From June to July of 2026, the cost for “food at home” — the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ phrase for groceries — dropped by 0.1%. The rest of the numbers in the monthly report ranged from not great to bad, so that drop was kind of welcome. NPR described it as, “the cost of groceries actually fell slightly.”

Digging a little deeper, though, the driver of that drop was a 16.4% decrease in the cost of lettuce. People stopped buying lettuce and leafy greens due to fear of Taylor Farms’ Cyclospora outbreak. To move the product already on shelves, suppliers and grocery stores dropped the price, thereby decreasing the cost of living.

Because shitting yourself to death is good for the economy.

It’s the stupid economy

In the first half of 2025, the biggest tech companies — Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia, Oracle, OpenAI, you know the list — spent tens of billions of dollars on data center hyperscaling and infrastructure. That money accounted for just 4% of the total GDP (consumer spending + all investment + all government spending minus taxes + the value of exports minus imports), but it made up 92% of the GDP’s growth over the same period.

Which is weird, because the GDP wasn’t really growing — it increased by about 0.1%. Jobs weren’t being created. Unemployment was generally up. The economy as a whole wasn’t doing anything special. But our Big Tech saviors were single-handedly (well, several-handedly) propping up the entire US economy.

Except they kind of weren’t.

Image via Bloomberg

Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI, but the majority of that money was in the form of credits for compute on Microsoft servers — Microsoft paid OpenAI to use Microsoft’s service. Nvidia promised $100 billion to OpenAI … that OpenAI promised to use to by Nvidia chips. Oh, and this week, they promised another $105 billion in the form of a data center in Ohio. Oracle invested $300 billion into OpenAI while it is building hyperscale data centers. Data centers that will be rented to OpenAI and packed full of Nvidia chips.

All of that money — all of that growth — was just a handful of giant corporations passing the same money back and forth between them and calling it profit. Nothing was created.

Homo economicus

Both the Cyclospora deaths and the AI investment shell game are examples of the economy working as designed.

It's not supposed to make sense. It inherently doesn’t make sense. There are huge swaths of the economy that don’t even affect you or me.

The American economy is every single transaction every single person in America performs. Every time I buy a bag of Bit-O-Honeys for $1, I’m taking part in the economy (it took me forever to come up with a candy example that didn’t involve child slavery). Each new employee, the output of every Pepsi bottling plant, the local government paving a road, and farmers selling crops across national borders — those are all part of the economy.

Image via NPR

Typically, consumer spending — people buying stuff — accounts for two-thirds of the GDP and is the primary driver of growth. In the first quarter of 2026, consumer spending slowed down. It was still about 68% of the economy, but Big Tech investment in AI infrastructure still contributed more to growth.

The most recent estimates put AI investment in 2026 somewhere around $725 billion.

And all of that brings us to the stock market — the stock market isn’t part of GDP, but it is a measure of the (perceived) health of the companies that contribute to the GDP. While something like 60% of Americans own stocks, that number isn’t evenly distributed. Almost 90% of people earning over $100,000 per year own stocks, while about 30% of people making less than $50,000 own any. And the vast majority of people who “own” stocks are actually talking about a tiny amount of stocks bundled up in retirement funds — if they’re lucky enough to have one.

The reality is that about 20% of Americans own stock directly. And of those, the top 1% own more than the remaining 99% combined. That’s about 700,000 people controlling roughly $28 trillion. That’s the population of two Pittsburghs or one-and-a-half Sacramentos. When was the last time you even thought about either of those cities, let alone considered pinning an entire economic structure on them?

When the Trump administration points to the Dow as an indicator of how well the economy is doing as a distraction from the atrocity of the day, it’s pointing to a subset of 30 companies. Which means that the Dow is only looking at about 1% of the number of companies listed on the NYSE. And those companies are not, like, a random, representative sample. They’re all massive companies like 3M, Boeing, Coca-Cola, and Chevron.

Image: Getty Images via Al-Monitor

As a quick aside, a solid 50% of the companies listed in the Dow Jones are on the BDS movement’s list of companies complicit in the Palestinian genocide. I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about. Moving on.

The point is, all of the talk about the economy — about the Dow being higher than ever, about the stock market doing great — realistically affects two Pittsburghs-worth of people. Roughly 0.2% of the US population give or take.

And, again, that’s by design. It is, according to the theorists and thinkers who shared the current US economy, natural.

People like Adam Smith, the generally accepted father of economic study, had this weird sense that being a poor was this inherent state (and inherent failing) a human possessed: “in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment.” Wealth inequality was just part of the system to him: “For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.”

To the discipline and its disciples, the free market and capitalism were just outgrowths of the natural world, something not to be interfered with. Wealth inequality was a feature, not a bug. Hell, to Adam Smith, wealth inequality was the only reason to bother with a government in the first place.

Manly qualities

When the United States secured its independence from Britain, it was a pretty heady time (they wrote a rap about it). But as the new country settled into being — and a generation of politicians came and went — politics, political parties, and politicians evolved into something new. Democracy among landed, white, free males started to flourish. This was already a stretch because democracy was a pretty sketchy idea among the founders — mostly because it implied poors might have an equal say.

Image: John Gast via Wikipedia

By the time Andrew “Never Met A Genocide He Didn’t Like” Jackson was elected in 1829, America even looked different. With the Louisiana Purchase and the super racist marketing campaign that was “Manifest Destiny,” the country was growing and our foundational myths were crystalizing. Add in the burgeoning railways and rapidly expanding capitalist markets both domestically and overseas, and the United States of the early mid-19th century was nothing at all like the colonies.

In his book, The Roots of American Individualism, Alex Zakaras argues that this is the era that gave us the image of the solely self-reliant pioneers and the myth of the self-made man. That neither of these things were true or accurate didn’t matter to America.

Image via Geek News Network

Those pioneers who bravely strode, unprotected and alone, into the wilderness to tame the continent were largely protected by the United States military, traveled in large groups, and were given literal government handouts via things like the Homestead Act(s) when they got there. Hell, the United States government published a guidebook for them to follow.

Even the great American cowboys, who, as Theodore Roosevelt said, “possess, to a very high degree, the stern, manly qualities that are invaluable to a nation,” were bored, corporate, wage-earners. Their deification as icons of rugged freedom is a much later development.

But none of that matters. The myth is what matters. The story is what we remember.

And America bought into its own line of bullshit to the point that, by 1887, then-President Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill that would’ve offered relief to Texan farmers’ suffering from a long drought. In his veto, he said, “I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.”

Back to Zakaras:

Fast-forward a hundred years, and that myth becomes Ronald “The actor?!” Reagan’s, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”

NPCs

There’s this idea in psychology and sociology called social distance (not the health practice). Very, very oversimplified, it’s the concept of “us versus them” but on an interpersonal level. Social distance relates to things like class and identity and race and power.

Power — things like wealth and influence — increases one’s social distance from basically everyone else — they end up in a smaller and smaller subset of society (the elites, if you will). And, like Dr. Susan Fiske argues, power means you think about other people less. You tend to pay more attention to other people when they have control over your life. If you’re wealthy and powerful enough, no one else can really affect you anymore.

Image via Wikipedia

At the same time, having power increases one’s tendency to objectify and dehumanize others — seeing other humans as tools, objects, and means to an end. It doesn’t even take a lot of power. Someone just having a factory job is enough to make random people think you’re more tool-like and less capable of “experienc[ing] human mental states.” (Which really puts into perspective all of the times Elon Musk called someone an NPC.)

It’s worth repeating that conclusion: random peers considered a person less human for having a repetitive, “unskilled” job. Human, here, defined as possessing thoughts, fears, plans, or even just seeing and hearing things around them. To be clear, there is no such thing as unskilled labor, only undervalued people. A full 20% of jobs in the United States pay less than $15 per hour. But these jobs aren’t “important.” Those people aren’t people.

