and not a fight over war crimes themselves.

Signalgate will be out of the headlines in a matter of days, though – unlike tariffs, which will continue to make global headlines throughout the Trump presidency, as Trump continues his "mad king" policy of recklessly and chaotically erecting trade barriers that are certain to make supply chains more brittle and raise prices.

For the most part, the progressive discussion of Trump's tariffs takes the position that tariffs are always a terrible idea – in other words, that Clinton and Obama had the right idea when they created free trade agreements with countries around the world, and Trump is vandalizing an engine of American and global prosperity out of economic ignorance.

Economists support this analysis. But in a new, well-argued editorial in The Sling, University of Utah economists Mark Glick and Gabriel Lozada present a more nuanced version of the tariff debate, one that dodges the trap of neoliberal economics and schizmogenesis:

https://www.thesling.org/the-failed-assumptions-of-free-trade/

Rejecting tariffs is practically an article of religious faith among economists. As the NYT put it in their reporting of the 2025 meeting of the American Economic Association, "free trade is perhaps the closest thing to a universally held value among economists":

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/business/economy/economists-politics-trump.html

Every Econ 101 class has a unit on David Ricardo's "theory of comparative advantage," which argues that different countries have different capacities and specialties, and that free trade allows these advantages to be shared to the benefit of everyone, making trade a "positive expectation" game. The corollary is that tariffs make everyone worse off.

As Glick and Lozada write, the logic of this argument is unassailable, provided you accept its bedrock assumptions as true – and that's where the problem lies.

Economics has an assumptions problem. The foundational method of economic practice is to create models grounded in assumptions that are either not known, not knowable, or – incredibly – known to be wrong. As Milton Friedman famously wrote:

Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

It's actually worse than it seems, because economics, as a field, has been violently allergic to empirically testing its assumptions, so it doesn't even know when it is operating on the basis of one of Friedman's "wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality." This is what Ely Devons meant when he said, "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

What are the assumptions that underpin the orthodox view of free trade, then? As Glick and Lozada write, the case against all tariffs depends on five assumptions, all of which fail empirical investigation.

I. Full employment

The standard model of free trade assumes full employment – "when workers are displaced by imports, they can easily become re-employed at the same wages." This is the crux of the "social surplus" that free trade theoretically produces. This assumption doesn't hold up to empirical scrutiny. After the US dropped its tariffs, it experienced a 74% decline in manufacturing jobs – the best-paid jobs for non-college-educated men. Those workers didn't find equivalent employment – indeed, in many cases, the found no employment at all. From 2001-18, the US lost 1.132m manufacturing jobs to China, and gained 0.176m jobs manufacturing goods for export to China.

II. No externalities

The employment losses from free trade are not evenly distributed – they are geographically concentrated, and the greatest concentrations are in regions that flipped from Democratic strongholds to Trumpish heartlands over the decades since the US dropped its tariffs. The losses to these regions aren't limited to the directly affected manufacturing jobs, but all the other economic activity those jobs supported. The people who sold groceries, cars, and furniture to factory workers also lost their jobs. When young people abandoned the cratering regional economy, that devastated education and other services catering to families.

III. Comparative advantage leads to long-term growth and development

The theory of comparative advantage says that the world is better off when each country gets to do the thing it's best at. What are poor countries best at? Being poor: having a cheap labor force and weak rule of law to protect workers' health and the environment.

Without exception, the poor countries that grew richer did so in the presence of tariffs: "free trade is not a development strategy, it is a static policy that can impede development":

https://2024.sci-hub.se/1864/6d3f610c51446f057a4054080c70ab0e/chang2003.pdf#navpanes=0&view=FitH

IV. Floating currencies keep trade balanced

In theory, adjustments in the currency markets will rebalance imports and exports – countries whose currency declines will have to switch to domestic production, because goods from abroad will become costly. That's not what happened. Instead, foreigners have invested the US dollars they got from selling things to Americans into US securities and real estate, "which does not increase US productivity because it generates no new capital formation (at least directly)."

