I've been warning about this moment for two decades over at Techdirt The U.S. is too corrupt to regulate data brokers (and their exploitation and sale of location data) and the check has come due

Probably shouldn't have let a handful of weird business perverts unwind the cultural miracle of American research universities

unfortunately the police state isn't particularly friendly to the left's bouncy castles

it does seem like many things have finally hit a breaking point over in the senate, but this should also be a reminder to senate dems that many of their republican colleagues would be perfectly happy to see them shot in the face with pepper balls

The fact authorities over the years have pivoted at will between “I trust your documents over you” and “I trust my own judgment over your documents” reveals that government information and documentation is only useful when it serves the existing intentions of police.

When "homeless working adults with minor-aged children" becomes a distinct administrative category—not an anomaly, but a recognized population requiring its own eligibility framework—you know something is very, very broken in our society.

Introduce yourself with 10 artists you’ve seen live They Might Be Giants (ticket bought with my babysitting money, age 15) Ani DiFranco Tori Amos Kaki King Rasputina Liz Phair Ezra Furman Martha Argerich Attacca Quartet with Caroline Shaw & Roomful of Teeth DJ Chris Ewen (thank you for everything)

“Ecology of communication” came out of the sociology and communications studies of the 90s, and it’s a lineage I’m glad to see evoked and expanded here.

genuine question are you smoking crack?

The EHRC guidance contains a vital aim of transphobes. It effectively creates a right for service *users* to insist on discrimination against groups they don’t like: their “right” to trans-exclusive spaces. Whereas previously it was about the right of service providers to discriminate.

In a new blog post, I argue that the anti-ai movement ought to distinguish between claims about the technology and the "project of AI," as defined by Vetsi et al. in their new paper. 🔗: doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-anti-a...

personally I think it's a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com — certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country — asked an unspecified "AI tool" what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.

Leon Salter and I wrote about this. The disinfo panic focused on foreign interference rather than the platform imperialism of American policy settings journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs

ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citation... source evaluation board at nasa was viewed as an aspect of 'total agency competency' and mentorship, but these docs are also littered with terror of 'brochuremanship' by contractors, and of devolving into an org that is susceptible to it

that scream you heard was every single lock-out tag-out guy on the planet screaming at the same time

Americans are taught Kent State was a brutal aberration- scared untrained guardsmen who went too far and were checked by public outrage. But Kent State was one of many massacres of antiwar student protestors in May 1970 - UNM, Jackson State, the (non-military) Hard Hat Riot - all met with impunity.

The US uses its Visa Waiver Programme to literally dictate EU policies. Now it demands near-unlimited EU-US data transfers, violating EU law. However the US does not even meet the criteria for EU visa free travel. Time for EU to play hardball: suspend visa free travel for Americans first, then talk

Draft EU/US treaty on exchange of personal data for immigration control, with analysis, via @statewatch.bsky.social - www.linkedin.com/posts/romain...

US Supreme Court, Burwell v Hobby Lobby 2014: “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”.

Police are using the surveillance state to stalk "love interests" because there really is no difference between the part of my job where I fight state surveillance and the part where I fight domestic abuse: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

It’s that time of year – we’re bailing out Black mamas and caregivers with your support for Mother’s Day! We’re organizing with 13 Black-led organizations all across the U.S. this Mother's Day to help Black mamas and caregivers return home to their families. bit.ly/freeblackmamas2026

I do frequently wonder what the average citizen of the U.S. knows about Reconstruction. As Du Bois would later point out, the backlash of lost cause propaganda didn’t just create mass disinformation about the civil war itself, but about the opening for actual democracy that briefly came after it.

U.S. Rep. Brandon Gill is having a viral moment for asking a witness her "favorite type of abortion." I have an answer for him

One of the most clarifying passages I've ever read on what "polarization" actually means in the U.S."

