this is what a right-wing monopoly looks like. when you buy political favor ($45 million) and swear allegiance to the president, you can buy whatever you want. when they can’t control the news or culture, they try to buy it instead.

the irony of people warring over lupita nyong'o's beauty and not realizing it makes her the perfect modern day helen of troy. her beauty has launched a thousand tik tok tirades, hundreds of bigoted reddit posts, countless youtube hot takes.

steal anything: second in a series of ai critical sign illustrations.

a sign of the times. dollar genai: exploit poor neighborhoods with dynamic pricing based on customer purchase history and habits. ai death & beyond: a death agent spends your remaining life, absorbing your memories, thoughts and beliefs.

The Meta x Kylie Jenner collab is giving Torches of Freedom vibes. How do you change the perception that a product is used by men to harass women? Find a beautiful reality star to promote them.

Imagine still being super excited about AI and simultaneously concerned about a vry fashy govt and not seeing the overlap of these two things.

It’s official, AI boosters are joining forces with NFT scam culture. In a completely predictable move, AI bros are amplifying an NFT scam artist (Monet scam) and calling it proof of bias. What do they have in common? A love of deception, a disdain of artists and a love of the grift.

“they’re eating the dogs!” “ai won’t take your job, someone using ai will” “tell me why my ai generated monet is inferior.” same vibes, same deception, same manufactured outrage. we’re all living in an epstein world, where deception is the currency.

The Monet post on X was manufactured outrage based on deception. You know, the kind of thing X and MAGA are known for. The real insight is that AI bros have never heard of behavioral priming. Maybe that’s why they’re so goddamn gullible?

Zines are great cause they’re like magazines but without MAGA.

Last week, a 20 year-old man threw a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's mansion; two days later, people fired a gun at it. Earlier that week, someone fired gunshots into an city councilman's house who approved a data center. Why the AI backlash has turned violent:

we need to cancel bot conscription, not just ai subscriptions. we need to cancel kill chains, fantasies about bot brains and automated people slain. we need to cancel job raiders and human haters.

art resist while fascism persists. new issue of the power tools zine is live. powertoolsofai.com/zines/power-...

New issue of the Power Tools Zine is live: powertoolsofai.com/zines/power-...

Power Tools Zine Issue #2 WIP

Updated the Power Tools website, issue #2 of the zine coming soon 👀 powertoolsofai.com

Bart Fish made a cool Zine about AI including a snippet of one of my essays and sent me a copy. Love it!

A well-know creative leader just told me that saying we should resist AI because it’s being used for mass surveillance, war (domestic & international), misinformation, racism etc is the same as saying designers should have not used computers and quit design, because the govt uses them for bad things

extreme techno-optimism, mixed w/ authoritarianism, surveillance and xenophobia have become the new american manifesto. billionaires get richer while we're mired in uncertainty, fear and ai-enabled shackles.

new newsletter up: powertoolsofai.com/the-rise-of-...

thank you to everyone that ordered a physical copy of my first zine issue 🖤 i’ve been working hard to put them all together and i am very close to mailing them out. still have a surprise or two, that i’m working on 👀

power tools: the zine is finally available ⚡🪚 it features eight creatives, including photographers, cartoonists, designers, artists and writers. It’s a mix of short stories, poems, essays, and art with critique of AI as the overarching theme. powertoolsofai.com/zine/

elon musk is an immigrant that hates immigrants, a narcissist disguised as an altruist, a critic who refuses to be criticized, a polluter parading as an environmentalist, a free speech “advocate” who pushes for censorship, a government contract hoarder that criticizes government spending…

what do you get when hobble together extreme tech optimism, authoritarianism, theology, and 1930s german political theory? a franken-thiel. this month i’m focusing on the monsters of ai, frightening demagogues hell-bent on transforming our society into a dystopian horror. first up is peter thiel.

