the only thing i'm comfortable labeling "AI" is an LLM that can generate code. everything else is either a clever machine learning tool or an automated civil rights violation.

YIKES: NSO floats Pegasus spyware used in hypothetical "time of domestic crisis" in 🇺🇸America. I believe they won't stop lobbying until they get Pegasus into USA. To hack Americans. 1/

Today is the official UK publication day for Silicon Empires! I'm excited to have it out and hear what people think. There's an enormous amount happening every day in AI, and it's difficult to gain a stable perspective. I wrote the book to try and get some secure hold on that constant flux. 🧵

terrifying myself by imagining that, somewhere out there, someone with more security clearance than brain cells is planning covert operations using chat gpt

religiondispatches.org/latest-ice-r... there it is. it is really out in the open

This is wild but I went on my fav podcast QAA Pod to harp on about the phoney baloney NatSec social science of Disinfo Studies. Big thanks to @travisview.bsky.social and Julian! www.patreon.com/posts/135278...

*The "Ljublen Set" Ancient Roman Multitool was unearthed from a dual grave with a married woman in it, while the "Ventimiglia Set" Ancient Roman Multitool came from a grave with an alleged woman's hairpin in it

starting to think we might need an Ingrate Man Theory of History

Surprisingly, we find that users who share unreliable URLs are more likely to share science. Moreover, this is particularly concentrated in more untrustworthy domains classified as fake/hoax or conspiracy theory. (3/10)

Good account of a KGB "dangle" to the CIA in the cold war. "GTPROLOGUE exemplifies CIA’s troubled experience with hostile double agents during the 1980s, when a few select services—particularly the Soviets, East Germans & Cubans—badly burned the agency." www.cia.gov/resources/cs...

Just arrived in Kraków for the 2025 'EISA European Workshops in International Studies Conference'. Any friends fancy some pierogi? #EWIS2025

CIA has published a lessons-learned review into the tradecraft behind the intel assessment that Russia "aspired" to help Trump win in 2016. The review highlights "multiple procedural anomalies" in that assessment. cia.gov/static/a336f...

Do you think Trump’s insistence that it be called the “12 Day War” is because someone briefed him on the Six-Day War and he wants ‘his’ war to be bigger?

Another short piece from me (apologies) on the pitfalls of military tech and VC logics and their fraught relationship to the realities of war. In this piece, I bring back Norbert Wiener to illustrate that technological progress should have ethical limits. untoldmag.org/when-war-bec...

I’m halfway into this amazing work by Erik Rechborn-Kjennerud that just dropped. I assume it will quickly become a go-to book in the genre. If you are interested in how and with what consequences militaries wage war, do yourself a favor and grab a copy. direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

This is one of the worst violations of research ethics I've ever seen. Manipulating people in online communities using deception, without consent, is not "low risk" and, as evidenced by the discourse in this Reddit post, resulted in harm. Great thread from Sarah, and I have additional thoughts. 🧵

excellent thread on our present political economy from my pal the Wolf

@thelastinstance.bsky.social weighing in on LLMs as symbolic prostheses: codepoetics.substack.com/p/ai-as-symb...

it's strange to read a scientific or scholarly paper and not find a single question mark. i can understand wanting to avoid a rhetorical style, but isn't addressing doubt the point of any inquiry?

All eyes on Serbia today. Time for the EU to end its cynical & anti-democratic cooperation with Vučić—a man who was Milošević’s actual propaganda minister. No deal with Vučić & Rio Tinto for lithium (DE); no sale of fighter jets (FR); no cooperation with repressive Serbian intelligence. #pumpaj

Standing with #belgrade - at least live on TV. The estimated number of 800,000 participants has just been announced on N1 - that was compared in percentage terms to 4,000,000 people taking part in a demonstration in Germany. #pumpaj

Extraordinary scenes in Serbia’s capital Belgrade right now. Around 500,000 people are on the streets in what may be the biggest protest in Serbian history. All demanding the resignation of President Vučić & his government. What began as a student protest is now a full democratic uprising. 🇷🇸

A digital ‘withdrawal’ from Europe? The U.S. halted all cyber operations – marking a stark shift from the previous administration’s cybersecurity strategy. On #PRIFblog, @cyberpeace1.bsky.social takes a close look at the consequences and why this policy shift matters. blog.prif.org/2025/03/13/u...

the only thing that can stop a Bad State with a weaponized security apparatus is a Good State with a weaponized security apparatus

sending thoughts and prayers to my CIA #FOIA request. this was already the expected completion date even before the current regime

There's a view that I call (for lack of a better expression) 'psychologism about the manifest image,' which expects most philosophical-sounding questions about entities outside of math and physics to be best addressed by discussing quirks or pathologies of human cognition

Over several years of phd work on deception in international relations, my own feelings about the geopolitical significance of disinformation, lying, manipulation etc, have swung from "very important!" to "mostly trivial..." to "no one knows [shrug]?" and, most recently, "Falsehood is Our Episteme".

I worry about a world (we haven't seen it yet) in which the node deletion is targeted according to network centrality etc, rather than random, making tariff-type measures far closer to the kinds of weaponized interdependence that @abenewman.bsky.social and I have described in our research.

See e.g. arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat... for a sense of how much more quickly things could get bad if governments start using some of the supply chain data that they have been gathering for offensive purposes.

can’t wait to have deepseek reviewer 2 the paper chatgpt wrote for me

if i was Peter Thiel and wanted to endear myself to regime sceptics by demonstrating that i was not a deranged and racist pseud but rather an erudite and discerning leader, i would probably not publish an OpEd that reads like you prompted a Straussian LLM to mimic Nick Land but that’s just me

Here's my Clashing Information Orders syllabus in case there is anything worth cannibalizing from it www.programmablemutter.com/p/a-syllabus...

RIP Wolfgang Wildgen: cognitive linguist and semiotician, sociolinguist, and theorist of evolutionary linguistics. His work beinging together Peircean semiotics with René Thom's catastrophe theory challenged me to push my learning into fields i never imagined. Below a list of his publications:

thinkin about how both Snowden and Assad have political asylum in Russia

social media is deskilling SVR and MSS agents

I don't write because it's easy, I write because the person who organized the Special Issue told me it would be easy

best example of Talcott Parson's concept of Double Contingency is two overly-familiar people trying to decide what to have for dinner

jar jar binks saying "mise en abyme"

We identified some important trends in the literature: - The majority of studies (78%) measure belief in misinfo as the primary outcome - Most studies discuss the potential real-world consequences of misinformation, but very few (<10%) actually study behavioural outcomes

While it is often said to be 'as old as war itself', my book shows that the idea of 'psychological war' was a specific product of WWII, early US intelligence agencies, and a broader desire to dress up 'propaganda' in the language of the social sciences.

My favourite politics book this year

New post up on @bindinghook.bsky.social from @danwblack.bsky.social! Moscow used a new type of cyberattack to destabilise Ukraine’s electricity grid — read more here bindinghook.com/articles-hoo...

[noodling] why are espionage/spy systems so difficult to build for 4x games? top level concept: Three phases: initial access maintaining access goals/consequences initial access would have the most branches depending on what the risk tolerance in maintaining access and the potential goal