Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹

https://tldr.nettime.org/@remixtures

Technical Writer @ UJET.cx (Portugal). PhD in Communication Sciences (ISCTE-IUL). Past: technology journalist, blogger & communication researcher.

#TechnicalWriting #WebDev #WebDevelopment #OpenSource #FLOSS #SoftwareDevelopment #IP #PoliticalEconomy #Communication #Media #Copyright #Music #Cities #Urbanism

Twitter: https://twitter.com/remixtures
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/remixtures
GitHub: https://github.com/remixtures
Academia.edu: https://iscte-iul.academia.edu/MiguelCaetano

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nprofile1qqsv382uul09c032ug8kvpalyqkx3c95ps9peqmy37ywcgcedc73x7qprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntpamf8a

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Published at

2026-10-20T13:39:02Z

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Last Notes

2026-06-21 14:08:27 GMT

"Oodi, voted the world's best newly built library in 2019, is thriving – a striking contrast to the situation in many other countries where public libraries are slowly disappearing.
Between 2008 and 2019, 766 public libraries closed across the United States, while in the United Kingdom, between 2016 and 2023, more than 180 council-run libraries were either closed or handed over to volunteer groups. Finland, instead, is expanding its libraries and transforming them into publicly funded community service centres where people can borrow much more than just books.
Research emerging from these initiatives – not just in Finland, but also in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Canada – already suggests that libraries play a significant role in promoting social inclusion, making a poignant argument: what if the value of libraries is not in how many books they lend, but more in how they help societies function? And what can the world learn from this Finnish model?
Finland has more than 700 libraries for a population of 5.6 million, offering everything from podcast studios and 3D printing to tennis rackets and swimming pool passes.
According to Vänttinen, the most borrowed items after books in Helsinki libraries are spaces: rooms that can be pre-booked, free of charge, to meet, study, hold political discussions or make music. Among portable items, board games and console games top the list.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260618-the-weird-and-wonderful-libraries-of-finland
#Finland #Libraries

2026-06-21 13:15:02 GMT

"Sorry, I’m saying it. Mastodon. We want fucking Mastodon. It’s run by an actual non-profit foundation, none of this “public benefit corporation” bullshit. It’s not subject to corporate enshittification. It’s not subject to creeping network-wide puritanism. Mastodon. Goddammit. Mastodon Mastodon Mastodon.
“No. Choosing an instance is too hard!” Have you chosen an email provider, fuckers? Yes? Congratulations! You can pick an instance.
“But how do I know that instance won’t implode in a giant cloud of drama?” You don’t. It happens, and it sucks when it happens, but it doesn’t happen all that often. Go find another instance.
“But what if the instance I’m on doesn’t federate with the ones my friends are on, or they change their policies to be more puritanical, or—” Go find another fucking instance. This is not rocket surgery.
“But if I move instances, I’ll lose my posts!” Yeah, you’ll lose your posts. You know what you won’t lose? Your entire group of followers. You know, the way you lost them when you moved from fucking Twitter to fucking Bluesky. With fucking Mastodon, you don’t have that problem."
https://giants-club.net/articles/just-use-mastodon/
#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #Mastodon #Fediverse #Decentralization #BlueSky

2026-04-16 22:45:33 GMT

"In Guyang-ri, a farming village of 70 households about 90 minutes south-east of Seoul, people gather for communal free lunches six days a week. The meals are funded by the village’s one-megawatt solar installation, which generates roughly 10m won ($6,800) in net profit each month.
“Residents eat lunch together every day, so we see each other’s faces, talk together,” says Jeon Joo-young, the village chief. “Bonds and solidarity between residents become much stronger. Life becomes more enjoyable.”
The shift has been dramatic. Before the solar project launched in 2022, the village of about 130 people had no restaurant, no easy way to move around, and little communal infrastructure. Now solar revenue pays for meals, a village “happiness bus” for elderly people, a table-tennis facility and cultural activities.
The village deliberately chose to spend solar income on welfare rather than individual dividends, a decision Jeon says residents made themselves rather than being persuaded."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/16/south-korea-solar-power-renewables-revolution
#SouthKorea #SolarEnergy #Renewables #Solar #SolarPower

2026-04-16 00:48:41 GMT

"Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) just inked a $12.2 million contract for an artificial intelligence tool that claims to map out immigrants’ daily routines, habits, and real-time location and categorize them as potential threats, per procurement records reviewed by the Lever.
Dubbed “Project SAFE HAVEN,” the product is advertised by defense vendor Edge Ops LLC as a “question-based AI interface” that uses “persistent passive data collection” to map “patterns of life,” a surveillance tactic that ICE says will identify the “habitual locations, routes, and behavioral patterns” of its targets.
Additional features of the technology described in procurement documents include real-time location tracking and analysis that will categorize individuals and groups as affiliated with ostensible criminal organizations, such as gangs or cartels. That includes building “target profiles” that track individuals’ activity by linking data obtained from Wi-Fi network connections and mobile smart devices, such as cell phones and smartwatches.
A promotional blurb for the tool on Edge Ops LLC’s website claims that Project SAFE HAVEN “transforms the way we identify, locate, and map illegal migrants.”"
https://jacobin.com/2026/04/ice-contract-ai-surveillance-immigrants/
#USA #Trump #Authoritarianism #ICE #AI #Surveillance #Privacy

2026-04-14 00:56:44 GMT

- reply

"Trump’s other interest is hard power, to better crush his foes. The BBB last year included $165bn for the Department of Homeland Security to “deliver on the President’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe again”. Last week, he bet the house to pay for a bigger military. As he put it at an Easter lunch reception last week: “We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
That is proving expensive. By some estimates, the Pentagon spent $12.7bn in the first six days and $28bn in a little over five weeks on the war against Iran, which appears to have next to nothing to do with guarding the country. His budget proposal, released last week, the one that cut the budget for HHS by 12% and the entire non-defense budget by 10%, was transparent about the Brobdingnagian sums Trump wants to spend on this kind of stuff: $1.5tn in 2027 alone. About three times Iran’s entire GDP and 42% more than the budget for 2026.
The message to everyday Americans is: beware. The cuts to the non-defense budget in the 2027 proposal are nowhere near enough to cover this increase in defense spending. Given Trump’s and the Republican party’s aversion to taxes, they are all but certain to come after the rest of the safety net to cover the bill."

2026-04-14 00:53:51 GMT

And yet the far-right complains about immigration originating from these countries !? Utter idiocy!!!
"Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and France (ranked by ODA volume) accounted for 95.7% of the total decline in ODA. The United States alone drove three-quarters of the decline, with its ODA falling by 56.9% compared to 2024. This is the largest reduction in volume by any provider in any year on record. In 2025, Germany was the largest DAC provider of ODA for the first time in history, with its ODA totalling USD 29.1 billion. Eight DAC members increased their ODA."
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/data-explainers/2026/04/a-historic-decline-in-foreign-aid-preliminary-2025-oda-data.html
#HumanitarianAid #ForeignAid

2026-01-28 10:45:40 GMT

"Britain’s reliance on Palantir, the controversial US data surveillance firm, is a “gaping national security vulnerability”, MPs and tech experts have said, as a Nerve investigation reveals how deeply embedded the company is in the UK’s critical national infrastructure.
The Nerve’s investigation shows the company, co-founded by one of President Trump’s most loyal allies, Peter Thiel, is enmeshed in Britain’s civil and defence structures to a far greater degree than previously realised. The Nerve has found at least 34 current and past state contracts across at least 10 government departments, local councils and police authorities.
The investigation also reveals previously undisclosed contracts between Palantir and AWE Nuclear Security Technologies, the agency that underpins Britain’s nuclear deterrence programme.
The agency, formerly known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment, designs and manufactures the nuclear warheads carried by UK submarines. The Nerve has found £15m worth of contracts for “cloud support” on the Crown Commercial Service dashboard, an agency that works with the Cabinet Office and external suppliers.
These contracts are not on the government’s official contract finder website and the Ministry of Defence refused to either confirm or deny their existence. Palantir did not acknowledge or respond to the Nerve’s inquiries.
The Nerve’s research – shown in two infographics here – shows that Palantir has current and historic deals worth £388m with the MOD across at least a dozen contracts and extensions to contracts, and more than £244m with the NHS (12 contracts/extensions). Government agencies and authorities with smaller contracts include Coventry city council, Leicestershire police, DEFRA and the Homes for Ukraine scheme."
https://www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-technologies-uk-government-contracts-size-nuclear-deterrent-atomic-peter-thiel-louis-mosley
#UK #Palantir #Surveillance #Thiel #NuclearWeapons

2026-01-26 08:51:21 GMT

RT @jayvanbavel
Scientists who use AI have published three times more papers, received five times more citations, and reach leadership roles faster than their AI-free peers.
But science as a whole is paying the price, the study suggests. Not only is AI-driven work prone to circling the same crowded problems, but it also leads to a less interconnected scientific literature, with fewer studies engaging with and building on one another.
It's a classic social dilemma: what's good for individuals is bad for the collective.
https://science.org/content/article/ai-has-supercharged-scientists-may-have-shrunk-science?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_content=alert&utm_campaign=SCIeToc&et_rid=689109562&et_cid=5855546

2026-01-19 09:05:47 GMT

RT @yarotrof
Trump’s “Board of Peace” looks very much like a plan to replace the UN Security Council with an imperial court of vassals in which he is chairman for life, even after leaving the White House, with veto over every decision and the sole right to designate a successor. And a $1 billion fee for aspiring permanent members.
https://www.ft.com/content/0ee79faa-86d3-4c01-a180-add6e164ac28?accessToken=zwAGSKwUmEg4kc8O55-qhtNMAdOhgK3W4WSsKA.MEUCIG90yhnpd6836G-pd4NwwXgCPPreNo-iI_ERePXH7fj_AiEAmYxxRC9xbqDYh43WecrbO_pFzaZu_3avjEKtNm0zUFw&sharetype=gift&token=b6692b27-71c2-4c84-90c8-4692ba31917b

2026-01-19 08:47:28 GMT

RT @BenjaminNorton
At the peak of the Gilded Age in 1910, the richest 0.00001% of the US population owned wealth equal to 4% of national income.
Now, the richest 0.00001% owns 12%.
US billionaire oligarchs today are even wealthier than the original robber barons.
Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/gzucman/p/standing-up-to-trumps-imperial-blackmail

2026-01-16 22:23:54 GMT

"Intelligence and consciousness are different things. Intelligence is mainly about doing: solving a crossword puzzle, assembling some furniture, navigating a tricky family situation, walking to the shop — all involve intelligent behavior of some kind. A useful general definition of intelligence is the ability to achieve complex goals by flexible means. There are many other definitions out there, but they all emphasize the functional capacities of a system: the ability to transform inputs into outputs, to get things done.
An artificially intelligent system is measured by its ability to perform intelligent behavior of some kind, though not necessarily in a humanlike form. The concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI), by contrast, explicitly references human intelligence. It is supposed to match or exceed the cognitive competencies of human beings. (There’s also artificial superintelligence, ASI, which happens when AI bootstraps itself beyond our comprehension and control. ASI tends to crop up in the more existentially fraught scenarios for our possible futures.)
Consciousness, in contrast to intelligence, is mostly about being. Half a century ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously offered that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism.” Consciousness is the difference between normal wakefulness and the oblivion of deep general anesthesia. It is the experiential aspect of brain function and especially of perception: the colors, shapes, tastes, emotions, thoughts and more, that give our lives texture and meaning. The blueness of the sky on a clear day. The bitter tang and headrush of your first coffee.
AI systems can reasonably lay claim to intelligence in some form, since they can certainly do things, but it is harder to say whether there is anything-it-is-like-to-be ChatGPT."
https://www.noemamag.com/the-mythology-of-conscious-ai/
#AI #AGI #Consciousness #ConsciousAI #Philosophy #Intelligence

