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Today's links

• Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death: The bifurcation of justice is always and ever a prelude to fascism.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: CCTV botnets; CEOs and random chance; Foxconn v Trump.
• 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.

Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death (permalink)

Shake Shack has changed the terms of service for its app, adding a "binding arbitration" clause that bans you from suing the company or joining a class action suit against it:

https://shakeshack.com/terms-conditions#/

As Luke Goldstein writes for Jacobin, the ToS update is part of a wave of companies, including fast-food companies, that are taking away their customers' right to seek redress in the courts, forcing them to pursue justice with a private "arbitrator" who works for the company that harmed them:

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/shake-shack-arbitration-law-terms-service/

Now, obviously you don't have to agree to terms of service just to walk into a Shake Shack and order a burger (yet), but Shake Shack, like other fast food companies, is on a full-court press to corral you into using its app to order your food, even if you're picking up that food from the counter and eating it in the restaurant. This is an easy trick to pull off – all Shake Shack needs to do is starve its cash-registers of personnel, creating untenably long lines for people attempting to order from a human.

Forcing diners to use an app has other advantages as well. Remember, an app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it, which means that whenever you use an app instead of a website, you are vulnerable to deep and ongoing commercial surveillance and can be bombarded with ads without you having any recourse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

That surveillance can be weaponized against you, through "surveillance pricing," which is when companies raise prices based on their estimation of your desperation, which they can infer from surveillance data. Surveillance pricing lets a company reach into your wallet and devalue your money – if you are charged $10 for a burger that costs the next person $5, that means your dollar is only worth $0.50:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

But beyond surveillance and price-gouging, app-based ordering offers corporations another way to screw you: they can force you into binding arbitration. Under binding arbitration, you "voluntarily" waive your right to have your grievances heard by a judge. Instead, the corporation hires a fake judge, called an "arbitrator," who hears your case and then a rebuttal from the company that signs their paycheck and decides who is guilty. It will not surprise you to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of their employers and even when they rule in favor of a wronged customer, the penalties they impose on their bosses add up to little more than a wrist-slap:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

This binding arbitration bullshit was illegal until the 2010s, when Antonin Scalia authored a string of binding arbitration decisions for the Supreme Court, opening the hellmouth for the mass imposition of arbitration on anyone that a business could stick an "I agree" button in front of:

https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&context=blr

A fundamental tenet of conservative doctrine is "incentives matter" – that's why they say we can't have universal healthcare (if going to the doctor is free, you will schedule frivolous doctor's visits) or food or housing assistance (unless your boss can threaten you with homelessness and starvation, you won't go to work anymore). However, this is a highly selective bit of dogma, because incentives never seem to matter to rich people or corporations, whom conservatives are on an endless quest to immunize from any consequences for harming their workers or customers, which somehow won't incentivize them to hurt their workers and/or customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

At this point, we should probably ask, "Why would anyone sue a Shake Shack?" To answer that, you just need to look at why people sue other fast-food restaurants, like McDonald's and Chipotle. The short answer? Because those restaurants had defective food-handling and sourcing procedures, and this resulted in their customers contracting life-threatening food-borne illnesses:

https://apnews.com/article/mcdonalds-chipotle-taco-bell-norovirus-e-coli-83f1077981d738b91dbf0c76f7db2883

By immunizing itself from legal consequences for the most common sources of liability for fast-food restaurants, Shake Shack is reserving the right to make you shit yourself to death. Combine this immunity with Trump's unscheduled rapid midair disassembly of all federal regulations (AKA "Project 2025") and you get a situation where Shake Shack can just make up its own money-saving hygiene shortcuts, and face no consequences if these result in your shitting yourself to death. This is both literal and figurative enshittification.

Of course, Shake Shack doesn't believe this should cut both ways. You can't slip out of Shake Shack's noose by walking into a restaurant with a t-shirt reading:

By reading these words, 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. This indemnity will survive the termination of your relationship with your employer.

Shake Shack isn't trying to create a simplified, efficient system of justice – they're creating a two-tiered system of justice. They get to go to court if you hurt them. Vandalize a Shack Shack restaurant and they'll drag your ass in front of a judge before you can say "listeria." But if they cause you to shit yourself to death, you are literally and figuratively shit out of luck.

That's really bad. Two-tiered justice is always and ever a prelude to fascism. The way to keep the normies in line while your brownshirts round up their neighbors and seize their property is by maintaining the "normal" justice system for some people, but not for the disfavored group:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewish-legislation-in-prewar-germany

Gradually, the group entitled to "normal" justice dwindles and more and more of us get sucked into the "state of exception" where you aren't entitled to a lawyer, a trial, or any human rights.

