Perplexity AI head describes the endpoint of cascading logics of automation (from automated data collection to sense making, to response). In a word, agentic AI: "Comet leads to a true personal assistant that can be an agent for you and take actions. It’s our transition from answers to actions."

In case anyone in Ljubljana might be interested, I'm doing a public talk Monday, 23 June at 11 am, in the library of the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. "“Granular Biopolitics: Biometrics, Surveillance and Automated Governance” Open to the public.

oligarch vs. despot. If it were Russia the winner would be clear. In neoliberal land where the government relies on Musk for core functions (low earth orbit satellite delivery, global comms, etc), maybe less so?

Interesting twitter phenomenon: random MAGAs and pseudo-conspiracy theorists who don't trust the media are putting their faith in Grok and Perplexity for fact-checking. The old institutions for adjudicating rival accounts of reality are on the wane. But the new ones are simply scraping the old ones.

this is pretty amazing article: a deep dive into the workings of a dramatically reconfigured media environment...

This French article is great not just because it interviews @timothyjgraham.bsky.social but also because the visualisations are really well done. Oh, and apart from tge deconstruction of his megaphoning RWNJ, it also provides a Deep Dive into the Muskian Projkek.

Looks like travel to the US will now require vaccination boosters.

"The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone – unsurprisingly, given their scatological bent, with bullshit – in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty." AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism newsocialist.org.uk/transmission...

You guys need to wise up, you’re not dealing with conservatives or libertarians trying to implement conservative or libertarian policies. You are dealing with fascists trying to destroy the idea of the truth and replace it with the exercise of power.

David Brooks in the NYTimes has a revelation. He is shocked, shocked to learn that gambling is taking place in this establishment... "The simplest answer is that Trump really seems not to give a crap about the working class" -- DB

When I was a kid in NYC, a family friend from Europe described to me what he thought was distinctive about Americans. "Most people see a glass on the table, and they know if they push it, it will fall off...Americans will just keep pushing until it falls off." The glass is falling.

Well the irony in that now, is Humanities will be the only programs universities will be able to afford to fund 🥴

"AI then becomes a tool for replacing politics. The Trump administration frames generative AI as a remedy to 'government waste.' However, what it seeks to automate is not paperwork but democratic decision-making" Love @eryk.bsky.social's writing and this piece is no exception. 👏👌

There is a simple solution to the CBS/Trump lawsuit. The Harris campaign should sue Fox and insist Fox release the unedited versions of all their many edited interviews with Trump.

c.f. "robodebt"

I suppose it was bound to happen. Silicon valley feeling liberated by not having to pretend to live up to the hype about being the good capitalists, etc... Every company has got to find a way to live up to its P/E ratio. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Our piece on Community Notes and its narrow understanding of the disinformation problem is now live on @techpolicypress.bsky.social. It is based on our paper on the topic, which can be found here: eprints.qut.edu.au/254907/1/Mat...

Maybe it's better not to mess around with certain federal functions. It's not a game.

Instead, these below-the-fold changes are very clearly designed to avoid having to penalize people like Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the increasingly dehumanizing language they use against these specific groups. You can tell because of the changes they *didn't* make. 🧵 9/11

NEW: Platformer has obtained the dehumanizing new guidelines moderating what people can now say about trans people on Facebook and Instagram. Employees tell me these changes are likely to inspire more violence against LGBT people: www.platformer.news/meta-new-tra...

The second death of the author.... Springer is publishing "machine-generated" literature "overviews" for 170 Euros (hardcover -- library edition, presumably?). link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

This really drives the point home: government of the billionaires by the billionaires for the billionaires... www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

There's lots of hot takes on Zuckerberg's content moderation decision, and then there's Julia Angwin's, who uses it to explain that Meta is no longer growing through innovation and is reduced to political groveling. buttondown.com/JuliaAngwin/...

It's worth understanding Trump's reverence for Putin. In the US, until recently, the political class has been beholden to the economic one. In Putin's Russia, it's the other way around. Oligarchs are beholden to Putin. Trump was never able to join the ruling economic class. Went bankrupt too often.

Who remembers AltSchool? What a great cautionary tale of edtech and data-driven schooling exuberance for our current AI moment. Funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Zuckerberg and Founders fund, it was a Silicon Valley experimental lab school for the kind of AI schooling hyped everywhere today ... 1/5

From the annals of social recession (hint: capital was never really comfortable with ceding much control over content to users...AI provides a strategy for clawing it back): www.404media.co/zuckerberg-t...

capitalism's weird complicities (#1,000,000): academic publishers contracting with AI companies need to push out more content faster to feed the training beast. Universities want academics to publish more publications faster to feed the rankings beast.

Social glut goes in hand-in-hand with social recession. This is a bid to regain more centralized control over content. Imagine trying to cut through the clutter of AI-generated profiles, all designed to manipulate you according to platform priorities. www.ft.com/content/9118...

As we gawk at the $250M Musk spent elect Trump, take a guess how long it took him to “earn” it back in the market? It took just 15 minutes. I'm not kidding... 15 minutes. According to Bloomberg, his net worth soared by $8B just today. That’s billionaire math for you—and it’s all of our problem.

Commercial algorithms shape our information environment...not always to our benefit. What would an algorithm that promoted public service values look like? How might we develop and use one? We will consider this at a free event today at UniMelb. events.humanitix.com/what-is-a-pu...

It would be wonderful if we could imagine the possibility of developing online spaces and tools for young people to communicate and create without subjecting them to comprehensive forms of commercial surveillance and manipulation by platforms that are interested only in exploiting them for profit.

About 5-ish years ago I did some research on chatbots specifically connected to course materials and FAQs from the prof. Don’t remember that article? The data was unpublishable. Students generally just didn’t like the bots, and asked weird questions just to try and break them.

Our upcoming public panel 'What is a Public Service Media Algorithm, and Why Might We Need One?' will foreground critical discussion around automation's role in the future of public service media, featuring ADM+S AI James Meese alongside industry experts from our partner organisations ABC & Google.

In addition to trying to figure out how to regulate the hyper-commercial media that have taken over our information system, what about envisioning a public service media alternative? Free event hosted by bsky.app/profile/adms... at Melbourne Uni this Wednesday: events.humanitix.com/what-is-a-pu...

there something vertiginously anomic about a world in which law enforcement gets swallowed up by conspiracy theory. Plenty of examples in the US (x.com/NC5PhilWilli...). And now cash at the FBI.

The fact that we are willing to accept the use by schools of an ad-supported, auto-play equipped, surveillance-driven platform like YouTube continues to boggle my mind. Can we create a public service, not-for-profit alternative education platform?