Modeled on the *fantasy* of a brain. They are not modeled on human brains. They come out of nearly a century of cybernetically-based concepts, attempting to predict human behavior from exterior indicators, treating the brain like a black box whose interiority can be statistically predicted.

Virginia has more data centers than anywhere in the world, and companies are pushing to build more of them, including around some of the most hallowed ground in the country: the Manassas National Battlefield Park.

Two weeks ago, @TheNation published my piece arguing Democrats were about to blow a once-in-a-generation political moment on ICE. I was head down and couldn't share it. They blew it — exactly the way I said they would. A thread. 🧵 www.thenation.com/article/soci...

The anti-data center movement isn’t just about limiting local development—it represents a new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes? www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The data center rebellion is just the start, or it should be. Rather than impeding AI governance, this is where good, truly democratic AI governance begins. A look at who's fighting data centers, why, and how a working class resistance can lay the groundwork for a better AI politics:

Even as they profess to be conservationists, Joseph Bullington found that most of the billionaire landowners in the Yellowstone ecosystem accumulated their wealth through industries that help drive the destruction of nature elsewhere. inthesetimes.com/article/yell...

As if the community college system wasn't strained enough by privatization efforts, tech bros have recently swooped in and are seeking to cause further disruption. A sketchy Silicon Valley-funded online school portends a bleak future for a critical sector of our education system. trib.al/8dN3Qgn

When I discovered that tech fascists like Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, and Sam Altman provided VC funding for an online "community college," I had to find out why. Thanks @newrepublic.com for publishing this.

Day 1055: We grow weary awaiting your return. Your vacant expression taunts us. Your unbroken gaze pierces us. Where are you now? Do you ever think about us--about what you left behind? Every day you get further away, carried into the past. A yawning chasm of time between us. Why can't you jump it?

NEW: Thomson Reuters, the media company which is also a data broker, has long provided personal data for ICE tools, according to documents obtained by 404 Media and sources. There are also indications its data is now part of the Palantir system ICE uses to find which neighborhoods to target.

"Chronically bubonic" is a phrase I would use if I wrote a rap about the bubonic plague and/or marijuana.

The Grok deepfake scandal is really the culmination of all that. Musk wanted to see more engagement, so he pulled back the guardrails and set his incel fans wild to victimize as many people as they could — the consequences be damned. disconnect.blog/its-time-to-...

Awesome reporting from @brandonrichardson.bsky.social. Also worth noting is that Anduril founders Trae Stephens and Palmer Luckey are both Peter Thiel acolytes. Thanks mayor Rex for welcoming these technofascists into our city.

Main thing is AGI is going to fix all of this, so really it's not so bad if you think about it. Just waiting for the magic answer to pop out and then we'll circle up and get everyone on board.

These freaks are very clearly and deliberately choosing slop factories over humans.

Less than a decade ago, Google employees scuttled any military use of its AI. Now Anthropic is fighting Trump officials not over if, but how

Trying to rebrand myself as a thinking man's idiot

Establishment Dems would rather twist themselves into knots and come up with convoluted policies than to simply fight for universal provision of public goods for all.

Check out this essay I wrote a couple few years ago about working a job where we tried to harvest rubber waste from old astroturf @publishedbyjake.bsky.social jakethemag.com/my-summer-of...

There's no such thing as "AI writing." It's slop output from a chatbot. Just cold numbers with a spit shine. We gotta weed out the anthropomorphic language at every level. This has been a public service announcement from a rando

"This isn't a border checkpoint. This is your neighborhood. ICE is now running facial recognition on phones — stopping people on the street, scanning faces in real time. What happens when the algorithm is wrong?"

Reuters Exclusive "U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school." "The strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the ​Middle East."

The rigor of debate and thought on LinkedIn is truly inspiring

AGI will swoop in and fix it all = don't worry guys, my mom will clean up after us. Except now it's our planet and resources instead of a little boy's room. Hell yeah

our government combines the impulse control of pete hegseth, the intellectual rigor of rfk jr, and the attention span of donald trump with elon musk’s signature sense of humor

NEW: A hobbyist has created Nearby Glasses, an app that warns you if someone close by is wearing smart glasses. 404 Media spoke to the creator who said he was inspired by our coverage that uncovers how men are wearing Meta's Ray-Bans to covertly film massage parlor workers.

NEWS: The FBI interviewed an Epstein victim who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was underage not once — but at least FOUR times. But the document that shows those additional interviews appears to have been deleted from the DOJ website. substack.com/home/post/p-...

(5/11) Walmart, Whole Foods, and Kohls are switching to electronic shelf labels that can display dynamic prices. Kroger deployed them with Microsoft AI—a setup a 2024 Senate inquiry warned could enable “surge pricing” via facial recognition. (Kroger claims it will only lower prices.)

Further proof that this is the worst MLM in history

After the DOJ dodged questions for months, Bondi acknowledged in a House Judiciary Committee hearing that she had a list of targets under NPSM-7.

"Why can't we have a calm discussion about AI?" Because folks don't actually want to discuss AI, they want blind submission to the ideological structures that motivate the contemporary use cases and deployments of AI. They don't want to hear the concerns except to dismiss them out of hand.

🗓️ Mark your calendar. Join us for the Future Knowledge #Podcast live recording: AI TOOLS, NOT GODS 🎙️ AI is often framed as supernatural, shaping policy. This #booktalk explores what AI is & how it should be governed. 📆 Tues Feb 10 🕙 10 AM PT 📍 Online 🎟️ www.eventbrite.com/e/future-kno...

"Firms deliberately operate from small cities & towns, where rents & labor costs are lower & a growing pool of 1st-gen grads are seeking jobs. Improvements in internet connectivity made it possible to plug these locations directly into global AI supply chains, w/o relocating workers to cities."

It's worth noting, some police *have* been investigating federal shootings. And experts told us they should be doing so. “Residents should be demanding that, ‘Hey, state authorities, police, local police: Protect us. Arrest people who kill us, who batter us who point guns at us and threaten us.’”

🚨 New: We built a visual tracker of the warehouses ICE is targeting across the US. Working off an idea from @actualkatherine.bsky.social, we’ve mapped active searches, canceled deals, and linked state property records. Explore the map here: tinyurl.com/ICEWarehouse...

Epstein: “the girls and i are going to see elon musk at space x tomorrow, are you around,”

Big Oil "purchased solar and EV patents to ensure others couldn’t use them, solicited control of renewable markets and then abandoned them, and funded powerful institutions to promote false solutions, all while using trade groups to downplay the harms of fossil fuels, according to the complaint." 😠

The behavior of our big beautiful billionaires over the past several decades is psychologically what I can only describe as "Crying out for consequences." They can't stop themselves and deep down they need to be stopped. They need it as much as we do

Today is a great day to unsubscribe from WaPo if you've been holding out thus far

For nearly a year, the administration has said that DOGE had no unauthorized access to your Social Security data. A new government filing admits that was false.

Russian agent www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

ProPublica identifies Pretti's killers

Republicans set fire to the 1st and 2nd Amendments for Donald Trump. Masked agents murdering civilians and arresting journalists aren't things that happen in America, until now.

NEW: In another act of unprovoked violence, an ICE agent pepper sprays a demonstrator outside the Moss building today in downtown Sacramento

Confusion over terms of service, data center blackouts, and a temporary unexplained block of direct messages about Jeffrey Epstein—why fears of censorship are mounting now that TikTok's U.S. moderation is controlled by investors linked to Trump:

I guess he just got lucky.