It is a truth universally acknowledged that an indie hacker in possession of a widget must be in want of a business model...

Every tool is a startup now.

Every script is a SaaS product.

Every neat little hack you cobbled together on a Sunday afternoon to solve your own problem is, according to the prevailing wisdom, an "MVP" waiting for its first round of funding.

The entire machinery of online discourse around building and creating has been so thoroughly captured by entrepreneurial "logic" that we've lost the language to describe what it feels like to simply make a thing that helps someone, give it away, and move on with your life.

I've been feeling this for a while now, and I suspect a lot of folks who have the itch to build feel it too, even if they haven't articulated it. You make a browser extension that fixes a tiny annoyance. You write a tool that reformats data in a way your colleages find useful. You build a small calculator for a niche problem that ten people on Earth actually have. 

And the immediate, reflexive, near-Pavlovian response from the internet is: 

Have you thought about monetizing this?

Gifts aren't pre-revenue products

Marcel Mauss published The Gift in 1925, and nearly a century later, the tech world still hasn't caught up with his central insight. Mauss studied indigenous societies across the Pacific Northwest and Polynesia and found that gift-giving operated as a complete system with its own logic, its own power dynamics, its own hierarchies, its own concept of value. Gifts created social bonds. They established reciprocty. They built trust in ways that market transactions can't.

The open-source software movement understood this intuitively. When Richard Stallman wrote the GNU Manifesto in 1985, his argument was moral: software should exist freely in the world. The modern internet runs on tools that people built and gave away: Linux, Apache, Python, the cryptographic libraries that keep your bank details from floating around in plaintext. These are gifts in the Maussian sense, and they built the foundation for an industry worth trillions of dollars.

But the gift economy of software has been absorbed into the entrepreneurial economy. Open source became a "go-to-market strategy." Free tools became "lead magnets." And now we live in a world where building something useful and giving it away for free is treated as either naive or as a clever long-game bottom-up business tactic. There's no conceptual space left for the third option: that you did it because you wanted to.

What the monks knew about useful work

The Rule of Saint Benedict, written around 530 AD, organized monastic life around a principle that sounds almost radical in the context of modern productivity culture: ora et labora, pray and work. The monks built things. They copied manuscripts, brewed beer, cultivated gardens, developed new agricultural techniques. Some of this work was consequential. Much of it was small and local and meant for their immediate community. None of it was oriented toward scale.

Work was understood as a form of devotion, valuable in itself rather than as a means to accumulate wealth or status. The monks built in private, for people they could see and know, finding meaning in the craft itself.

To transplant it:

Someone on a forum builds a tiny utility that converts between obscure file formats. Someone else writes a Tampermonkey script that removes an annoying popup from a website they use daily, then shares it because why wouldn't you. A developer at a nonprofit writes a data-cleaning tool for a specific kind of messy spreadsheet that everyone in their field has to deal with, posts it on GitHub, and walks away. Someone else publishes a tiny color-contrast checker that only people doing accessibility audits would ever need. These are Benedictine acts. They're labor undertaken for its own sake and for the immediate good of a knowable community, and they produce a satisfaction that no amount of MRR can replicate.

Scale poisons everything it touches

The startup ecosystem, and the broader culture of "building" that has grown up around it, operates on an implicit assumption that value scales linearly with reach. A tool that helps ten people is good. A tool that helps a thousand people is better. A tool that helps a hundred thousand is exciting. A tool that helps ten million is a unicorn, and you should probably quit your job to work on it full-time.

This logic is tempting, and in certain contexts it's perfectly sound. If you've discovered a real solution to a widespread problem, it would be odd not to try to bring it to more people. But the framework becomes toxic when it's applied universally, when every small creation gets fed into the same evaluative grinder and comes out measured against the yardstick of potential scale. 

Because most good things don't scale. 

Most good things are stubbornly local.

The best bread I've ever eaten came from a bakery in an Australian country town that didn't have a website and its originator couldn't have told you his "total addressable market" if you'd asked.

When we apply scale logic to everything, we end up devaluing the closeness to a real problem and the direct feedback loop between making a thing and watching someone use it. 

Fun is a valid engineering requirement

Freud was wrong about a great many things (charitably), but his concept of the pleasure principle has aged well in the context of creative work. He argued that people are wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and that much of what we call "civilization" is the process of learning to defer gratification in service of longer-term goals. The reality principle, he called it. Grow up, stop playing, get serious, build something real.

Modern productivity culture is the reality principle taken to an algorithmically appropriate extreme. Every hour must be optimized. Every project must serve a goal. Every creative act must be justified by its metrics and its contribution to some larger strategic objective. And this framework is so deeply embedded that even hobbyists feel guilty about building things for fun, as if fun were an insufficent justification for spending a Saturday afternoon writing code.

But fun is actually a good signal. When you're building a small tool because you find the problem interesting, or because the act of making it brings you real pleasure, you're operating in a mode that produces different (and, in my experience, better) results than when you're building to a spec or optimizing for a market. You make different design choices. You take different risks. You're willing to over-engineer a feature that delights three people and to under-engineer the parts that don't matter. The output has a character that venture-backed software, by structural necessity, can never have.

William Morris' Arts and Crafts movement was, at its core, an argument that industrialized production stripped work of its pleasure and products of their soul. Morris wanted to make beautiful things by hand, slowly, with care, in a way that honored both the maker and the user. He was fighting against the Victorian equivalent of "move fast and break things," and his economic program failed, but his aesthetic and moral intuitions hold up. There's something in a hand-built tool, physical or digital, that mass production can't touch.

