it does take a certain level of maturity which is one of many reasons why andrew cuomo should never work in government again, thank you andrew for pointing this out

Deliberation is under threat. Without common facts and shared epistemic ground, public debate becomes everyone yelling in their bubbles, not collective reasoning. The VDA framework highlights this as a structural fault line.

Verification is under threat. Information supply chains have become fragmented, platform logics favour viral over verifiable, and even traditionally trusted institutions struggle to anchor public belief. If you can’t agree on facts, the rest becomes theatre.

Why this framing? Because the crisis runs deeper than fake news, vaguely defined ideas of loss of trust in institutions, or polarisation. It’s epistemic collapse, when we lose a shared sense of truth, deliberation becomes echo-chambers, and accountability turns performative.

Verification asks: can we reliably establish what is true? Deliberation asks: can we debate and decide fairly together? Accountability asks: can we hold power to account? If one or more of those breaks down, democracy doesn’t just wobble, it hollows out.

I've been working with Demos to turn the Verification, Deliberation, and Accountability (VDA) Framework into a report that lays out how it can be used to diagnose the state of democracy and build solutions around building the capacity for those functions in institutional and public spaces.

I know that there are people outside Chicago who are paying attention and seeing these videos but there are no words for how it feels when the videos show everyday places in your neighborhood, places that are part of your routine. The sense of violation is profound.

I just think AI is so exciting bc it's a machine that you can get wrong answers from, that yields environmental devastation, and is being forced on all of us

SCOOP: Dominion Voting, the voting machine behemoth that Trump and his allies baselessly attacked after the 2020 election, has been sold to a company run by an ex-GOP election official.

I think of this image a lot

We need a bigger national spotlight on this building raid, fam. Agents dropped from helicopters onto the roof. Citizens and non-citizens alike were dragged from their homes in the night. People who weren't kidnapped during the raid had their belongings seized after the fact. This is madness.

The endgame for all of this is constructing a military that will obey orders when ordered to fire on citizens. That's the throughline to half of what Trump is doing.

Your reminder that they cannot arrest millions of people no matter how hard they try. They lack the infrastructure, they lack the personnel, and the economy would straight-up collapse They are going to try to scare us by making examples out of a few people, and our job is to not fall for it

Many things are bad. Let go of worrying if you are doing something "cringe". Anyone ambitious and hard-working has been thought of as cringe. Making something new and interesting is often seen by others as cringe. Immigrating is a cringe-filled process. Focus that energy on what is important to you.

The right has built a social architecture of state-enforced harassment for implementing ideological and social control through participatory engagement and bottom-up escalation of individual’s grievances via personal media creation and sharing (cf trading up the media chain)

Know your rights, Illinois. Stay safe and stay informed.

Americas blue cities are being systemically invaded by federal forces and we cannot continue pretending this is anything but what it is a president waging a campaign of terror against democratically held cities and states.

We are in very dark times. It’ll take an entire political/social movement, an overwhelming rebuke at the polls, and a new vision of governance to unstick this country from whatever this collapse is.

The same people demanding you present a photo ID to vote are perfectly fine with letting you be arrested, handcuffed & thrown into a van by armed men wearing plain clothes, face masks & presenting no identification of any sort.

Elon Musk’s the Boring Company is literally a money pit!

*Open bribery *Masked armed officials arresting residents without warrants, citizens who try to intervene *Arrests for engaging in non-violent speech *Destruction of government capacities *Massive economic uncertainty and damage *Unprecedented targeting of government power against political enemies

So if I am getting this right: Thursday the librarian of Congress was fired. Friday the copyright office rushed out a draft report suggesting genAI training on copyrighted works shouldn’t be legal. Saturday the head of the copyright office is fired.

Like, five years ago, if you were just a nobody who talked a lot about politics on social media, realistically speaking it wasn't ever going to be an issue for you crossing a border. Now? It's very very easy to police & target absolutely anyone's speech, at scale. LLMs make that possible.

