Webshit Weekly
March 7, 2025
The American Weather Forecast Is in Trouble
2025-03-01 | comments
Some media outlet discovers that the American government is busy dismantling its ability to tell you if it’s going to rain, presumably because meteorology has been flagged as “woke science.” This is, of course, the glorious culmination of decades of effort by companies like Accuweather, who have long lobbied to privatize the weather so they can charge you for the privilege of knowing if your house is about to be swept into the sea. Hackernews, in its infinite wisdom, miscorrects each other on the history of weather prediction. A moderator has to step in to scold the users for exhibiting basic human emotions like “alarm” or “despair” in the face of systematic societal decay. The thread serves as a perfect microcosm of our era: a critical public service being auctioned for parts while the digital peasants squabble over whether it’s even a problem.
America faces a Trumpian economic slowdown
2025-03-02 | comments
The Economist has discovered that running a country like a tech company staffed by venture-backed sociopaths produces predictable results, and Hackernews is shocked — shocked! — to learn that disrupting stable economic systems might have consequences. The comments fill with hand-wringing about index funds and market timing, completely missing that their entire industry has been practicing this chaos for years under the guise of “disruption.” While they debate whether to move their money to BRKB or VOO or whatever three-letter scam they’ve chosen, the digital feudal lords they worship are literally buying the country. The tech industry’s entire business model has always been finding something stable, introducing chaos, and selling access to the ruins. They did it with music, they did it with transportation, and now their orange-haired figurehead is doing it with the entire economy. The webshits will keep refreshing their portfolio apps until the servers go dark, wondering why their aura farming career didn’t prepare them opening their last can of food without a can-opener.
Tesla for Sale: Buyer’s Remorse Sinks in for Elon Musk’s E.V.-Owning Critics
2025-03-03 | comments
The great webshit tradition of purchasing products from fascists and then having a sudden ethical awakening continues with Tesla owners, who apparently only realized their four-wheeled iPad was connected to that guy who posts on Twitter all day. Hackernews immediately devolves into the usual slapfight about whether owning the car makes you complicit in whatever political outrage is currently trending, as if these digital feudal lords weren’t always transparent about being awful. The real innovation here is owners attempting to rebadge their cars, a metaphor for the entire tech industry: slapping new labels on the same exploitative systems while pretending your hands are clean. Some HNers bravely declare they’d keep driving their surveillance rectangles regardless of public opinion, missing the point that their ideological purity test is nothing more than consumer politics for people who think their car choice is a revolutionary act.
IRS drafting plans to cut as much as half of its 90k-person workforce
2025-03-04 | comments
The IRS announces plans to halve its workforce, apparently so the world’s least-cool digital landlord can install his favorite flavor of automation on the federal government. Hackernews, of course, is thrilled at the prospect of Google’s content moderation bot but with the authority to garnish your wages, fantasizing about a future where algorithmic tax enforcement hunts down W-2 filers while the ultrawealthy continue auditing the government with their lawyers. The chumps in the comments promise to keep filing because they’d rather give Uncle Sam an interest-free loan than risk the surprise penalty that an underfunded, understaffed, and fully-automated bureaucracy is guaranteed to produce. It’s the classic tech-industry power fantasy: replace civilization’s tedious “due process” with a perpetually hallucinating token predictor, then act surprised when the system exclusively prosecutes poor people while the billionaires continue to farm their aura offshore. The revolution will be automated.
Tesla sales crash continues in Europe, with Germany down 70%
2025-03-05 | comments
Tesla (business model: Reddit-tier shitposting for digital feudal lords) continues its inevitable march into the dustbin of history, as Europeans suddenly remember they don’t particularly enjoy overpriced, poorly-made computers on wheels driven by unstable algorithms. Hackernews, of course, has already figured this out, attributing the crash to everything except the glaringly obvious reality that nobody wants this shit. Instead, they confidently miscorrect each other about “robotaxis” and “humanoid robots” — the two foundational pillars of Tesla’s future strategy that definitely exist and aren’t just vaporware used to pump a stock into the stratosphere. The market, it turns out, is just a game of musical chairs, and everyone’s desperate not to be the one left standing while holding a flaming bag of TSLA.
State Dept. to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear “pro-Hamas”
2025-03-06 | comments
The State Department announces plans to let some clanker determine which foreign students have the wrong political opinions. The AI will apparently scan social media to determine visa-eligibility based on a sliding scale of “pro-Hamas-ness,” which will definitely be defined fairly and not at all used to silence pro-Palestinian voices. Hackernews users demonstrate their typical grasp of civil liberties by debating whether being pro-Hamas is actually a visa-revoking offense, rather than questioning why a token predictor is now in charge of due process. HNers miscorrect each other on the finer points of immigration law while completely missing that we’ve outsourced constitutional rights to the same technology that suggests racist recipes when asked how to make rice. Nothing says “land of the free” quite like having your academic career terminated by an AI that was trained on 4chan.
DOJ asks for judgement requiring Google to divest Chrome [pdf]
2025-03-07 | comments
The government has finally noticed that Google owns the internet. Hackernews, having spent a decade building webshits that only render properly in Chrome, debates whether breaking up a monopoly that controls web standards is wise. They confidently miscorrect each other about browser competition, ignoring that alternatives are Chrome reskins, Apple’s garden walls, or Mozilla’s zombie corpse funded by Google’s ad money. The solution: sell Chrome to some VC firm that’ll turn it into a surveillance casino for crypto grifts. At least the new owners can be upfront about harvesting your browser history.