"Use AI or get left behind" is rugged individualism applied to technology. It's a fantasy that a person could be "good enough" with AI to not be affected by global shifts in labor and information. It's propaganda for individual survival over collective action on behalf of the collective welfare.

Historical context for these jobs...one of the last people convicted for their role in the Holocaust was a secretary at a camp. She claimed as a secretary she wasn't responsible. She was found guilty because she could not deny that she knew what was actually happening. www.mlive.com/news/detroit...

Maybe you need this

I'm not worried about a future in which I'm left behind because I don't use certain technologies. I'm worried about a future in which everyone is expected to do even more than we already are and those things aren't actually useful, necessary, or good for us — individually or collectively.

It's wild to have 2 pro-AI people in the same article, one saying that authors need to use AI or get left behind AND the other saying if readers know a book is AI they won't read it. "Do the thing that your target customer will boycott you for if they know you are doing it." Wow. Great advice.

The arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are a test for every MSM member with a platform. If you are not voicing your outrage at this blatant violation of the First Amendment, you are utterly discredited as a journalist.

Georgia Fort, an independent journalist and vice president of the Minnesota NABJ chapter, was also arrested by federal agents this morning I was sent this video of agents at her door:

INBOX: @freedom.press on the arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort

We've built a system in which the penalties and settlements for lying and cheating cost far less than what companies can make when they lie and cheat and then we act shocked that they lie and cheat.

Cough media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/...

If you can be manipulated by someone playing on your resentments of others, your desire to see others punished, your wish to see others denied things you don't think they deserve, your dislike of those not like you, your feelings of superiority, or your refusal to listen, learn, or understand...

"We have to help people understand what is (the current, shared reality), we must collectively imagine what can be (a future possibility), & we have to diligently labor for what must be (organizing to sustain life/​livingness & for liberation)." @prisonculture.bsky.social on how to move forward.

Hee !Quote tweeting to plug @unbreaking.org is an information aid project tracking the ways the Trump administration is breaking reality . We provide sourced and cited thematic timelines to help people understand and take action without having to doomscroll or read 3837387 substacks

It's been far easier to diversify my fiction books than my nonfiction books and I think about the implications of that a lot because we need both diverse stories and diverse expertise and analysis.

I really hate that when my internet goes down these days my first instinct is to be suspicious, immediately check to see if I still have phone signal, and doing a quick double-check of headlines rather than just "that happens sometimes."

Her doing this and me scrolling social media are the same activity.

They want slavery . They want it. They want the the world slavery made and are trying to break it down to its coding parts and the people “fighting” them want the equivalent of benevolent overseer roles because they accept the premise

I got the best gift from @nws.noaa.gov A blaring very early Christmas morning flash flood alert that ensured we woke up and checked conditions around us. Functioning public services that keep us all safer every day is exactly what I wanted.

it's taken me a while to put this together. but I hope, if you've never heard of her, or even if you have, this tribute to Alice Wong buoys your heart and gives you a good sense of who this incredible person was. www.coyotemedia.org/remembering-...

One of the extremely hard parts of dementia caregiving is that sometimes you can do absolutely everything you can to try to make sure they understand and remember an important decision and discuss and repeat it a a million times...

I just want to buy a thing. If it's a good thing and the experience is good, I may want more things. That's it. I do not need and I definitely do not want this many touch points.

The thing that really annoys me on a regular basis is that I don't want to be suspicious, cautious, or critical nearly as often as I am and I do look for reasons to be less so but often the more I look, the more reasons I find to be suspicious, cautious, or critical.

There's a difference between "impossible" and "underfunded" and there are many, many conversations that would get a lot more honest—and productive—if people stopped saying "impossible" when "underfunded" is the reality.

Thrilled to announce the publication of our @rooseveltinstitute.org report that uncovers the policy roots of the current crises facing our news, information & communication systems. We argue that media reform must become central to a US pro-democracy movement. rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

I was excited to try out Coursera now that I get access through school and almost every interesting looking certificate has "learn prompt engineering for this field" in it. I want to learn the actual skills and concepts. Teach me like it's 2020 and I need to know how to actually do the thing myself.

