Baffled at what otherwise smart people are seeing in that Blair screed. We've known for years that Labour had no prospectus for governing. Blair's proposals, meanwhile, are like a Telegraph op-ed run through ChatGPT: slash welfare, scrap net zero, "unleash AI". It's not just unserious, it's boring!

IMHO possibly the most interesting question in finance and economics right now is the extent to which future AI dominance can retain any monopoly characteristics. People assume because it's "Silicon Valley" that those explosive network effects will necessarily pertain. They really might not... 1/

An aggressively expansionist ethnostate, but all they have to do is to parrot the word "security" (the security of their victims having no importance) and many Western journos just parrot along

Me, in the Guardian today, on Reform voters and sympathisers in England's post-industrial towns www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Not just lobbying! our new paper maps 27 mechanisms of regulatory capture used by Big AI + 11 narrative framings that rationalise capture. “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity” will be presented at #FAccT2026 next month arxiv.org/abs/2605.068... 1/

LGBTQ+ voters have abandoned Labour in droves (see work by @turnbulldugarte.com). Like in other areas, Labour has sacrificed minority rights to appeal to authoritarian voters. They are now facing the consequences. People who do not identify as straight make up 8-10% of the electorate.

Claims that AI will deliver significant productivity gains and savings in the UK public sector are shaping government policy and spending. Ada’s new briefing helps policymakers, journalists and others to evaluate AI productivity claims more robustly. www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/policy-brief...

Today we publish 📏𝐌𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐔𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐔𝐏📏, a new @adalovelaceinst.bsky.social briefing on AI and public sector productivity. We find: ⚖️The link between measurement and real-world outcomes is unclear 📐Workers and citizens are absent from research design ⏲️Industry shapes what gets researched Read more:

Scary diagram on how much of our daily lives would fall apart if somehow we were cut off from US tech. Tech sovereignty and resilience is going to be costly! www.ft.com/content/4c3a...

"Labour politicians are not terminally stupid. It should be puzzling, therefore, that so many of them were happy to accede to the government’s ‘hippie-punching’ strategy, in which socially liberal, left-wing voters – the core of their support – have been repeatedly castigated and rejected."

Pretty disappointing to see @adamtooze.bsky.social posting that climate issues around data centre growth are just barely "real" and are verging on "fake" Me and many others have done a huge amount of work I think solidly demonstrating how real they are. Much more than.......whatever this graphic is

Calls for data center moratoriums are strategic and help build needed leverage. For example, the national moratorium bill introduced by Reps Sanders & @aoc.bsky.social is explicitly designed to force AI regulation—the ban would lift as soon as laws were put in place that actually constrain harms.

We really are going to have to revisit the socialist calculation debate at some point quite soon.

I have family members who are very reliant on the state. And I use the NHS a lot for endometriosis. Sometimes I think the eye-rolling I see on here in response to voters' belief that everything is broken is because the eye rollers are middle class and don't interact with the welfare state much.

"The promises of a green future are being co-opted by the same forces driving planetary destabilization." NEW: @ceciliarikap.bsky.social on how Big Tech's cloud services give them unprecedented power to shape how we understand climate change, and how we respond www.break-down.org/talking-abou...

"The current public discourse about antisemitism is defined by two claims. First, that Jews are victims of Muslims and the pro-Palestine left, and, second, that the proper response to racism is more aggressive policing." Typically sharp analysis from Barnaby Raine in @equatormag.bsky.social:

BREAKING: The Chinese government pressured Zambia to screen + exclude Taiwanese speakers attending @rightscon.org, leading to the largest international convention on digital rights being canceled a week before it takes place, the host org @accessnow.org tells WIRED. By @telliotter.bsky.social + me

My colleague Ryan Lee and I been working for the past 6 months on a microeconomic theory that could serve as the foundation for a new, multidimensional economics. Our first working paper, "Choice under value pluralism," is below. Please read, share, and comment! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Look at the crazy Low Earth Orbit footprint of Muskism. ig.ft.com/space-weapons/

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

We got a chance to do something for @lpeblog.bsky.social on Muskism as a possible successor to post-Fordism, drawing on the concepts of Michel Aglietta and the Regulation School. This one was really fun! lpeproject.org/blog/muskism...

AI rose in salience more than any other issue for US voters last year, with backlash from creatives, X-risk activists, parents, workers, environmentalists and more We expect pressure to build in 2026 as AI gets even more capable, and @ippr.org we argue governments need to urgently spread the upside

BREAKING: Crowds gathering in Trafalgar Square to oppose the unlawful ban on Palestine Action. Despite the High Court ruling that the ban is unlawful, the Met police decided to continue making arrests following an embarrassing u-turn on their policy not to.