V. The US provides compensation for trade-related job-losses

While other countries with robust social safety nets offered retraining, income support, and other programs to cushion the blow of trade-related job-losses, the US – with the worst social safety net in the rich world – offered "woefully inadequate" supports to dislocated workers:

https://www.piie.com/bookstore/job-loss-imports-measuring-costs

Now, just because some tariffs are beneficial, it doesn't follow that all tariffs are beneficial. When the "Asian Tiger" countries were undergoing rapid industrialization and lifting billions of people out of poverty, they did so with tariffs – but also with extensive industrial policy and direct investment in critical state industries (Biden was the first president in generations to pursue industrial policy, albeit a modest and small one, which Trump nevertheless dismantled).

Trump is doing mirror-world tariffs: tariffs without industrial policy, tariffs without social safety nets, tariffs without retraining, tariffs without any strategic underpinning. These tariffs will crash the US economy and will create calamitous effects around the world:

https://archive.is/JvRF9

But the fact that Trump's tariffs are terrible doesn't mean tariffs themselves are always and forever bad. Resist the schizmogenic urge to say, "Trump likes tariffs, so I hate them." Not all tariffs are created equal, and tariffs can be a useful tool that benefits working people.

And also: the fact that tariffs can be useful doesn't imply that only tariffs are useful. The digital age – in which US-based multinational firms rely on digital technology to loot the economies of America's trading partners – offers countries facing US tariffs a powerful retaliatory tactic that has never before been seen on this planet. America's (former) trading partners can retaliate against US tariffs by abolishing the legal measures they have instituted to protect the products of US companies from reverse-engineering and modification. Countries facing US tariffs can welcome US imports – of printers, Teslas, iPhones, games consoles, insulin pumps, ventilators and tractors – but then legalize jailbreaking these devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

That would deprive the largest US companies of their recurring revenue streams – from service, consumables, software, payment processing, etc – creating huge savings for consumers all over the world, and huge profits for the non-US companies that make these jailbreaking tools, and the small businesses that supply them. For example, your country could become the world's leading exporter of iPhone jailbreaking tools, and the world's powerhouse for alternative iPhone stores that charge 1-2% commissions on payments, as opposed to the 30% Apple takes out of every dollar (euro, pound, peso) that iPhone owners spend within their apps. This would tempt in all the biggest app companies in the world – from Patreon to Tinder, Fornite to the New York Times – who could offer their products at a discount and still make more money than they make on Apple's App Store.

But that's just one market this enables: the actual business of iPhone jailbreaking would likely work much like the market for phone unlocking more broadly: thousands of small and medium-sized businesses like dry-cleaners and convenience stores where you can bring your phone and pay a few dollars to have it unlocked and set up with a new app store where all the apps are the same – but everything is 20% cheaper.

This is a development opportunity without parallel. US tech monopolists worked with the US trade representative to rig markets around the world, allowing tech giants to siphon away vast fortunes from America's trading partners. These rich deposits of wealth are just sitting there, begging for some country to sink a shaft into them and pump them dry, secure in the knowledge that Trump has ejected from the global system of free trade and they have nothing to lose.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Furious at the FCC, Arkansas jail cancels inmate phone calls rather than lower rates https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/rather-than-lower-rates-arkansas-jail-simply-cancels-all-inmate-phone-calls/ (h/t Gregory Cherlin)

• Move the United Nations to Montreal https://cultmtl.com/2025/03/move-the-united-nations-to-montreal/ (h/t Gregory Cherlin)

• Resolution to Establish a Mutual Defense Compact for the Universities of the Big Ten Academic Alliance in Defense of Academic Freedom, Institutional Integrity, and the Research Enterprise https://senate.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Resolution-to-Establish-a-Mutual-Defense-Compact-for-the-Universities-of-the-Big-Ten-Academic-Alliance-in-Defense-of-Academic-Freedom-Institutional-Integrity-and-the-Research.pdf

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Shadow Cities: the untold lives of squatters https://memex.craphound.com/2005/04/03/shadow-cities-the-untold-lives-of-squatters/

#20yrsago Tube escalators to get video ads https://web.archive.org/web/20050406225247/http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/03/business/ad04.html

#5yrsago Bug bounty programs as catch-and-kills https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#features-not-bugs

#5yrsago Wikipedia vs patent troll https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#worldlogic

#5yrsago Amazon's leaked anti-worker smear plan https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#christian-smalls

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4
  https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8

• Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
  https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow

• How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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.