2026-01-16 22:02:30 GMT

"AI adoption went viral following ChatGPT’s release on 30 November 2022 and the value of companies has skyrocketed. But uptake in businesses has not been as high as anticipated. Notwithstanding the hype, the use of AI at work is not soaring and may even be slowing, and concerns only a small fraction of the workforce. Recent evidence indicates that there is no immediate productivity boost from using AI. In short, while some automation is underway, there is no evidence of an imminent AI disruption capable of generating the huge economic gains predicted.
As is well known to radical critics and forcefully argued by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, there is no such a thing as efficiency-driven capitalist development; increased technical efficiency is a macroeconomic outcome that depends on the institutional setting. Powerful technologies can prove unprofitable and fail to be deployed if the structure of the market prevents investors from reaping the rewards; and they can immiserate labour if they lead to massive layoffs. With AI, the most immediate danger seems to be an epidemic of workforce demoralization. Research suggests that intensive AI use is demotivating and deskilling, fuelling boredom and mediocrity. We could even see a reverse ‘productivity J-curve’: short-term productivity gains rapidly overwhelmed by a deterioration in labour quality."
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/after-ai
#AI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #Capitalism #Imperialism #Automation #Productivity

2026-01-16 21:21:26 GMT

- reply

"All the while, confronted with Trumpian aggression but constrained by their own lack of agency, European leaders are stuck dealing with an Atlantic-sized chasm between their private reactions and what they allow themselves to say in public.
The good news from our poll is that despite the reticence of their leaders, Europeans are both aware of the state of the world and in favor of a lot of what needs to be done to improve the continent’s position. As we have seen, they harbor no illusions about the U.S. under Trump. They realize they’re living in an increasingly dangerous, multipolar world. And majorities support boosting defense spending, reintroducing mandatory conscription, and even entertaining the prospect of a European nuclear deterrent.
The rules-based order is giving way to a world of spheres of influence, where might makes right and the West is split from within. In such a world, you are either a pole with your own sphere of influence or a bystander in someone else’s. European leaders should heed their voters and ensure the continent belongs in the first category — not the second."
https://www.politico.eu/article/the-united-west-is-dead/

2026-01-16 10:22:01 GMT

"- Around the world, many people expect China’s—already considerable—global influence to grow over the next decade, and more now view Beijing as an ally or necessary partner.
- For much of the world, America is globally influential and will continue to matter, but few people expect it to gain in influence.
- In most countries, expectations of Trump are lower than 12 months ago. His first year back in power seems to have caused dramatic shifts of opinion in some places, including India and South Africa.
- In Russia, more people now see Europe as an adversary, while views of America have softened. In China, the EU is held to be a power player that strikes its own stances distinct from those of America.
- Europeans are the world’s chief pessimists. They lack faith in the EU’s ability to deal on equal terms with the US or China and worry about Russian aggression and nuclear weapons.
- European leaders should share greater honesty about where Europe stands in this post-Western, “China first” world in order to devise a successful strategy to navigate it."
https://ecfr.eu/publication/how-trump-is-making-china-great-again-and-what-it-means-for-europe/
#USA #Trump #China #Europa #Geopolitics #PublicOpinion

2026-01-16 09:08:36 GMT

RT @jasonhickel
It's not hypocrisy, it's capitalism.
The bizarre behaviour of Western states and leaders often seems to betray a moral double standard. But in fact it is all perfectly consistent with a single standard, namely, the objective of maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation in the core.
On Iran, they tell us they "support the protestors". But of course they violently brutalize protestors at home, and never support protests against the governments of their often brutal client states.
They say they support "women's rights". But of course they actively support a genocidal regime that has massacred tens of thousands of women, live-streamed to our screens.
They say they want to see "freedom" and "democracy". But of course they prop up several repressive dictatorships in the Middle East.
They say they value international law. But they violate it regularly, in spectacular fashion, as easily as they breathe.
They say they want to see "liberation". But their explicit objective is to impose a puppet monarchy with zero real sovereignty, permanently subordinated to the US and Israel.
Why? Because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation in the core.
This requires a massive flow of cheap labour and resources from the periphery. To keep it going, they do everything possible to crush any state or movement that seeks real sovereignty, because sovereign development in the South means that the South produces and consumes more for itself, so their resources and labour are less cheaply available for accumulation in the core.
This is why they are going after Iran. It's the same reason they are going after Venezuela and Cuba... it's the same reason they fantasize at going to war with China... it's the same reason they invaded Libya and Iraq... it's the same reason they assassinated Lumumba and Sankara. It's the same reason they prop up Saudi Arabia and the UAE...
https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/2011801479384825972

2026-01-15 09:54:25 GMT

RT @BenjaminNorton
Trump has threatened to attack Iran, and there are reports that he is considering bombing it again.
A poll found that 70% of Americans oppose this, including 80% of independents, 79% of Democrats, and 53% of Republicans.
Just 18% of Americans want to attack Iran.
But the US is NOT a democracy; it's an oligarchy. And peer-reviewed scientific research has shown that average people have no impact on US foreign policy.
This is the link to the polling:
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3945

2026-01-14 23:01:30 GMT

"What is so troubling about the Trump administration’s words and actions is not just that the administration is breaking the law. And it is: the intervention in Venezuela clearly violates the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. But more than that, U.S. officials have discarded the idea of legal constraints altogether.
The only constraint, Trump said in an interview with The New York Times last week, is his “own morality.” There is no real argument to defend the government’s behavior. No pretense. No attempt to persuade. When a policy is announced in an online post, without explanation or justification, one has the unsettling sense that its makers see no need to bother cloaking it with a lie. A system of rules can survive some hypocrisy, but nihilism will bring it down.
At the same time, the Trump administration is acting as though the threat or use of force alone can grant it legal entitlements. Gunboat diplomacy, roundly renounced when war was outlawed, has returned. The United States is using oil blockades, coercive seizures, and military threats to extract political and economic concessions from other countries. This is an attempt to assert that power alone creates rights, regardless of reason.
A world in which the powerful no longer feel the need to justify themselves is not merely unjust. It is barbaric: operations to kill, steal, and destroy are severed from any claim of right. That world does not have a legal order at all. It has only force, guided by one man’s whims."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/world-without-rules#
#USA #Trump #Imperialism #InternationalLaw

