Links and ephemera Wednesday 8.6.2025

✪ Americans say no as terrified ICE agents flee from angry citizens. www.tumblr.com/mostlysig…

✪ The Camp Snap CS-8 is a $149 digital video camera that looks and works like a Super-8 movie camera from 1970 or so. My Dad had one like this one and I used it like crazy on a family vacation. I loved it. www.theverge.com/news/7191…

✪ As BEAD becomes uncertain, the fiber industry is pivoting to AI, providing connectivity between hyperscaler data centers. My colleague Linda Hardesty reports at Fierce Network. www.fierce-network.com/broadband…

✪ A Denmark zoo asks people to donate small pets as food for captive predators. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/08/0…

✪ The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away. By Thomas L. Friedman. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/0…

✪ Is progress humanity’s greatest myth? www.theguardian.com/books/202…

Everything is in decline, argues the geographer Samuel Miller McDonald. Democracy and free speech are in freefall. Inequality is soaring, with the 1% scooping up ever-larger shares of global wealth. These days, the US has a Gini coefficient – the most common international measurement of inequality – on a par with slave-owning Ancient Rome. Maternal mortality rates for American millennials are three times higher than those of their parents’ generation – and this in the world’s richest society.

Global life expectancy is falling. So, too, are food standards. Outside a few bourgeois sourdough enclaves, real bread has vanished. In its place we get mass-produced, spongy, tasteless “pseudo-bread” – as Guy Debord lamented in The Encyclopedia of Nuisances. In an earlier age, there would have been bread riots. Now? Just muted indigestion.

What accounts for our complacency? False consciousness, claims McDonald in this sparky polemic against the myth of progress. We have been hoodwinked by elite propaganda. The “progress narratives” of the ruling classes assure us that history only moves forward, that we should trust the system and surrender agency to our betters.

Reviewer Pratinav Anil argues that McDonald fails to make his case.

✪ The homes of “working class Romans” from the early empire were found during a dig for a new metro station in Rome. www.theguardian.com/world/202…

✪ AGNTCY is the next big AI platform you’ve never heard of. My colleague Diana Goovaerts explains for Fierce Network. www.fierce-network.com/cloud/agn…

✪ The MCP factor: Telco vendors risk being left behind. MCP is a standardized protocol for applications to provide context to LLMs, introduced by Anthropic in November. It may already be too late for telco vendors to get into the game. My colleagues Dan Jones and Elizabeth Coyne provide analysis at Fierce Network. www.fierce-network.com/wireless/…

✪ The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mot…

The digital deluge is a familiar annoyance for anyone on a Democratic fundraising list. It’s a relentless cacophony of bizarre texts and emails, each one more urgent than the last, promising that your immediate $15 donation is the only thing standing between democracy and the abyss.

The main rationale offered for this fundraising frenzy is that it’s a necessary evil–that the tactics, while unpleasant, are brutally effective at raising the money needed to win. But an analysis of the official FEC filings tells a very different story. The fundraising model is not a brutally effective tool for the party; it is a financial vortex that consumes the vast majority of every dollar it raises.

Journalist Adam Bonica argues that a single company, Mothership, is behind all those spams, raising $678 million from individual donors. The company only sends about 1.6% of funds raised to candidates.

Here’s what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns.