Incredible. Italy brought to a standstill as Italians descend to the streets to protest for Gaza. No business as usual. Schools closed. Businesses closed. Shameful on the rest of us. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

we got a rapture coming on the day kimmel is supposed to return to network tv. #rapturetuesday is about to be lit 🔥

OpenAI: oh shit, we're losing gobs of money. Nvidia, help us! Nvidia: why should we help you? OpenAI: if we go out of business, we won't be able to buy your products anymore! Nvidia: solid sustainable business plan for all involved. Here's a boatload of money.

profit, surveillance, & authoritarian destruction of democracy: Thiel all the way down. "Palantir is the corporate backbone of Ice that the agency is relying on for surveillance and deportations"

"The incoherence is the point. Fascism is a temper tantrum disguised as an ideology."

a small bird flew into my window this morning. i heard the thud. i suspect it died on impact, but the internet said it might be stunned, so to put it in a paper bag for an hour. i did. still dead. now i am playing Mahalia Jackson for a small soft bird funeral. & for this fucking month so far.

Brad Lander and ten other elected officials were arrested inside 26 Federal Plaza after demanding access to observe the 10th floor, where detainees are held. The group staged a sit-in before Federal Protective Service officers moved in with zip ties.

go Pope?

“Chrome’s cheating tool exemplifies Big Tech’s continuing gold rush approach to AI: launch first, consider consequences later and let society clean up the mess.”

“You used to be able to say anything” comedians never been more quiet in their lives

Seeing lots of people talking about canceling their Disney+ subscriptions. If you happen to have some extra money around that used to go to Mickey Mouse... small indie media sites like mine could always use some assistance. Especially these days. www.techdirt.com/support/

From Milton Mayer's "They Thought They Were Free" I first read it in November and I'm rereading it now. It crushing feeling the exact same things as this academic did. It's the same process.

Jarvis: I hate to say this to my friends here at CNN, mass media is dying, so they're taking the last of these vestiges of institutions that matter and they're trying to turn them into propaganda organs under threat from the head of the FCC

For many this isn't our first rodeo, but ... the tactics are the tactics of previous rodeos, just now with a more sophisticated and institutionalized apparatus (which isn't too say it isn't more/worse, just ... also familiar).

the Overton window just...jumped straight out the window

Sometimes it's nice to remember that even Marcus Aurelius was like "you don't have to comment on everything bro"

"We have to figure out how to extricate ourselves from all of this, this digital mess we've made – from the demands for more data, for more "content." (At first that sentence contained the word "obviously" but I don't think it is to so many people who still insist that we're smarter when networked)"

Albert Einstein called it in 1949: "private capitalists inevitably control...the main sources of information... It is thus extremely difficult...for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights." monthlyreview.org/articles/why...

American media has been manufacturing parasocial reactionaries for decades. Limbaugh, Beck, Shapiro, Jones, Carlson, Hannity, etc. The importance of these figures is not ideological purity, consistency, inventiveness, etc. It’s that they keep you company in your cab, your cubicle, on your commute.

so is AP just baldface going with the pretense that groyper meme culture is "leftist" & putting it out there as fact? "Officials have said Robinson...subscribed to a "leftist ideology" that had grown in recent years" & CBC is wholesale parroting this? www.cbc.ca/news/world/d...

Efforts to demonize one side for the violent acts of a few will likely result in increased political violence. History has shown that democratic leaders use their position to help calm emotions and argue against violence after a political assassination. Autocrats focus anger on their opponents.

this happened to me, with two articles i wrote in 2022 for a large Canadian higher ed site. went to find them while designing my syllabus this year...just gone. site's there, but all articles pre-last year have been wiped.

exhibit 183193 in "nobody running big corporations has a single fucking clue about selling things" betty crocker shrank their cake boxes instead of raising prices and now a huge % of recipes that use them no longer work. meaning there's no point in buying a mix at all.

internet culture desks aren't just for cute meme trend stories. ever since gamergate, understanding how and why info moves online is critical to seeing how we got *here*

Transgender people are owed a retraction and apology from @wsj.com. The lie has already become canon to millions and it seems the least they could do.

Update: Civil War cancelled due to shooter being demographically uncooperative

A popular white man got killed by another white man while speaking on an overwhelming white campus in an overwhelmingly white state and this is the result. Racism doesn’t need a reason, only an excuse.

“one of the most egregious interventions in university autonomy we've ever seen in Canada,” one scholar of governance in higher education says. Ford will do literally anything but properly fund education in Ontario

The New York Times is casting doubt on the report that the shooter's casings had "transgender and anti-fascist" messages on them. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09...

(I am genuinely terrified that we are fast approaching the point at which I stopped watching The Handmaid’s Tale)

“When it comes to the AI technology industry, we refuse their frames, reject their addictive and brittle technology, and demand that the sanctity of the university both as an institution and a set of values be restored.” — zenodo.org/records/1706...

A modern day version of the Gold Rush: Oracle is selling picks, pans, and shovels to prospectors. Oracle is guaranteed to make a fortune, but it's boom-or-bust for frontier AI companies

This is gonna be like Limbaugh, where in the interest of fairness or because no one should die a violent death like that, you’ll get knee-jerk reactions like, ‘Even if you disagreed with his work …’ meanwhile, this was his work:

Information environment has reached its grotesque conclusion in that there is a very real killer out there who has not been identified, apprehended, or investigated, a detail practically inconsequential to nearly every commentator’s purposes.

There is no information yet on the Charlie Kirk shooter or the political motivation behind it but that hasn't stopped major right wing pundits immediately politicizing his shooting before a single fact is known

JUST IN: A judge quashed the subpoena to Boston Children's Hospital by the DoJ that sought the records of trans patients. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

"American tech companies not only knew, some also directly pitched their tech as tools for Chinese police to control citizens"

"The perception that the machine is 👂 is an illusion... This means that we lose much of the value of conversations w/ other people who might point [us] to new + richer spaces beyond our previous experiences, or propose new understandings we can draw out from empathy for those experiences."

If you are collecting sensitive information about users, like, I dunno...their sexual orientation...you need to take securing user data seriously.

Adjusted for inflation Spirited Away cost $22 million to make. The Triplets of Belleville cost $16.5 million, Cartoon Saloon's Wolfwalkers cost $14.28 million, and Oscar winner Flow cost only $4 million. These critically acclaimed, made by real people films, cost less than this pile of actual vomit.

hear me out but um, maybe institutions exist so that society can have structure & stability & NORMS so rich arseholes don't take ALL the toys but trick is we gotta hold them TO those norms right, too hard, all bets off

The media is going to frame this as part of the horse race, so I think it is worth noting the actual substance of Pritzker's words -that the federal government is actively planning on destabilizing an American city and endangering its inhabitants as a pretext for a military crackdown- is a BFD.

We really need a revolution from our technological revolution.

unxpected legend

These are desperate attempts to embed AI technologies into schools and recruit lifetime users and I urge my fellow educators to see these attempts as such and refuse to be bought by Big Tech and this fascist government.

OOF. "The real work is to remain capable of seeing the full humanity of people who do not see my full humanity in return & to never forget that I am here only as long as I can remember to think about the people I love who are not loved by this Technical system & to not lose my heart in the process"

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

the staggering scale & then speed of collapse of passenger pigeons feels like a cautionary tale. that America as a whole - or a great many of us in Canada - still will not listen to, on any front.

We have unions to thank for parental leave, extended health benefits and anti-harassment policies in the workplace. Solidarity forever!