When gifts become jobs you never applied for

The open-source world has been having its own reckoning with this tension for a decade now. High-profile maintainers burn out. Critical infrastructure projects turn out to be maintained by a single exhausted volunteer. Companies worth billions depend on libraries whose creators haven't been paid a cent. The discourse around "open-source sustainability" has generated an enormous volume of think pieces and not very many solutions.

But I wonder if part of the problem is that we're trying to solve the wrong equation. The burnout epidemic in open source goes beyond money (though money is part of it). It happens when something that started as a gift, something built for fun or out of real care, gets conscripted into an economy of obligation and expectation. You wrote a library because you needed it and thought others might too. Now ten thousand developers depend on it, and they file bug reports with the tone of customers who've been wronged, and suddenly your gift has become a job you never applied for and can't quit without feeling like you've betrayed people.

Better funding for open source would be nice, but the deeper issue is rebuilding the cultural permission to make things small and keep them small. To build a tool, share it, and explicitly say: this is a gift, not a product. I'll maintain it if I feel like it. I won't if I don't. You're welcome to fork it, improve it, ignore it, or throw it away. 

Why the market can't have everything

Markets are excellent at allocating resources toward problems that affect large numbers of people who are willing and able to pay for solutions. Markets are terrible at addressing problems that are too small, too niche, too specific, too local to support a business model. If you have a problem shared by ten million affluent people, the market will solve it six times over with varying degrees of elegance // extraction. If you have a problem shared by two hundred researchers in a subdiscipline of marine biology, you're on your own.

This is the space where gift-economy building works. The long tail of human problems: the thousands of little frictions and annoyances and workflow inefficiencies that are too small for anyone to build a company around but too real for the people experiencing them to ignore. When someone builds a free tool to address one of these problems, they're serving a need that money was never going to serve.

And this work has positive externalities we consistently undercount. A free tool that saves a hundred people twenty minutes a week gives back more than three thousand hours of human time per year. A well-written tutorial that helps people avoid a common mistake reduces frustration across an entire community. A spreadsheet template that makes a confusing tax form navigable for freelancers is doing work that no government agency and no private company has bothered to do. A CLI script that batch-converts a weird legacy file format saves someone from losing an afternoon every month. None of this shows up in GDP figures or on growth charts. The value is real anyway.

The Noble Path

None of this is an argument against entrepreneurship or against charging money for software. eople should get paid for their work. Businesses that solve real problems at scale have value. I am neither a purist nor a luddite, and I'm certainly not interested in living a life of poverty and obscurity. 

There is a Japanese concept, ikigai, that Western self-help influencers have repeatedly mangled and monetized into a mockery of a Venn diagram about finding your "purpose." But the original sense of the word is closer to "the thing that makes life worth living on a daily basis," and in the research conducted on centenarians in Okinawa, ikigai was rarely about grand professional achievement. It was about tending a garden. Talking to neighbors. Making small things that brought small joys. Waking up with something to do. The scale of the contribution didn't matter. What mattered was the directness of the connection between the effort and its effect.

I think what I'm arguing against is the monoculture. The idea that building-as-business is the only legitimate mode of making things, and that everything else is either a hobby (dismissive) or a pre-revenue startup (aspirational). I'm arguing for the recovery of a third category: building as gift, building as an expression of care for a specific community of people whose problems you understand because you're one of them.

If you've ever made something useful and felt a pang of guilt for not monetizing it, that guilt is a symptom of the monoculture. If you've ever hesitated to share a tool because it wasn't "polished enough" for a product launch, you've been contaminated by standards that don't apply to gifts. If you've ever described your own creative work as "a side project" with that apologetic minimizing doing all the heavy lifting, you've internalized a heirarchy of value that ranks market viability above human usefulness.

The Noble Path as I see it is to build a small, imperfect, deeply useful thing and give it away to the people who need it. Skip the landing page and the waitlist. A thing that works, offered freely, in the oldest and most human tradition of making things for each other.

The monks would understand.

Once upon a time, there was a country filled with religious extremists, willing to take violent action at home and abroad against anyone they declared their enemy.

This week, the United States military just followed orders as the President took the easy and fun decision to drop some bombs. By the end of the first week they killed one Ayatollah, 177 schoolgirls and teachers at a primary school, six Americans, sank 20 ships, killing hundreds more, supported Israel killing 123 people by bombing Lebanon, and killed over 1,300 Iranians, including all of their own perferred people to take over in the case of a regime change.

This weekend, they may have the start of a stomachache.

Carnival of Grotesques

This Trump administration has always been a cavalcade of the incompetent and the warped. Wherever possible, he tried to appoint people who met both those requirements so that they wouldn't have any independence of mind. He needed real losers so that they had nothing to fall back on beyond his patronage.

Which takes us to Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, a man who achieves the rare feat of being both eager to show off his hard muscles and yet somehow also personifying erectile dysfunction.

Everything objectionable about this failure of a person has been on show this week. His weird christian extremism (note, not actually Christian) saw his hand-purged officer class deliver simultaneous messages to their troops that "President Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

Oh, goody.

Also on display has been the fact that he is thicker than mince. Faced with pretty basic questions like "Hey, do you know what the plan for this war is?" or "Have you got enough missiles for this?" and "Have you started an illegal war? Because you're meant to get Congress' approval for that sort of thing." he immediately spiralled.

