The GOP has been looking for a truly empty vessel without standards to run their caucuses for decades, and each time they get a little closer. They may have succeeded at the worst possible moment with Johnson.

Really interesting article - one of the more insightful theories I’ve seen for truly understanding why people are attracted to the right’s outright lying and bad faith posturing.

You might be right, but I think the question is, “does my commitment to the cult outweigh my commitment to self and empirical reality?”

I think like in any other cult that fleeces its members, the answer for many is, “yes.”

This is the flipside of workers not getting the value of increased productivity over the last 40 years. Yes, we could be getting paid more, but we could (alternatively or also) be working a lot less to produce the same economic output as our parents did.

Unfortunately, this is something only a country that already has social safety nets and livable wages can even propose, because if we’re all kept to subsistence, we’ll work more anyway (because we have to).

This is a helpful. This sounds like a way, even if I’m still in the “hmmm, yes, I recognize some of those words” stage. Maybe I’ll look for a detailed guide.

I admit, though, the details of how to do this are pretty hard to imagine for me - networking and tunneling seems very technical. Before I can jump off the Plex enshittification train, I just want a way to share my media with tech-illiterate family without complex setup on their end.

Sorry to hit you with a random question, but since I’m in a similar situation: are you using Tailscale to remote stream to your parents, or how do you get that working seamlessly with Jellyfin?

I’m a Plex Pass user and we cannot opt out on Roku devices. On Android I was able to roll back the app, since we can sideload old versions and turn off updates.

There’s a new Plex UI that they pushed to Android a few months ago that breaks everything, removes options and customizability, requires extra unintuitive actions to get to any self-hosted libraries, and pushes Plex’s Live TV and other junk into prominent UI positions, as I assume the investors and MBAs demanded.

It was released and universally criticized. So Plex’s team thought long and hard about that user feedback - ok, ok, sorry, I couldn’t make it without laughing. They changed nothing and pushed forward and now it hit Roku, with no way to decline or roll back.

Ngl, the fact that a 9/11’s worth of people were dying every fucking day, just in the US, during the peak of Covid, and one entire fucking half of our country was just shitposting and TRYING to spread it more entirely reframed 9/11 for me.

I’m glad to see this, I feel like all Americans should have to come to some personal terms about the 9/11 worth of daily COVID deaths that half the country were just casually ok with. I prefer existentialism to nihilism as a response to the absurdity of the world, since nihilism is just going to trap us in a cycle of resigned apathy, but a little self-reflection is preferred either way.

And related to the 9/11 comparison: amazing how there was no reckoning about how hundreds of thousands of those cumulative deaths were attributable to Trump’s mishandling. From that standpoint, we elected Osama bin Laden times a thousand to be president, after he took down the twin towers.

Yeah, this post started as a reassurance that Tailscale wouldn’t enshittify. But it turned out to just be an argument about how to avoid enshittification that boiled down to two principles:

1. You shouldn’t make your product worse because it’ll eventually harm the company; and
2. Founders are magic and need to never turn over control of the company to others (be it new CEOs or VC) to resist enshittification.

Both are partially right and partially wrong.

For #1: Yes, making your product worse eventually harms the company. No, you can’t expect CEOs to accept that as a reason to not make their product worse because even if it harms the company, short-term incentives that lead to enshittification are eventually going to become irresistible. His comment about reaching “zen” with leveled growth and profit will never stop VCs from calling in demands and favors.

For #2: Yes, founders typically “get it” more than their VC- or failure-initiated replacements. No, that doesn’t mean founders are uniquely resistant to enshittification. This is your point too, and it’s why I don’t believe this person - they lose credibility here because they don’t acknowledge they aren’t special. Every tech bro out there thinks they’ve cracked the code to permanent tech hegemony. That exceptionalist thinking turns into enshittification, since the product-worsening or overcharging is easier to justify as temporary/necessary/not-a-big-deal (until it isn’t).

And all of this doesn’t explain why Tailscale specifically gets immunity if the principles are true.

So interesting post, and a lot more self-awareness than most founders which is still a little reassuring, but a lot of warning signs too.

Edit: clarity