Trump isn't just dismantling the regulatory state: his fascist snatch-squads ignore the Constitution and the courts. His supine Congress ignores the separation of powers (Trump: "I'm the President and the Speaker of the House"). This rapid erosion of the rule of law is about to meet and merge with the long-run, Federalist Society project to give corporations their own shadow justice system, where they hire the judges who decide whether you can get justice.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• In Memoriam/gbnewby https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/In_Memoriam/gbnewby

• Zohran Mamdani’s 5 Lessons for the Democrats <a href=https://jacobin.com/2025/10/zohran-mamdani-democrats-nyc-strategy/"https://jacobin.com/2025/10/zohran-mamdani-democrats-nyc-strategy/

• The Internet Doesn’t Have to Suck https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-amazon-slop-internet.html

• How Elon Musk Ruined Twitter https://jacobin.com/2025/10/enshittification-doctorow-musk-twitter-internet

• Hackers Say They Have Personal Data of Thousands of NSA and Other Government Officials https://www.404media.co/hackers-say-they-have-personal-data-of-thousands-of-nsa-and-other-government-officials/

  ---

  
  

  Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Katamari Damacy: the text adventure https://web.archive.org/web/20081011210518/http://www.livejournal.com/community/katamari_damacy/262676.html

#20yrsago danah boyd’s Friendster papers, all in one place https://web.archive.org/web/20051029083531/https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/10/24/my_articles_on.html

#20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s design future manifesto: viva spime! https://memex.craphound.com/2005/10/26/bruce-sterlings-design-future-manifesto-viva-spime/

#15yrsago South Korea’s US-led copyright policy leads to 65,000 acts of extrajudicial censorship/disconnection/threats by govt bureaucrats https://www.techdirt.com/2010/10/26/a-look-at-how-many-people-have-been-kicked-offline-in-korea-on-accusations-not-convictions-of-infringement/

#15yrsago British Airways chairman: “stop kowtowing to US aviation security demands” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/27/airport-security-rules-uk-us

#15yrsago France: 25,000 families a day at risk of losing Internet access https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/10/french-three-strikes-agency-getting-25k-complaints-a-day/

#15yrsago Taste receptors in our lungs sense bitterness and respond with opened airways https://web.archive.org/web/20101028234103/http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.2237.html

#10yrsago Botnets running on CCTVs and NASs https://www.imperva.com/blog/archive/cctv-ddos-botnet-back-yard/?redirect=Incapsula

#10yrsago A beautiful data-driven Tube ad from 1928 https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/1928-ad-london-underground-combines-data-awesome-1513/?cf-view

#10yrsago DoJ to Apple: your software is licensed, not sold, so we can force you to decrypt https://ia600301.us.archive.org/35/items/gov.uscourts.nyed.376325/gov.uscourts.nyed.376325.15.0.pdf

#10yrsago FCC trying to stop phone companies that rip off prisoners’ families https://web.archive.org/web/20151023015659/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-22/is-this-the-end-of-sky-high-prison-phone-call-rates-

#10yrsago Putting your kettle on the Internet of Things makes your wifi passwords an open secret https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/23/easily-hacked-tea-kettle-latest-to-highlight-pathetic-internet-things-security/

#10yrsago 70% of CEOs’ effect on company performance can be attributed to random chance https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151022192337.htm

#10yrsago Astounding showpiece table full of hidden compartments nested in hidden compartments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sWrgIgBT9M

#10yrsago A beautiful data-driven Tube ad from 1928 https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/1928-ad-london-underground-combines-data-awesome-1513/

#10yrsago Antioxidants protect cancer cells, help tumors to spread https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/myths-about-antioxidant-supplements-need-to-die/

#10yrsago Investing in David v Goliath: hundreds of millions slosh into litigation finance funds https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/should-you-be-allowed-to-invest-in-a-lawsuit.html?smid=tw-share

#10yrsago Globe and Mail: TPP's copyright chapter will cost Canadians hundreds of millions https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/copyright-concessions-may-be-downside-of-tpp-deal/article26939204/

#10yrsago Americans are pretty mellow about climate change, terrified of everything else https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2015/10/13/americas-top-fears-2015/

#10yrsago NSA spying: judge tosses out case because Wikipedia isn’t widely read enough https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/court-chooses-ignore-overwhelming-evidence-nsas-mass