"Our Authorities are Maxed Out" may be the standout quote in this freestyle jazz of artless aggression, plumb dumbness and barbarism. I think this is what is meant by the phrase Crashing Out. This guy is one week into a lifetime of consequences and he is already underwater. Or, if not water, than certainly some liquids.

A dishonest President won't even stay bought

One of the more obvious bits of the many many corruptions simultaneously at play in the US administration has been the eagerness of the Trump family to accept money from Middle Eastern governments. Two billion from Saudi Arabia for Jared Kushner's venture capital firm. (The Son-in-Lawless)

Half a billion for the Trump family crypto business from the United Arab Emirates. (Insert eyeroll emoji here)

A big gold plane for the President himself from Qatar.

And more billions in 'membership fees' for the Trump (Chairman for life) Board of Peace from Bahrain, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates.

And that doesn't include the numerous Trump-friendly financial deals inside the US economy that have been backed by petrodollar money, such as Twitter's purchase by Elon Musk and gulf-state backed AI and data centre investments.

Basically, the petrostates of the Middle East have been paying protection money for a quiet life and a say in US policy. But now there are unwanted Iranian drones and missiles falling out of the sky on them, killing locals, upsetting the influencers and angrying up their powerful Soulless Shopping Mall lobby.

This guy won't even stay bought reliably.

Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig

Nipping to Venezuela and kidnapping their president is one thing. Popping into the transport and oil engine of the global economic machine and jamming its works with dead schoolgirls and $100m missiles tends to be quite another. The sheer kinetic energy of the social and emotional forces released by that kind of intervention doesn't wind out in a day.

Instead, the colonial boomerang has whizzed back to the US at the speed of a fibre-optic cable carrying a market trade.

Let's take some quotes from The Hill, a newspaper specifically for Washington's political class. This is what the Imperial centre is reading about itself;

“The Fed is soon to meet to determine what to do with rates at a time when oil prices and gasoline prices are up and thus, inflation is probably on its way up,” wrote Eugenio Aleman, chief economist at Raymond James, in an analysis. 

“This is probably the worst scenario for monetary policy, and we will probably hear the term ‘stagflation’ repeated once again

The Islamic Republic’s naval operation has choked off oil exports from the gulf, severely restricting international supply. A prolonged conflict would also force Persian Gulf nations to halt production as barrels pile up in warehouses, which could lead to longer-term price increases.

[Trump said] "if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit,”

The US voter appears, from the outside, to have a series of complicated and contradictory beliefs and wishes. But one of the few constants is that they really hate paying higher prices for things. Never mind whistling past the graveyard, this last comment, from the President for Cheaper Eggs reads more like marching a brass band past his own political resting place.

Diplomacy by other means

The problem for personalist authoritarian regimes is that the Supreme Leader surrounds himself with stooges and yes men who don't tell him when he's making a mistake. This problem is particularly acute when the Supreme Leader has gaping holes in his intelligence and knowledge base, but is too insecure to listen to anyone who knows more or has better judgement than him.

Through both of his terms, Trump has been mesmerised and delighted by the fascist notion of strength, as projected by military force. This machismo pose has similarly pleased his base, who love a good sabre-rattle as much as the next red-cap wearer.

His self-retitled Secretary for War has played to his Supreme Leader's love of War talk, hysterically screaming about how much war he's going to do.

Having excitedly gone along with an Iranian engagement that, per the Secretary of State's comments, seems to have been initiated by another country entirely, the administration is now slowly discovering that War is not an end in itself. Fighting, killing and dying is not actually the purpose of a military.

After the defeat of Napoleon’s continental ambitions, Prussian General Carl Von Clauzwitz wrote a book titled "On War". Published in 1832, it started from a simple premise. War, as distinct from just slaughter, was the 'continuation of policy by other means'.

This is an inversion of the fascist impulse to present military strength and ability to cause suffering as a purpose in itself.

The US military can, unquestionably, cause death. But the US political system seems further away than ever from knowing what it is killing for.

Into that gap, whole empires have fallen.

The United States has a long tradition of photographing presidents with their cabinets on the eve of war or military escalation. FDR at his desk, surrounded by his ministers on 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbour; Lyndon Johnson with his foreign policy advisors in the Oval Office on 27 July 1965, weighing up whether to increase troop numbers from 75,000 to 125,000; George W Bush and his cabinet on 19 March, 2003, the day before military operations began against Iraq - all these pictures are part of the historical record, aimed at future generations.

At the same time, the photographic record is often intended to convey a certain image of American power to the present: in which decisions of national security and war and peace are taken through careful deliberation and consensus by wise, thoughtful officials with knowledge, experience and expertise. Often there is a uniformed general around to bolster the impression of competence and consultation. None of this applies to the photos released by the White House that accompanied the US-Israeli strikes against Iran on 28 February.

These photos were not taken in the White House, but in a curtained-off ‘situation room’ in Mar-a-Lago, presumably so that Trump could fit in the meetings between rounds of golf. The setting looks as improvised and provisional as the war itself. One of the photos shows Trump, Marco Rubio, chief of staff Susie Wiles and CIA director John Radcliffe sitting round a table. Behind them, a large map of the Middle East marked Operation Epic Fury that looks like a Risk board is festooned with battleship markers and diamond-shaped targets in Iran.

