About three and a half years ago, the American auto industry made a big bet on electrification, with the help of the Biden administration. It has been obvious to informed observers for at least a decade that EVs are where car production as an industry is going to land, sooner or later. They are faster, simpler, cheaper to run and maintain, dramatically more efficient, and most importantly, produce no direct carbon emissions, when stacked up against cars running on fossil fuels. So, the Inflation Reduction Act contained a large subsidy package for the manufacture and sale of EVs. Automakers got a variety of subsidies for building batteries and EVs, while car buyers got a $7,500 tax credit for purchasing them. That way, the Big Three—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis—could start to catch up with Chinese companies, which stole a march on America the first time Trump threw a wrench into the EV transition. Thanks to the IRA, the Big Three could claim a piece of the global auto market going forward. **_More from Ryan Cooper_** Then the American people, in their infinite wisdom, elected Donald Trump, and he proceeded to stab the American auto industry directly between the shoulder blades. Almost all of the EV subsidies in the IRA were repealed, as part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Now, thanks to that betrayal, plus Trump’s lunatic trade and foreign policy in general, the American auto industry is bleeding out. Consider Canada, which has historically been one of the biggest markets for American cars, being quite similar culturally, already heavily integrated into the U.S. auto industry (along with Mexico), and also one of the few places that will buy our big stupid trucks. America’s share of the Canadian auto market has been tumbling, down from about half in the previous decade to just 36 percent, because of Trump’s deranged trade war and threats of annexation, which has sparked a massive nationalist backlash and a mounting customer boycott of anything American. Canada’s Liberal prime minister Mark Carney almost certainly would not have been elected without Trump’s lunatic aggression. Now, he is quietly attempting to detach Canada from its dependence on American trade wherever possible. Last week, he announced a trade deal with China whereby Canada would exchange a greatly reduced tariff on Chinese cars in exchange for a big increase in China’s imports of Canadian canola seed, along with several other agreements. This is the kiss of death for American car sales in Canada. You can get a Chinese Xiaomi sedan with 300-plus miles of range, more than 600 horsepower, and _extremely_ fancy luxury trimmings for the equivalent of about $42,000 in China; or you can get a Chinese BYD Seagull with 190 miles of range for about $11,000. I would bet that the next step for Chinese automakers is to build a factory in Toronto or somewhere nearby so Canada can get a slice of the jobs and production. More broadly, the American EV transition has clearly hit the skids, thanks to Trump. Sales plummeted by about 46 percent when the tax credit for purchase expired at the end of September. Ford took a $19.5 billion bath on a planned battery factory investment, canceled its F-150 EV, and is now reportedly in talks with—wait for it—BYD to pick up batteries for its hybrid cars sold abroad. GM is doing better, but its EV sales are still down sharply, as are Tesla’s. Contrary to the triumphalism of various EV critics, all this horrendous waste does not mean that the global EV transition is now in question. As I have previously detailed, in 2025 a quarter of global car sales were EVs, led by Southeast Asia, where the EV share of new car sales in several nations has soared past the 40 percent mark, with many more nations just behind. China, the largest car market in the world, went from almost zero to more than half in just five years. America’s failure to gain a serious toehold in EV production—particularly very cheap models—is a major reason why the Big Three’s share of the global auto market has fallen from nearly 30 percent in 2000 to about 12 percent today, while China’s share has risen from 2 percent to 42 percent. > Trump’s Cargo Cult Imperialism in Venezuela And this is just the start. If the staggering fall in battery prices over the last year is any indication, EVs are still in the period of industrial development where both technological advancements and price declines are rapid. And critically for the developing nations like India, Pakistan, and Nigeria that will likely make up most of the economic growth this century, they allow nations to shake off the heavy burden of oil imports. The EV transition isn’t over even in America. As Andrew Moseman points out at Heatmap News, EVs are still straight-up better than gas cars for most purposes, and even our network of DC rapid chargers, while wretched by Norwegian standards, is good enough to make road trips workable in almost all of the country. Cheaper models like the Chevy Bolt or Equinox, Toyota bZ, or the Nissan Leaf are coming to market just in time. Who knows: Perhaps in 20 years, a desiccated husk of what once was Ford or GM will still be clinging to life. It’s ironic, given Trump’s fixation on “manly” blue-collar professions, that the only companies he actually throws his weight around to protect are Big Tech monopolies. When Europe ponders enforcing its laws regarding child pornography on Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, then the administration is quick to issue retaliatory threats. But American auto manufacturers? Those Trump will kill with his own hand. **We have 2 days left in our fall fundraising drive, and we’re still $10,000 short.