#10yrsago Stylish furniture made from discarded supermarket trolleys https://etiennereijnders.blogspot.com/

#10yrsago Youtube’s pay TV service makes video-creators a deal they literally can’t refuse https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/23/youtube-red-creators/

#10yrsago Secret surveillance laws make it impossible to have an informed debate about privacy https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3329/1495

#10yrsago Sony licensed stock footage, then branded its creator a pirate for using it himself https://petapixel.com/2015/10/25/sony-filed-a-copyright-claim-against-the-stock-video-i-licensed-to-them/

#10yrsago Pharma company offers $1/dose version of Martin Shkreli’s drug https://www.chicagotribune.com/2015/10/23/drug-firm-offers-1-version-of-750-turing-pill/

#10yrsago IMF: Cheap oil will bankrupt the Saudis in five years https://web.archive.org/web/20151026052347/https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/25/investing/oil-prices-saudi-arabia-cash-opec-middle-east/index.html?sr=twcnnbrk102515oilpricessaudiarabiacashopecmiddleeast512pStoryMoneyPhoto

#5yrsago Chile restores democratic rule https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/26/viva-allende/#bread-a-roof-and-work

#5yrsago Phone surveillance, made in Canada https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/26/viva-allende/#imsi

#5yrsago Bob Dylan sings a EULA https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/25/musical-chairs/#subterranean-termsick-blues

#5yrsago Facebook threatens ad-transparency group https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/25/musical-chairs/#son-of-power-ventures

#5yrsago RIAA kills youtube-dl https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/24/1201-v-dl-youtube/#1201

#5yrsago Foxconn out-trumped Trump https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#foxconned

#5yrsago Bring back the CCC https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#ccc

#5yrsago Cracking the Ghislaine Maxwell redactions https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#redactions

#5yrsago Student loans are dischargeable https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#education-benefit

#1yrago Scientific American endorses Harris https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/23/eisegesis/#norm-breaking

#1yrago The housing crisis considered as an income crisis https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/24/i-dream-of-gini/#mean-ole-mr-median

#1yrago Ian McDonald's "The Wilding" https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/25/bogman/#erin-go-aaaaaaargh

#1yrago Keeping a suspense file gives you superpowers https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc

• Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg

• Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
  https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable

• The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
  https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/

• Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "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/

• "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).

• "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).

• "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.

• "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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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"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

This post contains spoilers for the Netflix film ‘House of Dynamite.’

Netflix’s new Kathryn Bigelow-directed nuclear war thriller wants audiences to ask themselves the question: what would you do if you had 15 minutes to decide whether or not to end the world?

House of Dynamite is about a nuclear missile hitting the United States as viewed from the conference call where America’s power players gather to decide how to retaliate. The decision window is short, just 15 minutes. In the film that’s all the time the President has to assess the threat, pick targets, and decide if the US should also launch its nuclear weapons. It’s about how much time they’d have in real life too.

In House of Dynamite, America’s early warning systems detect the launch of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The final target is Chicago and when it lands more than 20 million people will die in a flash. Facing the destruction of a major American city, the President must decide what—if any—action to take in response. 

The US has hundreds of nuclear missiles ready to go and plans to strike targets across Russia, China, and North Korea. But there’s a catch. In the film, America didn’t see who fired the nuke and no one is taking credit. It’s impossible to know who to strike and in what proportion. What’s a president to do? 

House of Dynamite tells the story of this 15 minute Zoom call—from detection of the launch to its terminal arrival in Chicago—three different times. There’s dozens of folks on the call, from deputy advisors to the Secretary of Defense to the President himself, and each run through of the events gives the audience a bigger peak at how the whole machine operates, culminating, in the end, with the President’s view.

Many of the most effective and frightening films about nukes—Threads and The Day After—focus on the lives of the humans living in the blast zone. They’re about the crumbling of society in a wasteland, beholden to the decisions of absent political powers so distant that they often never appear on screen. House of Dynamite is about those powerful people caught in the absurd game of nuclear war, forced to make decisions with limited information and enormous consequences.

In both the movie and real life, America has ground-based interceptors stationed in California and Alaska that are meant to knock a nuke out of the sky should one ever get close. The early film follows missileers in Alaska as they launch the interceptor only to have it fail. It’s a horrifying and very real possibility. The truth of interceptors is that we don’t have many of them, the window to hit a fast moving ICBM is narrow, and in tests they only work about half the time.