The workers, their labor, and their jobs are only useful as cogs in the larger economic machine. And this is why shitting yourself to death is good for the economy. You don't matter.

Zakaras again, this time from an interview about the book:

These foundational American myths of independence, self-reliance, and the supremacy of the free market shift the blame and responsibility from the government to the individual. Economic failings became personal failings, and Americans were sold the lie that the government didn't owe them anything.

The United States didn’t even have an income tax until 1913 with the 16th Amendment. We didn’t have unemployment insurance, a protected right to trade unions, meaningful child labor laws, or social security until the 1930s.

DOGEshit

And that brings us back to salads.

Back in 2025, when Elon Musk took the stage at CPAC waving around his pretend chainsaw like a sugar-addled toddler, he declared it, “the chainsaw for bureaucracy.” (God, he’s such an unlikeable dork.) When he spearheaded the disastrous Department of Government Efficiency, the stated goal was to make the government as a whole more efficient.

DOGE was the inquisition for the heresy Zakaras was talking about.

Musk said, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

And you know what? I don’t even necessarily disagree with him until the last sentences. Because those “rules and regulations” were there for our protection. And DOGE gutted them.

Over the last three months, since June of 2026, (deep breath) blueberries, lettuce, eggs, jalapeños, granola, dog food, ricotta, baby formula, more cheese, some mushrooms, ranch seasoning, and dried herring have all been recalled for contamination with various food-borne illnesses. To be fair, it’s not actually much higher than any other year and is only slightly above what you’d expect. The difference is how visible they are and how long they take to spot. That last part is the result of DOGE cuts.

But, for a free market fanboy, the argument goes: “Competition means that people will just buy the lettuce that doesn’t make you shit yourself to death instead.” And that might even work in a broad sense, but it ignores just how restricted the US food supply is and how much influence those big companies have.

Image: Reuters via Newsweek

It also assumes, and this is the big one, that it’s worth it to literally sacrifice a few people to the lettuce so that the rest of us can shop smarter. It elevates the functioning of the economy above the lives of the people who participate in it. Because, to the shareholders — those two Pittsburghs-worth of people — it is. You’re a thing, a cog in their machine, and the government is only there to protect them from you.

When I wrote about Taylor Farms the first time, I said that the fight was existential. It is, and it’s a simple one. You don’t have to be pro-regulation to be anti-shitting yourself to death. You just have to see real people as more important than a made-up story about the economy.

You have to see people as people.

The United States was built on slavery. It took us a full two hundred years to decide owning people might not be okay, and a further hundred years to codify some of that “all men are created equal” part of the Declaration of Independence into law. (We’re currently actively dismantling that last part, though.)

Slavery is so inherent to the US that, despite being abolished in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment, we snuck a little forced labor into the middle of it. As a treat.

Today, both state-owned industries (like the DMV) and private companies can hire (“hire”) prisoners. And they get tax credits for doing so. Prison labor produces goods and services worth in excess of $11 billion a year while the inmates are paid somewhere between literally nothing and pennies per hour. And, fun fact, prison labor is exempt from OSHA, so there’s no required training or safety regulations.

Image via The Atlantic

Inmates are forced into jobs ranging from manufacturing body armor to producing furniture to firefighting to farming. The prisoners rented out to both state-owned and private companies have been convicted of things ranging from drug crimes to, more recently, simply existing as undocumented migrants and getting detained by ICE.

Four years ago, reporting by The Arizona Republic found that several companies employing prison labor happened to be employing that sort of ICE detainee. People it'd be illegal to employ if not for the fact that they were prisoners and, therefore, already exempt and dehumanized.

One of those companies was Taylor Farms, the largest supplier of salads in the world. Back then, Taylor Farms was paying $4.75 an hour to the Arizona Department of Correction, Rehabilitation and Reentry. The DCRR, in turn, would pay the inmates $1.50 per day.

It’s unclear if Taylor Farms still uses the forced labor of inmates, and it’s worth noting that the current Cyclospora outbreak has been traced to farms in central Mexico, not the US — which is a whole other set of human rights issues.

But the point is kind of moot, really, because Taylor Farms has never exactly been a wholesome company.

Image via Eater

Back in 2016, Taylor Farms employees protested at several Chipotle locations in California to expose workers experiences of “poverty wages, disrespect, and severe violations of their most basic rights.” Taylor Farms, by the way, provides Chipotle with their vegetables. They also supply or sell to — deep breath — Aldi, Amazon, Burger King, Costco, Denny's, Dollar General, IHOP, KFC, Kroger, McDonald's, Olive Garden, Pizza Hut, Sam's Club, Subway, Sysco, Taco Bell, Target, Walmart, Wendy's, and Whole Foods. And probably others.

Taylor Farms has issued food recalls in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2024 — sometimes multiple recalls per year — usually for E. coli or Listeria. Which, to be fair, are pretty standard food-borne illnesses. That phrase — “pretty standard food-borne illnesses” – is also why the Food and Drug Administration introduced the Food Traceability Rule. That rule laid out “requirements [that] will allow for faster identification and removal of potentially contaminated food from the market, resulting in fewer foodborne illnesses and deaths.”

Those new rules were set to go into effect in January of 2026. In January of 2025, though, Taylor Farms hired a lobbying firm and spent a little under $1 million on political lobbying. It's a pretty safe bet they were arguing against the increased regulation. It’s also a safe bet that a lot of other companies were paying to fight the rules, but, again, Taylor Farms is the biggest supplier of salads in the US and in the world.

In a shocking coincidence, two months later, on March 20, 2025, the FDA decided to push back the implementation of the new rules by almost three years. Then, on March 26, Taylor Farms donated $1 million to the Make America Great Again, Inc. PAC — a wildly profitable political action committee for Donald Trump that the New York Times describes as a pay-for-access operation.

The timing means you can’t really call it a bribe. It’s more of a thank you gift.

Image via Sky News

And this is where Elon Musk gets involved.

Musk’s DOGE and the second Trump administration’s cuts to government programs like USAID meant that the group of scientists who watch for things like a Cyclospora outbreak lost over $30 million in funding and went from a team of 11 to just three. The head of the department resigned in protest.

Now, just over one year later, we've got the Cyclospora outbreak causing explosive diarrhea across the US (but mostly in the Great Lakes region). The CDC reports almost 11,000 confirmed cases with an additional 12,000 unconfirmed. Just this week, there have been two deaths as a result.

The CDC’s response was delayed by the cuts to their funding, but the entire process was muddied by bad communication, corporate malpractice, and a little more (and more than a little) corruption.

Around July 22, 2026, the CDC had officially traced the outbreak to Taylor Farms lettuce from central Mexico sold to Taco Bells in the Midwest. Taylor Farms was given a deadline of noon on July 23 to issue a recall — thus alerting the public.

They didn’t.

And then the White House — remember that $1 million donation? — got the FDA and CDC together in a meeting. The statement drafted as a result of that meeting named Taco Bell as the source of the outbreak, but explicitly did not name Taylor Farms as their supplier. The government’s statements finally went out after 10pm — 10 hours after the initial deadline.

Image via Bloomberg

On Friday, Taylor Farms issued their own statement, saying they were doing a voluntary recall and that, “according to the FDA, there are no confirmed positive sample results for product testing for Cyclospora as of August 5, 2026.” Which is technically true, since food-borne illness means you literally eat the direct evidence. But the CDC was, in fact, pretty sure about the source.

On Saturday, July 25, the CDC thought they’d found Cyclospora on a new batch of Taylor Farms lettuce. This was, to be clear, in addition to the source of the original outbreak. That result turned out to be a false positive — it’s a thing that happens and the CDC owned up to it.

Taylor Farms jumped on the false positive part, though, and announced, “We were informed that FDA made a mistake, and this was a false positive. To be clear, at this moment, FDA has not identified a single positive product test result for Cyclospora.” Then the FDA had to get on fucking Twitter to clarify what was going on because we live in a remarkably stupid future.

