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The Negative Externalities will continue until morale improves

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Part of the problem, to @kalimurray.bsky.social's OP, is that too many law-pilled politicians have framed impeachment as a legalistic means toward an impossible end instead of a powerful political tool to train attention and build capital on specific issues with the power of blaming and shaming

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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 14h

One trope is “litigating political corruption doesn‘t address kitchen table issues that voters really care about.” The obvious retort is that the corruption is the foundation of the kitchen table issues. But it takes political skill and discipline to explain in simple terms how they are connected.

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Reposted by Blake E. Reid

On the Tech Policy Press podcast, editor Justin Hendrix talks with UNC Chapel Hill researchers Daniel Kreiss and Lorcan Neill about their new paper, "Militant Platform Democracy: A Framework for Democracy-Worthy Platform Policies." "Platforms have to proceed from an analysis of power," Kreiss says.

techpolicy.press

Why Social Media Platforms Should Adopt a 'Militant Democracy' Framework

Daniel Kreiss and Lorcan Neill on what social media platforms should do when the state itself becomes a threat to democracy.

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Great conversation and paper, though @justinhendrix.bsky.social’s Q about the lack of virtue among platforms highlights the challenges of bootstrapping your way out of the doom loop. *Somebody* (or class of somebodies) needs to behave better than they are now without an exogenous incentive to do so.

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Speaking of Negative Externalities in a Trenchcoat

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I track in our budget the various extra fees and semi-mandatory “donations” and so forth that we put into our (truly excellent) local public schools and covering it at scale with taxes would probably be an impossible political challenge. And that‘s not including “free as in surveillance” ed tech

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My guess is because once you start pulling at the strings it’s basically everything (and then you have to come to real grips with the hollowing out of school funding)

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So many facets of the U.S. economy have devolved into Negative Externalities in a Trenchcoat

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Blake E. Reid @chup.blakereid.org · 30/09/2026

AI “parent hacks” to avoid the high prices of the enshittified school photo industrial complex are basically just shifting around the deck chairs on the Negative Externality Titanic™

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Re: @kissane.myatproto.social's astute comment in the thread below about the long-term viability of open-source models, one thing that might not matter that much to frontier labs with singularity-or-bust capital but will matter a lot to cost-sensitive users is the uncertain application of copyright

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This also feeds into the doctrinally nonsensical but politically understandable project to conflate the First Amendment and Section 230 by suggesting that intentional expression and publisher immunity are mutually exclusive

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Tangentially, one reason First Amendment jurisprudence for tech platforms is such a hot mess is that when confronted by an unpopular editorial decision, tech companies often shift into the passive voice (e.g., "temporarily restricted by our system"), making it sound like they're not even in charge.

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Surely that particular talking point couldn't be motivated by anything other than 100% good faith rooted in a detailed understanding of the relevant domains

To be fair to that Senator who mixed up the Atlanta Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes, the elaborate Rube Goldberg conspiracy theory he was trying to prove with the gotcha is so convoluted that it's kind of a wonder he even managed to stumble on an underlying fact involving the same sport

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It would be cool if Congressional candidates started running on internally fixing Congress and making it more capable instead of inevitably letting down voters with big ideas that presume a functional Congress

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We coasted for awhile. But a dysfunctional judiciary and executive and tech industry have exhausted the fumes. We desperately need a functional, nimble Congress that can quickly do small fixes and diligently do big, complete-thought industrial policy.

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And this info fragmentation is a key part of it. Sometimes an individual or small group of Senators or reps will get good info from good-faith advocates and build momentum to get a narrow bill across the finish line. But by and large, Congress doesn’t get much done and runs on before-times fumes.

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You can also see exactly when this happened by watching Congress’ relationship with the courts go from a sophisticated dialectic in tech policy cases (e.g., Turner I-II) straight into the toilet by the time the Internet takes off. Congress hasn’t passed comprehensive tech legislation since 1998.

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Well, that's enough computer for the day

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...he said as he turned his dad hat backwards and spun the chair backwards to address the class

Aye. There are very different ways of structuring lists...

I also do not want unpredictable AI agents anywhere near my perfectly structured lists

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I mean, I buy that it is a complex cultural schism. I personally find it maddening that I cannot win converts to my particular form of List Madness™ but I bought a license to Omnifocus and made some scripts/tags to export a few essential things to the dreaded Simple Shared List App™ and it's fine

Blake E. Reid @chup.blakereid.org · 28/09/2026

Anecdata: I am definitely a hardcore every-granular-task-on-a-list sicko and I am the only one I know among my close friends and family. Many people have other ways of informally managing things or use lists very casually/sparingly

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Fanfic is just one of many copyright-adjacent areas where the excesses of AI-related movements jam good-faith advocates up with the most extreme, unpalatable versions of their interests and beliefs

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Blake E. Reid @chup.blakereid.org · 24/09/2026

@thedextriarchy.bsky.social feels like that category is either everything or nothing these days

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There's a California nexus here but also this is a lot bigger than that...

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Oh sure. The settlement is bad on its own terms. But there's also serious expectation creep on what the realistic possibilities were. We live in a federalist system and people should be worried that something is amiss when state officials purport to take on major national policy issues.

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It is interesting to see decades of fair use incrementalism being steamrolled by ultra-capitalized Uber-style zone-flooding

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It's not that people shouldn't be mad at Bonta, but it should be for perpetuating the idea that fixing this giant techno-economic-structural mess just takes a little hero-lawyering under extant law rather than generational reform of the country's institutions

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Blake E. Reid @chup.blakereid.org · 22/09/2026

Note also how the unrealistic prepositioning of antitrust as a legal deus ex machina, Lucy-holding-the-football-for-Charlie-Brown-style, let all the political air out of the balloon that Bonta is now left holding as everyone looks around for someone to blame for this essentially inevitable result

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Sorry, the QT was rude and I should do better. I hear you and share the belief in the historical tradition and theoretical potential.

(DGMW: I desperately hope that changes. But the underlying problems are institutional and political, not doctrinal.)

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If these companies somehow turn their circular-financing-powered space rockets to AGI fantasyland into a sustainable marketplace of real products, I expect U.S. antitrust will do as much to check their dominance as it ever has for any Internet industry: 👌

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I admire New Brandeisianism as a normative political project but we should be realistic about its limited actual impact in practice. The reality is that you don’t need an antitrust exemption because these companies are not even *participating* in any “AI safety” market, much less cartelizing.

Re: AI “antitrust exemption” discourse, I could not help but scratch my head at @reckless.bsky.social and Kanter’s conversation, which suggested that antitrust law had some meaningful track record of concretely checking the power of any tech company since AT&T or MS.

Blake E. Reid @chup.blakereid.org · 19/09/2026

This is right, and the real hard question for NBism is how to robustly seek pluralistic goals while preventing abusive under- and over-enforcement with an open-ended statute administered and adjudicated by partisan actors

The OP is good example of writing a heading and an article to avoid misinforming people. It's the "US military using AI" and "the analyst queried a chatbot," not "rogue AI almost starts World War III." It prompts the reader to wonder why the military and analyst used this tech and why it failed.

Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say

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It's funny how the amateur philosophers never imagine an AI that self-regulates

But one thing we do agree on is getting the narrative right. We aren't going to get anywhere with members of Congress, courts, agencies, the media, and the public are getting apocalypse-pilled.

And the copyright example teaches that AI companies are not especially susceptible to even really significant, realistic threats of actual liability.

That is all to say that there are no quick or easy answers in a world where nearly every institution for tech law and policy has been ineffectual, asleep at the switch, or actively pushing things in the wrong direction for the last three decades.