2026-01-12 18:10:39 GMT

"Nordic governments are rejecting U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertions that Russian and Chinese vessels are operating near Greenland, warning that the claims are not supported by intelligence and are fueling destabilizing rhetoric, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
Two senior Nordic diplomats with access to NATO intelligence briefings told the FT there is no evidence of Russian or Chinese ships or submarines operating around Greenland in recent years, directly contradicting Trump’s justification for U.S. control of the Arctic territory.
“I have seen the intelligence. There are no ships, no submarines,” one diplomat told the paper.
Trump has claimed that Greenland is “covered with Russian and Chinese ships” and argued that the U.S. must take control of the island for national security reasons — rhetoric that has intensified in recent weeks."
https://www.politico.eu/article/nordic-officials-reportedly-dismiss-trump-greenland-claims-nato-defense/
#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Greenland #Denmark #Disinformation #Propaganda

2026-01-12 09:16:01 GMT

"THE PACE of change is breath-taking. On January 3rd United States special forces captured Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator. On January 6th Donald Trump said Venezuela would be “turning over” 30m to 50m barrels of oil to the United States. Two days later the regime said it would release “a significant number” of political prisoners. The next day an American delegation arrived in Caracas, the capital, to work on reopening the embassy. A Venezuelan team is expected to head to Washington, with Mr Trump saying he would meet them “pretty soon”.
A crucial question is whether Mr Trump will “run” Venezuela down the barrel of a gun—he initially threatened interim president Delcy Rodríguez with a fate worse than Mr Maduro’s if she didn’t comply with his plans for the country—or whether he might be more collaborative. The latter may signal an intention to let Ms Rodríguez settle in for a longer period, an alarming prospect for Venezuela’s democratic opposition. Setting aside the bluster there is clear evidence, especially from the emerging deal on oil, of collaboration.
Mr Trump initially framed the arrangement as pure coercion. Officials in Caracas spun it as a “simple sale, a commercial transaction”. The Economist has spoken to a range of oil executives, financiers and traders to assess the possible contours of the scheme. Much remains uncertain and could change, but the deal appears to be mutually advantageous, albeit with some coercive elements."
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2026/01/10/donald-trumps-venezuela-oil-deal-is-already-up-and-running
#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Oil #BigOil #FossilFuels #Imperialism

2026-01-10 17:39:19 GMT

"This essay considers the emergent phenomenon of ‘junkification’ in academic research publishing. The term junkification was originally coined to describe the increasing volume of low-quality content and products permeating digital platforms. Extending junkification to online academic publishing, we draw on literature that frames academic research as an increasingly commodified good. We theorise that this commodification has enabled the same mechanisms that underpin the shift to junkification in digital marketplaces (and their subsequent degradation) to permeate online academic publishing. We argue that this trend represents a further perversion of the long-standing and pervasive ‘publish or perish’ culture in academia. As commercial publishing interests converge with new technologies, a system emerges where scholars increasingly bear the costs of low-esteem publishing that limits genuine scholarly contributions. We analyse the structural and cultural shifts within academic publishing that facilitate and perpetuate the junkification of research, and call for a re-evaluation of the underlying values and practices sustaining scholarly communication to counteract this trend."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13505084251399576
#Science #AcademicPublishing #Universities #HigherEd #Research #PublishOrPerish #Junkification

2026-01-10 17:37:20 GMT

I'm afraid the UK has learned nothing with Brexit...:
"Britain might yet enlarge its scope for sovereignty. If we truly wanted to take back control, we could, for instance, end our reliance on the US for the country’s nuclear deterrent, and return to the status quo ante before Polaris. We could develop a domestic space actor similar to Ariane, a pan-European organisation that is, nevertheless, majority owned by the French government. We certainly need to produce at least some microprocessors for domestic consumption. And we need a strategy for meaningful energy security.
Because of the strategic importance of such shifts, the state should hold at least some equity in these enterprises — in a manner similar to France’s APE (Agence des participations de l’État). Not as excessive as it sounds, it simply means reversing the more egregious mistakes of the Thatcher and Blair years. If uncorrected, these errors — such as discarding the importance of industry — will only create an increasing national vulnerability as the old order fragments,
Taking back control can’t just be rhetoric. To mean anything, those words can’t be constrained to borders, money or laws — they must encompass vital strategic industry. Otherwise, Britain will remain the least sovereign middle power of all. We may have left the clutches of Brussels a decade ago, but in a perverse inversion of the Boston Tea Party, we now risk becoming the 51st State of America — just without the voting rights."
https://unherd.com/2026/01/britain-hasnt-taken-back-control/
#UK #USA #Trump #Imperialism #EU #Brexit

2026-01-08 23:26:56 GMT

"In 2021, the rallying cry was “WAGMI” — we’re all gonna make it. It was a lie then, and the people chanting it loudest knew it. They knew all just meant them: the VCs, the founders, the early whales positioned to dump on latecomers. The retail investors buying at the top, the workers being paid in tokens, the communities being “democratized” — they were exit liquidity.
But now the lie has scaled. The industry that promised it would free us from captured institutions has captured them itself. The anti-establishment rebels are now the establishment, their survival dependent on the very centralized power structures they once claimed to make obsolete. And crypto is being woven into the fabric of traditional finance — integrated into banking and pension funds and retirement accounts, deepening systemic exposure that was once largely quarantined. When it collapses this time, the contagion won’t be contained.
But the foundation is shaky. The AI bubble shows signs of popping. The crypto industry is scrambling to pass market structure legislation before the 2026 midterms, terrified they’ll lose their window. Trump is feeling precarious ahead of the midterms too, recently admitting that he expects to face a third impeachment if Republicans lose control of the House — a threat made more real by his persistently low approval ratings and an Epstein scandal he can’t seem to make go away.
They know it. The technoligarchs aren’t confident their hold will last. That’s why they’re dismantling oversight, rushing through favorable legislation, securing pardons, amassing wealth — grabbing everything they can reach right now.
History offers little comfort here. Authoritarian regimes have maintained power through incredible economic devastation. Economic ruin alone doesn’t topple those who control the security apparatus, the flow of information, and the distribution of patronage. And the technoligarchs are building precisely these mechanisms."
https://www.citationneeded.news/the-year-of-technoligarchy/
#Crypto #USA