Hopping onto this. I have never and will not ever use ChatGPT for my research, reporting or writing. I don’t care if it can help me organize when I get stuck, because I believe finding my way through stuck moments, by myself or with other humans, is valuable for my writing and my readers.

Everyone in the past was neurotypical, which is how we got things like this single-author, eight-volume encyclopedia of ferns

This wrapping paper turns everything into bread 🥖 Created by Japanese designer Ippei Tsujio

It is the reason I spent so much of my teenage years on Wikipedia – as a contributor and maintainer. We were going to save humanity. We were going to make information free. And it would fix everything about us as a species. But it didn't. And that is the most crushing thing to live through.

Jan. 29, 2024: "THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET..." Apr. 30, 2025: "This is Biden's Stock Market..."

this feels like an incredible new urban legend taking shape on reddit otoh I've lowkey seen this happen. like jerusalem syndrome but for talking to the computer

Can we just talk about how this is a form of slavery in and of itself? They want the kind of serfdom that existed in coal mining and that Octavia Butler forecast would be on the return: company towns, wage slavery, generation poverty, work until you die, without unions or rights or livable wages.

going to need to start hearing from governors what they intend to do to protect residents of their states from the federal government

the old george carlin line “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it” never feels as true as it did when the president manipulated the economy by almost causing a recession, and yukked it up with other rich assholes about how much money they made destroying people’s savings

UPDATE: ICE is wildly unconcerned about where this man is and no one will tell me, his registered attorney. The universal answer so far is "let's wait and see where he ends up." This is deeply off. We would have more rights at this point if UPS had lost a pair of shoes I'd just bought from Zappos

It's not discussed in all the stories. But a key feature of the revocation of student visas is that there's no notification. This has forced universities to do regular online reviews of current visas to see which have disappeared since the previous query. The lack of notification is by design.

Like all authoritarians, he'll try to shape the information environment so that he looks like a winner, even though he's a loser. He'll try to propaganda his way through it, going for Heroic status.

Trump’s Justice Department is currently asking the Supreme Court for permission to build a deportation machine that can disappear anyone, citizen and immigrant alike, to a foreign prison forever, permanently extinguishing their constitutional rights with zero due process. slate.com/news-and-pol...

It seems a little insane that we're actually discussing whether or not a president can have you disappeared into a foreign prison camp where you will have no legal recourse.

Two Republican judges on the North Carolina Court of Appeals just effectively overturned Justice Allison Riggs' victory over Jefferson Griffin by retroactively nullifying thousands of lawful votes. A massive and outrageous blow to democracy.

the loomer stuff tracks with my broad framework of the world since 2015 where any morally bankrupt person I reflexively feel is supremely unworthy of my attention ends up being somebody who i am professionally forced to pay lots of attention to for years and years

unbelievably funny that every major financial institution in the anglosphere refused to give a concretely negative financial projection for the united states economy because calling trump and the republican administration stupid was considered too politicized

The tariffs are catastrophic. But so too are the abuses of power, so is the corruption, so are the police state tactics, so is the destruction of our health care infrastructure, so are the ways our national security is being endangered, so are the attacks on our core freedoms.

they are literally prosecuting thought crimes. this is fascism

Disappeared Tufts Human Dev. PhD student Rumesya Ozturk is also a graduate of Teachers College - she’s a dev. psychologist studying children’s media & prosocial development. She also bakes without recipes and binge-watches cartoons. She is our colleague & she was abducted on the street w/ our tax $.

"The use of prisoners for propaganda purposes is as old as war itself. ISIS made extensive use... The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese...This is what evil, illiberal regimes do." Now that's us. Must-read @JVLast thebulwark.com/p/this-is-th...

NEW: @motherjones.com reports that one of the men renditioned to El Salvador is Neri Alvarado, who was working in Dallas as a baker. An ICE agent told him they were questioning all men with tattoos. Neri has an AUTISM AWARENESS TATTOO in honor of his 15-year-old brother with autism.

When scholars of authoritarianism and fascism leave U.S. universities because of the deteriorating political situation here, we should really worry.