Again, it's technically true that the CDC has not tested any Taylor Farms product and found Cyclospora. But that is extremely misleading because the source of the outbreak is almost certainly lettuce provided by Taylor Farms. Taylor Farms is just tweaking the truth of the situation (also known as lying) for better PR.

Because it's not enough to be the largest salad company in the world. There is always more money to be made. Taylor Farms couldn't possibly risk the hit to their profits that would come from bad PR. A devastating hit that would leave them ... still the largest salad company in the world.

It’s all the same story.

The president’s son-in-law is behind the sale of EA for a record-breaking amount of money. Ubisoft canceled games and gutted studios in the name of profits. Paying the Trump administration means you can violate anti-trust regulations. Microsoft can cut thousands of jobs to make up for obscene spending on AI nonsense. Sony and Rockstar can both decide to stop making physical discs to squeeze a few extra bucks out of your hobby. FIFA tried to sell the World Cup for $20 billion. Taylor Farms can use slave labor, bribe the government, and lie about a deadly food-borne illness outbreak they caused. Because they can.

Billionaires and corporations will forever find new and exciting ways to push the envelope of exploitation.

Image via Institute for Public Art

They’re making billions from your job that they can take away on a whim, your free time that they keep finding new ways to charge you for, and your annoying need to have food that may or may not kill you.

And it’s never the companies or the billionaires making the disastrous and deadly decisions that pay the price. Hell, bigger corporations can get away with just shifting the blame to smaller ones — Taco Bell has taken more heat in the Cyclospora outbreak than Taylor Farms has, even though they didn't have anything to do with it.

It’s all the same story. It’s all the same, singular fight.

And it is existential.

A long time ago, every search engine’s function and design philosophy revolved around “10 Blue Links” — when you typed something into the search box on google.com, it would return you 10 hyperlinks to websites that contained information about that search. Those 10 links were ranked by relevance, exactness-of-match to what you searched for, and popularity. I genuinely can’t find the origin of that phrase, but Ask.com said it was dying in 2007, Yahoo had a whole keynote about the “End of the 10 Blue Links” era in 2009, and even Google threw a little shade at it in 2016.

Image via Version Museum

Some of that change was good. Instead of just links, search results started mixing in videos, book excerpts, and news. This is also about the time (2012 to 2013 or so) that Google leaned more heavily into intent than query — predicting what you were looking for rather than responding to what you typed. This is why I can type something as dumb as “that guy with the face what grows space ptotooes in a moovy” and still get a bunch of “Matt Damon in The Martian” results. It’s also why that same phrase doesn’t give you Damon-related results on DuckDuckGo.

But, slowly, Google stopped providing links and started providing answers. It did this with the sidebars and snippets and, eventually, the AI overview that provided information without requiring that extra click or reading the actual article. The links were still there (somewhere), and the accuracy of the searches was still (mostly) good, but Google was moving more and more of the internet onto itself. It stopped being a directory and started being a one-stop-shop. This is how Google would come to control over 90% of search market share.

And it’s that market share (read: monopoly) that allowed Google to dictate what the internet looked like. Because of the way Google delivered us the internet, it stopped being a collection of sites, and became an atomized collection of links scrambling for the attention of the algorithm. Yes, sites and brands could still have an identity and a voice, but if you weren’t writing for the algorithm, you were dropping your articles into the void.

Image: BBC

Google’s requirements (and whims) determined everything from the length of an article to the words used in it. Writers stopped writing for people and started writing for Google. All of us here at Rogue were shaped by it at our previous job and we’re all still unlearning how to write that way. It was simply unavoidable when a site’s continued existence relied on view count and the resultant ad revenue. But Google moving from providing links to providing answers meant that traffic was decimated.

There have always been other search engines. There will always be other search engines. But a 90% market share means, in the cyberpunkest way possible, Google shapes the reality of the internet. And if you don’t believe that, turn off your ad blocker, accept cookies, and then buy a toaster on Amazon. Within a day, you’ll be convinced that the entire point of the internet has forever been to deliver toaster-related content. The internet you experience is always filtered through their lens.

Independent and reader-supported media is fighting against that (have you heard about our Independent Media Collective bundle!?). The reemergence of newsletter culture is a reaction to that. It’s a return to an earlier version of the internet, where the reader decides where to go. It’s a response to the dictates of The Algorithm. It’s a response to the version of the internet that Google created.

Image: Google

And now, in the “biggest upgrade in over 25 years,” Google’s going all-in on AI. As TechCrunch points out, “Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times.” It’s got big plans for how its AI Mode will keep you engaged with its AI instead of directing you to sites, provide “Search agents” that will complete ongoing tasks (which sounds a lot like boiling a lake to set up a Google Alert), vibe code apps right from the search bar, and worm AI even deeper into your personal information.

To be clear, the vanilla Google search isn’t going away. Typing a search query into your address bar or Google toolbar or the website itself will still get you the (admittedly already AI-plagued) search experience you’re used to. But Google says that, one year after launch, its AI Mode has 1 billion monthly users and it’s growing rapidly. And that means, no matter how little you or I personally care about AI Mode, there are a billion people who care a lot and use it as their default search experience. So Google’s emphasizing it, developing it, and the writing on the wall says it might not be default yet, but it’s going to be soon.

Image: Lowe's

I say all of that to put some context behind all of the people calling this update “the death of the internet.” The internet is not dying, obviously, but the way we collectively interact with it is transforming in a profound way. Because those 1 billion users per month are shaping the future whether we like it or not. (Quick aside: literally as I’m typing this paragraph, I just got an email about a Lowes x MrBeast collaboration which feels apropos in a way I can’t quite put to words.)

There’s this sense of inevitability in almost every implementation of AI, and this update to Google is no different. That is by design. It’s propaganda being pushed by techbros, CEOs, and billionaires. AI (and, by extension, data centers) are a way to consolidate their control and wealth. And they’ll take every opportunity to remind you of that.

This podcast from 404 Media is long, but it brings up some great points. Namely, they talk about three commencement speeches from this month. And, as I’m writing this, a fourth just popped into my feed. I’m going to embed short versions of them here because they’re worth the watch.

This is Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google with a net worth of $42 billion, giving a commencement address at the University of Arizona last week. His address is scolding, threatening, and condescending. He talks like someone certain of his position of power. He smirks at the students’ booing like it gives him life.

The second one is Gloria Caulfield, Vice President of Strategic Alliances for Tavistock Development Company, a real estate and/or private equity company(?). In her speech at the University of Central Florida, she called AI the next industrial revolution. She was immediately met with resounding boos and it baffled her. She turned around as if she thought something boo-worthy had snuck up behind her. “What happened?” As Juniper puts it, “the tech world has genuinely not grappled with how many people despise them and what they make.” Gloria Caulfiled bought into all the hype and propaganda. It’s her unassailable reality.

The newest one is Scott Borchetta, CEO of Big Machine Records, speaking at Middle Tennessee State. As an aside, Borchetta is the guy who first signed Taylor Swift. She once described him as an “incessant, manipulative bully.”

For his commencement address, he tells the graduates, “AI is rewriting production as we sit here.” When they boo, he chides, “Deal with it,” and adds, “You can hear me now, or you can pay me later.” A bit later, he says, “The things you learned in your first year here may already be obsolete.” Interestingly, both his delivery and appearance are what you would get if you asked ChatGPT to generate a sleazy record executive.

Finally, here’s Magic Johnson speaking at Stillman College’s commencement. This one didn’t have a vertical, short-attention-span version, so the part we’re talking about is at 5:05. I’m going to write out the quote because it’s important. He says, “Make sure that you learn AI” with a sad shake of his head. “See, AI is not coming for your job, but those who know AI are coming for your job.”