2026-01-08 22:38:53 GMT

I would like to think that technical writers, at their best, establish a bridge between the two worlds described below. They not only inform, but also elucidate. They explain how to use technology, often by following a set of successive steps that are deterministic and falsifiable. Good technical writing helps users explore the tools they have access to as much as possible and use them in ways that are potentially far more productive, interesting and creative than you might initially think. If users also have the opportunity to improve their critical thinking skills along the way, even better.
"Under the reign of the STEM lords, the public’s trust in science and scientists is decaying. Far from promoting empiricism and objectivity, the cult of virtuality is encouraging a return to superstition, subjectivity, and myth. The overthrow of the old intellectual elite and its replacement by the new technological elite, we can now see, opened a cultural hole that has been filled by ideological fervour, financial speculation, and prideful ignorance, all amplified by a digital communication system that, in its inhuman scale and speed, leaves little room for reflection or discretion.
Whatever their shortcomings, the old avatars of high culture shared a set of values — a respect for talent, taste, and tradition; a disdain for the flimsy and the fake; a commitment to rigour in thought and expression — that encouraged the pursuit of excellence not only in art and literature but in science, engineering, and other practical pursuits. If Snow were alive today, he might feel nostalgic about the state of affairs he bemoaned at the dawn of the Sixties. He might now see that the divide between the two cultures was not as sharp as he supposed. Their differences masked a deeper bond."
https://unherd.com/2026/01/how-big-tech-killed-literary-culture/
#AI #STEM #Humanities #BigTech #Science #Art

2026-01-07 22:09:38 GMT

"Danish officials think they know how Donald Trump might seize Greenland. In a late-night Truth Social post, the president announces that the Danish territory is now an American “protectorate.” Because neither Denmark nor its European allies possess the military force to prevent the United States from taking the island, they are powerless to resist Trump’s dubious claim. And as the leading member of NATO claims the sovereign territory of another state, the alliance is paralyzed. Arguing that possession is nine-tenths of the law, Trump simply declares that Greenland now belongs to the United States.
This chain of events, which some Danish officials and security experts proposed to us in recent months, may have seemed faintly ridiculous as of last Friday. By the weekend—after the toppling of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Trump’s ensuing insistence that the United States now “runs” Venezuela—it seemed far less so. For months, Danes have anxiously imagined an audacious move by the Trump administration to annex Greenland, whether by force, coercion, or an attempt to buy off the local population of about 56,000 people with the promise of cutting them in on future mining deals. Now those fears are spiking."
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/01/greenland-trump-venezuela-nato/685511/
#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Greenland #Denmark #NATO #Venezuela

2026-01-06 21:30:44 GMT

"After Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow in Syria, Maduro’s fall in Venezuela represents a serious blow to Russia’s global ambitions, and this is good news for Europe. However, the fall of a regime, illegitimate as it may be, through an illegal military attack by a foreign country and the establishment of a quasi-colonial protectorate constitutes a violation of the most basic norms of sovereignty and independence on which European security is built. It is Russia’s dream for Europe.
True, Putin does not need Trump’s free pass to pursue such a vision. He has done so in Ukraine, as well as in Georgia and Moldova, well before Trump toppled Maduro. But there is no doubt that Trump’s green-lighting of spheres of influence – not just in words but in action – embodies the law of the jungle so dear to dictators such as Putin. For Europeans to silently condone such a vision is not just unethical. It is plain stupid."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/06/europe-venezuela-donald-trump-vladimir-putin
#EU #Europe #USA #Trump #Venezuela #Imperialism #Maduro #Ukraine #Putin #Russia

2026-01-05 09:07:13 GMT

RT @BenjaminNorton
The claim that the US corporate media is "independent" of the government is a myth. It has obediently supported every US imperialist war of aggression.
Major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post knew beforehand about Trump's plan to attack Venezuela, but they did not report it, in order to protect the US military -- and therefore help it commit war crimes.
These corporate media outlets are not truly "independent"; they are tools of the US regime, and they are complicit in its crimes.
Source: https://semafor.com/article/01/03/2026/new-york-times-washington-post-held-off-on-reporting-venezuela-raid

2026-01-04 14:03:24 GMT

"History shows that failed covert regime changes usually make a bad situation even worse. Relations between the intervening actor and its target go downhill, and as we have found in our research, militarized clashes between them become more likely. In the target state, such attempts tend to trigger violence, including civil war, and increase the risk that the regime kills masses of civilians.
The United States has long conducted covert interventions in other countries’ domestic politics—in Afghanistan, Albania, and Angola, to name just a few. But this pattern was especially pronounced in Latin America, where Washington attempted at least 18 covert regime changes during the Cold War. In 1954, it overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected government, ushering in a military regime that rounded up thousands of opponents and presided over a 36-year civil war that killed an estimated 200,000 people. In 1961, the United States backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and launched a coup in the Dominican Republic that unintentionally provoked the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. After Trujillo’s son seized power instead of the U.S.-backed coup plotters, Washington forced him into exile and continued to meddle in Dominican elections—as well as those in Bolivia and Guyana—throughout the 1960s. It also supported coups in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971, and Chile in 1973, and funded the Contra rebels in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s.
Yet not one of these operations produced a stable, pro-American democracy. More often, U.S. interventions installed authoritarian regimes or triggered cycles of repression and violence. Even when Washington found a staunch anticommunist ally, such as Augusto Pinochet in Chile, relations eventually soured over the regime’s brutality and human rights abuses."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/venezuela/regime-change-temptation-maduro-trump-venezuela?utm_campaign=tw&utm_content=&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
#USA #Trump #Imperialism #RegimeChange #LatinAmerica #Venezuela #Maduro