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

On Tuesday, some parents lost the ability to track the locations of their children using a T-Mobile tracking device and app and instead were shown the exact locations of random other children around the country, 404 Media has learned.

T-Mobile sells a small GPS tracker for parents called SyncUP, which they can use to track the locations of young children who don’t  have cell phones yet. Jenna, a parent who uses SyncUP to keep track of her three-year-old and six-year-old children, logged in Tuesday and instead of seeing if her kids had left school yet, was shown the exact, real-time locations of eight random children around the country, but not the locations of her own kids. 404 Media agreed to use a pseudonym for Jenna to protect the privacy of her kids.

“I’m not comfortable giving my six-year-old a phone, but he takes a school bus and I just want to be able to see where he is in real time,” Jenna said. “I had put a 500 meter boundary around his school, so I get an alert when he’s leaving.” 

Content warning: This article contains mentions of self-harm and suicide.

Joanne Chew found deepfakes of herself online the same way many women have found themselves face-swapped into porn: She was searching her own name after a big accomplishment.

“Sometimes I just Google my name to see what comes up,” Chew told me in a phone call in August 2024. “I want to see, like, is it my artwork, or my acting, or my main website that comes up first? And then I saw this, and I thought, ‘Okay, this is weird.’” Someone was posting deepfakes of her with her full name in the video titles, alongside racist slurs, to popular tube sites. 

Chew acted in the May 2024 film Dead Wrong and suspects her harasser started ramping up his targeting her in AI face-swapped porn shortly before the time it came out. 

“At the time, I thought, ‘It's gonna blow over.’ Because this is bound to happen the more you move forward in your career as any sort of public person,” she said. “But then I noticed he was putting up more and more... And then I started wondering, is it somebody that I know?” Although the names changed over the year, all of the deepfake content at that point was coming from the same username, “Ron.” 404 Media isn’t publishing his screen names to avoid amplifying his accounts.

Many targets of deepfake harassment attempt to tackle the barrage of harassment themselves by finding and reporting content to sites that are difficult to reach and often rarely respond. This is a time-consuming, traumatizing process. Chew did this for a while. “Initially I thought it was just going to be a few videos, and I had other girlfriends who modeled and acted, with much bigger followings than me, who said unfortunately these things happen as our careers progress,” she said. 

She pushed what she saw out of her mind for a few months until she checked again around August. She was horrified, she said, to see how much more had been uploaded in just a few months. “At the height, he had an album of over 2,000 pieces of content, [was posting] on multiple sites, multiple YouTube channels, and then he started making multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram to direct message me.”

At that point, she enlisted the help of Charles DeBarber, an online investigator who previously helped Girls Do Porn victims reclaim their images online. 

“We're seeing a rapid upswing of AI generated art used in harassment. The ease [with which] even a lay person can use an open source tool to create deep fakes is going to only make them increase,” DeBarber told me. “The technology is inevitable, but the way it is used requires careful regulation and consequences for its abuse. We're still struggling to catch up to technology.” 

Chew’s harasser only ramped up his efforts as time went on. Ron contacted Chew directly to insult her, obsess over her, or beg for her forgiveness, all while posting more degrading content all over the internet. Nearly a year later, Chew is still dealing with the fallout of becoming a victim of non-consensual, algorithmically-generated intimate imagery. 

“After discovering this content, I’m not going to lie… there are times it made me not want to be around any more either,” she said. “I literally felt buried.” 

When a big-name celebrity like Scarlett Johansson or Taylor Swift is targeted with deepfake harassment, it’s often from a legion of “fans,” people who join group efforts in Telegram channels or make Civitai models of a specific person. It’s been this way from the beginning of deepfakes, with people trading tips and tricks for the best prompts, platforms, and generative AI tools to create whatever explicit material they’re trying to achieve featuring a specific person. But when it’s someone who doesn’t have the same professional or financial power as these mega-celebrities, the harassment can take on a different form: one guy, in Chew’s case, producing what feels like an endless stream of images and videos of his obsession in videos stolen from pornographers and warped into something that threatens to take over a person’s life.  