It’s worth noting that, while Magic Johnson is (technically) a billionaire, he was delivering his remarks at a HBCU as a Black man. There’s no scolding or mocking in his voice. He’s almost apologetic. Magic Johnson did not get booed for mentioning AI.

The booing was never about AI’s real or, more likely, imagined usefulness as a tool. The booing was putting voice to the “no one asked for this” sentiment of everyone outside of the C-suite. The booing was in reaction to the presumption of AI’s inevitability.

So what, besides booing, can we do about it? Three things — one is easy (you’re already doing it), one is inconvenient, and one is hard.

The easy one is to support independent media outlets. Being reader-supported means that a site doesn’t rely on Google for traffic (we, for example, get less than a quarter of our traffic from search engines while other places we may or may not have worked used to get 90% or more), making us independent from media corporations and from algorithmic dictates. Yes, we’d love your subscription, but supporting any independent outlet benefits us all.

Image: Dogpile

The inconvenient one is learning to use a different search engine, preferably one that doesn’t force AI features onto you. You can do things like adding “-AI” or just typing swears to short circuit the AI results on Google. You can download extensions or use things like &udm=14 to revert Google search to a more useful version. But the better answer is to use something else entirely. Almost every alternative, though, still wants to add AI features. The difference is in how easy those features are to turn off. Some options are:

• Ecosia (Settings > Overviews) — has the added benefit of planting trees and funding climate action

• DuckDuckGo (Settings > AI Features) — there’s also a setting to hide AI-generated images

• Brave (Settings > Answer with AI)

• Holy shit, Dogpile is still a thing (no settings required)

Switching, frankly, sucks and it’s harder than you’d think. I’ve been learning how to Google for 25 years and starting over has a really annoying learning curve. More accurately, though, Google has been training me on how to use it for 25 years — kind of like how Starbucks quietly trains you to say your order in a specific way. That lack of familiarity with other search engines is awkward, but I know that’ll pass.

Image: WRAL

The third way is the hardest, but it’s also the most impactful — and you’ve probably heard it before. Annoyingly, it’s “get involved.” Last month, I went to a county commissioners meeting for the first time ever. It was a hearing on a one-year data center moratorium (which passed, for the record). For almost three hours, I listened to people from my community stand up and berate elected officials about how bad data centers are. It was refreshing. It was invigorating. (And only one person included any xenophobia or conspiracy theories in his statement, which felt like a win for rural North Carolina.)

Those moratoriums are happening all over the country on both the state and local levels. But decisions like that don’t just happen and it’s not fair to rely on the — let’s be honest here — NextDoor-pilled retirees who usually attend those meetings to do the right thing. Elected officials, especially hyperlocal officials, are just people. Hell, they’re your neighbors. And sometimes, they can be convinced to do the right thing.

Image: Meme-tivism

The secret fourth thing — the zeroth law of it — is to remember that it’s not inevitable. It doesn’t have to be this way. Karen Hao, who wrote Empire of AI, is part of a project called The AI Resist List. I’ll close with quotes from that site:

They include a quote from Ruha Benjamin — whose work I’ve mentioned before — that’s the best takeaway from all of this.

Virality is meaningless in this era of hyperspecific algorithms. Besides, you can just pay $8 to force your drivel onto everyone still clinging to the sinking ship that is X the everything-especially-Nazis app. So I don’t actually know if the post I keep seeing from the Legit Gaming Leaks gimmick account is viral or not. But I’ve seen it enough — and it’s bothered me enough — that we’re going to talk about it. I know Twitter isn’t real life. I know I’m terminally online. But I had to see it and now I’m making it your problem.

Image: X

The Legit Gaming Leaks account is generally anti-joke one-liners about gaming — “Xbox has no current plans to expand into the tractor industry” and “GTA 6 Trailer 3 will have audio.” It’s fine. I get it. I’ll even say that it’s successful satire of the breathless gaming journalism of the algorithm-driven clickbait reality we live in. I don’t like it, per se, but I appreciate the commitment to the bit.

This post, though — one of Twitter’s new pseudo-article monstrosities — wants to be a satirical takedown of the gaming fandom. It’s presented as a dangerous exposé on the real truth behind the video game industry: “Industry giants, corporate suits, and marketing departments … want you to believe the gaming industry is all about making video games.” It goes on to deliver a series of shocking truths like “video game companies are a business … with the intent of generating revenue” and “if you disconnect your console or PC from the internet, you will no longer be able to access servers.”

Image via Know Your Meme

This post isn’t funny. This post isn’t satire. This post fails at even being anti-humor. Even if its appearance on my feed is artificial and the responses are promoted by the blue checkedness of it all, the article worked in that it ragebaited me into engaging with it. But that’s mostly because it clumsily finds its way close to some actual points that I care about before veering off into propaganda. And, worse yet, it does so while failing to be funny.

It was never going to be funny, though, because it’s impossible to be tongue-in-cheek when you can’t tell the difference between farce and fellatio.

The premise returned to throughout the post is, in effect, consumers — gamers — shouldn’t complain when video game businesses make business decisions, you rubes. Because video game companies want to make money, developers are employees, and “if a video game fails to reach financial benchmarks … the company may choose to not produce a sequel.” These are mockingly presented as shocking revelations and hard truths.

Image via The Nib

But it’s really just … doing the Mister Gotcha meme with no self-awareness. Everyone knows that video games are a business. Everyone knows that money exists and businesses make money. The criticisms about those business decisions are about scale.

TR-49 — one of my favorite games of the year — costs $7 and made its budget back in three hours. Bungie’s Marathon had a budget of $250 million, has earned an estimated 20% of that back, and has hemorrhaged about 90% of its players since launch. Both Bungie and inkle made business decisions in creating and releasing Marathon and TR-49. But only one of them is going to cost hundreds of people their jobs.

Image: Kathryn Killackey via Smithsonian Magazine

Think of those napkin math examples that pop up sometimes. If you earned $1 per second every second starting at your birth, you’d become a billionaire at 31. After making $3,600 per hour for three decades, you’d have 0.4% as much money as Jeff Bezos. Meanwhile, at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, earning the same billion dollars would take 16,000 years. Meaning you would’ve had to start earning around the time humans got pet dogs and blond hair.

That’s what I mean by scale.

Criticism like saying Sony’s purchase of Bungie for $4 billion was a recipe for disaster is not the same as criticizing the concept of making money off of a video game like Legit Gaming Leaks’ misguided satire suggests. To say that it is is reductive, dismissive, and exploitation class apologia. My criticism isn’t about the money. It’s aimed at the corporation’s parasitic and ruinous expectation of endlessly extractable profit. (It’s as true of video games as it is of movies and television.)

Image: Button Mash/Polden Publishing

Because, yes, video game devs are employees. But they’re also creative people, in a creative industry, performing a creative task. To criticize their need for money to survive in a capitalist society without taking that last tiny step to a criticism of the monetization and commodification of artistic pursuits misses the point entirely. Stopping before that realization just addresses the symptom without addressing the root cause.

Pretending they're the same is a backbreaking level of water carrying for the concept of capitalism.

The second half of the article is more of the same sarcastic dismissals. It makes points like you need an internet connection for multiplayer games, you need an internet connection to download updates, and consoles require electricity. This is delivered in the same tone as “water is wet,” but it’s just self-important egocentrism. It’s clearly aimed at movements like Stop Killing Games, but misses the fact that we needed a law to stop game publishers from lying about whether or not you owned the games you bought.

Besides, the article got a positive response from Tim “we’ve had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season” Sweeney. That means you’re doing something wrong.

Now that I’ve spent more words complaining about the article than the article itself contains, here’s a different example of satire from an actually funny outlet.

Mocking the very concept of daring to imagine a better version of the world is lazy, hackneyed, and the very definition of punching down. But before you put in the newspaper that I got mad, I’m not.

