The knowledge is retained and owned by a private corporation who now does not have to share what may have been a still under copyright, but now the corporation owns it? Make it make sense.

Zitron is a pinnacle of you can be smart and foul mouthed. Part of the reason he succeeds at this is he actually knows where to properly put cusses in sentences and doesn’t overuse them (like me, for instance).

There was evidence part of the reason people gravitated to Trump was that his foul and odious way of speaking seemed more “honest” because of the vulgarity. As someone who worked in local television news for 10 years, I can say that I think that’s true because it was always so clear that our newscasters were putting on a show and often had very few feelings whatsoever about what they were reporting on, or worse, genuinely were dismissive and cold to people in real tragedy. People have responded to that over time by realizing that all that faux-professionalism just really comes off as covering your ass and/or just using buzzwords to sound like you know how anything works at all when you don’t. It doesn’t come off as sincere, knowledgeable or, most importantly passionate.

When we heard Bernie Sanders, AOC, or Mamdani speak, we can hear the passion they have in the way they speak. When we hear Centrist Dems like Chuck Schumer speak, we automatically hear the work of strategy to get people on their side, not that they really believe or care about what they’re doing. I don’t hear passion in Schumer’s voice for anything but Israel. Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, you can hear that passion that they have for citizens and protecting and lifting them up.

Trump is passionate about himself and his followers are passionate about him, too, I guess. It’s that their is spurred by delusion and unaddressed mental health issues.

Anyway, people need to speak more plainly and with more passion, Zitron is a prime example of doing it well. Other than Doctorow and maybe WIRED, I don’t know of any other really hard hitting evidence-based journalism on this stuff, and Doctorow is a little bit too up his own ass on coining fucking words. (In my humble opinion, Doctorow comes off as way too extremely online to connect his ideas with regular people, he’s just too much of a fucking nerd who can’t stop being a nerd long enough to jive with average people)

Let’s be real though, technically software has always lived and died on licensing instead of ownership.

I remember software in the 90s having limits on how many computers you could use an application on (however rarely enforced), and making backup copies of software that you owned (like copying a CD for backup purposes) was a hard fought right when the DMCA was being implemented. But even the backup only helped so much because especially in the last 20 years tech has grown at lightning speed since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. A CD backup of Office 2003 isn’t really helpful in 2026 anyway.

I’m not arguing this is how it should be. I’m just clarifying that technically this is how it has always been. We’ve never had full rights to do whatever we want with the software we buy. It’s why Free (as in speech, not as in beer) Open Source Software is so important, and why open hardware is so important by extension.

The same companies that rose to dominance using an environment with weak regulation and enforcement while also maintaining that hacker attitude of “routing around bad legislation” have now been using their dominance to make an environment of tight regulation and enforcement, now that they’re at the top. They have spent endless amounts of lobbying money to get this environment to benefit them where you’re locked in via hardware and software to the companies rules on how you use your hardware and software… because the software was never really ours, and now they’re leveraging that to make our hardware not ours either.

The only way out is through. FOSS.

Isn’t this enough proof that these chucklefucks are a drain on company resources and time and the FIRST thing to replace AI with is the bosses so workers can organize collectively while the AI helps them stay organized without the AI being in control.

I mean, I guess that would make too much sense.

Genuinely though, if the first thing they do with AI is outsource their own decision making, isn’t it just rock solid evidence that these people are useless at their fucking jobs to begin with? They aren’t even making the decisions anymore, the AI is. Let’s cut out the middleman, which is all a boss is now if AI is running the show. I mean, it’s what they did with all the junior developers, because they had forced the juniors into using AI and then asked themselves “why not cut out the middleman.” And they hadn’t even considered that maybe the cost of AI would outpace the cost of an employee. How the fuck are these short term thinking idiots in fucking charge anyway? A lot of bosses are just fucking charlatans.

EDIT: Clarified first sentence.

Linux Users: