Plinkpump linkdump
A blogging sabbath.
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me in PDX at Barnes and Noble with BUNNIE HUANG on June 20. The last two stops are in London (Jul 1) and Manchester (Jul 2).
Every now and again, I reach the end of the week with more stray links that I’ve been able to squeeze into the newsletter, and when that happens it’s time for a linkdump. This is linkdump number 31; here’s 1–30:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
It’s been five years (to the day!) since Wired killed off “Beyond the Beyond,” Bruce Sterling’s excellent blog, a wanton act of online vandalism that, among other things, made it much harder to figure out what was on Bruce’s mind, a subject I find endlessly fascinating:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/17/cheap-truthers/#cheap-truth
Sterling’s got a Medium that he almost never updates. I follow it through RSS, the best way to keep up with both things that update frequently and also hardly ever:
This week, he posted a long, thoughtful, and seriously intriguing review of Cafe Europa Revisited, Slavenka Drakulic’s followup to her 1996 international blockbuster Cafe Europa:
https://bruces.medium.com/cafe-europa-revisited-2025-be8875c06c4c
I confess that I had never heard of Drakulic, though, as I read Sterling’s review, it became clear why he dotes on the acerbic Croatian essayist, a keen observer of the material world and theorizer of political upheaval:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602764/cafe-europa-revisited-by-slavenka-drakulic/
Drakulic is well-known for an essay collection called “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed,” and the subtitle of this volume is “How to Survive Post-Communism,” which just about says it all. Sterling characterizes it as the start of a new hot genre, “Old books directly written for old people by old people.”
“The West” (whatever that is) is getting old. For more than a decade, Bruce Sterling’s been predicting a future of “old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.” Original Sin, a new heavily reported book on the 2024 election makes a good case that Biden was indeed in a state of advanced senescence through much of his presidency and the entire election campaign, and had no business occupying the White House, much less running for another four years:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/books/review/originial-sin-jake-tapper-alex-thompson.html
Biden’s unwillingness to confront his age and frailty, along with Trump’s obvious mental and physical decline, has many terrified American political thinkers talking about the gerontocracy that’s running the country:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/01/designated-survivors/
Corey Robin got in some good licks on this one, in a piece called “We really are the oldest democracy in the world”:
https://coreyrobin.com/2025/05/15/we-really-are-the-oldest-democracy-in-the-world/
“Oldest democracy” as in, “the democracy with the oldest leaders.” The Democrats are gearing up for the midterms with such repeat offenders as Maxine Waters (86), Rosa DeLauro (82), John Garamendi (80), Doris Matsui (80) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (80). Also running: David Scott (79) who had to step down as ranking House Ag Committee member over health concerns. And: Dwight Evans (70), who missed most of last year’s votes after suffering a stroke.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi (85), Steny Hoyer (85), Danny Davis (83), Frederica Wilson (82), Emanuel Cleaver (80) and Alma Adams (78) won’t say whether they’re running in 2026:
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/15/house-democrats-age-members-reelection-biden
At 53, I can tell that I’ve lost a step. Sure, I have the benefits of wisdom, but man, I am so tired. Maybe the reason our Democratic leaders have sat idly by and watched as Trump dismantled democracy and installed fascism is that they’re too tired to scale the fences like their South Korean counterparts did?
https://www.theverge.com/24312920/martial-law-south-korea-yoon-suk-yeol-protest-dispatch
I’m not saying everyone over 65 in Congress should retire. I’m saying that a caucus that skewed younger might be more, you know, vigorous. I’m minded of my favorite John Ciardi poem, “About Crows”:
The young crow flies above, below,
and rings around the slow old crow.
What does the fast young crow not know?
WHERE TO GO.
https://spirituallythinking.blogspot.com/2011/10/about-crows-by-john-ciardi.html
Meanwhile, young people might just be getting something out of the regulatory apparatus. Thanks to a smashing court loss in the USA and regulation in the EU, Apple is now required to allow app makers to use their own payment processors, skipping the 30% App Tax Apple levies on every in-app purchase, to the tune of $100b/year.
Among other things, this means that every Fortnite skin and upgrade could suddenly get 25% cheaper without costing Epic Games a dime. The only problem is that Apple refuses to obey the regulation or the court order:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup
This week, Apple blocked Fortnite’s app from the App Store:
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/16/apple-blocks-fortnite-return-to-ios-app-store/
And defied EU regulators by slapping deceptive warning labels all over any EU app that accepts payments without kicking 30% up to Apple:
https://www.theverge.com/news/667484/apple-eu-ios-app-store-warning-payment-system
Apple’s in a lot of trouble in the USA (Apple execs who lied to a federal judge about this stuff now face criminal sanctions), and it looks like they’re spoiling for a fight with the EU. After all Trump flew to Davos and threatened to destroy any country that tried to regulate US Big Tech. The rest of the world doesn’t seem scared — or at least, they’re more scared of the risk of trusting US cloud technology that can be cut off to kneecap a rival economy, or used to spy on government and industry, or both. In the EU, Cryptpad — a free, open cloud based document collaboration platform — is luring away Google Docs and Office 365 users at speed:
Meanwhile, back in the USA, things are looking grim for Meta, as the FTC’s case against the company moves into the end-game. The stakes are high: Meta could be forced to sell off Whatsapp and Instagram:
https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/from-roadshow-to-expert-witness-courtroom
That is, if Mad King Trump doesn’t step in. Seems like nothing is too petty for the Trump admin. How petty are they? This week, Trump’s CBP seized a load of t-shirts from the subversive design studio Cola Corporation:
https://www.404media.co/cbp-seizes-shipment-of-t-shirts-featuring-swarm-of-bees-attacking-cops/
Why did CBP seize Cola’s tees? Apparently, it was design that featured a cop being attacked by a swarm of bees. Cola knows good publicity when he sees it: he’s printing up more of the tees and selling them in a new line he calls “the confiscated collection”:
https://www.thecolacorporation.com/collections/confiscated
Get yours while supplies last!
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/17/odds-and-sods/#cafe-europa
