Gonna take a break from social media for a while, to focus on some writing! My email's on my website, if anyone wants to be in touch about something!

Here come the economists to tell us the stock market is doing gangbusters and no we're not in a recession everything is fine stop looking so worried

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

This book looks really cool. Understanding both the nightmares and hopes of AI are important not because they are true, but because they reveal something about what people are really contending with that is the real issue at hand.

Common Notions gift guide - for all the loved ones who know that labor creates all wealth @veronicagago.bsky.social @tamigraph.bsky.social @enda-b.bsky.social @gleemie.bsky.social

Looks like this Meta is gone again (TikTok's still there though), very curious about this. Wouldn't be surprised at all if they gave money but didn't want their name on it. Well - I'd read a story about what happened here

Did we really need a mnemonic for remembering that the wolf is the bad guy (Naomi) in the story?

I think the forces that have aligned major parts of the Western working class with capital are under immense strain. And the "white men are deprived of opportunities by DEI" line of argument is trying to explain this in fascist terms, rather than materialist ones. Imho, one has to understand 1/4

Lovely blogpost from @jasonread.bsky.social! What drives technological development, and how do social developments and technological developments relate? Does one drive the other? Relating these seemingly abstract questions to AI, and claims of its inevitability is absolutely crucial!

We live in a time of monsters

Added "Why we fear AI" by @hagenblix.bsky.social to my picks of 2025! semble.so/profile/rone...

For a brief second I thought Ross Douthat had had something like an actual thought, but then I realized he's talking about that mediocre white man that didn't get that one job or whatever.

Why do the promises of technology ring not just hollow, but hostile? We look at the political economy of tech and hype, and argue that the powers that be literally can't distinguish between the good and the awful. 👇

AI is a labor issue. We'll have to join professional ethics with class consciousness in this fight.

Happy to finally launch Disjunctions with an article from the editorial team! Stay tuned for our first issue, which we will start publishing in the new year.

Strong correlation between how well people are known, and their advancing in @techwontsave.us's "Worst Person in Tech 2025". I guess we can conclude that people rightly feel like: "All tech billionaires are bad, but the more I know about them, the worse they seem."

great piece from @hagenblix.bsky.social on the thought-terminating character of the anti-hype framing. it’s a category error to argue with hype in the same way it’s a mistake to argue with an ad playing on your TV. it is not listening. it will not respond

I tend to think that critiques of "identity politics" are usually missing the mark quite widely. But idk if something noteworthy isn't happening when "my kid doesn't want to talk to me" is a thing that people want to deal with by constructing some kind of shared identity?

Why do the promises of technology ring not just hollow, but hostile? We look at the political economy of tech and hype, and argue that the powers that be literally can't distinguish between the good and the awful. 👇

abolish geniuses

Join leadership and experts from @aaup.org AI team and Mijente for an online press conference on the urgent concerns about Palantir Technologies' involvement with the Department of Education. fedscoop.com/palantir-edu... TOMORROW Wednesday, December 17, 4PM ET Register here: bit.ly/4p3iCh7

Excellent essay from @kevinbaker.bsky.social on LLMs as a machinery for intensifying a bureaucratic logic (If you like it, our book, Why We Fear AI is concerned with a lot of related issues, from management to bureaucracy!)

I have to admit, when I read Latour's Laboratory Life, I thought it was satirizing anthropology

Excellent essay from @kevinbaker.bsky.social on LLMs as a machinery for intensifying a bureaucratic logic (If you like it, our book, Why We Fear AI is concerned with a lot of related issues, from management to bureaucracy!)

“Knowledge ultimately residing in private property is the dream” of Bezos, Altman, Thiel, et al.

Another first with the Meta sponsor just added to the Turning Point USA mega conference

So RAM prices have basically tripled because of the AI demand, wonder how that's negatively affecting everyone else who might, you know, use computers 🤷

Google is currently mistaking bookshop.org's "X dollars Raised For Local Bookstores" banner as the price when you google a book title & bookshop lol

The AI corollary to Clarke's claim

Some interesting points, especially around the idea that even mediocre human output is about the production of scientific community (whereas AI slop is undermining the very possibility of communality)

Man, when this whole thing comes crashing down (and you know it has to come down at this rate), it'll be bad

I find it nearly impossible to imagine that anyone other than a white man could write such texts, when this is surely not at all true for texts calling for more empathy for literally anyone or anything else (Didn't read the text, so I won't link it)

and we're seeing people lose access to basic human needs because of algorithmic systems; i keep getting really angry about hinton brushing off the work of people like timnit and safiya and a bunch of other women in AI who were saying this for years, because he was slow on the uptake & vain about it

i often worry there won't be any pop in the same way that the military industrial complex didn't pop at the end of the cold war. the state is so invested in *making* AI an effective tool for management and oppression that they will let people die if the alternative is to admit this tech is overblown

"Am I saying that every machine learning course has to have a few weeks on science studies? Yes I am. Of course, this is frustrating as all hell to computer science students who are taught that you just type incantations into Jupyter notebooks and conjure up pure logical positivism."

Economists and other apologists of capitalism have sold our institutions on a particular model of needs, wants, and desires: We cannot know them, except as measured by spending. Whatever people buy is what they want and need. It's an idea that cloaks itself in apparent humility: 🧵

Yeah, way more writing needs to make the connection to recently Trump-pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, for example, whose conflict with the supreme court was about establishing libertarian governance zones like Próspera

The ebook version of Why We Fear AI is currently on sale for just $5 directly at the publisher! @commonnotions.bsky.social

This is the whole ball-game of the billionaire tech bros. It's a world that should be totally rejected.

There really is a weird blood-and-soil undercurrent to these forms of self-flagellation. I suspect it says a lot about the spiritual emptiness at the heart of liberal capitalism that it keeps generating this depressingly poor and evil idea of "belonging" as its way of imagining community

"there is little reason to doubt what the aim [of the massive investment in AI] is: to embed knowledge in machines—knowledge that previously belonged to the people working in these domains." 🧵

1. In Hamburg there is a "fully autonomous train" that for some reason has a human operator to press the ON switch first thing in the morning and the OFF switch at the end of the night. In a recent talk about AI in science, I asked the audience to consider whether they want to be like that operator.

Hey @mta.info - why are there eugenicist ads on our subways?!

No, I actually love when me and my data are being turned into the inside of a privately owned black box algorithm for manipulating people, thanks for (not even) asking, ebay

@katiejwells.bsky.social ‘s research finds that Instacart shoppers experienced extreme algorithmic price discrimination - just as Instacart workers experience wage discrimination. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/b...

AI will somehow 'solve energy' and is 'on the verge of curing all diseases' but the bottleneck is that people 'wont accept the singularity.' It feels very like "I am worried about the rapture because my favorite teacher is not a born again christian."

"Not hating women is gay" is really what it is about

Space is cold, but not "cold to the touch"

Also: Markets are made, that's why we can't count on hype, bubble, etc to solve these problems, exhibit #9000