I’m sad. It’s sad when someone can’t believe in something better. It’s heartbreaking when someone's spirit gets broken. Because a better world is possible and your ability to imagine it is just one more thing that’s been stolen from you.

Alright, let's go through this again.

Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle and sixth richest person in the world, is a colonizer, Zionist, Trump ally, and is 50 years older than his sixth wife. He once said, "citizens will be on their best behavior" when they're under constant state surveillance and … hold on. Let me just quote the last time I wrote about him:

Oh. He's also part owner of TikTok.

His children, Megan and David, each head their own media companies. Megan runs Annapurna — which came up in The Discourse™ around Mixtape — and David manages Paramount Skydance. I say manages because Larry holds the controlling interest in the company.

In 2025, Paramount paid (bribed) President Trump a settlement over a frivolous lawsuit and then, in a shocking twist, their merger with Skydance was approved by the Trump administration. Following the merger, Paramount Skydance fired Stephen Colbert, installed Bari Weiss as the head of CBS news, and, just this week, has been fucking with 60 Minutes. Paramount Skydance is still waiting for approval of its deal to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, which would mean that it also owns HBO, the DC Universe, and CNN.

And now today, just a couple hours before Summer Game Fest, Paramount Skydance announced the creation of Paramount Games Studio. A few hours later, they announced their first game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin — an action-adventure game based on the alternate future comic series of the same name.

This new studio merges Paramount's IP (like TMNT) with Skydance's two existing game studios — Skydance Interactive (which has put out … games?) and Skydance New Media (which has not). Along with The Last Ronin, Paramount Games Studios will continue working on those studios' upcoming games, Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra (the trailer for which came out two years ago?) and an untitled Star Wars game.

Paramount Games Studio will be headed by Tony Driscoll, who's been running Corporate Strategy for Paramount for a while and worked at Epic Games running the Creator Economy in 2023 and 2024.

Image: Getty Images via Fortune

So what's the takeaway here? I mean, nothing good. The overarching story of the game industry this year is a bleak one. We've seen so, so many instances of billionaire owners using and abusing game developers, closing studios, scrapping games, and firing people. And this is just another billionaire owner who has already shown a disregard for people and institutions.

One family controls one of the largest social media apps, a television network, a movie company, a big chunk of AI and data center infrastructure, and, now, a game studio. They're friends with the Trump regime and have proud ties to Netanyahu's genocidal government in Israel and its apartheid economy. David Ellison has gutted a nationally respected newsroom. Paramount Skydance is in the middle of antitrust lawsuits over the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition.

Anyway, here's Jon Stewart on 60 Minutes 20 years ago. At one point, he says, "We're all gonna get fired by the same guy one day, and it's gonna be like a freaky—it's like a cross-breed genetic between like Dolly the Sheep and one of [Rupert] Murdoch's kids, and it'll just, rule—AOLTimeViacomWarner synergy."

He just got the billionaire wrong.

Let me start by saying this: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has done a lot for the conservation of North Carolina lands. He owns (or owned as of 2025) roughly 55,000 acres of NC and regularly donates or sells parts of it to the government or conservation agencies.

His net worth of somewhere north of $5 billion means he can do that. That's a nice thing he's doing.

Image via Raleigh News & Observer

So anyway, after laying off 1,000 people a few months ago and then making an incredibly tone deaf statement about it, Tim Sweeney was at Unreal Fest in Chicago last week. There, Tim talked up Unreal Engine 6, its AI integration, and his plans for the future of gaming. After that, he sat down with PC Gamer for an interview.

The interview is a fascinating read not for the content, but for Tim's plug-your-ears-and-say-la-la-la answers. I'm not going to go into most of it because Tim's vision of the future of gaming — you're not going to believe this — is basically Fortnite, the Epic Games Store, and Unreal Engine.

Image: Epic Games

This quote here sums up his attitude really well:

Imagine it! Imagine making a game that won't be as popular as Fortnite! Imagine making a game that isn't Fortnite at all! Have you ever imagined something so absurd!? Why would anyone play anything that isn't Fortnite when Fortnite is right there!?

So you can kind of see Tim's relationship with creative pursuits from that quote. That carries over into Unreal Engine 6, which combines Unreal Engine and the Unreal Editor for Fortnite into one package (whee). UE6 will also integrate AI into the engine itself. From their announcement:

Tim clarifies what those time-consuming tasks are in the interview.

He repeats that idea that a lot of creative work is "drudge work" in the next sentence.

Image: Epic Games

Tim spends a lot this part of the interview refusing to understand what it is about AI that people reject. It's clear that, to Tim, AI is merely a tool and there's obviously nothing wrong with tools.

He goes on to equate generative AI with artists using reference materials and doubles down on those productivity improvements.

For Epic Games, remember, greater efficiency came at the cost of 25% of its workforce. This was "incredibly painful" for Tim.

When the interviewer suggests the thing about AI people have a problem with is that all LLMs are built from stolen creative works, Tim mostly ignores it. He acknowledges that many AI companies had (not have, had) "shitty practices," but think of the productivity.

This is the part of Steam's AI disclosure requirements that Tim doesn't like. It prevents people from being maximally creative and profitable.

Now, I'm not an expert in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. My experience with The Scarlet Letter is having to read it in high school mumblety years ago and a half-remembered viewing of Easy A starring Emma Stone while on a plane. But I'm pretty sure getting called out for making soulless AI slop is not the same as the draconian punishment of a puritanical society for a perceived sin.

Image: Epic Games

And there's no doubt about the sin of LLMs and generative AI. It's theft. The training data was stolen. Some of it was full-on illegal, all of it was indefensible. Tim recognizes this, he just doesn't care. He doesn't care because he sees creativity as "drudge work" and he doesn't like getting called out for cheating his way though the process.

Tim. Timmy. Timothee. AI disclosures aren't ascribed guilt. They're admissions. They're disclosures. And people choosing not to participate isn't "a hater community trying to kill the game." It's consumers making an informed decision about what they're willing to be complicit in.

There are many reasons to be concerned about the impending $111 billion merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. It's a blatant monopoly that puts roughly 25% of the entertainment market share in the hands of one company. It's tied up in a lot of foreign money from countries in the Middle East with atrocious human rights records. And also Jared Kushner's venture capital firm (but I repeat myself). It'll be run by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison. Their takeover of CBS has already been disastrous, and now they'll be able to do the same to CNN.

It's bad. It's hard to overstate just how bad it is. But I'm concerned for one extra reason.

Image: Warner Bros. Discovery

Shark Week.

When the deal goes through, terrible people are going to be in charge of my favorite week of the year.

Discovery Channel's Shark Week is a 38 year old institution. Think about that. Nearly four decades of Shark Week. It started with 10 hours of content across a few days. Today, it has evolved into a seven-day, 20-hour spectacle. By 2022, there were 272 episodes of Shark Week content.

Image: Warner Bros. Discovery

The Mythbusters hosted Shark Week once. The cast of American Chopper hosted Shark Week. Craig Ferguson, Andy Samberg, Rob Riggle, and Eli Roth have hosted. Shaq hosted. The Rock, Jason Momoa, and John Cena have hosted. Peter Benchley hosted.

I fucking love Shark Week. Shark Week is perfect. I hope it never ends.

Now, let me be clear about something: Shark Week, as it exists today, is utter trash. It is is a disservice to education, conservation, sharks, and humanity. It has taken an interesting and important topic and turned it into intelligence-insulting, reality TV, jump cut slop. It is the only time I can watch a purported documentary and finish the hour knowing less about the subject matter than when I started.

Image via Futurism

In his 1996 book, The Demon-Haunted World, astronomer, pothead, and prolific science communicator Carl Sagan wrote:

Shark Week took this warning as a challenge.

