All the noise about alignment from the advocates of 'AI Safety' is completely specious because AI already aligns with the hierarchical dualisms that shape our society at the deepest levels, especially misogyny, racism and a contempt for nature.

"Americans are being pulled into something worse than war. We are being pulled into a global realignment in which our existence is inconvenient. The ruling class doesn't want to spill my blood: they want to kill my soul and hope that I don't notice. They want the same for you, whoever you are."

Agreed. Return to office is clearly not what people want, not making them more productive, and a company that is cracking down on their employees like this is just damaging itself. Or: the managers that decided that. These aren’t good managers.

The real news though, from Finland, are these: yle.fi/a/74-20203184

Finally some good news from Finland. yle.fi/a/74-20203380

Spotted over Linkedin (of course). To claim Aristotle being the father of AI is such a ridiculous claim it's almost comical. But ofc they meant it. I don't have the mental capacity to ridicule people on LI, but any serious humanities person should have told them that this slide was full of shit.

I still think about this. @fasterandworse.com & @designinginward.bsky.social should we meet?

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.

Design communities have been reduced to 0, but the design communities, I would want to have, feel almost non existent. Should I become a farmer instead?

The history of tech is inherently political. collectivefutures.blog/a-short-crit...

oldhead advice from an oldhead. every couple years, newcomers to the movement think "THIS is finally it, the moment when the dam breaks and the whole system is overthrown" and when it doesn't happen they lose patience and get disillusioned and drop out of movement work gotta build for long term

Thank you @racheldonald.bsky.social on your extremely humane and thoughtful latest episode of Planet Critical. It's what I needed today. www.planetcritical.com/for-the-futu...

Not sure why this dross, dated Dec 1, seems to be circulating now (and why it didn't cross my feed a month ago), but wow what a terrible essay. A few comments, in a short 🧵>> bigthink.com/the-present/...

one of the things i hate most about this persistent line of argument is the implication that any of these actions would be fine if groceries were cheaper

Drop your RSS feeds in the replies so people (including me) can find them 👇

Thinking of a state of design post... I see 4 different – broad – ontologies of design being present. ▪️ Default/status-quo design (business-as-usual, metrics, business objectives) ▪️ Hype design (AI everything) ▪️ Design that adapts and survives (vegetates) ▪️ Design by schismogenesis (anti/design)

“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back to a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.” IT SAVES PUBLIC MONEY to house people.

Interesting news from Finland for the EV sphere: "A Finnish company has announced the world’s first production-ready solid-state battery for electric vehicles (EVs), capable of charging to full capacity in just five minutes" evsandbeyond.co.nz/solid-state-...

It’s frosty in Finland. Even the sea has frozen

“the ‘early messy stuff’ that non-arty folks insist can be ‘fixed by a human artist later’ is where the best work is done”

Got excited while sitting on a couch and dislocated my arm

This ideology described by Paris is part of cyberlibertarianism as defined by David Golumbia.

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

.. 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.