This print I created was inspired by Joe Nunnink’s AI Bob Ross skits 🤣 Added some fast food / clown references because why not

test print: ai companions

what do all of these tiktok ‘creators’ have in common? they are all ai accounts entirely dedicated to spreading maga and conservative views.

openai doesn’t care about our health, it cares about our healthcare dollars. powertoolsofai.com/the-ai-war-o...

these two power tools of ai images i created, are live on @betterimagesofai.bsky.social i donated them so anyone can use them for free. if you’re not familiar with better images of ai, their mission is to source ai images that aren’t stereotypical and better represent the discourse around ai.

what if the jobs that ai creates, are ones that nobody wants? what if these jobs are low paying, lack security and involve being exposed to traumatic materials? this is already happening in countries like kenya, uganda, the philippines, venezeula and india. read more at powertoolsofai.com

Users hate AI. So tech made it mandatory. Even if you don't use it, it pollutes what you read and how systems make decisions. The computer's hallucinated word is final. And it needs all of your data to do it. In the age of no consent, UX exists to normalized complete acquiescence to surveillance:

“that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.” -erich fromm, the sane society

if you wanted to control large masses of people, where would you start? how they create, consume and distribute information. how would you force adoption? threaten their livelihood and financial security.

ai is not merely a tool. it’s a power tool. a tool used to surveil, persuade, misinform and control. elon musk wants to use his ai to rewrite history, using his own extremist views to create an orwellian record 1/5

social media = influence machines ai = bullshit machines politics = both

I recently finished reading this and it was a thoroughly enjoyable, yet unsettling read. I came into it already quite critical of Musk, Thiel, Andreesen and Zuckerberg but this book uncovered many more reasons to be concerned. Kudos to @jttaplin.bsky.social for writing such a great exposé.

Elon Musk is so familiar with the idea of weaponizing empathy because he’s been weaponizing altruism his whole career. It’s never been about “saving the human race” for Musk, it’s about gaining influence, respect and power by appearing to be selfless.

I don’t usually post work on here but this is a brand refresh I led late last year.

The Dems should take on corporate greed and pitch a new model of capitalism that places workers on even footing as shareholders. Caps on C Suite comp, and a formula for wage increases as a % of revenue. Different model for speculative businesses that rent cash flow positive.

A maga supporter told me “Not tolerating opinions is fascist.” Isn’t Trump’s whole spiel about not tolerating other people’s opinions? Isn’t he weaponizing the entire govt, to destroy opinions (and facts) he does not like? Cognitive dissonance is real people.

Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show performance is everything.

"The revolution is about to be televised. You picked the right time but the wrong guy." Kendrick Lamar 🔥🔥🔥 #SuperbowlHalftime

Our govt wants to make American AI models more like Trump. We’re talking about an extreme ideological bias that relies heavily on beliefs, conspiracies and straight out lies. Revisionist history that erases and replaces. Still keen on AI?

@kenmartin.bsky.social I’d love to volunteer to help the DNC with design, general creative and strategy. How can I help? I’d love to see the DNC open up volunteering in more creative ways. Why aren’t we building, decentralized pro-democracy tech? Why aren’t we empowering our democratic creatives?

Trump’s Gaza plan IS ethnic cleansing at a massive scale. It’s not enough to deport millions out of America, now he wants to help Israel with their mass deportation. It’s sick, dangerous and not at all American.

Today, I remembered a book I read in college: When Religion Becomes Evil: Five Warning Signs by Charles Kimball. I looked it up to remind myself what the five signs were, and it occurred to me that there are some similarities with the Maga movement. 1/7

“the vibes have shifted” is passive voice. “tech oligarchs made deliberate changes to social media algorithms which altered the way most people perceive reality in a successful attempt to engineer business-favorable outcomes” is more EW WOKE CRINGE but it’s also direct, accurate, and meaningful

We don’t really trust algorithms, do we really think AI models offer any more transparency? When someone like Musk says Grok needs tweaked because it’s still to PC…can we not see the danger around models being manipulated to serve certain ideologies?

It’s very sad when America is the fascist bully and the rest of the world are the democratic heroes. Or on a positive note, maybe it’s precisely what we need.

There’s some irony that the media and culture helped create Trump and Elon Musk’s personas, only for them to later be the ones that discredit them. Trump and Elon ARE the lies mainstream media helped create.