From roughly 2010 to 2015, Shark Week aired a number of "docufictions" — utterly made up shows presented as documentaries. Even when it's not just straight up fiction, Shark Week is full of junk science and ratings bait. Shark Week is spectacle, not substance.

Image: Warner Bros. Discovery

Let's speedrun the stats from the "Criticism" section of the Shark Week Wikipedia entry. As of 2022, 43% of episode titles had negative connotations about sharks and only 37% of shows were research-focused. Most episodes don't differentiate between "experts" and scientists. Of the "experts," 94% were white and 79% were male. Even episodes focused on majority-Black countries feature white experts.

Also:

I say again: Shark Week is trash. Let's talk about some shows from recent years.

There's Jaws vs Mega Croc, in which "the great white shark faces off against the Nile crocodile in a CGI fight to the death." This show is nothing — it's the computer-generated fever dream of an overactive toddler. It also, however, fits neatly in the unofficial series of Jaws vs Leviathan, Jaws vs The Meg, Jaws vs Kraken, Tyson vs Jaws: Rumble on the Reef, and Frankenshark.

Image: Warner Bros. Discovery

Frankenshark, by the way, is just three people what-if-ing the coolest shark they can imagine and making some poor, underpaid animator render it. Look at this screenshot. The overlaid animation only barely matches the TV screen it's supposed to be on. Even the greenscreening of the expert in front of their blank TV is terrible. This show doesn't care. I love it so much.

In 2024, we had Big Shark Energy, 6000 LB Shark, The Real Sharknado, and — and I want you to understand that this series of words is the real name of a real show that real people worked on — Expedition Unknown: Sharks vs Nazis in Paradise. I watched every one of those episodes. I cannot remember a single thing about any of them.

Image: Warner Bros. Discovery

2023 gave us Raiders of the Lost Shark (perfect name, no notes) and Cocaine Sharks. This is the promo image for Cocaine Sharks. If I remember that one correctly, the "expert" admits early on that sharks cannot be affected by cocaine — like, biologically and neurochemically, it just doesn't work on them. The remaining 45 minutes are fully make-em-ups that mean nothing. It's not even empty calories. It's nonexistent entertainment.

Image: Warner Bros. Discovery

2023 also has one of my favorites, Belly of the Beast: Feeding Frenzy, where the experts build a life-sized, fake humpback whale calf carcass and fill it with fish blood. They then stuffed a researcher inside of it and just set it adrift. They repeated the experiment the next year with a bigger fake whale and even more blood. It is a miracle no one died. I have absolutely no clue what we learned by doing this.

That is two years worth of Shark Week. There are 36 more years of Shark Week I haven't even mentioned.

Here's the lineup for this year.

Image: Warner Bros. Discovery

I adore everything about this. The tortured Mount Sharkmore imagery. The cheeky "FIN" at the end. The terrible names.

What could K-Pop Shark Heroes possibly be about? House of Sharks and How to Train a Great White are particularly strained references to pop culture that will have nothing to do with anything. What does My Strange Shark Addiction even mean!? Before I look up anything about this, I'm fucking pumped.

K-Pop Shark Heroes, by the way, is described as, "actor/comedian Ken Jeong and GRAMMY®-nominated artist REI AMI team up in the all-new K-Pop Shark Heroes, using the power of K-Pop to transform the perception of sharks in East Asia and across the globe." It will be the cringiest and most awkward hour of television you can watch. You will learn nothing. There's an excellent chance neither Ken Jeong or REI AMI will be anywhere near a shark at any point in the show. I cannot wait.

There's another stat I skipped over earlier. Only 41% of the experts on the Shark Week shows have a large number of peer-reviewed publications and 23% — 23% — "lack any contribution to the scientific literature." Let me repeat: Shark Week is absolute trash and somehow de-educational television.

Image via Nature

The deep-dive that Wikipedia cites doesn't seem to've looked at Shark Week's relationship with the phrases "overfishing" and "climate change." Specifically, the mental and linguistic gymnastics these shows and presenters will go through to avoid acknowledging the effects of humans on sharks. Shark populations will "mysteriously migrate" when their food sources disappear. Shark species' ranges will expand and they'll show up in places thought to be too cold for them. And that implication will just hang in the air.

At first it was weird, but over years of watching Shark Week, the conspicuous absence is unmistakable. It has to be intentional. If it's not humans actively and intentionally hunting sharks, Shark Week is baffled by what could be happening. No one says a thing as anthropogenic climate collapse as the result of an extinction economy hangs heavy over every scene in every episode.

Image: Warner Bros. Discovery

I mean, maybe not over Jackass Shark Week 2.0 or Sharkadelic Summer with Snoop Dogg, but definitely the rest of them.

Shark Week shows are not documentaries. Shark Week is actively harming climate activism and education. Shark Week is ideologically incapable of challenging you. It is not fun to watch or even particularly entertaining. Shark Week is militantly dumb. But Shark Week is also fascinating and I'll watch every episode.

The mucus of several kinds of snails contains an organic compound of bromine. If you crush up a lot of these snails, you can turn the mush into a fabric dye — apparently, 12,000 snails yield about a gram and a half of dye, or enough to color the “trim of a single garment.”

Image via Reddit

The color produced by that dye is purple. But, because purple dye production was such a labor-intensive ordeal (to say nothing of the sheer quantity of snail murder), purple fabric was wildly expensive and the people who could afford it were rich. Like, Emperor-rich or High Priest-rich. While it’s most well-known from the Mediterranean region, the exact same family of snails was used to make purple dye in ancient Mesoamerica where purple was also associated with Aztec royalty. (Fun fact, the dye apparently stinks like fish so bad that the Talmud says a woman can divorce her husband if he becomes a dyer after they get married.)

Purple fabric was so intrinsic to the office that becoming a Roman emperor was called “donning the purple.”

Image via NYT

The first US president to wear a flag pin was Richard Nixon. It was a show of patriotism in reaction to the protests against the Vietnam War. After Nixon resigned in disgrace, the flag pin fell out of fashion. Reagan didn’t wear one. Bush 1 didn’t wear one. Clinton didn’t wear one. You can even look at the pictures from the debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 and neither of them are wearing one. Looking back on it, it’s off-putting.

But the American flag lapel pin was brought back by President George W. Bush after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and, more importantly, during the Iraq War. It quickly became a show of support, both of the president and of the war.

Image via Time

Six years later, presidential candidate Obama did not always wear his flag pin. Him not wearing it was a national headline. It was a talking point. It came up during town halls. The lack of pin on his suit was taken as a political statement. He tried to point out that it had become empty symbolism that had replaced true patriotism, but that argument didn’t last long.

A quarter century later, it’s just part of the uniform.

These small things — stylistic choices like a color and a lapel pin — are messages. They are political. Because everything is political.

There’s a refrain that comes up from time to time covering gaming that says “leave politics out of video games.” I’ve been accused of bringing politics into reviews. I think almost everyone who covers games has. But it comes up in almost all art.

Image via Reddit

This week, it’s about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I haven’t seen it yet, but I did watch that one episode of Wishbone and I really liked O Brother, Where Art Thou? Nolan’s version of The Odyssey has been a culture war talking point ever since the casting was announced. And the talking points and controversy have been the same exhaustingly predictable nonsense.

Image via Instagram

Stormtroopers can’t be Black. Mermaids can’t be Black. And, now, Helen of Troy can’t be Black. The fact that she’s the daughter of Zeus and was hatched out of an egg, presumably, is fine, though. She’s just supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world and racists can’t allow beauty to be non-white. (Also, interestingly, Helen of Troy has been played by Black actors before — once in Xena: Warrior Princess and once in a stage performance by the best Catwoman, Eartha Kitt.)