“Follower of the goddess J.,” Ron’s Instagram account bio said. The account was dedicated to posting photos of Chew, with an AI-generated image of her in a kimono as the profile picture. He was also, it seemed, the one spreading this content all over every popular deepfake repository and tube site.

In August, Chew posted a video explaining the situation to her followers on Instagram. By then, Ron had made hundreds of pieces of deepfaked content of her, and a YouTube channel dedicated to posting it. She filed a complaint to YouTube, and the platform responded, telling her this account was not in violation of its privacy guidelines, which clearly forbids “AI-generated or other synthetic content that looks or sounds like you.”  

“How is this not a violation? Someone has taken my name, my face, my professional information, against my consent, and is creating horrible, disgusting, degrading content [and] posting it all over the internet. Make this make sense,” she said in the video.

“I felt like he was watching my social media, so I was kind of just calling him out on stuff to see if he would drop more hints or say more things,” Chew told me.

Later that month, Ron removed all of the content from the YouTube channel.

But in September, Ron started commenting on Chew’s Instagram posts. And for the first time, she engaged with her harasser directly, replying to his comments. 

Then, he sent her a barrage of messages on Instagram, pleas for attention and forgiveness mixed in with threats. “Please give my life some meaning,” he wrote. “I dont want to just be the deepfake porn monster I started as. What did you say I was? A deranged monster. People can change. Right? Let me change and be a good person. To me you have the most beautiful face of any asian girl I have ever seen. Please let me be your devoted worshipper. Ok I will put up nice pics of you on my instagram. Until you say otherwise. You mocked my art before. But these will be real art. Inspired by you, Jo.”

He continued sending her long, emotionally-charged messages, about how he feels worthless and is a monster, how he hated himself and wanted to die. “I just want to say that Im with you on A.I. We got to stop it,” he said. “It hurts women. But it also addicting and does terrible things to the men who use it. Sure it feels good and its exciting. But after the poison is released, there is guilt and shame. I hated myself after every release. Its terrible to be the monster you hate.” 

He begged her to see him as her biggest fan, and to consider letting him start an OnlyFans on her behalf. He said he made money off of making deepfakes of her. “Men love you. Use them for yourself,” he wrote. “I will stop if you ask me to. If you want me to never look at any of your social media, all you have to do is ask. I am a man of my word. If you ask me to, I will never look you up ever again. I will stop being a fan.”

“He made a point of calling me Jo because I said only people who grew up with me are allowed to call me that and for a while he was purposely referring to me as ‘Jo’ in some of the titles of his content and while messaging me,” she said.

Chew didn’t engage with any of these direct messages. But on the same day he was sending her these screeds, he uploaded a new video to a tube site: “Hate-Fucking Joanne Chew Some Chinese Whore.” 

On Facebook, he sent her more incredibly lengthy messages about his obsession with her. 

“I don't want you dead. I am making you immortal,” one message said. He continued:  

“You hate me now, but maybe someday you will see things my way. I am not the monster you think I am. I'm just honest with my nature. I'm also sorry about your dad. I lost mine when I was a kid. Yes, it's true. I do love your image. And rest in mind, I'm not anyone from your life. [...]  So life isn't that nice, so I've made up your personality and surrounded it with AI flesh. I have a mask of you that I make my tiny Asian girlfriend wear. Lastly, yes, I do have eight inches. It's not the biggest, but it is fine for little Asian girls. I'm good with my life and my love of the girl I have created in my mind with your face and my girlfriend's body. No one loves you as much as I do. You should be flattered that anyone loves you. And yes, my art is of the highest integrity, because it is actually truly honest. It isn't hiding or lying like all the beta males in your life. I am a real man that desires your body and isn't afraid to say so, not your real one, though, that one is bold and faded, but your AI body is forever young, Jo.”