** Right now, our reporters are fanning out across the country to bring you the stories behind the midterm races. That reporting costs money, and it’s funded by readers like you—not advertisers or corporate owners. **A $5 monthly gift is the single best way to keep that work going through Election Day and beyond.** Please give before Friday. **David Dayen ** Executive Editor Support our reporting **We have 2 days left in our fall fundraising drive, and we’re still $10,000 short.** Right now, our reporters are fanning out across the country to bring you the stories behind the midterm races. That reporting costs money, and it’s funded by readers like you—not advertisers or corporate owners. **A $5 monthly gift is the single best way to keep that work going through Election Day and beyond.** Please give before Friday. Support our reporting **David Dayen ** Executive Editor ### _Related_

I've always had an understanding that the independent web was designed by humans and for humans. There were times that my inbox or forums I visit were solicited by people (and maybe occasionally agents) who vibecoded a project and were proudly sharing it as part of the resistance against the corporate web. That always felt totally antithetical to what is trying to be accomplished and achieved with regards to the IndieWeb. Take for instance this website proclaiming that the IndieWeb is punk. While I appreciate the intent of the message, it felt totally counteracted by the fact that the website was created with the help of Claude Code, and how the language on the website itself reads like what an LLM would output. How can you advocate that people should hand-make their Internet pages when yours itself is not? Now, I've only been an active participant on the IndieWeb for around a year, and I will stress that it is an incredibly loosely-defined movement and umbrella term. But the view and understanding of the subculture being pro-human and anti-genAI, just as it is anti-corporation, seemed coherent and widely agreed upon. If you read the AI policy article on the wiki, there seems to be a broad overall consensus. So, what do we do when the founding technical member of the IndieWeb has decided to use Claude Code in some of the most important IndieWeb projects? I briefly gestured towards this in an earlier post, but I haven't really reckoned with what it means until now. But I'm getting ahead of myself. ## Aaronpk? Let's start at the beginning. Aaron Parecki (known online as aaronpk) is one of the co-founders and the lead technical architect of the IndieWeb movement. Alongside Tantek Çelik, he co-founded the movement in 2010, with the main idea being to empower individuals to own their own identity, data, and web presence rather than relying on centralized social media silos. Parecki’s contributions to the IndieWeb as-we-know-it are incredibly foundational. He co-founded and helped organize the very first IndieWebCamp in Portland, Oregon in June 2011. He built and maintains Meetable, an open-source event-listing platform that powers events.indieweb.org and facilitates community gatherings. Parecki bridged the gap between IndieWeb concepts and technical web specifications. He's served as the editor/co-editor for critical W3C protocols: * Webmention: A protocol enabling websites to automatically notify each other when they link to one another, allowing cross-site commenting and conversations. * Micropub: An API standard for independent clients and posting apps to securely create, update, or delete posts on a user's own domain. * WebSub: A protocol for real-time pub/sub notifications, allowing for instantaneous decentralized feeds. Parecki also created much of the essential backend plumbing used by the community under his personal p3k project umbrella: * webmention.io: A widely adopted, free service that receives and aggregates Webmentions on behalf of independent websites. * Quill & Teacup: Micropub clients used to post text, photos, food logs, and check-ins directly to your personal sites from your phone or web browser. * Monocle & Aperture: A self-hosted Microsub reader and server environment designed to let users consume content in a decentralized manner. * OwnYourSwarm: A bridging tool to syndicate Foursquare/Swarm check-ins back to your personal domain; an example of PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site) philosophy. He is so foundational that the IndieWeb wiki has an article titled single point of Aaron, where "IndieWeb technology is being developed and there haven't been enough implementations to create proper diversity causing an over