Anthropic partnering with the Gates Foundation on health and economic mobility while also making a deal to use the Memphis xAI data center polluting Boxtown, every day is a winding road

It feels a bit on the nose to be reading a WaPo article about ProPublica employees going on strike for, among other things, guardrails on AI in journalism, and seeing a little button telling me to “dive deeper” into this story using AI. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

The obvious question is to ask what is the point of the article. And the answer is means testing. By saying the rich don't deserve public goods it makes it easier to say someone just above the poverty line doesn't either. They want public goods to be shit.

📣 New! @cariatida.bsky.social, @aihathing.bsky.social & Sanjay Pinto argue for understanding the sprint to create the "AI-first economy" not as the logical march of progress, but as a series of deliberate economic decisions that risk harming workers in ways old & new. datasociety.net/library/last...

Endlessly grotesque the way he's talking like some feudal lord invoking droit du seigneur over one of his female vassals...

A while back I saw an AI-generated "anti-woke comedian" Insta account advertising itself as "uncancellable." Which, I feel like, is probably a more direct endgame of these AI personas in cultural production; more so than job displacement, it's just the ambition of crafting an unaccountable cipher.

"But as sex work has become an increasingly digital field, their major concern is the contract’s threat to their ability to protect their image and likeness, especially from potential AI uses." www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Abolish ICE is not enough. It's not about training -- Ross who killed Renee Good was a TRAINER. It's not about body cams -- we saw Alex Pretti killed with our own eyes. We have to abolish the idea that violence ever made us safer, before it's too late. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

AI use for progress notes is causing serious privacy and clinical risks in aged care. Professional bodies need to act. AI shouldnt be used for client notes and reports hellocare.com.au/ai-use-for-p...

Donation link to the Sameer Project's "Give Warmth to Gaza" campaign is here: chuffed.org/project/1491...

ICE agents shot a woman yesterday, but that wasn't enough cruelty, so Border Patrol went to a school and attacked people.

If he fixes the 17th Ave pedestrian footbridge over the Belt Parkway in Bath Beach that's been """"under construction"""" since 2021, I will truly believe in miracles.

Featuring a trans woman so prominently at his inauguration like this was an absolutely baller move by Zohran

Our study, using over 400 volunteer shoppers, found that Instacart offered different prices to different shoppers on 74% of the grocery items tested.

One Haitian woman “showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled,” her attorney said.

A disaster in the making for millions of care workers and the people they support: "[The Trump administration proposal] reopens a loophole allowing employers to broadly classify care workers as “companions” who can be paid less than minimum wage and are not eligible for overtime pay."

"Remembering Alice Wong: Writer, Advocate, Friend" Steven W. Thrasher on Meeting and Collaborating with the Outspoken Founder of the Disability Visibility Project published by @literaryhub.bsky.social | art by @mollycrabapple.bsky.social lithub.com/remembering-...

"...she used the same phrasing ChatGPT had given back to her: precise, clinical, flattened language...Her deep fears were now encased in borrowed phrases, translated into a format she thought I would recognize as legitimate medical concerns..." www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

⚠️ How are workers led movements against AI shaping climate action in the tech industry? Join us for a book presentation on worker led movements by Tamara Kneese (Data & Society) with Sana Ahmad (Weizenbaum-Institute). Register now: buff.ly/SnAZkHi @tamigraoh.bsky.social, @datasociety.bsky.social

Turns out a lot of Americans understand that trans people aren’t the reason shit is expensive and people are being starved

The basic takeaway from Wong and Warzel's Atlantic piece last week: big tech is financing data-centers at break neck speed by packaging securitized debt on hypothetical gains from super intelligence. Great. 🙃

Starvation is always a policy choice. Just like homelessness.

It's kind of funny the idea that a $20K robot housekeeper is a novel, dystopian loss of privacy when for millennia poor people have had *very* intimate views into the daily lives of the ultra-rich by working as maids, cooks, nannies, and butlers in their homes. Now they're just working remotely.

We are offering one time payments to disabled folks in the South who will not receive their SNAP benefits this month. If you need help, please find more information and details at ndsdj.org/snaphelp. If you’d like to donate to the fund, go to ndsdj.org/snapdonate We take care of each other ❤️

🚨NEW🚨 from DAIR: Today we are releasing "Driven Down", a new report on how workplace technology enables Amazon to steal wages, hide labor, intensify poor working conditions, and evade responsibility. Read the full report here: drive.google.com/file/d/1yBxy...

Nighttime, the enemy of capitalism. "The company...says its future constellation will deliver light on demand after sunset and before sunrise to paying customers on Earth, effectively extending the daytime hours." www.space.com/space-explor...