“So it’s a fucking coin toss? That’s what $50 billion buys us?” Secretary of Defense Reid Baker, played by Jarred Harris, says in the film. This detail caught the eye of the Trump White House, which plans to spend around $200 billion on a space based version of the same tech. 

Bloomberg reported on an internal Pentagon memo that directed officials to debunk House of Dynamite’s claims about missile defense. The Missile Defense Agency told Bloomberg that interceptors “have displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.” The Pentagon separately told Bloomberg that it wasn’t consulted on the film at all.

Director Bigelow worked closely with the CIA to make Zero Dark Thirty, but has tussled with the Pentagon before. The DoD didn’t like The Hurt Locker and pulled out of the project after showing some initial support. Bigelow has said in interviews that she wanted House of Dynamite to be an independent project.

Despite that independence, House of Dynamite nails the details of nuclear war in 2025. The acronyms, equipment, and procedures are all frighteningly close to reality and Bigelow did have help on set from retired US Army lieutenant general and former US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Chief of Staff Dan Karbler.

Karbler is a career missile guy and as the chief of staff of STRATCOM he oversaw America’s nuclear weapons. He told 404 Media that he landed the gig by scaring the hell out of Bigelow and her staff on, appropriately, a Zoom call.

Bigelow wanted to meet Karbler and they set up a big conference call on Zoom. He joined the call but kept his camera off. As people filtered in, Karbler listened and waited. “Here’s how it kind of went down,” Karbler told 404 Media. “There’s a little break in the conversation so I click on my microphone, still leaving the camera off, and I just said: ‘This is the DDO [deputy director of operations] convening a National Event Conference. Classification of this conference TOP SECRET. TK [Talent Keyhole] SI: US STRATCOM, US INDOPACOM, US Northern Command, SecDef Cables, military system to the secretary.”

“SecDef Cables, please bring the secretary of defense in the conference. Mr. Secretary, this is the DDO. Because of the time constraints of this missile attack, recommend we transition immediately from a national event conference to a nuclear decision conference, and we bring the President into the conference. PEOC [Presidential Emergency Operations Center], please bring the President into the conference.”

“And I stopped there and I clicked on my camera and I said, ‘ladies and gentleman, that’s how the worst day in American history will begin. I hope your script does it some justice,’” Karbler said. The theatrics worked and, according to Karbler, he sat next to Bigelow every day on set and helped shape the movie.

House of Dynamite begins and ends with ambiguity. We never learn who fired the nuclear weapon at Chicago. The last few minutes of the film focus on the President looking through retaliation plans. He’s in a helicopter, moments from the nuke hitting Chicago, and looking through plans that would condemn millions of people on the planet to fast and slow deaths. The film ends as he wallows in this decision, we never learn what he chooses.

Karbler said it was intentional. “The ending was ambiguous so the audience would leave with questions,” he said. “The easy out would have been: ‘Well, let’s just have a nuclear detonation over Chicago.’ That’s the easy out. Leaving it like it is, you risk pissing off the audience, frankly, because they want a resolution of some sort, but they don’t get that resolution. So instead they’re going to have to be able to have a discussion.”

In my house, at least, the gambit worked. During the credits my wife and I talked about whether or not we’d launch the nukes ourselves (We’d both hold off) and I explained the unpleasant realities of ground based interceptors. 

Karbler, too, said he wouldn’t have launched the nukes. It’s just one nuke, after all. It’s millions of people, sure, but if America launches its nukes in retaliation then there’s a good chance Russia, China, and everyone else might do the same. “Because of the potential of a response provoking a much, much broader response, and something that would not be proportional,” Karbler said. “Don’t get me wrong, 20 million people, an entire city, a nuclear attack that hit us, but if we respond back, then you’re going to get into im-proportionality calculus.”

Despite the horrors present on screen in House of Dynamite, Karbler isn’t a nuclear abolitionist. “The genie is out of the bottle, you’re not going to put it back in there,” he said. “So what do we do to ensure our best defense? It seems counterintuitive, you know, the best defense is gonna be a good offense. You’ve gotta be able to have a response back against the adversary.”

Basically, Karbler says we should do what we’re doing now: build a bunch more nukes and make sure your enemies know you’re willing to use them. “Classic deterrence has three parts: impose unacceptable costs on the adversary. Deny the adversary any benefit of attack, read that as our ability to defend ourselves, missile defense, but also have the credible messaging behind it,” he said.