Throw in Elliot Page and Travis Scott — a, gasp, second Black actor — and you had the perfect recipe for Fox News to declare the movie a disaster before the first frame was shot. And totally-not-a-racist Elon Musk echoed the baseless criticisms every time. Now, he has decided he’s going to let his plagiarism and CSAM machine, Grok, make a “historically accurate” version of The Odyssey. Obviously, this will mean that Odysseus will wear a story-accurate pig tooth hat instead of that silly thing Matt Damon is wearing in this version.

The thing is, The Odyssey is a myth. It’s a fairy tale. Odysseus wasn’t real. Cyclopses aren’t real. Helen of Troy wasn’t real. The Trojan Horse wasn’t real. Hell, the Trojan War — the thing Odysseus is odyssey-ing his way home from — wasn’t real.

The controversy about Nolan’s The Odyssey was never about the story or the historical accuracy. It's about the presentation. It's about the signals. Because everything is political.

Roman emperors didn’t all independently decide they loved purple robes. It was to signal how much money they had (and how much they hated snails). Nixon didn’t start wearing a lapel pin because he just loved America so darn much. He wore it to signal (fake) patriotism. Matt Walsh and the other fascists don’t give a shit about Helen of Troy. They care about signaling their racism. Their supremacy. Their politics.

Image via YouTube

Every act — what color toga you wear, how big your lapel pin is, who you cast in your movie, the video game you make, your scarf, your car — is political. Even when you don’t mean it to be and even when you don’t understand what you’re signaling. Especially in the Because Fuck You, That’s Why economy, where you choose to participate matters. Because everything is political.

Less than a month ago, the Supreme Court finally, a year and a half later, decided to uphold the Constitution and protect birthright citizenship (for now) because where your parents were born is political. Over 800 bills have been introduced this year alone to legislate the existence of gender non-conforming people because pronouns are political. Wearing a dress while reading to children is political. Who you love is political. The color of your skin is political.

This week, ICE and CBP released their latest statistics and they're bad. Federal agents arrested over 43,000 people in June. There are more people without criminal histories than with them in federal detention. More than twenty people have died in detention centers this year. Over half a million people have been deported since January of last year. ICE agents murdered two (more) people this week, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerro.

There’s no such thing as leaving politics out of anything. Because existence is political.

Soccer is one of those pure sports. It doesn't require elaborate infrastructure, expensive equipment, huge amounts of space, or a history of being colonized (but that last one admittedly helps). It's just a ball-shaped object, a relatively flat patch of land, and a lazy hour or two. You can play it in a backyard, an abandoned lot, a patch of dirt, or in the street. It's infinitely adaptable in ways that nearly all other sports aren't.

Recreational sport, especially in the US, is inherently classist. In general, it requires huge investments of money, time, resources, and space. You can’t just have a spontaneous game of tennis in the middle of the street one afternoon. A game like hockey requires the cooperation of the climate and specialized footwear. You can’t pick up bobsledding in the park on a whim. You can’t have a pick-up game of cricket without a superhuman capacity to tolerate tedium and two weeks off from work. A game of the more popular, CTE-inducing American football requires a couple hundred dollars worth of gear at a minimum, but even a toned-down game of flag football has a space requirement that a lot of people around the world just don’t have access to.

Image: Adidas

But not soccer. There’s a reason it’s the most popular sport in the world. Soccer is accessible and attainable. Hell, the exact same Adidas ball used in the 2026 World Cup final costs $170. Sure, that’s a lot of money for a soccer ball, but that’s the ball.

Soccer is simple. Soccer is pure. Soccer is universal.

That's also why it's so easily exploited.

Association football — official soccer with its standardized rules and the tournaments and whatnot — has been governed by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association since 1904. FIFA has more members than the UN. It is a globe-spanning nonprofit that is instrumental in bringing the most popular sport to the world.

FIFA is also a wildly corrupt institution.

Image: The Guardian

If nothing else, FIFA has a history of cozying up with authoritarians. “I will say something which is crazy, but less democracy is sometimes better for organising a World Cup,” as former FIFA Secretary General Jérôme Valcke put it in 2013. FIFA held the second ever World Cup in Mussolini’s Italy, the 1978 World Cup in Argentina under its military junta, the 2018 World Cup in Russia just two years after Putin invaded Ukraine, the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and the 2026 World Cup in North America (mostly the United States). The World Cup is basically the example for sportswashing — reputation laundering through bread and circuses.

And this is all to say nothing of the bribery and corruption.

Going through the wikipedia entries for the previous World Cups, it’s shocking how many of them involve the phrase, “marred by controversy.” Just this year alone, you may remember the made-up FIFA Peace Prize awarded to President Trump because he’s such a fragile crybaby and FIFA overturning a red card because Trump told them to.

Image via Rolling Stone

For a lot of people — like, famously, John Oliver — FIFA is a necessary evil for the chance to watch the planet’s most important sporting event. That’s not hyperbole either. In 2018, almost half of the world’s population watched the World Cup. That’s over 30 times the viewership of the Super Bowl from the same year. It’s a big deal.

It’s also big business. FIFA, the nonprofit, has about $10 billion in assets and is expected to announce $15 billion in revenue from this year’s World Cup. And those are just the sort of numbers the parasite class takes note of.

Image: Getty Images via Houston Public Media

To that end, last week, FIFA President Gianni Infantino announced plans to create a company called FIFA Forward Enterprise that would run the World Cup. This would take the event from the vaguely-but-not-really democratic and in-name-only non-profit endeavor it currently is, and turn it into a purely profit- and shareholder-driven enterprise. This, by the way, is the second time Infantino has tried this. That he would end up with a cushy eight-figure job as a result, I'm sure, has nothing to do with his plans.

This most recent scheme would sell a minority stake (reportedly 20%) of control over the World Cup tournament to investors to the tune of $20 billion. The deal would transfer control over things like licensing, broadcasting, and ticketing for the World Cup from FIFA to the new company. In other words, they'd control access.

Infantino insisted that the new company would remain under the control of FIFA, but the lead investor into this new company was going to be Thrive Capital — a venture capital firm founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of the president’s son-in-law — so people were dubious.

To help sell the idea, Infantino promised roughly $7 million per year to FIFA member associations if they supported his plan. This, admittedly, is an extremely beneficial amount of money for some of the poorer FIFA members. There was, however, zero transparency about who the other investors would be and how much control they would have over decisions about the World Cup — things like timing, host country, streaming rights, and ticket pricing.

The proposal was almost immediately opposed by basically everyone on Earth, from football associations to world governments. There were threats of boycotts from the largest FIFA members. At least one FIFA official resigned, and Infantino is now facing a vote of no confidence in his presidency. He withdrew the proposal three days after introducing it. Rumor has it, he’s currently trying to reach Trump to help bail him out.

Image: Getty Images

There are a lot of important lessons to take away from the events of the last week. More than anything, it’s a warning. It’s not just that, in this information and extraction economy, you are a product and your very existence is exploitable. It’s that even your joy is a resource to be mined and profited from. Because to the wealthiest people on the planet, there could be no other purpose for it. Who else but a parasite could look at the smile of a child in a tiny village with a handmade soccer ball and think, “But who profits?”

Nothing is immune to the exploitation of the billionaire class. Nothing. No business, life-saving service, food chain, artist, or pastime is safe. But, more importantly, nothing is made better when profit becomes the focus. There’s no company that will magically survive a push to maximize wealth extraction. There’s no service that will be made better by a focus on shareholder value. No art is made better when profit is the sole goal.

But that won’t stop them from trying.

Image: AP

The other lesson of this week, though, is a bit more rosy. It's that solidarity works. Football associations threatening to boycott FIFA events served the same function as unions threatening to withhold labor. Sure, this was a particularly egregious example of the exploitation athletes face and on a global scale, but organized opposition successfully shut it down. In just three days.

Threatening the profits of the parasite class works. Boycotts work. Boycotts work best when they’re organized, at scale, and no one breaks ranks, but they work. They don’t make the existence of billionaires any more palatable, but they do bully them into behaving like human beings.