AWS outage seemingly takes down Medicare website during open enrollment... www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

“The notion of AI personhood is a marketing exercise and a legal maneuver that I don’t think we should buy into,” says D&S researcher @cariatida.bsky.social. “Tilly is not an actress any more than, like, Sid the sloth from the ‘Ice Age’ movies is an actor.” www.huffpost.com/entry/ai-act...

Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.

Opening up a talent agency and creating an army of AI actresses named Milly, Dilly, Lilly, Billy, Jilly (and so on) who are all completely identical to Tilly but cost less to underbid this so-called AI talent agency. variety.com/2025/film/ne...

GOP lawmakers cite Georgia’s experiment as a model for the federal Medicaid work requirements set to take effect in 2027. A new report by a government spending watchdog found that the nation’s only Medicaid work requirement program spent twice as much on administrative costs as on health care.

Companies are marketing “alternatives” to immigration detention such as ankle monitors, GPS-enabled watches, and biometric reporting apps. But research by Petra Molnar, Daniel Ghezelbash, Carolina Gottardo, and Antonella Napolitano finds that tech doesn’t dismantle detention—it expands it.

Trump administration tackling the problem of home health care workers getting wages that are [checks notes...] too high.

Republicans: "transgenderism must be eradicated." Trans people: "they're trying to eradicate us." Republicans: "Saying we want to eradicate you is violent extremism."

My dad was a storyboard artist for a commercial art studio for 30 years, and he'd tell me how the transition from alcohol markers to digital in the early 2000s was quite rough and led to a lot of labor intensification. But it's stories like these that make me glad he's retired.

Sharing a snapshot of a project I’ve been working on w/collaborators Zoe West & Sanjay Pinto at Cornell ILR School, looking at genAI in the fashion modeling industry. AI-generated models have been turning up a lot - H&M, a Guess ad, Luigi(!) in Shein’s catalog… datasociety.net/points/fashi...

NEWS ALERT: Early bird tickets now available for Circuit Breakers, our annual US tech labor conference! Repost please! 🗽 New York City, Oct. 18-19th ✊ Conference will feature workers from the wider tech labor movement 🎟️ Snag your early bird tickets here: techworkerscoalition.org/circuit-breakers

CRAFT FAIR FOR GAZA! Tomorrow! 629 Nostrand Ave. 12-6 PM

🙃

Administrative burden by design- but with even less ability to trace decision-making processes. Mind you, OIG & Senate were previously investigating Medicare Advantage insurers for their high rates of denied payments oig.hhs.gov/reports/all/...

Black markets always reveal how things really work: "This is a colonial model adjusted in the digital age: European citizens may use their status and residency to be paid for doing nothing, while taskers in the Global South only get a fraction to do all the work” algorithmwatch.org/en/scams-and...

I wrote about this in 2020. This shit isn’t new and people are just capitalizing on the AI hype cycle slate.com/technology/2...

"Reductions could come in several forms. States could place further restrictions on who qualifies for coverage, cover fewer hours of care or lower pay for home health workers. Or they could eliminate waiver programs altogether." www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/w...

In our new policy brief for @datasociety.bsky.social, @mwoluchem.bsky.social and I break down the myths and industry talking points attached to data centers. Who benefits from unbridled data center growth and who is most at risk when such speculative ventures fail?

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: liberals and liberalism have turned transphobia into a mainstream, everyday, top tier, omnipresent social crisis. It was a niche problem driven by conservatives. Liberals blew it into the screaming global moral panic it now is.

National Guard at the LA riots in 1992, by photographer Gary Leonard.

Really lovely essay on photography, grief, and the pandemic: "But our very real pandemic had no shortage of documentation. You remember. We showed every bit of evidence of our deterioration to each other as it happened..." www.thegeorgiareview.com/posts/polaro...

🚨 Support Los Angeles immigrant communities 🚨 Please consider donating to one or all of the following orgs: Immigrant Defenders Law Center: give.immdef.org/donate LA Jail Support / Bail Fund: account.venmo.com/u/jailsuppor... Unión del Barrio: uniondelbarrio.org/main/support...

I want to report some good news from LA: ICE picked a hotel in Pasadena to be their headquarters for this side of the city. The residents of Pasadena (myself included) would not stand for this and protested all yesterday in front of the hotel until, eventually, the hotel kicked out ICE!!

“Shareholders can rejoice as less worker organizing means fewer problems for companies...And if the people who work the closest with this technology don't get a say in it, who will?” From Luca Belli in @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/ai-gig-worke...