These are weapons that have the power to end the world, weapons we make and pray we never use. But we do keep making them. Almost all the old nuclear treaties between Russia and America are gone. The US is spending trillions to replace old ICBM silos and make new nuclear weapons. After decades of maintaining a relatively small nuclear force, China is building up its own stockpiles. 

Trump has promised a Golden Dome to keep America safe from nukes and on Sunday Putin claimed Russia had successfully tested a brand new nuclear-powered cruise missile. The people who track existential threats believe we’re closer to nukes ending the world than at any other time in history.

Zenni, an online glasses store, is offering a new coating for its lenses that the company says will protect people from facial recognition technology. Zenni calls it ID Guard and it works by adding a pink sheen to the surface of the glasses that reflects the infrared light used by some facial recognition cameras.

Do they work? Yes, technically, according to testing conducted by 404 Media. Zenni’s ID Guard glasses block infrared light. It’s impossible to open an iPhone with FaceID while wearing them and they black out the eyes of the wearer in photos taken with infrared cameras.

However, ID Guard glasses will not at all stop some of the most common forms of facial recognition that are easy to access and abuse. If someone takes a picture of your naked face with a normal camera in broad daylight while you’re wearing them, there’s a good chance they’ll still be able to put your face through a database and get a match.

For example, I took pictures of myself wearing the glasses in normal light and ran it through PimEyes, a site that lets anyone run facial recognition searches. It identified me in seconds, even with the glasses. One of the biggest dangers of facial recognition is not a corporation running an advanced camera with fancy sensors, it’s an angry Taylor Swift fan who doxes you using a regular picture of your face. Zenni is offering some protection against the former, but can’t help with the latter.

But the glasses do block infrared light and many of the cameras taking pictures of us as we go about our lives rely on that to scan our faces. When those cameras see me now, there will be black holes where my eyes should be and that’s given me a strange kind of peace of mind.

The modern world is covered in cameras that track your every movement. In New Orleans, a private network of cameras uses facial recognition tech to track people in real time and alert cops to the presence of undesirables. Last year tech billionaire and media mogul Larry Ellison pitched a vision of the future where cameras capture every moment of everyone’s life to make sure they’re “on their best behavior.”

Zenni’s director of digital innovation, Steven Lee, told 404 Media that the company wanted to offer customers something that helped them navigate this environment. “There’s devices out there that are scanning us, even without our permission and just tracking us,” he said. “So we asked ourselves: ‘could there possibly be a set of lenses that could do more than just protect our vision, maybe it could protect our identity as well.’”

As a side benefit of beating facial recognition, I noticed the ID Guard lenses were more comfortable for me to wear in sunlight than my normal glasses. I’m sensitive to sunlight and need to wear prescription sunglasses outdoors to prevent headaches and discomfort. The Zenni glasses cut down on a lot of that without me needing to wear shades.Lee explained that this was because the ID Guard blocks infrared light from the sun as well as cameras. This was one of the original purposes of the coating. “When we delved into that, we realized, not only could it protect your eyes from infrared…but it also had the additional benefit of protecting against a lot of devices out there…a lot of camera systems out there utilize infrared to detect different facial features and detect who you are,” he said.

There’s many different kinds of facial recognition technology. Some simply take a picture of a user's face and match it against a database, but those systems have a lot of problems. Sunglasses block the eyes and render one of the biggest datapoints for the system useless and low light pictures don’t work at all so many cameras taking pictures for facial recognition use infrared light to take a picture of a person’s face. 

“What's happening when you're using these infrared cameras is it's creating a map that's basically transforming your face into a number of digital landmarks, numerically transforming that into a map that makes us each unique. And so they then use an algorithm to figure out who we are, basically,” Lee said.

But the pink sheen of ID Guard beats the infrared rays. “When infrared light is trying to shine into your eyes, it’s basically being reflected away so it can’t actually penetrate and we’re able to block up to 80 percent of the infrared rays,” Lee said. “When that is happening, those cameras become less effective. They’re not able to collect as much data on your face.”

To test ID Guard’s effectiveness I put them on my wife and sent her to battle the most complex facial recognition system available to consumers: an iPhone. Apple’s Face ID system is the most comprehensive kind of facial ID system normal people encounter everyday. An iPhone uses three different cameras to project a grid of infrared lights onto a person's face, flood the space in between with infrared light, and take a picture. These infrared lights make a 3D map of a user’s face and use it to unlock the phone.