reliance on one of Aaron Parecki's services in order for the technology to work broadly." Parecki's personal website, aaronparecki.com, serves as a fantastic reference implementation of an IndieWeb-enabled site. There's location tracking, fitness logs, music, micro-blog notes, and much more. All built on his own infrastructure. And if you visit that site, you'll notice it was only a few weeks ago that he 3D printed a Claude Code mascot (with the help of Claude, of course), and that he's been using a local LLM model to generate cat pictures for his weather display. And if that was the end of it, that'd be one thing—I think it'd be weird of me to write this blog post if Parecki was just dabbling in genAI personally. But that isn't the case at all. What's happening here is that major IndieWeb projects, such as webmention.io, are being entirely reworked into PHP with Claude Code. The original Ruby code hasn't been touched since April of this year, and seems to be human-only and what I mirror on folk.zone. The same can be seen in the commit history of indielogin.com, which began having Claude Code as a contributor only around a month ago in mid-September. And the same for Meetable's codebase, IndieNews' codebase, micropub.rocks' codebase, and I'm sure many of Parecki's projects I haven't checked. Suddenly, if you have an anti-genAI stance, you have a reckoning on your hands. My website, for example, uses IndieAuth/IndieLogin for comments, I use Webmentions, I have Micropub enabled. The list goes on and on. ## The "Discourse" I can imagine the discourse going in several directions here. To start, the IndieWeb has always had an inherent fragility and over-reliance on Parecki's work. He could have decided to inject advertisements or malicious code into his code at any time, and many others (and I) would have been at the mercy of that. Instead, he has decided to use Claude for his many projects. You could also make the argument that there just simply isn't enough funding or attention for these projects, that people have been too passive and unsupportive of projects like these for human-only maintenance to be sustainable. Next—and I think this is actually important—the lowercase indie web is NOT the uppercase IndieWebCamp and the IndieWeb wiki. I have always tried to emphasize that it doesn't matter if you use Microformats2 or any of the other specifications and protocols listed on the wiki—as long as you made your website and it isn't just a mere account on a corporate social media platform, then you've succeeded and are part of the indie web. But of course, many people (myself included) still conflate the two as one-in-the-same. What comes up when you search "indie web," after all? Probably the wiki that's existed for over fifteen years. The "brand" that has merch and a logo. ## What Do We Do, Now? Many people who participate in the IndieWeb and who are passionate about the subculture aren't technologically savvy enough to fork and build their own human-made versions of Parecki's projects. Maybe there will be a few devoted, technical people willing to put in the work there, but it would take a lot of time and effort. It would be a good thing to have a more diverse selection of choices, don't get me wrong, but it does feel like a serious schism in a way. Or do we just bend the knee? Do we accept that generative AI is so ubiquitous that, even in a movement and subculture promoting humanity and our fight against corporations and their ruinous effects, it's okay that the major fundamental building blocks of the IndieWeb use the likes of a chatbot built by the corporation Anthropic? Do we just let the developers and programmers we rely on use the technology? Or do we just abandon uppercase IndieWeb altogether? Do we strip our websites of the specs and formatting and just simply wash our hands of the project that's been built for over a decade and a half? Obviously, I don't think there's an easy answer. I don't even know what I personally am going to do, here. I don't think I can overstate how vital and influential Parecki's technical contributions have been to the IndieWeb, regardless of his recent genAI usage. I am not writing this out of judgment or anger, but rather to just bring awareness to the situation, so people can make an informed choice for themselves. That's all I ever try to do. Somebody I look up to and who's been handcrafting his own (impressive) code for years has told me that he feels fatigued by having to feel angry all the time at genAI at this point. And I can sympathize deeply with how demoralizing it must feel, and that there is obvious burnout in trying to be proactive and vocal about this when there's a never-ending torrent of chatbots and genAI in our face every single day. I'd really love to know the thoughts of other people (yes, you reading) on this, I think it'll help me get a clearer picture. Maybe it will for you, too.

SpaceX suddenly throttled access to Starlink with no warning, Ukraine says.

Generative AI works a lot like fossil fuels “work”—narrowly, intermittently, and with a lot of nasty side effects.

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