2025-12-29 12:11:00 GMT

"Most-popular streaming service of the last few years is...
YouTube. The Alphabet Inc.-owned streaming service eclipsed Netflix as the most-popular streaming service on TVs a couple years ago and has never looked back. It is now larger than Netflix and Amazon combined.
YouTube has spent the last few years building out its audience on TVs. It’s been so successful that Instagram is now following its lead, while Netflix is looking to compete in new categories like video podcasts. Many Hollywood producers are looking to incubate new shows and talent on YouTube, while every major streaming service and brand is talking to top online content creators about potential partnerships.
Free streaming services are growing more quickly than paid ones
YouTube has been the fastest-growing network on TV, but it’s not the only one. The rise of YouTube is part of a larger trend – the growth of free, advertising-supported streaming. The Roku Channel is the fastest-growing streaming service after YouTube, and Tubi isn’t far behind."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-28/americans-are-watching-fewer-new-tv-shows-and-more-free-tv
#USA #Streaming #Video #TV #YouTube #Netflix

2025-12-28 12:51:07 GMT

That's Late Stage Capitalism for you:
"More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found.
The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.
Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.
The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop. One-third of the 500 videos were “brainrot”, a category that includes AI slop and other low-quality content made to monetise attention.
The findings are a snapshot of a rapidly expanding industry that is saturating big social media platforms – from X to Meta to YouTube – and defining a new era of content: decontextualised, addictive and international.
A Guardian analysis this year found that nearly 10% of YouTube’s fastest-growing channels were AI slop, racking up millions of views despite the platform’s efforts to curb “inauthentic content”."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/27/more-than-20-of-videos-shown-to-new-youtube-users-are-ai-slop-study-finds
#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedVideos #AISlop #YouTube

2025-12-23 19:33:55 GMT

"The focus on mathematical formalism and consequent abstraction from important issues in the real world do not only have consequences for understanding the economy — it also has consequences with respect to the questions asked within the discipline. Far too many economists are concerned with how a change in measured variable X affects measured variable Y rather than asking normative, important questions such as: Is capitalism preferable to socialism? What are the global consequences of China’s rise in the world economy? What are the limits of looking at climate change purely through the lens of market failures? In fact, I’ve met many economists who say that they think economics is a ‘hard science’ that should be unconcerned with these types of questions. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, two of the most important figures in classical economics, would turn in their graves if they heard this. Despite their political differences, these two scholars approached economics in a similar way. They both understood that economics is shaped by human values, social norms, and ideologies. According to Smith and Marx, to be an economist is also to be a philosopher.
The crisis in economics education isn't just an academic problem — it's a societal one. When policymakers, business leaders, and analysts graduate with a mathematically sophisticated but contextually impoverished understanding of economic systems, it has serious consequences."
https://www.theglobalcurrents.com/p/how-economics-lost-its-soul
#Economics #PoliticalEconomy #Philosophy #Utilitarianism

2025-12-23 18:24:22 GMT

"[R]ather than face the fact that German and Western publics express revulsion at the death and destruction in Gaza, their political classes have decided that the medium and not the message is the problem. Social media is to blame, we hear. It’s because China and Qatar control the algorithm of TikTok that teenagers are seeing “walls of dead children.” Their solution is to change the ownership of TikTok so that pro-Israel messages flood their phones instead.
The political and media classes have reason to be apprehensive. Were it not for the independent journalist with her phone in Amsterdam, who filmed Israeli soccer fans running amok against Dutch citizens, we would have been stuck with the lie propagated by the mainstream media that a “pogrom” against the Israeli fans in Amsterdam had been perpetrated by those very victims of those soccer fans. Only once this journalist placed her footage online were mainstream stations compelled to correct their coverage.
Yet Western governments and media have offered justification or trivialization of these claims in the same breath. Can they be surprised by the crisis of confidence in the media, evidenced by academic studies, and that people are turning to alternative sources and political parties?
All that separates us from the world predicted by George Orwell are independent sources of information and the healthy instincts of publics who have drawn a universal lesson from the Nazi past, namely that the near-total destruction of a region like Gaza is illegitimate, criminal, unacceptable: even in the face of the deplorable Hamas-led attack on Israeli settlements more than two years ago."
https://thediasporist.de/is-holocaust-memory-over/
#Germany #Holocaust #Palestine #Gaza #Israel #Disinformation #Propaganda

2025-12-23 16:34:32 GMT

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has a new definition of “reasonable expectation.” According to the justices, it’s no longer reasonable to assume that what you type into Google is yours to keep.
In a decision that reads like a love letter to the surveillance economy, the court ruled that police were within their rights to access a convicted rapist’s search history without a warrant. The reasoning is that everyone knows they’re being watched anyway.
The opinion, issued Tuesday, leaned on the idea that the public has already surrendered its privacy to Silicon Valley.
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
“It is common knowledge that websites, internet-based applications, and internet service providers collect, and then sell, user data,” the court said, as if mass exploitation of personal information had become a civic tradition.
Because that practice is so widely known, the court concluded, users cannot reasonably expect privacy. In other words, if corporations do it first, the government gets a free pass."
https://reclaimthenet.org/pennsylvania-court-rules-no-privacy-in-google-searches
#USA #Pennsylvania #Google #Privacy #Surveillance #PoliceState

2025-12-20 14:49:43 GMT

LoL. Would you expect any different outcome than this out of a industry built upon "citation cartels" where articles are made to be cited but not to be read?
"What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals.
“There have been lots of AI-generated articles, and those typically get noticed and retracted quickly,” Heiss tells Rolling Stone. He mentions a paper retracted earlier this month, which discussed the potential to improve autism diagnoses with an AI model and included a nonsensical infographic that was itself created with a text-to-image model. “But this hallucinated journal issue is slightly different,” he says.
That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations. This leads to students and academics (and any large language models they may ask for help) identifying those “sources” as reliable without ever confirming their veracity. The more these false citations are unquestioningly repeated from one article to the next, the more the illusion of their authenticity is reinforced. Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to."
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-journal-research-fake-citations-1235485484/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Hallucinations #Chatbots #LLMs #Science #AcademicPublishing