Trump is wearing a USA baseball cap, and looks like a cobra struggling to stay awake while sucking on its own venom. His advisors - assuming that’s what they were doing - seem simultaneously resigned, blank, and entirely nonplussed. Through the gap in the curtain, you can see the gilded trashiness of Trump’s pleasure dome - the same building where the FBI found thousands of top secret classified documents in 2020.

There is not the faintest trace of competence, knowledge or expertise in this grim ramshackle tableau. This is an image of indolence, craven submission and fundamental unseriousness, all of which makes it the perfect historical marker of a war unleashed on impulse and capriciousness, with a barely-disguised yawn, by men and women without the slightest concern for its consequences.

It is likely that posterity will regard this photograph as a terrifying reminder of how the most powerful country in the world abased itself before the dim-witted, malignant, maggot-brained creature who now commands the most destructive military machine in human history.

The decision to go to war is always the most serious decision a government can take, and there are times - at least to those who are not pacifists - when war is necessary. But the horrific conflict now unfolding is not one of them. This was a war of choice, and wars of choice are always wars of aggression. Indeed the prevention of such wars is one of the primary aims of the ‘international rules-based order’ constructed in the aftermath of World War II.

It was for this reason that the 1945 Nuremberg International Military Tribunal designated the plotting and waging of aggressive war as the ‘supreme international crime’ which ‘contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ It’s why the United Nations includes ‘the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace’ in its foundational charter. It’s why the 1974 General Assembly Resolution XXIX defined wars of aggression as a ‘crime against international peace.’

Of course, there have been many breaches of these principles, and powerful countries - not least the United States - have found ways to circumvent them. But no government since World War II has ignored them with the brazen contempt and disdain that the Trump administration has shown, in the ludicrous and vaingloriously-named Operation Epic Fury.

Few governments in the history of human conflict have ever waged war with so little understanding of the enemy they are fighting, and with such a complete absence of any coherent strategic vision, beyond the performative display of destructive military power that Trump and his equally-depraved minions regard as strength.

The Stupid War

This is a war that Israel has wanted to fight for decades, and which it has been repeatedly trying to drag the American colossus into. It’s the war that American neocons once dreamed of, when the slogan ‘real men go to Tehran’ accompanied the build up to the invasion of Iraq. It’s a war that has its roots in Trump’s 2018 decision to wreck the nuclear agreement achieved under Obama, and impose sanctions on Iran.

Now Israel has its wish, and America is once again at war, led by a fascistic administration that you would not trust to run a crack den, and whose members act as if they have just stumbled out of one. In the final scene of Scarface, a coked-up Tony Montana staggers out of his Florida mansion, with an M16-turned grenade launcher, zonked on his own stash.

At least Montana was fighting for his life. The same cannot be said of the vicious clowns who inflicted this calamity on the world from another Florida mansion, for no good reason whatsoever. In doing so, they have unleashed a cascade of killing and destruction that threatens to destabilise the Middle East once again, and deal a final blow to the withered carcass of rules, treaties and obligations that the architects of the post-World War II international order constructed to prevent precisely this kind of outcome.

In The Godfather - the gangster references write themselves with this shower of bastards - Michael Corleone attends his nephew’s baptism, while his hitmen massacre the rival Barzini and the Tataglia families, who the Corleones had lured into a negotiated peace. The Witkoff/Kushner team played the same game with the Iranians who they were pretending to negotiate with. Only the day before the strikes, the Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusadi reported that negotiators had made ‘substantial progress’, and that Iran had agreed to blend its supplies of enriched uranium to the ‘lowest level possible.’

Contrary to the lies that have been told since, it was probably for precisely this reason that Israel and the US launched the strikes 24 hours later that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and begun bombing Tehran. In a single stroke, Trump wiped out hundreds of years of diplomatic practice, whilst also violating international customary law prohibiting the killing of heads of state.

Such actions are also a breach of US federal law, not that Trump cares. Executive Order 12333 - enacted in the wake of the Church Committee’s investigations into the CIA’s covert ops and signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, expressly prohibits US personnel from engaging in or colluding in the assassination of foreign leaders.

You may not like Khameini or the regime he headed - I certainly don’t - but assassination is the stuff of political nightmares. It ushers in a world in which any country can decide to kill any leader it wants. But Trump has done this because he sits at the helm of the one country on the planet that looks at every other country - and certain countries in particular - through a gunsight or a bombsight.

So when the White House posts gleeful Call of Duty-style videos of missile strikes on Iran, and gleeful TikTok reels alternating crude Hollywood-mashups with real attacks, it is not just demonstrating the depravity of its current occupants. In presenting carnage and death as entertainment, these videos also reflect how America views much of the world - in which certain countries are bombable targets.

Subscribe now

It makes no difference who its leaders are. They might be Harry Truman, Kennedy, McNamara and the ‘brightest and the best.’ Or Ronald Reagan sending Contras to slaughter teachers or shooting up harbours in Nicaragua with an ‘aw shucks’ folksy grin. It could be George Bush warning that the smoking gun cannot become a mushroom before blitzing Iraq. Or Barack ‘I’m really good at killing people’ signing off Predator drone ‘double tap’ strikes in Waziristan. America is always locked and loaded, and very few presidents can resist the urge to pull the trigger.

Sooner or later, every American leader follows the pattern defined by the sinister neocon spook Michael Ledeen in 1992 that: ‘Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.’