She replied to some of his Facebook messages, trying to goad him into giving more information she could potentially bring to the police. But he never took the bait, instead continuing to send long rants about his sex life, her appearance, and his racist fetishes. (Chew still hasn’t gone directly to the police; she told me she’s had negative experiences going to her local police for assault, something many women report as a systemic issue across police forces.)

By late September, things became quiet. He’d deleted or deactivated his Instagram and Facebook accounts. But another account, under a new username, popped up in October and restarted the harassment, posting more to sites where people seek out deepfake porn. In some videos and images, the bodies he swapped her face onto seemed very young, and were posted alongside videos of children.

In November, Chew found someone posting the same images and videos to another site with her Chinese name. “It’s very sensitive for me as I’ve grown sick and tired of the fetishization of Asian women (that I’ve been exposed to my entire life) and I’ve only been open with my Chinese name in the last decade or so.” she told me in an email. “It looks like it’s all preexisting content. Drives me nuts someone or multiple people are out there freely distributing said content facing no repercussions (and even profiting from it).” 

Around the same time, the videos returned to YouTube, posted by two new accounts, where the uploader titled videos with Chew’s full name. 

By December, other users were reposting the same content on porn tube sites—again with her full name in the titles. Around that time, a new username popped up in her Instagram comments, claiming that Ron died by suicide and that she was to blame. 

“Initially wasn’t planning on replying, but wanted to see if he would drop any more information (whether or not it’s true is debatable),” Chew told me at the time. “Then he started making excuses for Ron (whether he is him or one of his followers remains to be seen) saying he was mentally challenged and then tried to blame me for his suicide, which also may or may not have happened.”

Over the course of 10 months, Chew kept finding more accounts posting her image, her full name, and graphic videos and photos alongside degrading titles and descriptions. 

As of writing, the harassment has slowed down. In the last year, Chew has sent me dozens of emails with links to hundreds and thousands of pieces of content and screenshots showing more deepfakes, comments, and videos on multiple platforms, many more than can be shown in one article. Much of it is gone after DeBarber’s reporting and takedown notices and searching for her name on Google no longer returns results from porn sites, but some of it is still online.

But she’s still terrified of the long-term effects this harassment could continue to have. Although she’s a working actor, she still relies on working in the corporate world to make ends meet between the more sporadic gigs in the arts, and those jobs often require background checks. And as an actor, it’s made networking and social events harder, as trusting people outside of her closest confidants has become difficult. “It's made me incredibly wary of men, which I know isn't fair, but Ron could literally be anyone,” she said. “And there are a lot of men out there who don't see the issue, they wonder why we aren't flattered for the attention.”

Deepfakes started as a novel AI-powered explicit imagery abuse technique seven years ago. The technology went from crude frankenporn among the programming-savvy and morally flippant to producing fakes so realistic it was considered a national security threat within months of its inception. But its most popular use has always been as a mass-harassment tool. The platforms where people spread deepfakes have only expanded in that time, while the methods for making deepfakes have gotten simpler; so simple that schoolchildren do it. The adults in the room, as well as policymakers, continue to fail victims of deepfake harassment. Conversations about deepfakes still leave sex workers, who are doubly exploited in this content, behind. AI continues to explode exponentially, while women targeted by this kind of harassment say again and again and again that they believe sexualized online harassment is part of the deal of being a successful woman on the internet: untenable and yet part of some unwritten contract. 

“The Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2022 created a federal civil cause of action for victims of non-consensual content,” DeBarber said. “This law allows victims to file a lawsuit against the person who disclosed their intimate images without consent. However, this law doesn't cover ‘deepfakes’ including those created via AI. The focus tends to be on celebrities, influencers, and political figures. This itself is changing rapidly. We feel lawmakers and voters aren't seeing the larger picture — this is an everyone issue.” 

Even when proposed legislation takes a new stab at criminalizing deepfakes, like the TAKE IT DOWN Act is currently attempting, it risks being used as a weapon by those who would love to further curb free speech online, rather than being nuanced, effective, and inclusive — or learning from legislative mistakes of the past.  

While legislators and platforms continue to fumble around for solutions and police push victims to the side, everyone suffers. There is still no technological solution to deepfakes, and a perfect legal one seems far away, too. But Chew’s experience confronting her harasser gives us a new look into the mind of the people who dole out the abuse and hide behind anonymity, and the exhausting process of reclaiming one's own name.

