From the tech bro gospel: “someone was going to coarsen society and further immiserate people, it may as well be me.”

you'd think a prominent news outlet like the New York Times might mention that "antifa" isn't an actual organization in a long story about antifa, but nope! and the subhead helps props up a false claim this professor was up to something seedy as something up for debate

If the regime does go after DSA, the appropriate response will be for as many people as possible to become dues-paying members.

Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal for a data center in a Milwaukee suburbs after community pushback. After opposition from area residents and elected officials the 244 acre Caledonia project will not proceed.

I love it. Non-violent creativity works every time. Effective resistance is often (not exclusively) psychological and based on optics.

Fucking vampires. Amazon got a 100 percent property tax abatement... and has fires on the regular. futurism.com/future-socie...

Unacceptable to put the costs of the AI boom on the backs of families struggling to pay their bills. It’s a crisis.

Today on Volts: the folks at @rewiringamerica.bsky.social have an idea. Hyperscalers desperately need to free up grid capacity for data centers, right? Why not let them buy that capacity by paying for residential heat pumps & solar/storage systems? I discuss it w/ the head of RW & a rep from PG&E.

An ANU all-staff meeting erupted into cheers when it was announced that Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell was stepping down, writes Ben Eltham.

@wyden.senate.gov @repdexteror.bsky.social @hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social Let him shut it down. Have his tantrum. We don't throw people under the bus. Hold the line.

The Democrats already decided disabled ppl and Palestinians are worth sacrificing for everyone else’s comfort. Trans ppl are next if we don’t take a stand. It will be awful, but let him shut it down. At some point, you have to stop sacrificing ppl and stand for fucking something

The graphs in here are interesting. I wonder if the apparent 2025 drop in right-wing violence has to do with the fact that those folks feel appeased now that the fascists are in control, or if it has just morphed into state violence, and is now treated as out of scope.

No No No... Not another naked bike ride in Portland! 🫣

Here on the "war-ravaged" streets of Portland Oregon today, so far I have witnessed middle aged women discussing tree fruit, dude walking his dog with a latte, and brunch queues exceeding the 40 minute regulators requirement. Chaos!

I hope the difference between corporate media and civic-minded non-profit media is crystal clear. Even in these highly uncertain times, public media are still fighting for journalism and access to good information

To read the university’s triumphant all-campus email about restored NIH funding, you’d think UC administrators made it happen. But that’s not true. In fact the UC *Faculty Association* organized the lawsuit; administrators kept their heads down and hoped it’d go away.

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

The Enshittifier becomes the Enshittified.

Being Anti-Fascist is important but we need to also be aware about Fascism's root causes.

Do any of the professors or journalists or teachers also get their jobs back or nah

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Tired of how AI somehow lives rent-free in your head? Done with the ways that it inhibits our collective ability to imagine how technologies could be, beyond next word prediction? Now's your chance to gather with like-minded folks. Submissions due Oct 9. www.undonecs.org/2026/

#5: Yes, they're going after comedians. That's because comedy is the best weapon against oppression. Soviet people bonded through "anekdoty," stories about the hilarious dysfunction of Soviet life. We need that kind of sustenance more than ever.

This is the best piece I've read on AI in years. And I say this as someone who has lost all patience with AI commentary, critical or otherwise. Well done, @hagenblix.bsky.social and Ingeborg Glimmer. Spot on, re how "inaccuracies" are a feature, not a bug, of fascist rule.

A man in Washington, DC, plays the Imperial March from Star Wars while following patrolling soldiers. One of the soldiers threatens to call the police.

New peer-reviewed paper documents massive lobbying by big oil & gas over 20 yrs to promote carbon, capture & storage, spending almost $1 Billion. CCS is a scam. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Imagine how much money could have been saved just by going with an actual human to begin with www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...

“AI’s environmental footprint does not happen one prompt at a time. By making the calculation as if it did, the number hides the fact that Google and its peers are building an entirely new digital infrastructure at a massive scale”

Great point on strategic sneakiness of scale. The bigger the phenomenon, the smaller the impact any *individual* act seemingly has. A perfect way to devolve responsibility to individual scales & dismiss individual acts as insignificant. It’s scale *creators* who have real power & responsibility.

Google's claim that each AI prompt uses the energy of 9 seconds of television is like throwing dispersant over an oil slick. The only way to get a number that low is with massive scale, which you should definitely worry about. medium.com/@dnafus/why-...

If you're an author, this is the place to do this thing: www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-au...

Silicon Valley power players want a Congress that's pro-AI. They're spending $100 million to try to get it. Our story today on Leading the Future, the new AI-focused Super PAC modeled on the success of the cryptocurrency lobby: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2... w/ @nitasha.bsky.social

The now more than week long series of actions started with a worker encampment on Microsoft’s campus last Monday www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Don't be too fast of a learner, or too slow. Don't have any disabilities! Don't daydream. Don't socialize. Don't get bored. Don't get upset. Don't have questions. Don't think.

I love Terry Gross she is a top ten person

Outside Dupont north metro

So... Suffolk is going full NZ?

Vinay Prasad and other COVID contrarians said that the pandemic response—a patchwork of different state-level policies with limited guidance from the federal government—was the path to authoritarianism. And after yelling that for years, they then joined the authoritarian regime. Wild stuff.

🤖 What many already knew. Helpful proof, reporting, documentation from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social: Meta allowing sensual roleplay with kids, promoting discrimination, giving false medical info. But listen, there's a tech PR trick I need to draw your attention to here. 🧵 www.reuters.com/investigates...

That server is a sex predator. Demanding to see someone's chest while preventing them from leaving the situation is a sex crime, and we need to talk about it as such.

When your main investor is also your cloud provider, you don't really have much of a choice of infrastructure, do you?

tip: don't dump your deepest thoughts into chatbot servers run by technofascists in a country too corrupt to pass even a basic consumer internet privacy law

The Trump administration will deny emergency preparedness funds to cities and states boycotting Israel, which is heinous but unsurprising. The Trump admin literally wants its political enemies to die. The American Jewish Committee supports the Trump admin’s policy. www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...

Friends! Today I'm launching the Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter. It's motto is: "Stop doomscrolling and just read this!" I'll provide a weekly mix of news that isn't covered elsewhere, and commentary drawing from my unique background in eschatology. www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/introducin...

The Quantified Nope

📢 NEW Paper! @siree.sh, Lucy Suchman, and I examine a corpus of 7,000 US Military grant solicitations to ask what the world’s largest military wants with to do with AI, by looking at what it seeks to fund. #STS 📄: arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17840 We find…

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?

A U.S. surgeon trying to have a “peer to peer” consultation with a doctor at a health insurance company who is hiding his identity as her patient gets denied coverage. And it gets worse from there. You have to see it to believe it. (1/2)

Queue at Heathrow for check-in, cattle class, 2003-ish. Dude is in those designer jeans meant to look tatty, but in a cool way. Has a mini-entourage hanging on his every word. Kinda looks vaguely familiar. Finally work out it's Jarvis Cocker, aka Mr. I Wanna Live Like Common People.