This has not been discussed in parliament. If the British military are aiding and abetting war crimes in Lebanon, and our politicians have not even explained to us why this is happening, in what sense are we living in a genuinely democratic society any more?

"The [US] government is increasingly reliant on commercial AI technology developed by the private sector; at the same time, AI firms are prioritizing defense applications. From a business perspective, this is called synergy. From a political economy perspective, this is called codependency."

One of the best jobs in UK social science, research & policy.

"Ontology, a term popularized by Palantir..."

BlackRock said it was “incredibly excited” to “partner with GMPF to accelerate the availability of private capital for these essential assets”. Okay but I’m *not* excited to accelerate the availability of essential public assets to private capital. www.ft.com/content/1cdc...

“We’re sold this idea that this is going to be the key to rebuilding Britain, when in fact it looks more like the key to making some fund managers quite a nice profit.” @hettieobrien.bsky.social joins us to discuss the billionaire machine of private equity. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HOm...

This is interesting, not least because it shows the ridiculous sensitivity of over-valued tech stocks giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Loved this conversation between @piercepenniless.bsky.social and @sarahsteinlubrano.bsky.social on (among other things) the importance of social relationships in political organising, what cognitive science has to offer left-wing movements, and how we can begin to rebuild the public sphere

one of my favorite Sohn-Rethel texts is all about how in Napoli technical objects can be repurposed in weird and liberating ways when they break down hardcrackers.com/ideal-broken...

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

As we’ve all been saying for many years 👇.

The first set of postdocs for our ERC project on popular government have just been advertised. These 3 postdocs will be based at UC Louvain with my co-PI Pierre-Etienne Vandamme and focus on contemporary democratic theory. Apply! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...

If flawed and inaccurate LLMs are instrumented in AWS by replacing humans for decision making, then "wars" may as well be indiscriminate lethal campaigns. Anthropic's position also isn't a moral high ground given their AI-DSS uses w/ Palantir, where automation bias may lead to similar outcomes.

I don’t disagree with the general thrust. But this: “I am realistic enough to know that the argument for free university education no longer wins political traction” How does this happen? You accept it and normalise it. There is no law of nature separating higher ed. from primary/secondary ed.

Another day another article by a former LSE student! This one by @stephaniewanga.bsky.social ! I really learned a lot seeing her work through these ideas, and basically came to see the story of Ujamaa as a somewhat tragic tale. Check it out! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

While I'm glad that Dario is standing up to Hegseth here, as a person who studies tech regulation for a living, I'll just point out that the difference between "medium responsible usage" and "The Full Orwell" being the moral backbone of One Guy is not a governance system we should feel good about

I wrote on the fall of Peter Mandelson for the next issue of the @lrb.co.uk Online early now: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

OpenSAFELY is open from today! Huge thanks to all who supported this vast collaboration: whole population GP data; in a productive platform; innovative privacy protections; unprecedented support from professions, privacy campaigners; &c Now it's over to users! www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/02...

NEW: Meta’s director of AI safety, supposedly the person at the company who is working to make sure that powerful AI tools don’t go rogue and act against human interests, had to scramble to stop an AI agent from deleting her inbox against her wishes...

NEW How Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence How a close read of public domain documents show how MoD was commercially colonised by Palantir By me, at FT www.ft.com/content/5207...

"American executives worry that competitors, especially in China, could emulate their scientific and technological achievements. They can probably afford to fret less about threats to America’s exceptionalism in the field of financial engineering."

“it turns out that the engine of Musk’s X — its algorithmic ‘For You’ page — is an ideological ratchet.” - @jwherrman.bsky.social nymag.com/intelligence...

I’ve written this lengthy FT analysis overnight about the multiple multi-thousand pound Epstein payments to Mandelson’s husband these particular paragraphs are worth reading slowly www.ft.com/content/608a...

orange catholic bible incoming

I would take a pay cut to not have an email address.

The Josh Simons story isn't just about one minister commissioning smears on journalists. It's about a toxic political culture that was built to destroy Corbyn — and then walked straight into government. My piece for @tribunemagazine.bsky.social 🧵 1/4

This is fantastic, and it's something that we've been saying for years. When companies say that are using "AI for climate change", they are referring to much smaller models used for doing things like climate modeling. Massive generative AI models are NOT USEFUL for mitigating climate change.