2025-12-19 17:06:01 GMT

- reply

Here's an unpaywalled version of the article: https://archive.fo/p4AcP

2025-12-19 16:35:27 GMT

"An infinitesimal delay in the typed commands of a new IT worker provided an early clue that an imposter had gotten access to an Amazon.com Inc. corporate computer.
Keystroke data from the laptop of a worker who was supposed to be in US should have taken tens of milliseconds to reach Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. Instead, the flow from this machine was more than 110 milliseconds, Amazon’s Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt told me.
The barely perceptible lag suggested the worker was half a world away.
The person, who Schmidt said was hired by an Amazon contractor, was part of the surge in recent years of North Koreans skirting strict sanctions by the US and other countries to con their way into remote jobs, often in IT. The purpose is to raise money for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, including for its weapons programs. The pattern of imposters has raised legal and security concerns for small businesses and major corporations.
Since April 2024, Amazon staff have found and foiled more than 1,800 attempts to be hired by North Koreans, Schmidt said during a security event at the company’s New York City office this week. This year, the number of such attempts has gone up 27%, on average, from one quarter to the next, the company says."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-12-17/amazon-caught-north-korean-it-worker-by-tracing-keystroke-data
#Amazon #CyberSecurity #NorthKorea

2025-12-18 21:26:05 GMT

"EU governments are pushing to widen data retention obligations for apps that citizens use every day – and the best VPN apps are among those targeted.
A new internal document dated November 27 (first published by Netzpolitik) provides important insights into the current thinking of the Danish Presidency of the EU Council. It shows that member states largely agree on the need for a new framework on data retention, presenting an important overview of lawmakers main position on the matter.
The topic has been debated since April, when the EU Commission first unveiled "ProtectEU," a strategy aiming to create a roadmap for "lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement." The Commission then presented the Roadmap in June, which outlined an intent to decrypt citizens' private data by 2030.
Crucially, the document reveals that EU governments see metadata – specifically traffic and location history – as the most vital tool for law enforcement.
Most member states argue that simply knowing who owns an account isn't enough. Instead, they want a new legal baseline where companies are forced to log exactly when and where a user was online, as well as the IP addresses they used to connect.
The document notes that member states are aware of the legal hurdles of gathering this data and emphasize that any new system must include robust safeguards and strict proportionality to satisfy the courts.
However, privacy experts and technologists have long warned that such 'safeguards' are not enough, arguing that you cannot weaken encryption or retain this data without fundamentally compromising user security.
Besides virtual private network (VPN) companies, other online services targeted include messaging apps, hosting providers, file sharing services, cloud storage apps, and other over-the-top (OTT) services."
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/the-eu-prepares-ground-for-wider-data-retention-and-vpn-providers-are-among-the-targets
#EU #DataRetention #Privacy #VPNs #Metadata #Surveillance #DataProtection #DigitalRights #ProtectEU

2025-12-12 10:12:27 GMT

"Mac and Crane discuss the essay "Legality and Illegality" by György Lukács (Georg Lukács) in the context of his broader development: after joining the Communist Party in 1918, Lukács would play an important role in the leadership of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March to August 1919), around which time he would write many of the essays later collected and published in Tactics and Ethics: 1919-1929, only to reverse some of his positions on core issues in his subsequent exile in Vienna, resulting in History and Class Consciousness (1923). In their discussion of the vicissitudes of fate and philosophy, Mac and Crane attempt to answer the fundamental question tragically left out of E40's classic song "Choices": Lukács - Nope or Yup?"
https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-7-lukacs-145622463
#CriticalTheory #Lukacs #Marxism #Philosophy

2025-12-11 21:31:32 GMT

"The best evidence we have shows that rising health spending in the United States since 1975 can explain roughly the same share of the growth in income inequality as increased trade, outsourcing or automation. It has pushed down wages, fueled inequality and left families drowning in unaffordable medical bills.
Despite devastating out-of-pocket costs, Americans are generally insulated from the true cost of health care premiums. However, the expiring subsidies on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, where more than 20 million Americans get their insurance, show just how exorbitant premiums have become. Consider a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 a year. Without subsidies, their health insurance premiums next year will approach $32,000 (akin to buying a new Toyota Camry).
Those of us who get health care insurance from our employers — some 160 million Americans — may be breathing a sigh of relief. But our health care premiums are also staggering (an average of $27,000 a year for a family of four), and the fact that our employers pay part of the tab isn’t much of a reprieve.
That’s because decades’ worth of research shows that, even though employers pay most of workers’ premiums, those costs are passed on to workers in the form of lower wages and fewer jobs. That’s why the rise in health spending above the rate of inflation over the past decade has depressed wages by nearly 10 percent, according to my calculations. And because premiums are a bigger share of total pay for lower-income workers, the job cuts triggered by rising health care spending fall disproportionally on low- and middle-income workers and fuel income inequality."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/opinion/health-care-aca-cost-insurance.html
#USA #HealthCare #PublicHealth #HealthInsurance #MedicareForAll #Capitalism

2025-12-10 17:15:32 GMT

"On a Thursday in early September, more than 40 strangers logged in to Instacart, the grocery-shopping app, to buy eggs and test a hypothesis.
Connected by videoconference, they simultaneously selected the same store — a Safeway in Washington, D.C. — and the same brand of eggs. They all chose pickup rather than delivery.
The only difference was the price they were offered: $3.99 for a couple of lucky shoppers. $4.59 or $4.69 for others. And a few saw a price of $4.79 — 20 percent more than some others, for the exact same product.
The shoppers were volunteers, participating in a study published on Tuesday and organized by the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group, and Consumer Reports, a nonprofit consumer publication. In tests in four cities across the country, nearly 200 volunteers checked prices on 20 grocery items on Instacart.
On item after item, they found significant differences. In a Target in North Canton, Ohio, some shoppers were charged $3.59 for a jar of Skippy peanut butter that others could get for $2.99. At a Safeway in Seattle, some people paid $3.99 for a box of Wheat Thins while others paid $4.89. And at a Target in St. Paul, Minn., some people were charged $4.59 for a box of Cheerios that others could get for $3.99.
“Two shoppers who are buying the exact same item from the exact same store at the exact same time are getting different prices,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative. “The data really backs up how extraordinarily pervasive this is.”
(...)
Groundwork’s findings are the latest example of how the notion of a single price, offered to all customers for a predictable period, is breaking down in the digital age. Companies are using sophisticated algorithms to adjust prices quickly in response to competitors’ offers and consumer behavior."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/business/instacart-algorithmic-pricing.html
#USA #AlgorithmicPricing #DynamicPricing #Insatacart #Inflation #Algorithms

