This happened at the Target I shop at:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/ice-immigrat...

Two teenagers just doing their jobs, dogpiled by roughly four adult men, beaten up and released hours later. One of them was just dropped off at the Walmart down the street, the other they released at the federal building they’re working out of.

Just a handful of examples from last year. As a resident of Minneapolis I can assure you it is much, much worse than these few examples.

Are you not familiar with Liam Conejo Ramos? Or Kilmar Abrego Garcia? Just two other high profile cases, but this is far more prevalent than any reporting has outlined. Three of Liam’s classmates were also “mistakenly” shipped to Texas and returned. At least one of his classmates, a documented asylum seeker like the rest, is still in Dilley.

When you use a computer to tell you who to target, it makes it easy for your brain to never consider that person as a human being at all. They are a target. An object.

Their stated capabilities are lies, marketing, and a smokescreen for their true purpose.

This is Lavender v2, and I’m sure others could name additional predecessors. Systems rife with errors but the validity isn’t the point; the system is.

There certainly is a huge army of people ready to spout this sort of nonsense in response to anyone talking about doing anything.

Hard to know what percentage of these folks are trying to assuage their own guilt and what percentage are state actors. Russia and Israel are very chronically online, and it behooves us internet citizens to keep that in mind.

I don’t think violence is necessary. The common people have access to many levers of power, we only need to overcome lack of coordination and awareness.

But violence is an important part of our history. It is human nature and it serves a purpose. I won’t shy away from it.

I think it’s a reason. It’s certainly demoralizing. Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat.

But… For starters, plagiarism has always been an issue. Even before the internet. Look at Tesla, or Rosalind Franklin. It was an issue on the internet before LLMs showed up. It’s always been trivially easy to copy and paste digital information, and with a little bit of programming to do so at scale. Those weird SEO wordpress blogs with their aggregated/stolen content have been around forever. The web was choked full of plagiarized garbage years before chatgpt was an option or even an idea.

Also consider that the AI machine takes a lot more than your stolen creative output to run. It needs tons of electricity poured into expensive equipment. It’s not clear whether the “stolen data + expensive scientists + expensive graphics cards + metric shittons of electricity” side of the equation is ever going to equal “monthly rate people will pay for access to sort of ok almost sometimes accurate information (a service which has been on offer for free for roughly 2 years and is easy to find for free depending on the company/model/use case)” let alone be lower than it. The plagiarism is not profitable and hopefully unsustainable.

And let’s sit on “access to sort of ok almost accurate information” for a second here. Because I’m pretty sure people looking for this and people looking for a blog written by a real human person who they can build a (parasocial perhaps but still) relationship with and send emails to and follow for more related content are entirely separate demographics. Blog traffic has dropped off because Facebook, Instagram, etc. It was those massive sites, not LLMs, that gutted that part of the internet.

Going back to sustainability, legal challenges to the plagiarism machines do still exist and have traction. The more creators, more bloggers and artists and programmers and more of anyone sharing their stuff online, the more people we have with a very vested stake in ending the plagiarism free for all.

I say get in there, get creating, and get up to some lobbying on the side for good measure. Don’t sit back and let a handful of spoiled nerds and obscenely wealthy old people ruin the joy of creating and sharing things. Maybe drop in more references to baseball bats to make your output less palatable to the monster. I don’t know.

It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.

In the meantime, there are lots of actual humans trying to do things who will benefit from your knowledge being repackaged and delivered by the blood suckers.

The SSA data heist also sticks out.