Now the Trump gangsters are applying this rule to a ‘crappy’ country of 93 million people for no good reason whatsoever. We know why Israel wants this war. Unconstrained and by its devastation of Gaza, by a succession of tactical victories, and by the carte blanche it has received from successive American administrations and the ‘international community’, the Netanyahu government believes that it can eliminate Iran as a military threat and transform it into a failed state.

Some commentators have worried likely that Iran might slip into chaos and civil war as a result of this assault. It is highly likely that Israel is seeking precisely this outcome. Because if Iran follows Iraq and Syria, then Israeli military domination of the Middle East will be entirely unopposed, and Israel will be free to complete its destruction of the Palestinian people, annex the West Bank, and expand its borders into Syria and Lebanon.

The motivation of the Trump mafia is less clear. The administration does not even seem to know itself why it has done this. It has not tried to explain its motives or aims to Congress, as the Constitution requires. Instead, succession Trump and his lackeys have given a series of half-baked, implausible and downright dishonest statements to the media, which frequently contradict each other.

Before the strikes began, Trump’s disreputable envoy Steve Witkoff claimed that Iran was only a ‘week away’ from acquiring material to make a bomb. Then Trump himself - borrowing a leaf from George Bush’s playbook - claimed that Iran had restarted its nuclear program and was developing missiles that could ‘threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe’ and would soon be able to ‘reach the American homeland.’

Trump then called on the Iranian people to rise up against their own government, suggesting that regime change was the goal. But little more than a day later, Pete Hegseth - the Secretary of War who makes Conan the Barbarian sound like Bertrand Russell, claimed that regime change was not the goal, though the regime had to change.

Don’t try to figure this out, because Trump then claimed -falsely - that the US was in talks with Iran, and that he would be willing to accept a Venezuela-style arrangement with a new Iranian government, suggesting that popular uprisings and regime change might not be the goal, after all.

Meanwhile, his dead-eyed hapless consigliere Marco Rubio told reporters that the US had decided to strike Iran because it knew that Israel was going to do so, and that US forces would therefore be attacked, and so it decided to strike first. Could the world’s only military superpower not have have stopped Israel from carrying out its attack? Shouldn’t the US have taken steps to protect its bases - not to mention American citizens who were in the line of fire?

None of this happened, and Trump then contradicted Rubio and said that, on the contrary, he had ordered the strikes, and Israel had followed his lead . And his propagandist-in-chief, Comical Karoline Leavitt then claimed that Trump had gone to war ‘on a feeling based on fact.’

What was this ‘fact’? That Iran poses ‘an imminent and direct threat to the United States of America’ - another whopping lie dismissed by most experts, but which will be entirely familiar to anyone who remembers the Iraq war.

All this suggests that this is a war in search of a meaning, or that simply acquires meanings makes it up as it goes along. It may indeed be that this war was intended to knock the Epstein Files off the front pages, in which case it has succeeded. And even though most Americans do not support it, and Trump started it without Congressional approval, wars can easily create an internal dynamic of crisis and emergency that a docile opposition will readily succumb to, and that can give a government all sorts of emergency powers that it didn’t have before.

Whatever its reasons for starting the war, it is not at all clear if the US knows how to finish it. Does the US intend to dismember Iran, by inciting separatist rebellions and civil war? Or does it seek to control its central government, the way it has sought to control Venezuela?

US talks with Kurdish forces in Iraq suggest that the former may be an option. But Trump’s megalomaniacal insistence that he must be allowed to choose Iran’s leader suggests that he wants to rule Iran by proxy through a central government approved and appointed by the US That statement is one more indication of how little Trump and his minions understand Iranian history or the kind of regime they are dealing with.

Last week, Trump’s brutish Secretary of War denounced ‘Crazy regimes like Iran, hellbent on prophetic Islamist delusions’. This image of a country hellbent on collective martyrdom has been so widely disseminated that it has almost become established fact in Washington and other Western capitals. But the Islamic Republic is no crazier than the government currently running the United States. Its leaders are as capable of taking geopolitical decisions in what they perceive as the national interest - and their own - as any other country, which doesn’t necessarily mean that these decisions are good ones.

Trump and his minions seemed to have assumed that the Islamic Republic would fold after killing its figurehead. Instead, Iran has unleashed multiple attacks on US bases and allies that has dragged 14 countries so far into the theatre of war.

These capabilities have clearly been developed over some years, in preparation for an event like this. Iran cannot match Israel or the United States in terms of conventional firepower, but it can force the US to disperse its forces; it can increase the political and economic cost of the war both regionally and internationally. It can drag the war out, testing the will of its enemies and their domestic constituencies.

Iran’s strategy of attacking almost all its neighbours may backfire, but this is a regime that is fighting for its survival, and in such circumstances, mistakes can and will be made - particularly when Israel and the United States are killing leaders who might have been able to curb the regime’s worst instincts. Iran apologised to neighbouring states yesterday and promised to limit its attacks to countries from which it was attacked, suggesting that its leadership has exerted some control over its military leaders.

In the case of the United States and Israel, no one is curbing anyone, as Trump and his officials revel in killing, death and destruction, like psychotic boys pulling the wings of flies. Every day, Trump, Hegseth, Miller and their fascistic supporters exult in a war unconstrained by what Hegseth called ‘stupid rules of engagement’.

Reacting to news that more than 165 Iranian schoolgirls had been killed in a ‘double tap’ strike on a primary school, conservative lobbyist Matt Schlapp told Piers Morgan, these girls are better off dead than being ‘alive in a burqa.’ Hegseth bragged that a US submarine had torpedoed an unarmed Iranian frigate sailing home naval exercises with the Indian nary, killing more than 60 men in what he called a ‘silent death’. Dozens of others were left to drown, and would have drowned, had the Sri Lankan navy not rescued them.

