All you need to know about Twitter

Barbara Streisand had the excuse she had never heard about the Barbara Streisand effect.

The touchstone of most authoritarian regimes is not the kind of total control that most people feel in their day-to-day lives. It is that the regime is only selectively bound by law, producing constant low-grade anxiety as to whether, how, or against whom power will be exercised.

And don't forget this clueless effing moron. youtube.com/shorts/ucpYt...

Memex 1.1 today

Today’s Memex 1.1

Delighted to announce that we are going to become an independent Department - the Bennett School of Public Policy - @cambridgeuni.bsky.social from this autumn. Thanks to all those who have supported us on our journey to this point - www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/blog/bennett...

DOGE recommended firing workers at: -FDA, which oversees Neuralink -FAA, which oversees SpaceX -USAID, which probed Starlink -CFPB, which oversees Tesla's financing arm and a potential payment platform on X. "Conflict of interest" is a severe understatement.

Pubmed.gov is down. There are many outrages. This one is senseless, foolish, and a sign of a new dark age. A biostats friend wrote "This is akin to burning the libraries at Alexandria and Ninevah."

#JenniferRubin at her best today. The Reckoning's a'coming open.substack.com/pub/contrari...

'...before...Trump took office the first time in 2017, Transparency International ranked the United States among the top 20 countries in the world for least corrupt government. Now the United States has plunged in those rankings to its lowest level ever. We now have the same ranking as the Bahamas.'

I drafted this post last night, when TSLA was at 331/share. This morning, before publishing it, I updated the numbers. It had dropped to 311/share. It's at 302 right now. substack.com/inbox/post/1...

DOGE savings (WSJ): $2.6b TSLA subsidies (10 years): $15b Annual increase in deficit: $900b Cuts to Medicare: $880b

Annoying side effect of climate change is a growing sense that electrification of transport solves the problems with cars rather than leaving all the other problems with cars unchanged

Tesla paid $0 in federal income tax last year. 2022: $0 2021: $0 2020: $0 2019: $0 2018: $0 Tesla reported $6.7 billion in profit in those years.

So complex but we need to understand that what is happening to our country has been designed by Thiel and others to destabilize our economy, our markets, and our future...they are not making America Great Again. They are making America their piggy bank.

Yep, politics feels like a subset of tech right now

Commission publishes the Guidelines on prohibited artificial intelligence (AI) practices, as defined by the #AI Act! digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/c...

Sharp criticism here from a French regulator over a former Amazon UK boss taking the role of interim chair of the UK Competition and Markets Authority - from a Rana Foroohar column www.ft.com/content/7e37...

The UK finds itself in an interesting place re: AI and tech policy. Outside of the EU AI Act and, from what I can see from the Data (Use and Access) Bill, unlikely to be in overall alignment re: automated decisions. Meanwhile Beeban Kidron's proposed amendments to the copyright provisions seem...

I made a reel about posting photos of your kids online. In short, please stop. Generative AI models trained with CSAM can be used with your kids photos. It’s terrifying. www.instagram.com/reel/DFiRNR6...

Graff, who wrote this, is a former editor of POLITICO.

When oligarchy meets technology. (And media, money and corruption...) Well worth reading, by @williamcb.bsky.social: open.substack.com/pub/williamc...

The Royal Society really needs to get their act together on this one, Musk is an appaling reflection on such an august institution. Unless, of course, they approve of Nazis-saluting disinformation-spreading people, I suppose. Fauci deserves better than their complience through inaction, imho.

Banksy drops another bomb.

🎙️How are data & algorithms impacting our lives? @ginasue.bsky.social, @jenitennison.com & @jfbonnefon.bsky.social discuss how data & algorithms impact our work, public services & decision-making, while raising questions about ethics, fairness, & governance. 🎧https://pod.fo/e/299eb0

1/4 The term social web is probably too big a compromise. The "web" part is the only part that's imho useful. The sad part is that "social" means "we removed most of the features of the web." Why? Some vague sense that people would write too much if given the space. Or link too

I’m not sure people quite grasp how much of the crypto world is reacting to the Trump memecoin launches.

Superb by @histoftech.bsky.social on the women, largely women of colour, who persistently raise real-life harms of tech to be sacked by rich white guys and sidelined by comforting white corporate feminists who just want a few tweaks, not system change The misogyny and racism are features, not bugs.

www.theatlantic.com/internationa... Read this by @anneapplebaum.bsky.social It's a foretaste of what we all will face as of tomorrow. Can we survive this future? Not unless we are bold and serious, elect leaders who lead, and kick out those out to destroy Europe. It's existential. It's real.

The great thing with Signal is that not only is it more secure and operated by better people, but it's also flat out the better product in terms of usability and aesthetics. Also no weird AI bots, solid desktop version, and great videoconferencing.

🎄 Merry Christmas! 🎄 🔔 As Advent ends, the 12 Days of Christmas🎄begin! Join me for a deeper dive into the initiatives shown in this map - from Data Science Africa to @ai.cam.ac.uk - as we explore practical responses to AI challenges. the-atomic-human.ai/reflections/...

A lot of rich parents are very upset at the government for charging VAT on private school fees. Maybe they should instead ask why private schools have put up fees so far above inflation over the past 15 years. www.ft.com/content/852b...

The most important plot for understanding UK politics & economics now - the collapse in productivity growth since the mid-2000s. Nothing that governments of last 15 years have done has made a material difference, & if we continue doing the same things we'll get the same result.

A Modernist duck-pond memex.naughtons.org/friday-27-de...

If you've never donated to Wikipedia, now's the time. Elon Musk is attacking it because it's one of the only sources of honest, curated information that he can't control. www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-ta...

Cake of the day!

Lots of interesting & important takes in this review essay by @himself.bsky.social @foreignaffairs.com (I also recommend Mary Bridges' book which is a must-read for anyone interested in the construction of the US national security/economic security apparatus) Some additional thoughts 👇

Including the interview with @katecrawford.bsky.social - and the terrific idea of AI as a “metabolic technology”

My prediction in @wired.com: 2025 is the year of AI agents. The coming psychopolitical regime "directs the environments where our ideas are born, developed, and expressed. Its power lies in its intimacy—it infiltrates our subjectivity. We will be playing an imitation game that ultimately plays us."