For a little while at least.

Last week, Sony announced that it would stop making physical copies of its games in 2027. Lots of people had a problem with this — it’s bad for sharing, for preservation, for libraries, for the concept of ownership, and for retailers. The move saves Sony a little money on production and a bit of money on retailer fees. It’s an ugly and unpopular move.

The day of the announcement, when the outrage was the loudest. Sony’s stock price started going up. Because the outrage doesn’t matter to the shareholders.

Image: Getty Images via Hollywood Reporter

It’s been up and down since, but is still up roughly $0.75 — about 5% or so higher than it was before the announcement. (Don’t quote me on those numbers, I need more coffee and I just can’t be bothered to double-check math on something as made up as the stock market.) In the last few days, Sony’s CEO, Chairman, and several other executives made over $10 million from selling off their own stock.

The moral here, though, is that all of the outrage, betrayal, and destruction of trust made a few people a lot of money. Because Fuck You, That’s Why.

Last month, Rockstar Games announced that GTA 6 would be selling for $80 for the base edition and $100 for the Ultimate Edition. The $100 version gets extra missions, story content, and shops. If you want the fullest version of the game, you’ve got to drop that extra $20. Oh, and there’s no physical editions either — if you buy a copy at a retailer, you’ll be getting an empty box with a download code inside. Because Fuck You, That’s Why.

Image: id Software

Over the last decade or so, Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studio has bought, sold, closed, and consolidated a dozen or so studios. Meanwhile, Microsoft has spent over $100 billion on its partnership with OpenAI and has committed an additional $190 billion to AI infrastructure over the “coming years.” Xbox this week announced that 3,200 people would be losing their jobs. One of the studios hit hardest by the Xbox layoffs, id Software, just released a DLC for Doom: The Dark Ages that’s sitting at a 9.0 on Metacritic and a “very positive” on Steam. But that studio was punished. Because Fuck You, That’s Why.

According to Gallup polling, 71% of Americans are opposed to building data centers in their area. There are also thousands of proposed data centers. In February, the construction process for a Meta AI data center dumped a rare bacteria into Cheyenne, Wyoming’s water supply — the report only came out this week, by the way. Meanwhile, a pro-AI super PAC called Leading the Future is spending dark money on a fully AI-generated news outlet, paid social media influencers, and political candidates to promote their talking points. Because Fuck You, That’s Why.

Image: Getty Images via NPR

The crypto exchange Binance is banned from operating in the UK, might get banned from the EU, and has paid billions of dollars in fines worldwide. Binance’s founder went to prison for money laundering and then was pardoned by President Trump. The Trump family is in negotiation to buy part of Binance. Donald Trump has made over $1 billion from crypto investments in his first year back in office. Reform UK head and far-right asshole Nigel Farage got a £5 million donation from a crypto billionaire that may or may not’ve been full-on illegal (vote Count Binface!). Because Fuck You, That’s Why.

Image via Britannica Money

Roughly 95% of Americans say they believe we’re facing an affordability crisis and 57% say the economy is getting worse. But the US economy is bigger than ever. The Dow Jones (whatever that is) has never been higher. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are going to spend $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. And both things are true because of our K-shaped economy — basically “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer” on a systemic scale. Because Fuck You, That’s Why.

Google sucks now. Every app you use is spying on you — and your garbage truck might too. Meta’s smart glasses are being used by sexual predators and stalkers. The Wikipedia entry for Criticism of Facebook has more words than the entry for Isaac Newton (or the entries for George Clooney and Brad Pitt combined). You can go to prison for distributing anarchist zines. There’s a diarrhea-causing cyclospora outbreak in 30 states with thousands of people affected — but we don’t know the actual numbers because the CDC stopped mandatory reporting last year. Meta filed a patent for a wearable that tracks your mood by recording your entire day. The Starbucks CEO makes 6,666 times as much as the average Starbucks employee. The average age of first time homebuyers in 2026 is 40, up from about 30 years old just 10 years ago. The world’s richest 12 people possess as much wealth as the poorest 4 billion — and that stat is from before Elon scammed his way into briefly being the planet’s first trillionaire. Uwe Boll is still allowed to make movies. Because Fuck You, That’s Why.

Image via Yahoo! Finance

On a recent episode of Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast, author Cal Newport used the phrase “doom trolling” to describe the way that Big Tech is fearmongering about rapidly accelerating technology while also accelerating that same technology. And it’s a brilliant phrase because it highlights the Because Fuck You, That’s Why economy for what it is — one long troll by the world’s saddest, most useless bullies.

The goal of a troll is to wear you down through emotional provocation. When they annoy you enough or finally make you angry enough to snap, they’ve won and you’re that much weaker for it. Doom trolling wants the same thing. The Because Fuck You, That’s Why economy wants to beat you down until you can’t imagine anything better. It wants you to think that everything that’s being done to you is inevitable and unavoidable. It wants you to think those 12 richest people in the world did something to deserve the wealth they possess. They want you to throw up your hands in frustration knowing that that’s the way it is.

Because Fuck You, That’s Why.

Image: Getty Images via Bon Appétit

What are you going to do, stop eating ice cream just because it punishes speaking out against genocide? Stop drinking coffee because of union busting? Give up two-day shipping because of human rights violations? Not play the biggest new game because of crunch culture and union busting and a gender pay gap? Not shop someplace that changes prices depending on where you are in the store? Not get a new console because the manufacturer enables genocide? Not listen to music because the streaming app platforms propaganda and misinformation while also abusing artists? Stop going to the movies or enjoying Shark Week because it’s owned by propagandists and Zionists?

The reality of the Because Fuck You, That’s Why economy is that all of these thin​gs — every necessity and every distraction we all need to get through the relentless days — are tied up with the same corporations and people making the world so bad we need a little treat to get through it. It’s manufactured complicity. It's desperation-driven compliance. It’s one big, “What are you going to do about it?”

Image via CNET

The doom trolling and constant barrage of abuses eats away at your ability to imagine something better. The erosion of the moral high ground makes it harder to make a stand.

Throughout (Western) society, we have both myths and science to back up the belief that humans — and all animals — are inherently greedy and one step from chaos. We are told that we are all Lord of the Flies in waiting, that this is just the way of things.

Except it’s demonstrably not true. It was fiction written by a depressed alcoholic. Fifteen years after William Golding made up Lord of the Flies, a real group of boys — six boys from a Tongan boarding school on a fishing trip — really did end up shipwrecked on a deserted island with no grown ups.

Image: Getty Images via The Guardian

When they were rescued fifteen months later, the boat’s captain wrote, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire.” They shared resources, worked together, and cared for each other when they got hurt. No one died. They remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Our (Western, capitalist) popular mythology says we’ll turn on each other the first chance we get. Reality says people help each other. Even all of that science misses the point — they’re all about power. What the Robbers Cave study, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram experiment, and the Third Wave experiment all show is not that humans are inherently evil. They show that hierarchies of power can be manipulated into making humans turn on each other.

And it doesn’t take much. Sometimes, it’s as simple as discomfort and friction. So much of the Because Fuck You, That’s Why economy is built on comfort and complacency. There’s friction in giving up a treat or even in finding a different diversion. But that’s the point. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable. Finding a different coffee shop is not as uncomfortable as fighting every day for a living wage. Buying your second favorite ice cream is not as uncomfortable as watching a country be turned into rubble.

Back when we started Rogue, I wrote about finding your own personal moral line.

I stand by that. You shouldn’t deny yourself everything, but you can and should deny yourself some things. Even if you only draw the line at the most egregious. Over the last year, I’ve found myself becoming less forgiving as more and more of the Because Fuck You, That’s Why economy crosses my line and I'm even more filled with vitriol for the large injustices.

And my line is shifting. Because I choose humans over money. I choose people over power. I choose to not only believe in, but demand something better.

Because fuck them, that’s why.