Last Sunday, a US or Israeli ‘double tap’ strike hit Tehran’s Niloofar Square. A witness interviewed by Dropsite News described what happened:

One hit and it wasn’t that bad but when the second one hit, suddenly everything exploded. The windows all shattered. Whoever had hookahs were thrown to the floor…One of my friends whom I don’t know that well he was sitting here. His hookah was in his hands until the last moment. He was severed in half. Half of him was thrown to the side. I put him back together and placed him where he was. A piece of his brain was thrown here on the floor.

This is gangster-imperialism in practice. This is one more reason why Operation Epic Fury should be called Operation Epic Depravity: a rampant display of lawless violence, unconstrained by any humanitarian or legalistic considerations or any pretensions to nation building and democracy building.

It’s a war in which fundamentalist Christian officers are telling their soldiers that Trump was ‘anointed by Jesus’ to bring about Armageddon in the Middle East and bring back the Messiah; in which six anonymous gamblers can make $1.2 million betting on the bombardment of Iran on the cryptocurrency prediction site Polymarket - to which Donald Trump Junior is an investor and advisor; in which the freakish ghoul Melania Trump can chair a United Nations Security Council meeting on ‘children in conflict’ only days after her husband’s war has massacred Iranian children in an elementary school.

All this could not be more dystopian, dangerous or disgusting. Thousands of Iranians have been killed and wounded. Tehran’s oil refineries are now burning. Israel has attacked a desalination plant and Iran has responded in kind in Bahrain. It now seems that Gaza, rather than a savage aberration, has become a model for both Israel and the United States.

It is painful and horrific to watch such carnage unfold. It is a legal and moral obscenity that the United States and its bloodthirsty sidekick should be able to bomb cities with impunity and displace tens of thousands of people, dragging the region and the world into a new era of lawless brute force. And yet all this has been done with very little opposition or condemnation from the upholders of the ‘rules-based order.’

The House of Cards

No one can be at all surprised that rightwing ‘populist’ leaders across the world, from Milei, to Farage, and Abascal have loudly approved of the war. These are little men who will always wade happily through any political sewers, and who will approve of anything Trump does, because they think it will benefit them. Nor can anyone be surprised to find the likes of Boris Johnson, Andrew Neil or Stephen Pollard applauding the American-Israeli assault as if were some kind of righteous crusade.

Surprisingly, there have been some criticisms of the war from unlikely sources within MAGA itself. But the general response from the ‘international community’ has been silent or muted. This silence has been particularly striking amongst some of the defenders of the ‘rules-based order’. If the notion of international ‘order’ means anything, it must surely be related to the ability to prevent and condemn aggressive war, regardless of the perpetrator.

Yet barely had the strikes begun last weekend than Mark Carney - the eloquent defender of that order at Davos - declared Canada’s ‘full support’ for the US-Israeli assault, in order to ‘prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon’ - regardless of the lack of evidence to suggest that Iran had any such intention or capability.

Carney later rowed back slightly, claiming that he only supported the strikes ‘with regret’ because ‘the current conflict is another example of the failure of the international order.’

Russia and China were more forthright in condemning the strikes as a ‘cynical violation of law’, and called for an immediate halt to military operations. But Russia is not the country to pontificate on such matters. The Brazilian government also condemned the attacks and pointed out they ‘occurred amid a negotiation process between the parties.’

The European Union did not support the strikes, but its response to them has been weak and subdued. European commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa called the conflict ‘greatly concerning’ and exhorted all parties to ‘exercise maximum restraint’ to protect to civilians, and to fully respect international law’ - regardless of the fact that the US-Israeli assault was as much a breach of international law as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In an initial joint statement, the UK, Germany and France condemned ‘Iranian attacks in the region in the strongest terms’ and called on Iran to ‘refrain from indiscriminate military strikes’ and resume negotiations. There was no mention of the US-Israeli strikes that had brought these negotiations to an end.

In a visit to the White House last Tuesday, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz shamefully told Trump that Germany was ‘on the same page in terms of getting this terrible regime in Iran away, and we will talk about the day after,’ while also allowing German bases to be used to carry out further attacks.

Not surprisingly, this abasement pleased the orange emperor, who called Merz an ‘excellent leader.’ Trump was less pleased with Keir Starmer, who was as cautious and timid as we have come to expect him to be on almost everything. Such caution might seem welcome, in comparison with the mindless gung ho calls from the likes of Badenoch and Farage, for the UK to join offensive operations. But this is a low bar, and it doesn’t take much to rise above it.

Some commentators have cited Starmer’s refusal to allow US planes to use British bases as an indication of his skilful diplomatic tightrope walking, but a cabinet meeting leak suggests that Starmer would have allowed these bases to be used, had it not been for opposition from his own ministers. Instead, he reached a compromise: that British bases can be used for ‘defensive’ purposes by taking out Iranian missile silos. Leaving aside the question of how these distinctions would actually be monitored, the notion of ‘defensive’ strikes is objectively meaningless in an illegal war in which every US bomb or missile has an offensive purpose.