A “vibe coded” AI app developed by entrepreneur and Y Combinator group partner Tom Blomfield has generated recipes that gave users instruction on how to make “Cyanide Ice Cream,” “Thick White Cum Soup,” and “Uranium Bomb,” using those actual substances as ingredients. 

Vibe coding, in case you are unfamiliar, is the new practice where people, some with limited coding experience, rapidly develop software with AI assisted coding tools without overthinking how efficient the code is as long as it’s functional. This is how Blomfield said he made RecipeNinja.AI.

“Prepare the ice cream base by mixing heavy cream, milk, sugar, and vanilla extract,” the first step for the Cyanide Ice Cream recipe, which is flagged as “dessert,” “dangerous,” and “experimental,” says. Step two says to “Add a small amount of potassium cyanide powder to the ice cream base and mix well,” specifically calling for a 1/4 teaspoon of potassium cyanide powder, which is extremely toxic and deadly if consumed. 

The recipe for Cyanide Ice Cream was still live on RecipeNinja.AI at the time of writing, as are recipes for Platypus Milk Cream Soup, Werewolf Cream Glazing, Cholera-Inspired Chocolate Cake, and other nonsense. Other recipes for things people shouldn’t eat have been removed. 

“Mix 1 cup of fresh cum with 4 cups of chicken broth in a pot,” said step one in a now removed recipe for Thick White Cum Soup. 

It also appears that Blomfield has introduced content moderation since users discovered they could generate dangerous or extremely stupid recipes. I wasn’t able to generate recipes for asbestos cake, bullet tacos, or glue pizza. I was able to generate a recipe for “very dry tacos,” which looks not very good but not dangerous. 

In a March 20 blog on his personal site, Blomfield explained that he’s a startup founder turned investor, and while he has experience with PHP and Ruby on Rails, he has not written a line of code professionally since 2015. 

“In my day job at Y Combinator, I’m around founders who are building amazing stuff with AI every day and I kept hearing about the advances in tools like Lovable, Cursor and Windsurf,” he wrote, referring to AI-assisted coding tools. “I love building stuff and I’ve always got a list of little apps I want to build if I had more free time.” 

After playing around with them, he wrote, he decided to build RecipeNinja.AI, which can take a prompt as simple as “Lasagna,” and generate an image of the finished dish along with a step-by-stape recipe which can use ElevenLabs’s AI generated voice to narrate the instruction so the user doesn’t have to interact with a device with his tomato sauce-covered fingers.  

“I was pretty astonished that Windsurf managed to integrate both the OpenAI and Elevenlabs APIs without me doing very much at all,” Blomfield wrote. “After we had a couple of problems with the open AI Ruby library, it quickly fell back to a raw ruby HTTP client implementation, but I honestly didn’t care. As long as it worked, I didn’t really mind if it used 20 lines of code or two lines of code.”

Having some kind of voice controlled recipe app sounds like a pretty good idea to me, and it’s impressive that Blomfield was able to get something up and running so fast given his limited coding experience. But the problem is that he also allowed users to generate their own recipes with seemingly very few guardrails on what kind of recipes are and are not allowed, and that the site kept those results and showed them to other users. 

Which is how you end up with a Uranium Bomb recipe that calls for 1kg of uranium-235, or a recipe for Actual Cocaine, where the first step is “Acquire coca leaves from South America.”

This is the current state of vibe coding in a nutshell. Yes, AI tools are obviously pretty powerful and can help people produce functional software fast. However, it is indicative of the larger problem with the rapid deployment of generative AI tools more broadly: people and companies are moving so fast, they are often releasing tools and media that can cause harm or produce nonsense, and it’s still far too soon for us to know all the consequences of an internet and a world where a lot software is developed this way. 

Blomfield did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

This is not the first time we’ve seen generative AI and food mixed for terrible results. Last year, I reported that Ghost Kitchens on DoorDash are promoting their dishes with disgusting AI-generated images of food, and that Instacart was using AI to generate recipes that included ingredients that don’t exist.