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Tribe, California reach groundbreaking agreement for cultural burns -…

Legislation passed last year allows federally recognized tribes to practice cultural burning freely once they reach an agreement with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials.

Northern California’s Karuk Tribe, the second largest in California, becomes the first tribe to reach such an agreement.

(Feb. 27, 2025, Noah Haggerty)

Northern California’s Karuk Tribe has for more than a century faced significant restrictions on cultural burning — the setting of intentional fires for both ceremonial and practical purposes, such as reducing brush to limit the risk of wildfires.

That changed this week, thanks to legislation championed by the tribe and passed by the state last year that allows federally recognized tribes in California to burn freely once they reach agreements with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials.

The tribe announced Thursday that it was the first to reach such an agreement with the agency.

“Karuk has been a national thought leader on cultural fire,” said Geneva E.B. Thompson, Natural Resources’ deputy secretary for tribal affairs. “So, it makes sense that they would be a natural first partner in this space because they have a really clear mission and core commitment to get this work done.”

In the past, cultural burn practitioners first needed to get a burn permit from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, a department within the Natural Resources Agency, and a smoke permit from the local air district.

The law passed in September 2024, SB 310, allows the state government to, respectfully, “get out of the way” of tribes practicing cultural burns, said Thompson.

For the Karuk Tribe, Cal Fire will no longer hold regulatory or oversight authority over the burns and will instead act as a partner and consultant. The previous arrangement, tribal leaders say, essentially amounted to one nation telling another nation what to do on its land — a violation of sovereignty. Now, collaboration can happen through a proper government-to-government relationship.

The Karuk Tribe estimates that, conservatively, its more than 120 villages would complete at least 7,000 burns each year before contact with European settlers. Some may have been as small as an individual pine tree or patch of tanoak trees. Other burns may have spanned dozens of acres.

“When it comes to that ability to get out there and do frequent burning to basically survive as an indigenous community,” said Bill Tripp, director for the Karuk Tribe Natural Resource Department, “one: you don’t have major wildfire threats because everything around you is burned regularly. Two: Most of the plants and animals that we depend on in the ecosystem are actually fire-dependent species.”

The Karuk Tribe’s ancestral territory extends along much of the Klamath River in what is now the Klamath National Forest, where its members have fished for salmon, hunted for deer and collected tanoak acorns for food for thousands of years. The tribe, whose language is distinct from that of all other California tribes, is currently the second largest in the state, having more than 3,600 members.

Trees of life

Early European explorers of California consistently described open, park-like woods dominated by oaks in areas where the forest transitions to a zone mainly of conifers such as pines, fir and cedar.

Legislation Passed Last Year Allows Federally Recognized Tribes To Practice Cultural Burning Freely Once

The park-like woodlands were no accident. For thousands of years, Indigenous people have tended these woods. Oaks are regarded as a “tree of life” because of their many uses. Their acorns provide a nutritious food for people and animals.

Indigenous people have used low-intensity fires to clear litter and underbrush and to nurture the oaks as productive orchards. Burning controls insects and promotes growth of culturally important plants and fungi among the oaks.

Debris, brush and small trees consumed by low-intensity fire.

The history of the government’s suppression of cultural burning is long and violent. In 1850, California passed a law that inflicted any fines or punishments a court found “proper” on cultural burn practitioners.

In a 1918 letter to a forest supervisor, a district ranger in the Klamath National Forest — in the Karuk Tribe’s homeland — suggested that to stifle cultural burns, “the only sure way is to kill them off, every time you catch one sneaking around in the brush like a coyote, take a shot at him.”

For Thompson, the new law is a step toward righting those wrongs.

“I think SB 310 is part of that broader effort to correct those older laws that have caused harm, and really think through: How do we respect and support tribal sovereignty, respect and support traditional ecological knowledge, but also meet the climate and wildfire resiliency goals that we have as a state?” she said.

The devastating 2020 fire year triggered a flurry of fire-related laws that aimed to increase the use of intentional fire on the landscape, including — for the first time — cultural burns.

The laws granted cultural burns exemptions from the state’s environmental impact review process and created liability protections and funds for use in the rare event that an intentional burn grows out of control.

“The generous interpretation of it is recognizing cultural burn practitioner knowledge,” said Becca Lucas Thomas, an ethnic studies lecturer at Cal Poly and cultural burn practitioner with the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region. “In trying to get more fire on the ground for wildfire prevention, it’s important that we make sure that we have practitioners who are actually able to practice.”

The new law, aimed at forming government-to-government relationships with Native tribes, can only allow federally recognized tribes to enter these new agreements. However, Thompson said it will not stop the agency from forming strong relationships with unrecognized tribes and respecting their sovereignty.

“Cal Fire has provided a lot of technical assistance and resources and support for those non-federally recognized tribes to implement these burns,” said Thompson, “and we are all in and fully committed to continuing that work in partnership with the non-federally-recognized tribes.”

Cal Fire has helped Lucas Thomas navigate the state’s imposed burn permit process to the point that she can now comfortably navigate the system on her own, and she said Cal Fire handles the tribe’s smoke permits. Last year, the tribe completed its first four cultural burns in over 150 years.

“Cal Fire, their unit here, has been truly invested in the relationship and has really dedicated their resources to supporting us,” said Lucas Thomas, ”with their stated intention of, ‘we want you guys to be able to burn whenever you want, and you just give us a call and let us know what’s going on.’”

Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading

A cylindrical black Alexa speaker on a coffee table; it is wearing a Darth Vader helmet. Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexa_%2840770465691%29.jpg Sam Howzit (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWC_6_-_Darth_Vader_Costume_(7865106344).jpg CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

Amazon Annihilates Alexa Privacy Settings, Turns On Continuous, Nonconsensual Audio Uploading

Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/everything-you-say-to-your-echo-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-on-march-28/

It's easy to flap your hands at this bit of thievery and say, "surveillance capitalists gonna surveillance capitalism," which would confine this fuckery to the realm of ideology (that is, "Amazon is ripping you off because they have bad ideas"). But that would be wrong. What's going on here is a material phenomenon, grounded in specific policy choices and by unpacking the material basis for this absolutely unforgivable move, we can understand how we got here – and where we should go next.

Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: why does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?

For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a "growth story" – a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It's hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it's actually very dangerous.

Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio – about triple the ratio of other retailers, like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors – they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock. Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

But the downside here is that every growth stock eventually stops growing. For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime. Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the "sell" button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.

For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn't an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It's a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.

That's where "AI" comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies. By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there's plenty of growth in their future.

OK, so that's the material need that this asshole tactic satisfies. Next, let's look at the technical dimension of this rug-pull.

How is it possible for Amazon to modify your Echo after you bought it? After all, you own your Echo. It is your property. Every first year law student learns this 18th century definition of property, from Sir William Blackstone:

That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

If the Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it? Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to "bypass an access control" for a copyrighted work:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let you get inside your Echo and change the software back. Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner. Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device after you've bought it, in a way you can't roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

The ability to remotely, unilaterally alter how a device or service works is called "twiddling" and it is a key factor in enshittification. By "twiddling" the knobs and dials that control the prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations, and core features of products and services, tech firms can play a high-speed shell-game that shifts value away from customers and suppliers and toward the firm and its executives:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon – without your permission, against your express wishes – is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices. Isn't that against the law?

Well, you'd think so, but US consumer privacy law is unbelievably backwards. Congress hasn't passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you brought home. That is the last technological privacy threat that Congress has given any consideration to:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

This privacy vacuum has been filled up with surveillance on an unimaginable scale. Scumbag data-brokers you've never heard of openly boast about having dossiers on 91% of adult internet users, detailing who we are, what we watch, what we read, who we live with, who we follow on social media, what we buy online and offline, where we buy, when we buy, and why we buy:

https://gizmodo.com/data-broker-brags-about-having-highly-detailed-personal-information-on-nearly-all-internet-users-2000575762

To a first approximation, every kind of privacy violation is legal, because the concentrated commercial surveillance industry spends millions lobbying against privacy laws, and those millions are a bargain, because they make billions off the data they harvest with impunity.

Regulatory capture is a function of monopoly. Highly concentrated sectors don't need to engage in "wasteful competition," which leaves them with gigantic profits to spend on lobbying, which is extraordinarily effective, because a sector that is dominated by a handful of firms can easily arrive at a common negotiating position and speak with one voice to the government:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Starting with the Carter administration, and accelerating through every subsequent administration except Biden's, America has adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly policy, called the "consumer welfare" antitrust theory. 40 years later, our economy is riddled with monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops

Every part of this Echo privacy massacre is downstream of that policy choice: "growth stock" narratives about AI, twiddling, DMCA 1201, the Darth Vader MBA, the end of legal privacy protections. These are material things, not ideological ones. They exist to make a very, very small number of people very, very rich.

Your Echo is your property, you paid for it. You paid for the product and you are still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it's been processed by the AI servers. Amazon's made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on:

https://archive.is/TD90k

And sometimes, Amazon just sent these recordings to random people on the internet:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/20/amazon-alexa-user-receives-audio-recordings-stranger-through-human-error/

Fool me once, etc. I will bet you a testicle* that Amazon will eventually have to admit that the recordings it harvests to feed its AI are also being retained and listened to by employees, contractors, and, possibly, randos on the internet.

*Not one of mine

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/2025/03/15/altering-the-deal/#telescreen

Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexa_%2840770465691%29.jpg

Sam Howzit (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWC_6_-_Darth_Vader_Costume_(7865106344).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

4K notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

2 months ago

TW: Pedophilia

Teenagers are rarely taught the reason why they can't consent to sex with adults.

And that's because teaching them that would completely unravel our coercion-based society.

It can be difficult to explain in detail the exact reason and all the specifics in a way that they will understand. But the simplest way to phrase it is that in some cases, even when someone agrees to something and even when they appear enthusiastic about it, there's too much of a power imbalance that it's no different than forcing them. Also, having power and being abusive doesn't require a conscious expectation to be obeyed.

Imagine a world in which every teenager understood that and was easily able to call out anyone who tried to convince them otherwise.

They'd know that there's no such thing as an employee consenting to working for a poverty wage, working in unsafe conditions, working long hours, or working without taking breaks. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to paying a bank overdraft fee. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to student loan debt. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to medical bills. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to generating profit for banks or landlords in order to have a place to live and being evicted or foreclosed when you lose your source of income. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to a police search. They'd know that there's no such thing as a child who's okay with their parents spanking them. They'd know that being dependent on someone does not mean that you can never criticize them. They'd know that if it's considered abusive to simply play along when someone obeys, then it has to be much more abusive to actively expect to be obeyed, which many adults do to them.

And people who benefit from a society based on coercion masquerading as freedom wouldn't like that.

So instead, teenagers are taught something dismissive. They're taught that what they want doesn't matter. They're taught that they're too young to know what love is. They're taught "it's the law". They're taught things that are insulting to their intelligence, which they'll naturally rebel against.

29K notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

1 month ago

dear autistics who

white

low support needs

not need 24/7 support

can work independently

can pay taxes

language privileged

intellectual & cognitive privileged

who can fit in societal definition of useful & productive (yes, even if hard)