The WSJ carelessly spread anti-trans misinformation www.theverge.com/politics/777...

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*

Banner Health, the largest health system in Arizona, is currently refusing to offer COVID19 vaccines or to provide prescriptions for them. Our healthcare system is utterly broken. “Everybody who wants a COVID19 vaccine can get one”, quoth RFK Jr.

What, exactly, does this string of words mean? Why does everyone who stands to profit from selling "AI" love to repeat it? And what's the value of slogans that masquerade as history? sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

Fantastic — and actually quite heartening — interview with @histoftech.bsky.social. And this is a great cross-cutting reminder to always keep in mind: “It’s not inevitable…There’s always time to change things.”

Historian of tech @histoftech.bsky.social on how AI hype is a way of gaming the system by "reengineering society around the technology." The goal is to "create an environment—a labor environment, a regulatory environment, a user environment—that will bring that unlikely thing closer to reality."

"Large data centers, many devoted to researching artificial intelligence, are expected to use more than 150 billion gallons of water across the U.S. over the next five years, according to the advocacy organization Alliance for the Great Lakes."

I spoke with @histoftech.bsky.social about AI hype, how tools are used to amass power and reshape systems, expertise, and more! www.fastcompany.com/91384078/not...

We have apparently entered the "papers, please" stage of Trump's takeover of D.C. law enforcement.

Google's data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa used 1 BILLION gallons of water in 2024 - enough to supply all of Iowa's residential water for five days. Researchers in water law and policy explain how companies rarely tell the public exactly how much water data centers consume: buff.ly/uRvYWPN

As I reported earlier this year at @motherjones.com, Russell Vought's daughter has benefited immensely from NIH research, and her condition (cystic fibrosis) has received more research funding than most rare diseases. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

"If you lose a local newspaper in a small community, someone can come in at another point and start up another local newspaper. But once broadcast licenses are gone, they’re gone." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

I often think about the essay from Sam Harnett about how tech media sold the gig economy to the public and overlooked the problems with the model it was rolling out, especially seeing what they’ve done with generative AI and chatbots.

One month apart.

Meta AI leakage is a massive scandal, a careless company exposing deeply private stuff. It's also a window into what the AI companies see in their data — what they know about how people actually use chatbots nymag.com/intelligence...

There are no distractions. It's all bad. Systematically stripping trans people of their rights, guys in balaclavas shoving any brown person with a tattoo into a ummarked vans, ending healthcare for millions. It's all in service of fascism and technofeudalism. It's all one thing. That's the point.

Silicon Valley Execs Join the Army as Officers (But Won't Have to Attend Boot Camp)

There is a push to use AI in newsrooms as a tool to assist reporters with research, fact-checking, and data analysis with the justification that it’s not replacing reporters’ jobs. But this overlooks the fact that those tasks are actually real jobs that are being automated away in the process

If you, like Casey Newton, use LLMs for fact-checking, that should be disclosed directly beneath your byline

Research conducted by the African Content Moderators Union and Personaldata.io reveals the extent to which African workers are indirectly employed in the tech sector, doing content moderation, customer service, and data annotation for AI models, among other jobs, per Rest of World.

People are having very strange conversations with ChatGPT, in which they discover secret cabals or conspiracies or that we are all in fact living in The Matrix. It sends these people into delusional spirals. Then ChatGPT tells them to email me about it. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/t...

Not only will this discourage states from cooperating with the federal government going forward, it will lead people to miss out on life-saving benefits they’re entitled to as they can’t trust that their information won’t be used against them. apnews.com/article/m...

The Supreme Court, in a narrow ruling, made it easier for students with disabilities to sue to enforce their rights under the ADA and other laws.

New from me @gabrielgeiger.bsky.social + Justin-Casimir Braun: Amsterdam believed that it could build a #predictiveAI for welfare fraud that would ALSO be fair, unbiased, & a positive case study for #ResponsibleAI. It didn't work. Our deep dive why: www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/11/1...

