banging their gavel

God bless Cory Doctorow, upon whose example my own relentless stretching of metaphors is inspired, but who has a knack of bringing them in to land that I’ve never quite managed to match: This isn’t hard to understand. Google runs an ad business that locks in buyers and sellers on a marketplace Google owns and controls, where it also competes with those buyers and sellers. Buying or selling an ad through Google is like going to court to get a divorce, only to discover that you and your soon-to-be-ex- are both represented by the same lawyer, who promptly ascends the bench and dons a judge’s wig, and then spends the whole trial trying to match with both of you on Tinder, and who concludes the trial by banging their gavel and announcing that they’ve decided that the family house will be awarded to…the judge! Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/05/divorce-court/ He also spends a couple of hours calmly and patiently disassembling various flavours of hysterical nonsense around “AI”…