The entire book is free to read online, as a downloadable pdf, or you can order a hard copy!!

2: Energy, Laura Watts "Energy cannot end and it cannot be made. Energy is always conserved, physics tells us. In some ways, it has no future and no past." ...

+ Huge thanks Stefan Laser and Edward Ongweso Jr, with guest editor Hollis A. Brown @stefanlaser.bsky.social @edwardongwesojr.com @hollisabrown.bsky.social www.matteringpress.org/books/predic...

+made possible with the amazing 🧠 👨🏻‍💻✍️ @hollisabrown.bsky.social

“Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm.”

You can't call every step of creeping fascism a distraction from kitchen-table issues and then punt whenever you have a chance to address the kitchen-table issues.

To me the chatbots pose zero interesting questions about the ‘nature of selfhood’ but dozens about the nature of manipulation. Here the Claude team pretends they are programming the robot for ethical responses but they land on one that is false and disingenuous.

if AI is so amazing, why can’t its supporters point to one real actual benefit to society it offers?

Deploying and prompting #Claude by #Anthropic means ripping apart literal books. Strange, strange world "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world." An exclusive WaPo post: archive.is/9hDYR

Never donating to them again...they sold out to Big Tech. "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told The Associated Press that he welcomes AI models training on Wikipedia data." arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/w...

I think about this quote from the Luddite movement all the time

I appreciate this and I've been thinking about it a lot today. Not "Good or Porter were innocent and did not threaten the agents who killed them" but "goons are kidnapping and killing our neighbors and must be stopped."

👀 Not sure my hand is steady enough (or my eyes sharp enough tbh) but what a great idea!

Align the compounding multitudes of nefarious use cases of GenAI with the battle cry of the industry echoed by administrators of corporations and education alike that AI is inevitable, to understand the participation of various forms of power in what is essentially a predatory project.

I know they're going for harm reduction by giving advising parents about giving their kids ai toys, but it feels like we found out some toys are chockablock full of arsenic and we're trying to limit how much kids lick the arsenic toys instead of scrapping the whole idea www.cbc.ca/radio/thecur...

On hype, @hagenblix.bsky.social writes that the bubble discourse “is dangerously inadequate for understanding what is actually going on … the problem with AI isn’t hype. The problem is who and what it’s useful for.” www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hy...

Long but fascinating read as the beauty industrial complex revs into high gear to sell us yet another invasive, dangerous procedure to solve the terrifying problem of having human skin and living past twenty-five fatherkarine.substack.com/p/the-anti-c...

Incredibly disturbing to listen to the CBC's reporting on what's happening in Gaza, which always lists the deaths of Israeli soldiers first, and then frames the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians during the so-called ceasefire as merely "reports from Gaza's Health Ministry"

this is exactly what is happening in Canada and international students were also the first to get slashed

Open to your ideas all year round: www.heliotropejournal.net

Ontario is slashing accreditation requirements for psychologists, eroding ethics requirements and clinical practice hours etc, and a friend of mine just suggested that delegitimizing mental health professionals like this might open the door for AI to take over, which feels disturbingly plausible

“We can point that large language model at an entire treasure trove [of data],” Kevin Elder [Securus Technologies president] says, “to detect and understand when crimes are being thought about or contemplated, so that you’re catching it much earlier in the cycle.”

i'm told chatgpt had a birthday

“This seems like a perfect metaphor for Queen’s. We still look like a university and act like a university, but we have lost our sense of purpose, our “soul,” our mission…

PSA: if you’re somehow not burnt out, you should probably know that almost everyone else is

www.wsj.com/finance/cme-... via @ubiquity75.xyz

If you are someone — citizen, scholars, journalist, activist, etc — fighting against AI data center development anywhere in Canada, can you ping me? Would like to coordinate something…

In our last post before the winter break, Hassan Asif brings us this vivid and striking piece on theology and technology in Lahore's Hall Road www.heliotropejournal.net

“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 into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.” It costs a lot less to house people.

“Until its A.I. can accomplish some incredible feat — say, generating a cure for cancer — success is partly defined by turning ChatGPT into a lucrative business. That means continually increasing how many people use and pay for it.”

Israel just struck Beirut’s southern suburbs for the first time in months and first time since last year’s war without a warning. Reports saying it was an airstrike in Haret Hreik. Though such attacks usually are struck by drone

Carney continues to deliver everything I expected of a banker running a country.

Finally something on this argument current and future school teachers keep throwing at me - no, underserved groups are not currently or ever going to benefit from LLMs.

THIS

The lad, so cozy

🎵 “Join Ice” - @wellesmusic on Colbert

I'm eating granola in bed and SHE WANTS THE GRAN

I mean, why should toddlers be excluded from the AI extractionist project? So much $ thrown at AI booster academics, meanwhile those critiquing AI are institutionally alienated and must pin hopes in funding competitions that maybe one critical study will be tokenized as an alternative viewpoint.

Shot + chaser

do i have this about right? university admins claim that they know (somehow) that AI is “the future” and that we have to train students to have the skills to work in environments that (will) require AI, but ...

Machines of automated Holocaust denial “A Grok X post on Monday in French said the gas chambers at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau were "designed for disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus” Shut this crap down www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/ar...

AI-driven casino economy www.theglobeandmail.com/business/art...

The Republican Party is a Nazi-allied party.

Episode 46: Sapiens It's an ambitious goal to write the entire history of humanity in just 400 pages. It's even more ambitious to do it without reading any research.

“LLMs aren’t going away” statements are wishes, not predictions, that they’re trying to make happen. Treat them as advocacy for a specific future, not observations of inevitability

Thanks to @melhogan.bsky.social and @tessajbrown.bsky.social for the opportunity to publish in www.heliotropejournal.net