Creativity doesn't need to be "democratized" or liberated from "gatekeeping." We are human beings. We are born creative, we just aren't born skilled. The solution for that already exists and human beings have been doing it for millennia. We have to practice.

Love how every single website I have ever interacted with is currently sending me emails to remind me about their Black Friday sales. Super great experience. This is definitely how being a human being should feel. No notes.

I will never forget the conference reception where someone asked what I was drinking. It was Dr. Pepper in a glass. They actually blocked people from clinking their glass with mine while loudly telling the table not to toast with me because it was bad luck since my drink wasn't alcoholic.

People automatically assuming the moment someone posts a piece of information, a thought, or an opinion is the moment the poster learned that piece of information, first had that thought, or formed that opinion makes social media far more tedious than it has to be.

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

It is absolutely fitting to be able to subvert LLMs with poetry. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15304

In a special project on extreme cold in prison, 27 PJP contributors in 17 states describe winter behind bars — and the small dignities that could make it more bearable.

I've been thinking about social media a lot lately and how so much of the interaction I feel like I'm witnessing is oriented around users correcting one another. www.hbcompass.io/breathe-just...

I kinda think the tail actually being attached to the fox's body might have been one of the creative limits to keep.

If you are struggling with the current national topic of conversation you are not alone. This is very difficult. It is grueling to hear people treating it like a debate. The coming weeks and months are going to be rough. You are not obligated to witness every update or cruel comment.

Hey, while we're talking about the absurdity of 50-year mortgages can we also talk about how Medicaid Estate Recovery causes families to lose houses, which represent the only wealth most middle income families are able to build while higher income families have the ability to protect their assets?

Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL

News orgs that produce good journalism but also publish incendiary, bigoted, and/or offensive "opinion" content because it's lucrative is like a hospital running a gun store in their lobby. You can be in the service of informing people or the business of provocation but tolerance for both is waning.

Big "hitting on women and then calling her names after she says no" energy here. The content is worth scraping & sharing but if the rights holder says no, then it's "worthless". The ubiquity of liars who fail at basic consent in the Gen AI space is part of why I don't want anything to do with it.

The end of the calendar year brings a lot of holidays. You do not owe anyone a meeting, attention, forgiveness, reconciliation, a second chance or anything else simply because it is almost a holiday. www.hbcompass.io/forgiveness-...

We made it to November 1. Wishing you a satisfying Let's Circle Back to This In The New Year for all who celebrate the season.

I was a child raised by a disabled grandmother on food stamps. Which one of us was supposed to get a job?

The Venn diagram of journalists mad when their stories get ripped off and reposted without credit and journalists who use Gen AI tools built with stolen and unlicensed art to create visuals for their stories is the shape of hypocrisy.

Being outraged that California is voting on whether to redistrict when red states are just unilaterally deciding to redistrict without input from their voters is a wild choice for hypocrisy.

No discussion of Musk/ Futurism/ Moderation or epistemological collapse can be done properly without discussion of race/ class and yess interpersonal dynamics “But Sydette that’s kind of like saying we’ve never had a good discussion”

Where XanderCat could choose to lay and where he does choose to lay.

If you haven't read this or haven't read it in a while, it's a very grounding experience at this time.

Dear messaging app developers, when you have friends you actually want to see the things they message you and you want to see it in their words not "✨See a summary of the last 5 messages" because that's how being a friend works and is literally one of the most meaningful parts.

Extremely low chances: Being harmed by AI that gains sentience and turns on us. Extremely high chances: Being harmed due to software on a critical system that is compromised or fails because of vulnerabilities created by someone recklessly relying on AI to build and/or run it for them.

The Shepard Tone is an auditory illusion where the tone seems to ascend or descend but it never actually breaks, creating this feeling of ratcheting tension that is never released. That's what this entire year has felt like.