Even this sleight-of-hand could not pacify the rabidly rightwing British press, nor did it satisfy Trump. It is also unlikely to be permanent. Though Starmer has insisted that he would not join a war without a ‘lawful basis’, he has not explicitly not ruled out the possibility that Britain may join in the US-Israeli assault in future. Given that Starmer responded to last Israel’s attacks on Iran last year by immediately offering the RAF to ‘defend Israel’, no one should assume that his ‘standoff’ with Trump will last long.

This is how international ‘order’ collapses - not just when powerful countries break the rules, but because the countries that proclaim to represent these rules do not condemn or oppose those who break them, or do so only selectively. Amid this timidity and discount store realpolitik, only the Spanish president Pedro Sánchez has denounced the perpetrators with the outrage they deserve, declaring unequivocally:

Spain’s position is the same as in Ukraine or Gaza. No to the breakdown of international law that protects us all. No to resolving conflicts with bombs. No to war

Sánchez is no less politically vulnerable than Starmer or Macron. Like Labour, his government is fragile, and he faces a conservative-far right bloc without decency or scruples that is looking for any opportunity to destroy him. Yet he refused to allow the US to use Spanish bases, and made arguments that shame Trump’s would-be appeasers:

Some will say that this is naive. What is naive is to think that violence is the solution. Or to think that blind and servile obedience is leadership. We are not going to be complicit in something that is bad for the world for fear of reprisals from someone

Exactly that. And Sánchez has even managed to coax some lukewarm gestures of solidarity from Macron and von der Leyen, in addition to some mild criticisms of the illegality of the war. But as the European Council on Foreign Relations argues, this is not enough. Even from the point of its own interests, the European Union needs to defend Spain against Trump’s threats and distance itself from a deranged war that may well usher in the defeat of Ukraine.

We cannot have a world in which the United States is able invade and bomb any country it likes without opposition or condemnation, merely because it is powerful. We cannot have a Middle East in which Israel is allowed to destroy and devastate its neighbours, with complete impunity.

There is no way that a better Middle East and a better world will come out of this. It is more likely that it will be made much worse. And to those who say that Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear bomb, the US-Israeli war of aggression has just given every country in the region the best possible reason to acquire one.

We need leaders who will call, loudly, clearly and without any equivocation, for the strikes to cease, who will uphold the authority of the United Nations that Trump and Netanyahu are trampling on, and stand up for the values that supposedly uphold the European Union ‘peace project.’ With the exception of Sánchez, we don’t have them. Instead we have only silence, cowardice and collusion with the violent American Behemoth, a narrow focus on the national interest, and the occasional polite tepid criticism.

Tragically, this is not entirely surprising. Too many governments had already found a way to live with genocide in Gaza. Just as they emphasized with the ‘suffering’ of Palestinians while nothing to prevent that suffering, they may well find a way to support or at least acquiesce in Trump’s war of stupid, with the usual headshaking pieties about sparing civilians.

This weakness and de facto obeisance is almost as dismaying as the brazen gangsterism that we are now witnessing. In the aftermath of World War I, William Butler Yeats famously wrote ‘the blood-dimmed tide is loosed/and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.’

Those words could almost have been written for our own perilous times, as ‘mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ by some of the worst examples of humanity this planet currently has to offer, with the tacit complicity of leaders who believe themselves to the best, or at least better, but too often lack the courage of their convictions.

Perhaps they never really had any to begin with. Or perhaps they have also been looking at certain countries through a gunsight for so long that they no longer care who pulls the trigger, or how many people are killed, or how many cities are bombed and destroyed by the gangsters who have just set the world on fire for no good reason.

Share

Invasive behaviour that would have shocked us a decade ago now barely registers. And that includes the way we digitally track and monitor each other

A TikTok comedian recently launched a fake ICE tip line and received dozens of calls – including one from a teacher suggesting agents look into a kindergartener in her class. Governments and companies are the architects of surveillance culture, but civilians are increasingly keen to play a part. And it’s not just our perceived political enemies we’re willing to watch. It’s our friends, neighbours, partners and children.

As corporations and governments tunnel further into our digital lives – hoarding information about where we shop, who we know and what we believe – we’ve grown increasingly comfortable demanding the same access in our personal lives. While multiple apps log our location throughout the day, we demand that our friends also share their real-time movements through Apple’s Find My feature. While OpenAI uses our chat logs to train its models, we peek into the text messages of our partners. And while Palantir analyses social media data to help ICE identify its targets, we record strangers in public without their consent.

Tatum Hunter is a technology journalist based in Brooklyn. She writes on Substack at Bytatumhunter

In the world of open source, relicensing is notoriously difficult. It usually requires the unanimous consent of every person who has ever contributed a line of code, a feat nearly impossible for legacy projects. chardet, a Python character encoding detector used by requests and many others, has sat in that tension for years: as a port of Mozilla’s C++ code it was bound to the LGPL, making it a gray area for corporate users and a headache for its most famous consumer.

Recently the maintainers used Claude Code to rewrite the whole codebase and release v7.0.0, relicensing from LGPL to MIT in the process. The original author, a2mark, saw this as a potential GPL violation.

↫ Tuan-Anh Tran

Everything about this feels like a license violation, and in general a really shit thing to do. At the same time, though, the actual legal situation, what lawyers and judges care about, is entirely unsettled and incredibly unclear. I’ve been reading a ton of takes on what happened here, and it seems nobody has any conclusive answers, with seemingly valid arguments on both sides.

