For decades, Canadians eagerly rushed onto US tech platforms and services. But now the drawbacks of that dependence are on full display. For @policyalternatives.ca, I explain the economic and political consequences of a US-dominated internet — and why digital sovereignty is imperative.

The job search vertical is so sad right now. Everyone is looking for marketing or ai strategists and I’d rather perform hara-kiri than do this job. At the same time I need to survive. Fun huh?

I am, only half sarcastically, excited that we’re all becoming experts in crude oil grades, refining, and extraction.

Manufacturing consent 101

"America is an oil company with an army." —George Carlin

Trace who will benefit from that stolen oil and you will find the complicit parties. Likely big tech and data centers are in for the grab

2026 has been a year huh?

We had a good run

When you’re doom posting about how everything is inevitable and no one can stop them, you’re doing their work for them. Stop that

“Hey grok put some drug lords all over Venezuela”

I keep seeing a repeat discourse regarding AI, the "revealed preference" argument. Someone says "AI is liberating because I use it to automate boring work and build something quickly". They generalize from personal experience therefore this tech is revolutionizing everything for everyone else too.

.. are (de)valued. We draw on Braverman there, to sketch how up- and de-skilling are actually always conjoined movement, and how they tend to produce social stratification. Imho, being clear-eyed about the effects that AI will have there is politically crucial.

Nice essay, thanks for tagging me! Plenty of stuff in there that we talk about in our book, too (we also take Graeber & Fisher as one of our starting points)! I think the deskilling thing is particularly crucial. Not just the loss of skill aspect, but the question of how particular skills..

Holy shit. We’re living the Pakled episode of ST:NG:

This whole thread is really good. The main reason I remain skeptical of GenAI’s supposedly transformative potential is its confidence in wrong answers. If it can’t get trivial (to me) things right like which quarterbacks are in the NFL Hall of Fame, how can I trust it with serious stuff?

I've seen a few people tout LLMs as improving their programming workflow (after *significant* time and effort testing and customizing their own bespoke toolkit). "Coding faster" seems like a pretty paltry "win" compared to the other nonstop horrific outputs of these systems.

I think this is a very astute thread. I would add that “AI” broadly defined is the first real instance of something hyper technical in benefit making it big across non technical domains that we’ve seen in a while — the non software benefits to it are still pretty inchoate, whereas we software

Well articulated thread saying things that have been rattling in my head better than I could’ve. It’s the systemic, market-pressured, bullying way this tech has been shoved down our throats — as a general purpose truth machine — that most unsettles me.

I keep seeing a repeat discourse regarding AI, the "revealed preference" argument. Someone says "AI is liberating because I use it to automate boring work and build something quickly". They generalize from personal experience therefore this tech is revolutionizing everything for everyone else too.

Wrote a piece on a critical history of AI, starting from ELIZA to today's tech fascism, as we are witnessing the fusion of computational thinking with capitalism's various mutations (from claims of inevitability, to efficiency above all...) collectivefutures.blog/a-short-crit...

Wrote a piece on a critical history of AI, starting from ELIZA to today's tech fascism, as we are witnessing the fusion of computational thinking with capitalism's various mutations (from claims of inevitability, to efficiency above all...) collectivefutures.blog/a-short-crit...

Finnish police forces have boarded and seized the 132-meter-long Russian shadow fleet cargo vessel Fitburg moments after it destroyed 5 submarine telecommunication cables between Finland and Estonia by dragging its anchor on the seabed. www.hs.fi/suomi/art-20...

The top 10% of richest Americans own 87% of stocks. The top 1% alone own roughly half of all stocks. It's worth pointing out once again that the stock market is not the economy.

2025 has been the year that fucked me professionally really bad, but at least I invested in my personal "growth" in various ways: - I picked up a new master's degree - I wrote 21 newsletter articles (in comparison to 5 from last year!) - I expanded my reading to critical theory and have a book idea

I just published a ~short~ critical history of AI. This is an extended version of a short talk I gave in Helsinki at an event called Critical AI Happy new year! collectivefutures.blog/a-short-crit...

Although I’m not in it (yet?) I’m embodying the anti design design club.

Since I dumped some really bad news on y'all I wanna tell you about the other side of social media. It's children of anti-vaxxers turning 18 and filming themselves getting vaxxed.

Has anyone been able to put steamOS on an old PC?

👀👀

Fighting with brain fog to publish an article that is a ~political~ history of artificial intelligence, as an end-of-the-year wrap up. This is actually an extended version of a talk I gave in Helsinki where we organized a Critical AI event.

We've tested this repeatedly. The people who promise to save us with their perfect rules are the ones we need saving from. 6/

And it always, without exception, ends the same way. Gulags. Surveillance states. Bureaucratic nightmares where human imagination gets crushed under the weight of someone else's brilliant plan. 5/

Bureaucratic technologies work differently: they're born from the certainty of people who believe they've figured it all out—how to save humanity, how to establish the correct rules once and for all. 3/

Poetic technologies can be dark, brutal, dangerous—and that's fine. Freedom isn't safe. It's unpredictable, uncontrolled, sometimes frightening. 1/

Yes

There's an entire apolitical (or more like cyberlibertarian) cult of founders and tech bros and generally good-vibes-only biz-fluencers who love everything about Elon, Tesla, and the rest of the neofascist Silicon Valley class.

As Hannah Arendt put it: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." Undermining that distinction will be a lasting legacy of generative AI.

Winter holidays is all about these (Melomakarona)

This has to be the dominant heuristic of social media, where a single person will say a thing, others will connect it to a broader discursive pattern, and then get mad at its adjacency to the discursive pattern, all while nobody knows what anyone else’s patterns look like.

"Capitalism has a notorious tendency to periodically come spinning apart. Each time it does, those who profit from it have to convince everyone there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like the original form." - David Graeber

This is an unhealthy obsession with other people's private parts

#OtD 18 Dec 1974 the radical Danish Solvognen theatre group, dressed as Santas, provoked a near-riot in the Magasin department store when they gave out free toys from the shelves to children. When they were arrested by police, the children began to cry www.tiktok.com/@workingclas...

Apart from any sort of luddite movement against AI, we should be building public infrastructure as islands of coherence that are AI- and algorithm-free Gather articles, software, tools, communities without paywalls, ai summaries and so on.

Currently composing an end of the year wrapped.. I am kidding - sort of! I am composing a newsletter where I will offload all my favorite critical AI resources from my bookmarks to my subscribers. So subscribe as well, if you like that kind of stuff, it's free! collectivefutures.blog

AI is a labor issue. We'll have to join professional ethics with class consciousness in this fight.

Something that gives hope in Greece, out of the very few things left, is farmers going on strike. Historically when farmers go on strike the govt. is scared shitless. And so this is a moment to observe. Also sorry but you might get feta & oil disruptions... thepressproject.gr/clashes-at-h...

Angelos is too pessimistic, we also have fur farms and low added value extractive industries (where profits are privatized and we the people pay the damages)

Finland is an ever-downward spiral. If you go to Slush though, you will see only success AI hype. Sleepwalking towards oblivion, but at least we will have data centers so we can dry the lakes in the near future