Yeah the rotisserie chicken amendment is neat! Unfortunately it was attached to the Farm Bill which locked in $187 billion in cuts to SNAP. So, yes, now SNAP can be used for rotisserie chickens but more importantly, this bill means red tape, cuts & tons of people losing access to food completely.

the indoor smoking bans of the 90's and 00's were the last genuinely great win for organized labor in this country and absolutely could not happen today, trying to reopen this door actively sets us back as a civilization, don't give them an inch

Librarians & archivists might need to be considered emergency support workers due to the ubiquity of this now, the emergency being societal and civic. retractionwatch.com/2026/04/23/e...

also, if you see a queer/trans person traveling alone, you probably actually *are* in the presence of a hardened operator who has genuinely useful security and travel advice

Normal people have absolutely had enough and they are starting to cook lmao

one of the (many) problems with gaze direction approaches to detecting attention--which is what in-car systems use--is that over and above the failure mode described herein it is perfectly possible to be paying attention to something you aren't looking directly at

The Trump administration had no problem relying on Dr. Rachel Levine’s expertise — and properly naming her — in explaining its marijuana moves today, despite maligning the trans doctor who worked in the Biden administration in other contexts. At Law Dork, I explain:

Damn, who would've thought palantir employees would become self aware before the AIs did

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

"Waymo has told advocates that expecting it to respect bike lanes is 'too high a bar' because customers expect to be dropped off in them." To be crystal clear, it's illegal for a car to be in a bike lane. It doesn't matter what Waymo's customers expect; the company shouldn't be doing it.

I want to talk a little bit more about this from the other day bc I think it’s important. As politics increasingly comes to mean “Everyone in the world vs a handful of tech overlords,” I think it’s important to be clear on the historical relationship between labor and technology.

New from me: “When AI-driven algorithms are deployed to set prices “just for you” as a consumer or to determine the best wage “just for you” as a worker, the corporate objective is not your best interest. Not by a long shot.” www.governing.com/workforce/ai...

early view of my article is out! it explores the twinned ideologies of referentialism that often subtend language and "AI" and how those ideologies break apart in the R&D pipeline, where the social-pragmatic dimension of both speech + data come to the fore rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Calm down, computer software isn't making decisions about who lives and who dies in war. It merely processes a ton of data and then makes a recommendation to a human who has no realistic way to verify it

These are going to come for the left too. They financially motivated — Macedonian teenager type stuff for the AI era. Scammers profiting off of easily enraged people. MAGA may be more susceptible to ragebait but worth understanding what’s going to happen in 2026 and 2028.

Data centers are a physical manifestation of AI infrastructure and they've become a flashpoint precisely because they're tractable. They exist in specific places, consume specific resources, can be seen and pointed to. I spoke with @lorenaoneil.com @rollingstone.com about our urgent AI reckoning.

What we do know is DOGE's project--shrinking the federal government and attacking programs and people that the administration sees as opposition under the guise of going after waste, fraud, and abuse--continues. www.wired.com/story/where-...

Making events into public memory is a cultural technology you have to do on purpose and repeat over and over. The fight to keep hold of the truth never ends it's generational and idk, maybe we're bound to lose in the end. But I have to believe we can do better than we did in the last six years.

Orbán is out, but the think tanks, funding and relationships built under his government won’t just disappear overnight. So we’re making that investigation free to read

Even as Northwestern was having its police physically beat its students for ideas its board disagreed with, it was launching a center for “enlightened disagreement” www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-re...

It's not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It's that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he's been operating as a headquarters and funding source...

Reminding folks that one of the first signs of Orban’s authoritarianism was his attack on universities, including closing the highly-regarded gender studies MA program at the Central European University in Budapest. That program left Hungary & continues today in Vienna.

"Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has said he is open to the idea that Claude may already have some form of consciousness, and company leaders frequently talk about the need to give it a moral character." This is a sales pitch, and journalism that doesn't highlight this has failed.

Luckily not everyone has to flee. Here's a story of someone who is currently at NASA and helped this mission: www.nasa.gov/image-articl...