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...

"We could call it spreadsheet culture in hyperdrive, a world in which all data can be translated into summary language and all language into optimized data with nothing more than a prompt. " www.theideasletter.org/essay/our-sp...

I'm fascinated by this notion that professional knowledge, experience, and skill have somehow been rendered so obsolete that employers can just hire any fungible, featureless human and have make them climb into the AI machine like it's a mecha robot. Journalist Gundam.

One of the scifi novels that feels too real for me these days is The Lathe of Heaven. I feel like George Orr waking up every morning to find some major, world-shattering event from like, the day before, has been wiped from collective public memory. Did it even happen? The forgetting is horrifying.

"I rely on Medicaid to cover a personal care attendant...And yet, if I earn more than the narrow income limits set by Supplemental Security Income — which is often tied to Medicaid eligibility — I risk losing that care altogether." thehill.com/opinion/heal...

"Be indigestible. Grow spikes." is such a perfect motto for this age. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

"Ethnic cleansing has become the official policy of Israel. The nation’s leaders are admitting it, without apology. There was barely a pretense before. But now there’s not even that. And these admissions, combined with mass killing on the ground, point to something even more horrific: genocide."

Please continue to donate to the Sameer Project. They continue to provide support, risking their own lives to deliver water and food to the most under-served areas of Gaza. They do this work while suffering unbearable losses of their own, as 'humanitarian' orgs retreat. chuffed.org/project/help...

I guess time to speed read all those articles I bookmarked to read "later." :( www.theverge.com/news/672924/...

"Precisely because they’re overlooked, administrative burdens are an excellent political tool to accomplish unpopular policy goals." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/o...

The underlying ideology of AI enforcers is that optimizing the individual will improve humanity: given the scope of collective actions needed to address climate change, this approach is absurd, wrong, and dangerous. But it conveniently lines up with the subscription-based economy of attention.

"The local police arrived to prevent the community from protecting their neighbor from an unlawful kidnapping. They succeeded, and in the process arrested two of the people who tried to stop it."

At which point she will have spent nearly two months behind bars for the crime of writing an op-ed.

“I hope this writing will startle you into understanding that a democracy for some — a democracy of convenience — is no democracy at all. I hope it will shake you into acting before it is too late.” www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Data centers are expanding globally; destroying the climate, exploiting labor, and creating toxic conditions for those nearby In this webinar we'll unpack what they are, why they're expanding, how we can organize against them. 📆 April 18, 2025 ⏰ 3pm PDT / 6pm EDT Register at bit.ly/datacenters101

"Palantir is running adverts at U.S. colleges which say “a moment of reckoning has arrived for the West. Our culture has fallen into shallow consumerism while abandoning national purpose. Too few in Silicon Valley have asked what ought to be built—and why. We did.”"

At this point maybe we just need to band together and set up a fake ChatGPT website, but it's actually just a chat window that connects our elected officials to constituents pretending to be AI in real time. Democracy in action...

“xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities... These dozens of gas turbines are doing significant harm to the air Memphians breathe every day.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I cannot overstate the crisis in basic access and inclusion rights the disability community is facing right now as Trump shreds all the agencies and entities responsible for upholding the laws tha protect us.