Obituary slop is truly insidious. And it's a prime example of AI being used exactly according to design (pejorative). www.cnet.com/tech/service...

"I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write."

What happens if Trump hits the “kill switch” and blocks Europe from American tech? No Amazon or PayPal. Netflix and YouTube blocked. The building blocks of our lives: inaccessible. But what was once an outlandish question is now less hypothetical. Today's Big Read is on #FTEdit 👉 ft.trib.al/mk8Sop4

WE DON'T NEED PETROLEUM-BASED PLASTICS ANYMORE! "The [bamboo plastic] outperforms most commercial plastics and bioplastics in mechanical and thermo-mechanical metrics while maintaining full biodegradability in soil within 50 days and closed-loop recyclability with 90% retained strength."

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...

I recommend being a breathless booster hype man for people and friends and ideas you very much actually like.

Another example of how your data will be used against you. You should be able to own and drive a vehicle without it transmitting ANY data at all. Alternatively, include an ability to turn it off. Why should consumers pay for this self-surveillance that benefits others? @profferguson.bsky.social

I am collecting protopia. Amsterdam is one of few protopian cities

It has come to my attention that not everyone has experienced this most ethereal, dudes rock, vibiest music video Ahead of a very anticipated album release (or maybe it’s just me??) please enjoy this sensory bath youtu.be/Ng2vTXxnD20?...

This hit me so hard this week.

A dozen female Palestinians are working to save and preserve medieval and early modern manuscripts 📕 from the Al-Omari mosque’s library. Hang this picture in the Louvre (and the Met). www.newarab.com/features/ins...

Adding this to the list of protopian things we want to

Solid reporting on why "age verification and age assurance" are just fancy ways of saying "online identity checks" and why lawmakers have much better ways to address online harm if they'd just listen to experts and impacted communities www.governing.com/policy/state...

If you are in or near London, they are having a mini-RightsCon at Newspeak House! 🙌🎉 We can just DO things… together. luma.com/dhw92dsa

Looking for a name to the fallacy when technologists conflate what is possible with what is realized. Promises that end-users will be empowered through a technological means without addressing the social, cultural, literacy, and infrastructural aspects that it takes to sustain those changes .

😡

"The digital sphere is still in its early days. It may currently suffer under an authoritarian private government, but that need not be its adult form. We stand at the doorstep of democratic renewal that can take us out of the 18th century and into our better future."

I added most of my recent low-relief paper sculptures to my website. I love seeing these gathered together. Check it out: rachaelashe.com/paperart/low...

my team at @ainowinstitute.bsky.social is hiring three new roles: a program associate, comms associate, and senior operations director. come join us in the fight to shape the future of AI in the public interest! more details here: bit.ly/49jMZe7

lmao www.euronews.com/next/2026/05...

A big study that was cited as evidence that text generators are good for students has been retracted: www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-wi... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NEW: DHS subpoenaed Google for a Canadian man's location and account activity after he criticized ICE. The man hasn't been in the US in 10+ years, and DHS used an import law from the 1930s to try to get his data. ACLU is fighting it. @regret.bsky.social w/ the scoop: www.wired.com/story/dhs-de...

my “chatgpt helps keep teens safe by default” ad has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my ad

This is one of the most quietly revolutionary things any city can do to improve kids' lives & outcomes. If you genuinely care about kids having access to education or safe after school spaces & activities, then fund your libraries, staff your libraries, & make every public school ID a library card.

the first between Tidal, Apple, and Spotify to ban AI songs will get a windfall of new subs and the other two will get crumbs

He’s barely beating @killthecomputer.com lmfaooooooo

Updated my tracker of European orgs—governments, companies, etc—ditching US tech. It's now up to 20 entries, with the latest including a couple of media entities, the Dutch National Bank (reportedly), and open source sewing software Spreadsheet here: drive.proton.me/urls/EG60KWH...

my husband is preparing a different kind of potato every night this week, because it is my birthday week and potatoes are one of my love languages

This article frames tech as a battleground between parents and schools. But I was chatting the other day with a school official who's leading an effort to shift her district away from device-based learning, and she told me--every teacher she's talked to is on board. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/t...

Perfect summary. 1) Googlers routinely assume that the research and services they provide in exchange for the rent they extract are God's Gift To Creation, even though they're very unimpressive for the actual cost. They also think the manage data well, which their own privacy team contradicts…

Finally some useful innovation

The fight is here. If hospitals, airports, & stadiums succeed in normalizing facial rec, get ready to scan your face EVERYWHERE. Your privacy - and the privacy of the vulnerable, the dissident, the minority - will disappear forever.

I’m collecting realistic protopian futures and this is good

Adding this to the Protopian Thoughts collection that answers “what would the world look like if the internet was good?”

This is so smart. The people do not yearn for automation! “It is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software—to turn themselves into a database—is a doomed idea.” www.theverge.com/podcast/9170...

Revoking kids' visas because their parents criticized Elon Musk.

Oligarchs have always been a threat, but tech oligarchs represent a new level of danger. Their wealth dwarfs historical tycoons and their control over algorithms allows them to curate human reality. They own the digital infrastructure of thought

cephalopodmaxxing

This is wild: the authors find evidence for giant, macro-predatory octopuses in Late Cretaceous oceans that might max out at *62 feet long,* comfortably large enough to attack, kill and eat mosasaurs

Ashamed Meta Employee Just Tells Everyone He Works As Guard In Private Prison For Disabled Children https://theonion.com/ashamed-meta-employee-just-tells-everyone-he-works-as-g-1851012454/

We are very happy that today Apple issued a patch and a security advisory. This comes following 404 Media reporting that the FBI accessed Signal message notification content via iOS despite the app being deleted.

What she said 👇🏻 To put a finer point on it, it took House Republicans more than a year to come up with this barely-reheated, lukewarm garbage. Shameful *and* embarrassing.

Current stack of what I hope will be protopian fiction. Not dystopian! Not utopian! Realistic-ish visions of what the world could be if it was better than what we have now.

"Benches are where optimistic visions of civic life meet reality. To remove them, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it." NEW: Why benches are slowly disappearing from public spaces — and why we need them back:

I’ve been looking for protopian fiction and this book has just made it onto the list

This Is Just To Say I have turned off the AI features that were in the update and which you were probably hoping to monetize Fuck you they were stupid so unnecessary and so annoying

This is a good thread, but I'd like to make a slightly different point here: it's not that money won, it's that we set the game up so that money would win. The distinction matters because it informs how we can change things.

I haven't had a long enough breath to talk about how AI is ruining the open web. API after API I used to use is closing - literally because paying the $$$ required to feed these impersonation machines is prohibitive.

Sorry to be overly sincere for a second, but here's why we decided to persevere through all of the bullshit and take over InfoWars. There's just gotta be a line somewhere. Thank you @pablo.show for letting me talk so openly about this.