I learned so much talking to ProPublica for this story. It's a telling window into how Trump/DOGE are using AI to shrink the government and the consequences. And even though this use is particularly ham-handed, it's a good example of the limitations of the technology more generally.🧵 @propublica.org

Technologies, even widespread ones, do not *necessarily* determine social norms and goods. If you can’t stop a social harm on the level of force/physical coercion (technology) you can often stop it on the level of consensus (custom, norms, law, governance).

If you’re thinking, what can we do? Well, I’ll tell you one thing you can do: look at the patterns of the past and then REJECT the next big disruptive technology that comes along and seems like an “emperor has no clothes situation.”

It’s not a surprise that we’ve ended up here, with the “boy geniuses” breaking the federal government for profit and ever more consolidation of power, just like they broke other systems, laws, labor markets, and norms before.

A top coronavirus vaccine adviser at the CDC has resigned, citing concerns that she could no longer help vulnerable people after officials rescinded recommendations to immunize children and pregnant women.

AI is Getting Worse, but It's Getting Worse

The bottom line is that management is always looking for ways to use tech as a means of undercutting or degrading labor—AI is the latest and most ubiquitous iteration

I spoke to @npr.org about USDA’s illegal demand for sensitive data about millions of food stamp recipients. It’s the kind of request you make if you’re trying to feed a massive surveillance program, not if you’re trying to feed hungry kids. Every state should sue, and refuse to comply. 👇👇

there are knock-on effects similar to what happens when abortion is criminalized. consider the life of robert eads, a trans man who had treatable ovarian cancer but couldn’t find a doctor to remove his ovaries because they were afraid of being seen as gender doctors, so he died. doc about him here:

Russell Vought, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has canceled plans to more tightly regulate the sale of Americans’ sensitive personal data. www.wired.com/story/cfbp-q...

"Public radio stations have been a lifeline for residents during natural disasters that take out power, the internet and cell towers. And in many remote and rural areas across the U.S., they can be a lone source of local news." www.latimes.com/politics/sto...

They're dismantling (what remains of) the social safety net and replacing it with a dragnet instead.

While you highlight it, please note is the product of local journalism, which has been carrying a lot of the burden in an environment where national outlets simply can't cover everything everywhere all at once. Support your local journalists!

The NIH community invites you to join us in weekly vigils to commemorate and mourn the losses resulting from cuts to funding, programs, and people that have been both discriminatory and indiscriminate.

It is unsurprising that the people pushing a mediocrity machine in order to stop paying workers can only come up with the same, banal, mediocre justifications for its use—justifications that have been proven to be false time and again.

The CDC has scrapped a plan to offer schools in Texas help with curbing measles, we're told NIOSH's experts had been in the state, wrapping up work helping fix errors in ventilation/filtration at hospitals treating measles, when they got layoff notices www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-scr...

scammers are using LLMs to take up all the slots in community college courses in San Diego as part of a financial aid scam. Hard to see a way this doesn't eventually kill remote learning for these colleges. Huge deadweight loss generated by LLMs.

“Many people don’t realize how high the American quality of life is because of the competent & stable enforcement of regulations, &if that goes away a lot of lives are at risk,” said Steve Cicala… “This affects airplane safety, baby formula safety, the safety of meat, vegetables and packaged foods…”

The administration has removed an image of actual disabled people from ada.gov and replaced them with a stock photo of a flag

FDA plans to phase out animal testing requirement for drug testing and replace it with “AI-based computational models of toxicity” and organoid toxicity testing www.fda.gov/news-events/...

Among cuts at HHS: most of the workers at NIOSH, incl Pittsburgh national lab that approves and ensures continued quality of respirators - N95s + breathing devices for firefighters, miners, people working w chemicals, construction dust. “Nothing is happening to make sure they continue to be safe”

Petabytes of critical government research that is marked for possible deletion cannot be archived because of technical and legal restrictions, meaning it is very likely to be lost forever: www.404media.co/nih-archives...