Apart from all the other terrible things happening, Minneapolis is showing us what descendance into fascism looks like. The Minneapolis major was on the Daily Show with a very clear story and message, which should raise those gun-totin’ Americans in an uproar, one would think. I listen to the Heavyweight podcast, whose main lead lives in this city, and who’d be telling exactly the kind of stories you’d expect are now plentiful there. The latest episode is about the events, and the way his wife tells here experience, just one word popped into my mind: razzia.
In Dutch, this sort of “raid” would be (but isn’t much) translated as “razzia”, which means a very specific kind of raid, namely the sort of raids ICE are conducting. Looking to find people with a certain status and ethnicity, people who’ve almost always settled here ages, generations ago, are part of their communities but can be distinguished if you insist by having some customs or skin color that never was a problem in their communities but can be made into a problem if you have an army of brownshirts looking for something to do, something to hate.
The ascendance of Trump and the extreme-right in the US have made it hard to avoid Godwin’s like the word “razzia”, so let’s try the following. Imagine we are living in Germany late thirties, and let’s take stock of how the government, public discourse and the national conversation have changed in recent years. Fascists, or if that’s too strong a word for you, fascist-admirers have taken control over the government. Not quite through elections, which then were cancelled because why would they now me necessary? A clear vision on who is desirable (white Aryans) and who isn’t (the rest, with a certain hierarchy) and who can be freely blamed instead of solving problems is established. Most aren’t part of the undesirables, but many are, and certainly in more urban areas do people know, interact, live with, marry with the undesirables. A new quasi police force is not really there to dispense justice but to harrass, bully and even “accidentally” murder the out-group. They sometimes do that by way of raids, or razzias: a group will attempt to discover and “arrest” all out-group people present in a certain area, street or block. First, things happen far away, then, they happen in your street.
How can you possibly ignore the huge commonalities?
One of the first studies on the relationship between AI and work shows an interesting and solid result: AI intensifies work, it does not reduce it. Even without that conclusion, it’s an interesting article because we all want to understand how our work is going to change.
I have to think of who’s been pocketing advances in productivity ever since Keynes speculated about the 15 hour work week: not workers! And a lot of workers undestandibly don’t mind this, because productivity can give you an advantage that doesn’t save time, but earn you more money. And guess what people, business owners and employees alike, overwhelmingly prefer?
I also have to think about addiction, obesity, mental issues due to social media overuse; we as a biological species are not programmed for surplus, we don’t know how to set our own goals and boundaries. Plus, we measure against peers, so we don’t want the same house but a 15 hour work week, we want a 40 hour work week and a bigger house, just like the neighbour. Or at least, many people can’t make that decision.
As scarcity decreasingly is an issue, I wonder when, or if, our species will ever adapt and simply choose a level and state we are comfortable in without feeling pressure or need to stay in the rat race.
Beste analyticus, Ik voel me weinig een kind van mijn tijd. Ik houd niet van concerten, festivals, raves, avontuurlijke reizen, netwerkevents, social media. Maar ik houd van lezen, wandelen, baden, middagdutjes, stofzuigen en lang tafelen. Het zijn niet bepaald de zaken die je langs de maatstaf van ‘succes’ kunt leggen. Publieke erkenning zal ik er althans niet voor krijgen.
Ik doe mijn werk gepassioneerd en zo goed mogelijk, maar vraag me niet naar een meerjarenplan. Vandaag doe ik dit, morgen zien we wel. Soms verdenk ik mezelf ervan dat ik niet ambitieus ben. Ik heb een natuurlijk talent voor luiheid en nietsdoen. Ik verlies tijd met lummelen, ronddwalen in de tuin, een bladzijde drie keer opnieuw lezen omdat ik een gedachte of formulering niet begrijp.
Ik ben traag en verkies stilte boven het soms drammerige lawaai van de wereld. Ik word makkelijk overrompeld door nerveus geclaxonneer en mensen die hun stem verheffen. Ik voel me bij momenten een kind van twaalf (in de natuur) of een opaatje van zeventig (na een middagdutje). In werkelijkheid ben ik dertig. Terwijl mijn vrienden halve marathons lopen, bedrijven oprichten, vijfsterrenrecensies scoren en andere zichtbare successen boeken, vraag ik me luidop af: waartoe zal dit trage, onzichtbare leven leiden – het leven dat misschien onopgemerkt voorbijgaat?