Intuitively, this feels deeply and wholly wrong. This is the license-washing “AI” seems to be designed for, so that proprietary vendors can take code under copyleft licenses, feed it into their “AI” model, and tell it to regurgitate something that looks just different enough so a new, different license can be applied. Tim takes Jim’s homework. How many individual words does Tim need to change – without adding anything to Jim’s work – before it’s no longer plagiarism?

I would argue that no matter how many synonyms and slight sentence structure changes Tim employs, it’s still a plagiarised work.

However, what it feels like to me is entirely irrelevant when laws are involved, and even those laws are effectively irrelevant when so much money is riding on the answers to questions like these. The companies who desperately want this to be possible and legal are so wealthy, so powerful, and sucked up to the US government so hard, that whatever they say might very well just become law.

“AI” is the single-greatest coordinated attack on open source in history, and the open source world would do well to realise that.

Georgios Samaras is an assistant professor of public policy at the School for Government, King’s College London.

I’ve spent more than a year examining the media’s habit of using substitute labels instead of calling the far right what it is — and this practice is now everywhere.

Newsrooms cycle through a growing list of alternative descriptors, usually in search of language that feels safer or less likely to trigger backlash: hard right, alt-right, new right, religious right, national conservative, traditionalist… The list keeps growing.

This would matter less if any of these terms added clarity, but most do not. They’re vague, they aren’t grounded in political science research, and they blur ideology rather than naming it, only to leave readers with softer language that hides what these actors truly stand for. And there are grave consequences to this mainstreaming.

Of course, none of this is new. Scholars of far-right mainstreaming, such as Katy Brown and Aurelien Mondon, have shown how buzzwords — especially “populism” — helped produce this kind of journalistic ambiguity. The far right understood this dynamic long ago and has been exploiting it with discipline. Many of these actors now routinely deem being described as “far right” as defamation, treating accurate political description as if it were a form of vilification.

Instead, these parties— from Reform UK and France’s National Rally to Brothers of Italy and Alternative for Germany — are selling a self-proclaimed conservative vision that is wrapped in the language of common sense. Paired with promises of order and national renewal, this is the standard trick for presenting racist politics as natural, and smuggling some of the darkest ideas of the 1930s back into public life under the cover of murky policy language.

Let’s take, for example, the concept of “remigration.” In political science, remigration refers to the forced removal of minorities, especially those of African and South Asian descent, through coercion, exclusion and mass displacement — it’s ethnic cleansing dressed up in bureaucratic language. But today this term is appearing across Western media with far too little scrutiny, often treated as just another hardline immigration policy in the far-right playbook.

We can observe the same pattern being applied to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which which purports that political and cultural elites are deliberately engineering demographic change by encouraging immigration and higher birth rates among non-white, non-Christian populations to displace white Christian Europeans. Claims that whole cities are being “lost” to Islam, “no-go zones” and “two-tier policing” myths; distortions around grooming scandals; and blatant lies about crime statistics are turning the conversation around migration into a permanent moral panic.

While the effects of this are visible all across Europe, Britain’s Reform UK presents one of the clearest cases — not least because the party has been at the front of the line when it comes to legal threats and public pressure against media outlets for using established terms to describe its ideology.

Alas, much of the media has also handed Reform UK an absurd amount of airtime. This party, with just eight members of parliament, is routinely given a platform to push extreme ideas with a free pass, while its figures pose as a government-in-waiting more than three years ahead of the U.K.’s next general election.

This is exactly how someone like Reform UK policy head Zia Yusuf has become such a central figure. Not even an MP, Yusuf has been laying out his far-right vision in plain sight, getting it amplified nonstop. He has threatened mass deportations on a staggering scale — floating figures approaching 300,000 people a day — called for an end to “Indefinite Leave to Remain” when it comes to Brexit, and proposed an enforcement agency akin to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry it out. He has also boasted that Reform UK wouldn’t just leave the European Convention of Human Rights, but “derogate from every international agreement” standing in the way of its deportation agenda.

But while these slogans play well on X and rack up thousands of likes, the second a journalist pushes back and calls this ideology what it is, the whole act falls apart — as when BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire pressed Yusuf to name even one protected characteristic his party wanted to remove from the Equality Act, and he couldn’t name a single one.

This interview showed exactly how little substance sits behind the political performance — and the vital importance of proper scrutiny. The problem is that moments like this are growing increasingly rare.

The BBC’s reporting style, for example, is all too often shaped by internal guidelines and a collapsing vision of performative neutrality. This was clearly demonstrated in coverage of the death of 23-year-old Quentin Deranque in France two weeks ago, with a report that described Deranque as a “far-right feminist” — a phrase that invents a political category no serious politics course anywhere in the world would recognize. Far-right politics and feminism come from fundamentally different traditions and pursue fundamentally different aims.

But this isn’t a one-off example. These aren’t isolated editorial lapses. They reflect a political climate that rewards euphemism and intimidation. And that ecosystem now has a global engine it would be naïve not to name — U.S. President Donald Trump.

Last year I wrote in POLITICO that Trump wants to poison global political culture. What we’ve seen since is an effort to export a style that thrives on bullying journalists and steadily lowering standards, including those of political language.

It’s a lesson that travels fast. His European counterparts are catching up. They now understand that these practices can pressure media organizations into softening their language and normalizing their presence. And with far-right parties topping the polls across so much of Europe, we’ve already passed the mainstreaming stage.

Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences. Every headline, every clip, every click adds weight. This is how the line gets crossed. And how some media are no longer just covering the far right but helping it speak.