My wife uses an iPhone for work with a FaceID system and when she was wearing Zenni’s ID Guard glasses, the phone would not open. Her iPhone rejected her in low light, darkness, and broad daylight if she was wearing the Zenni glasses. If she wore her own sunglasses, however, the phone opened immediately because the infrared lights of Apple Face ID made them clear and saw straight into her eyes. 

The 2D infrared pictures taken in most public spaces running facial recognition systems are much less sophisticated than an iPhone. And there’s a way we can test those too: trail cameras. The cameras hunters and park rangers use to monitor the wilderness are often equipped with infrared lights that help them take pictures at night and in low light conditions. Using one to take a picture of my face while wearing the Zenni glasses should show us what I look like in public to facial recognition cameras used by retail businesses and the police.

Sure enough, the Zenni glasses with ID Guard stopped the camera from seeing my eyes when the infrared light was on. I sat for several photos in dark conditions while the camera captured photos of my face. The infrared went right through my normal sunglasses while the ID Guard glasses from Zenni stopped the light all together. The camera couldn’t get a clear shot of my eyes.

Zenni is not the first company to offer some form of anit-infrared coating that disrupts facial recognition tech, but it is the first to make it affordable while offering a variety of style choices. The company Reflectacles has been offering a variety of Wayfarer-style glasses with an anti-IR coating for a few years now. But Reflectacles style options are limited and have a powerful green-yellow tint. Zenni is also a major glasses retailer competing with other major retailers, it’s offering a variety of styles that match different aesthetics, and the pink sheen is way less noticeable than the green coating.

Zenni offers the ID Guard on most of its frames and the glasses have a subtle pink tint that’s obvious if you look directly at them, but I didn’t notice when I wore them. I used them to watch TV and went to the movies with them on and never noticed altered colors. “So with the pinkish hue, that was not by accident,” Lee said. “It was purposeful. We wanted to do something where we could actively show individuals that the lenses were actively working to protect their identity.”

Whether Zenni’s ID guard will actually protect people from facial recognition is less interesting than the fact that they exist at all. The state of our surveillance dystopia is such that a major glasses retailer is advertising anti-facial recognition features as a selling point as if it was normal.

PauseTalk Vol. 99 was held on Thursday, October 23 at Bananafish Books, and ended up getting the biggest turnout yet for a PauseTalk session in Shanghai, with 20 participants. It was a lively bunch, with of course a long intro roll at the start – that itself ignited a lot of questions and discussion as it was still going. Topics throughout the night ranged from community (why we join them, how to run them), whether language used influences who attends the event more than any cultural influence (i.e. why an event like PauseTalk tends to be expat heavy), some takes on fashion in the city, and yes, good ol’ AI, which tends to be a recurring theme, with strong opinions on both sides of the debate on its use. As one of the topics touched on filmmaking, and more specifically, a few in attendance had participated in the recent 48-hour Film Project, we capped it off with an impromptu viewing of the short they had produced (“The Greatest Show-Off”), which ended up winning the top prize.

Below, the list of participants:

• Alberto Sanseverino (Creative Director)
• Ano (AIGC Creator)
• Bill Glennie (Would-be Actor)
• Candy (Trade Assistant)
• Cliff Chiu (Game Designer)
• Dorothy Foo (Filmmaker/IP Creator)
• Gemma Li (Filmmaker/Director)
• George Hubert (The Man)
• Gordon Wang (AI & Digital)
• Jean Snow (Game Developer)
• Juliette Xue (E-commerce Marketing)
• Kat (Brand & Community)
• Kuan Tong (Voice Actor)
• Maria Razzhivina (Robot Lover)
• Mason (AIGC Creator)
• Olga (Marketing & Communications)
• Paul Copeland (Filmmaker)
• Tessie Wang (Pending New Role)
• Yegor (Phsyics Teacher)
• Yumeng Gai (Sculpter & Designer)

What’s next? As I had shared last time, I am still planning on producing a zine to commemorate the upcoming Vol. 100, and the collecting of material for that (for those who would like to contribute a page) is likely to mostly happen in the WeChat group we have – but if you’ve ever attended a PauseTalk in the past (either in Tokyo or Shanghai) and would like to contribute something, do get in touch.

As for the next session, PauseTalk Vol. 100, that will normally happen sometime in December, and I’ll share the details here when they get confirmed. I would like to do something special for it (on top of the zine), so we’ll see what I come up with. In the meantime, the best way to stay updated is via the WeChat group (contact me to be added).

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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It's like going up to someone who doesn't know about conservation of energy, and telling them you have a wheel that never stops spinning, and expecting them to be blown away.