The tech sector's fall from grace should show us that the path to a more convivial life does not emerge from purchasing individual consumer technology. Those devices are build to alienate and isolate us. The "convenience" they promise just means "you do not have to meet and talk to others".

This whitewashing of actual antisemitism is as dangerous as it is expected, and it remains essential that we see this for what it is: fascist politics

Do you know I actually think that these people are so inoculated from any public sentiment that they are legitimately shook by a handful of boos at commencements this week?

Things are bad when you get fact checked by unherd.com

The fact that people are using AI to steal my writing, churn out a shittier version of it, falsely attribute it to someone more famous, and get more press coverage and sales for their book than I ever will is *chef’s kiss* pure 2026 energy

"synthetic quotes" - nice new oxymoron you have there

There’s a long list of reasons to boo this man.

Is Effective Altruism just but-look-there-are-numbers-washing for climate change denial at this point, or..?

Is Effective Altruism just but-look-there-are-numbers-washing for climate change denial at this point, or..?

DOJ considering intervening in the below case "under the Trump administration’s policy 'to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance.'" www.politico.com/newsletters/...

One of those books where I was somehow very familiar with a lot of their source material but they still came to conclusions that surprised me.

Is this one of those morbid symptoms of the interregnum, or..?

Reposting our essay on class conflict in Silicon Valley, from last year!

Published with some minor changes! Please share widely. 😊 Guest, O., Suarez, M., ... & van Rooij, I. (2026). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Digital Culture & Education, 16(2), 85–118. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Journal: www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/volume-162

We are living through a severe crisis of hegemony, a moment where the future is wide open. It's a time to be bold

ICYMI: Occasioned by Thomas Zigal's "The Seasons of Rick Roderick," @roberttally.bsky.social 's reflections on his former teacher Rick Roderick are still live on our website.

“The likelihood of PII appearing in AI training data is only increasing as public data ‘runs out’ and AI companies look for new sources of high-quality training data. This includes information from data brokers and people-search websites.”

The thing with the crisis of hegemony (ruling class can't solve the problems they see, can't form alliances, struggles to produce consent of the governed etc)... is that just buying the instruments for making hegemony doesn't solve that problem, it exacerbates it

Reposting our essay on class conflict in Silicon Valley, from last year!

Being accelerationist about it = Realizing that the current crisis of hegemony means that it's time for us to demand radically better things

You can, in fact, not automate the consent of the governed like this

Hey @sanders.senate.gov, we've got a book arguing that AI is a weapon of class war from above, a tool for wage depression. I think that's what you should be talking about, instead of repeating the industry's own marketing scares www.commonnotions.org/why-we-fear-ai

When we wrote our critique of machine ethics in 2021, the response that refused to acknowledge us found some Rawlsians on twitter who were basically like "noo, the LLM is basically pure democracy", and look where we're now *sigh* @adinawilliams.bsky.social @zeerak.bsky.social @mayameme.bsky.social

Raging Against the Machine: A Popular School Against AI Join @hagenblix.bsky.social (WHY WE FEAR AI) and some of the leading thinkers of our time as they address the problems, possibilities, and politics that haunt our understanding of AI.

Haven't watched it yet, but given the speaker list ( @kevinbaker.bsky.social, @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social, @beenwrekt.bsky.social, and Lily Hu), I am sure this will be excellent!

Meta employees are organizing against the mass surveillance of everyone at the company, already citing the NLRA Crucial time for some coalition building

I made a starter pack for Cultural AI based on this conference, if you have any names I should add, feel free to suggest go.bsky.app/5Cn68mW I'm getting the sense that this is a great synthesis of Critical AI and research and a good way forward for a conversation stuck in partisan clichéd hottakes.

"We think the straight will be opened because it would be bad if it didn't" Well, that is, uhm, an interesting perspective for the head of JPMorgan's global commodities strategy. So good to know that the ruling class totally knows what they're doing, and are totally not of gambling with our lives!

Someone is noticing that the "just burn through the tokens" strategy doesn't seem so rational

Concordia U is hosting this event — we’re going to make it into an episode of The Data Fix. I think that anyone can register and attend online or in person:

Coarse graining is pretty useful to think about AI with, imho (closely related to what Ingeborg Glimmer and me have been writing about AI & bureaucracy, and AI & deskilling, too)

hi, I'm hosting a new (limited run) book club at iffy on anarchy this summer! We're starting (on May 24th) with Anarchism & Other Essays by Goldman and Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin before diving into more contemporary stuff if you're in philly, come join :) victorgom.es/anarchy-summer

The rest of the issue was gold, too 1. There's someone literally named Sarah O'Connor asking "Can AI help poor countries leapfrog into the future?"

What so many have experienced personally has been confirmed by a new study: AI has been a disaster for working artists.

“Why is the proletariat not cheering for the bourgeoisie?” Look, if you believe AI is the “next Industrial Revolution,” ask yourself if weavers & the working class were super excited about factories. Then you’ll know what to say about AI at a commencement speech!

h/t @danmcquillan.bsky.social

Peer review is a method of scaling trust beyond interpersonal ties. It was already under stress - it won't survive this. The question is whether other systems of scaling trust can be found before the whole enterprise is rendered untenable

Like every Mother's Day today I am asking that you consider a donation to @nationalbailout.bsky.social to help free mamas who are separated from their families by the injustices of pretrial detention systems. secure.actblue.com/donate/freeb...

Peer review is a method of scaling trust beyond interpersonal ties. It was already under stress - it won't survive this. The question is whether other systems of scaling trust can be found before the whole enterprise is rendered untenable

Great thread. I wonder if the occultist tendencies of LLMs are part of what seems to make them so appealing to authoritarians?

This is a good thread. The idea of a “general purpose machine” in particular is interesting; it seems close to the idea of a perpetual motion (or, as was sometimes preferred, a “self-mover”) as articulated in the seventeenth century

Thanks for sharing that long quote; high overlaps too where you talk about Turing and golems with my work here from 2023 too: bsky.app/profile/oliv... Lots of crossovers!

This looks great, makes me wanna do a long quote from Why We Fear AI, too: "What, one might wonder, does it mean for a thing to be incomprehensible even to its creators? To say that something is in principle incomprehensible would be to make a mystical, even occult (1/23)

Looks like a great new paper!

"the forklift model" of a.i. education maxread.substack.com/p/the-drama-...

🧵Today I am releasing a new, open source tool that combines information on energy use, emissions, and health impacts for over 2,000 proposed and operating data centers across the US. It draws on the outstanding work of FracTracker Alliance, @oilandgaswatch.bsky.social, and others. 1/12

And yeah, of course the push for AI in schools is a push for technofascist obedience