It's heeeeere

“Squarespace for scams.”

happy this day

I hate that AI has made me approach cute animal videos with an air of suspicion. I resent having to harden my heart to the possibility of an unlikely friendship between a very large dog and a very small one

As @damonberes.com writes in @theatlantic.com, Big Tech companies are basically porting over their social media business models into generative AI. Once again, they’re betting we will trade our attention and data for the promise of connection. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

When I woke up this morning I didn't expect my workday would end with Charlie talking to Deepak Chopra about appearing in the Epstein email dump, but life is full of beautiful surprises

Importance: High subj: An article for U (gift link) i wrote ,,,,,, about jeff epstein. s emails. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Tech companies have long promised to deliver a golden age of human connection—but with AI companions, what’s actually unfolding is a digital age “more actively anti-social than the last,” @damonberes.com argues:

🤙🤙

For the cover of Businessweek’s December issue, I wrote about the reigning queen of America’s strip malls: Ulta Beauty, the country’s biggest beauty retailer (yes, bigger than Sephora) and quietly one of the more fascinating retailers in the country. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Tell Caity about your fave bread

The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

In one specific way, Grok might be the most honest and transparent AI project out there nymag.com/intelligence...

I read fewer novels than I’d like to but I did in fact read Flesh a month or two ago and it really was very good

The veil is dropping…

i parachute into X/Twitter a lot for my job and obviously have chronicled the devolution but today it feels that, even outside of the realm of groyperposting the broad culture there is just like *i have lead poisoning*

job opening alert

I think @damonberes.com nailed this one: Social media is not social anymore, and with the pivot to AI, companies that build social media are building something that is isolating us even more www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Cannot wait for this. I will buy several. I will read it to my three-year-old

A lot of great detail in this story by my colleague @nickmiroff.bsky.social, but I’m struck that you could boil most of the justifications down to: ICE agents are scared.

Omg a heartwarming tale!!!!

Tulsi Gabbard is trying to take control over counterintelligence from the FBI. It's not going great. A scoop with @shaneharris.bsky.social

One of the best newsletters I receive tbqh

I think @damonberes.com right that chatbots shouldn’t be your friends, and insidious stuff arises from treating them as such. But that doesn’t doom LLMs, which are useful and (sorry to ppl here) not purely evil. It would be nice to try to sort out the jumble, but our culture isn’t great at that!

"Over years of use—and product upgrades—many of us may simply slip into relationships with bots that we first used as helpers or entertainment, just as we were lulled into submission by algorithmic feeds" www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

this is so good and really captures what's sinister about everyone befriending chatbots. "They provide some facsimile of companionship while allowing users to avoid uncomfortable interactions or reciprocity," writes @damonberes.com www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Although chatbots may be built on the familiar architecture of engagement, they enable something new: They allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself". 👇👇

@damonberes.com wrote a real barnburner this week, on what we are permitting the AI chatbot industry to do to us all. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

if you're gonna read anything today, make it @damonberes.com's excellent (and unnerving) story about AI chatbots derailing the future of human friendship: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

New: The FBI filed a subpoena trying to unmask the person or people behind archive.is / archive.today, which have been running anonymously for 13 yrs. Site was widely used by GamerGate, and then to bypass paywalls but has become kind of core archiving infrastructure www.404media.co/fbi-tries-to...

😇

Tech companies have long promised to deliver a golden age of human connection—but with AI companions, what’s actually unfolding is a digital age “more actively anti-social than the last,” @damonberes.com argues:

New from me: I went deep on the way that generative AI and chatbots act as wormholes, pushing us deeper into our own minds. They threaten to compound the problems of algorithmic targeting that have festered unaddressed for years and years—what comes next may be even more alienating and isolating (🎁)

Robots are cool! But you definitely need real friends. Chatbots "allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself." And the anti-social media era is only in its infancy... Must-read @damonberes.com: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Defining and essential from @damonberes.com on how AI is ushering the age of anti-social media: "Although chatbots may be built on the familiar architecture of engagement, they enable something new: They allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

New from me: I went deep on the way that generative AI and chatbots act as wormholes, pushing us deeper into our own minds. They threaten to compound the problems of algorithmic targeting that have festered unaddressed for years and years—what comes next may be even more alienating and isolating (🎁)

I don't want to over hype anything but @cwarzel.bsky.social's GALAXY BRAIN is going to be the single greatest podcast ever created I cannot wait

A little-known nonprofit has been lying to news publishers while funneling millions of paywalled articles to tech companies for AI training. Read my investigation in The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

good, smart, and long overdue look at Common Crawl: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Be sure you get to the kicker in this essential investigation into Common Crawl, the data archive behind the AI boom

Didn't want to be on a crystal cube on the moon anyway

NEW: Common Crawl, the massive archiver of the web, has gotten cozy with AI companies and is providing paywalled articles for training data. They’re also lying to publishers who have asked for material to be removed. “The robots are people too,” CC’s exec director told us when we asked about this.

Grateful to the always-fantastic @andrewdeck.bsky.social for writing such a substantial piece building on our recent AI Watchdog work at the Atlantic 🙏

are we seriously securitizing ai data centres. are we deadass.

"Mamdani argues that 'freeze the rent' is not just a way of delivering relief from exorbitant housing costs; it is the only way to get enough voters on board with a growth agenda. A growing body of real-world evidence suggests that he has a point."

Very bad ideas are being normalized at an astonishingly swift speed.

"Multiplying Ford’s current market cap 94 times over wouldn’t quite get you to Nvidia’s. Yet 20 years ago, Ford was worth nearly triple what Nvidia was."

Hundreds of billions spent on AI with little to show, a potential $1 trillion IPO without a path to profit, byzantine financial arrangements that, yes, can be sorted in tranches. @cwarzel.bsky.social and I on how the AI boom could come crashing down: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

so @matteowong.bsky.social & I wrote on data centers: arguably the most important buildings in the world & are, in a way, holding the economy hostage. Byzantine financial instruments, private equity, depreciating tech, hype, $trillion valuations. it’s all there. an ai crash prob starts here.