Hartelijke groeten,
T.
Dank voor het schrijven van je brief, T. En dank Arthur voor het schrijven van je reactie.
Remember how I installed /e/OS,based on LineageOS 22 based on Android 15, that comes with microG preinstalled? Turn out that when you add your Google account to it (under Settings > System > microG) MEETS_BASIC_INTEGRITY now passes! In the same place, you’ll find an item “Google device registration”, which should be ticked and I suspect is what makes the difference. After this, one of the apps in questions now correctly works, I’ll test the other later. Strangely, this reports the phone as a Pixel 2? Is this one of those hardcoded fingerprints?
I recall going over these items when I ran the phone with LineageOS+microG (which should function identically) but I left most of the options unticked (they were not ticked). I retried using try on the LOS 23 image, amd that worked too! Make sure to install both microG Services and microG Companion.
Adding your Google account to the /e/OS “App Lounge” (which is a presupplied Aurora Store) does NOT do the trick.
Although I am not sure, perhaps signature spoofing is what makes this work? MindTheGapps is missing from that list, and LinageOS specifically includes code to make microG work. Then again, why would Lineage recommend MindTheGapps? No idea… And is this a way to register manually?
In summary, do NOT use MindTheGapps, but microG, as they instruct. Alternatively, /e/OS.
Recently I got a discarded Motorola G84 phone, which is supported by LineageOS, version 23 no less (Android 16, so the latest!). I unlocked the bootloader and flashed LineageOS (and MindTheGapps, turned out it’s important to start Lineage once before you flash it, not right away) and started setting up apps and data, as I have done now with nearly a dozen phones.
The first sign things were not well arrived when an app, that required entering my phone number to retrieve my account, errored out with an issue related to Firebase authentication. It just wouldn’t work. I suspected the issue was in the Google Play Services, which is why you load up MindTheGapps (or other such Play Store reimplementations), as regular apps (obtained through F-Droid or manually downloaded apks) worked fine. Even some apps from the Play Store worked. So I first searched for the issue in this direction, trying out NikGApps and microG as well. I even tried /e/OS. All the same issue.
Since it was related to authentication, I started to suspect it was about the unlocked bootloader, not an error in the Play Service app or provider. Perhaps a signing issue in LineageOS itself? Few clues remained, but one was that a banking app reported it could not set up my account because the phone was not secure or somesuch (didn’t write down the error). LineageOS has no public forum, chat (IRC and Discord require an account), so it’s kinda difficult to find a place to find user experiences about this. The XDA forums are really the largest knowledge base, but it’s not very structured and this phone (G84) is apparently not that common so not a lot of forum presence.
I quickly came across SafetyNet [1] (pre Android 13), Play Integrity [2] and the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) [3], the latter two of which report that my phone indeed is not passing any sort of validation. It is strange that all my earlier phones do pass MEETS_BASIC_INTEGRITY. Although payment (e.g. Google Pay) never worked (I guess because MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY==false), at least everything else I (want to) use works. So what changed?
I don’t have to full pciture, but it seems to be the confluence of Play Integrity updates (May 2025) to Android Key Attestation. Some XDA posts speak about outdated or non-forward-compatible keys on the device (so a new Android version with a newer kernel may cease to work, although I managed a downgrade to LineageOS 22 by way of /e/OS which didn’t help). Others mention invalidated fingerprints. I can’t be 100% sure, but this is the part that must be failing. When I get my hands on a Windows machine, I’ll try Motorola’s fix tool to reset me back to stock. Some say relocking the bootloader works, other’s say it doesn’t.
There are ways that fake the return values (Play Integrity Fix, TrickyStore?) and could enable apps checking for them, but they require rooting the phone, something I prefer not to do. Moreover, if apps use this API, they usually also check other things (i.e. rooting) and people reports it’s a game of cat and mouse. Wouldn’t want to have apps disable themselves all the time!
In any case: it seems my days using LineageOS are over. GrapheneOS seems to make sure that you always at least meet BASIC, but that requires fairly recent Pixel phones, phones that I probably won’t soon get my hands on. This is not great.