2025-12-10 12:43:31 GMT

"The Justice Department announced two indictments in the Central District of California charging Ukrainian national Victoria Eduardovna Dubranova, 33, also known as Vika, Tory, and SovaSonya, for her role in conducting cyberattacks and computer intrusions against critical infrastructure and other victims around the world, in support of Russia’s geopolitical interests. Dubranova was extradited to the United States earlier this year on an indictment charging her for her actions supporting CyberArmyofRussia_Reborn (CARR). Today, Dubranova was arraigned on a second indictment charging her for her actions supporting NoName057(16) (NoName). Dubranova pleaded not guilty in both cases, and is scheduled to begin trial in the NoName matter on Feb. 3, 2026 and in the CARR matter on April 7, 2026.
As described in the indictments, the Russian government backed CARR and NoName by providing, among other things, financial support. CARR used this financial support to access various cybercriminal services, including subscriptions to distributed denial of service-for-hire services. NoName was a state-sanctioned project administered in part by an information technology organization established by order of the President of Russia in October 2018 that developed, along with other co-conspirators, NoName’s proprietary distributed denial of service (DDoS) program.
“Politically motivated hacktivist groups, whether state-sponsored like CARR or state-sanctioned like NoName, pose a serious threat to our national security, particularly when foreign intelligence services use civilians to obfuscate their malicious cyber activity targeting American critical infrastructure as well as attacking proponents of NATO and U.S. interests abroad,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California."
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-actions-combat-two-russian-state-sponsored-cyber-criminal
#CyberCrime #CyberSecurity #Russia #StateHacking #DDoS #USA #Hacktivism

2025-12-10 11:31:49 GMT

"OpenAI has allegedly become more guarded about publishing research that highlights the potentially negative impact that AI could have on the economy, four people familiar with the matter tell WIRED.
The perceived pullback has contributed to the departure of at least two employees on OpenAI’s economic research team in recent months, according to the same four people, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity.
Dispatches from the heart of the AI scene, with a focus on the people, communities, and companies driving this transformative technology.
One of these employees, Tom Cunningham, left the company entirely in September after concluding it had become difficult to publish high-quality research, WIRED has learned. In a parting message shared internally, Cunningham wrote that the team faced a growing tension between conducting rigorous analysis and functioning as a de facto advocacy arm for OpenAI, according to sources familiar with the situation.
Cunningham declined WIRED’s request for comment.
OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon addressed these concerns in an internal memo following Cunningham’s departure. In a copy of the message obtained by WIRED, Kwon argued that OpenAI must act as a responsible leader in the AI sector and should not only raise problems with the technology, but also “build the solutions.”"
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-economic-research-team-ai-jobs/
#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #AIBubble #AIHype #Automation #Economy

2025-12-08 14:40:27 GMT

"We are hurtling toward climate chaos. The planet's vital signs are flashing red. The consequences of human-driven alterations of the climate are no longer future threats but are here now. This unfolding emergency stems from failed foresight, political inaction, unsustainable economic systems, and misinformation. Almost every corner of the biosphere is reeling from intensifying heat, storms, floods, droughts, or fires. The window to prevent the worst outcomes is rapidly closing. In early 2025, the World Meteorological Organization reported that 2024 was the hottest year on record (WMO 2025a). This was likely hotter than the peak of the last interglacial, roughly 125,000 years ago (Gulev et al. 2021, Kaufman and McKay 2022). Rising levels of greenhouse gases remain the driving force behind this escalation. These recent developments emphasize the extreme insufficiency of global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mark the beginning of a grim new chapter for life on Earth.
In this report, we seek to speak candidly to fellow scientists, policymakers, and humanity at large. Given our roles in research and higher education, we share an ethical responsibility to sound the alarm about escalating global risks and to take collective action in confronting them with clarity and resolve. We show evidence of accelerated warming and document changes in Earth's vital signs. These indicators build on the framework introduced by Ripple and colleagues (2020), who issued a declaration of a climate emergency that has garnered support from approximately 15,800 scientist signatories worldwide. We also examine recent extreme weather disasters and discuss physical and social risks. The final sections of the report include suggested climate mitigation strategies and the broader societal transformations needed to secure a livable future. A summary of key findings is given in box 1."
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biaf149/8303627?login=false
#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #ClimateCrisis

2025-12-04 15:42:32 GMT

"Mobilizing Rousseau against Thiel, we may be more optimistic about human nature and believe in the possibility of democracy. We should reject Thiel’s false dilemma between state totalitarianism and libertarianism: there are more options in between, even in the U.S. And even global governance could be organized in a (more) democratic way.
Yet it remains a challenge to deal with the problem of violence in a way that does not lead to totalitarianism. This is not only an issue in the post-9/11 context in which Thiel’s thoughts developed, but also and perhaps especially in today’s divided and polarized political world.
This divisive context is not unrelated to tech. Current digital social media, including the Facebook Thiel invested in, have monetized mimetic desire. Girard’s theory has become a business model. The result is there for all to see, and it’s rather ugly. Social media have become the main theatres of mimetic rivalry. Artificial intelligence, in turn, doesn’t seem to make things better, undermining democracy and creating the soil for new forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
That takes us back to the tech world. In practice, Thiel’s way of dealing with the Girardian problem is Palantir. Monopoly as a means to avoid mimetic competition, a classic recipe of Big Tech (as Palaver reminded his audience in his recent lecture at the University of Vienna). But also surveillance and control of the population to deal with the problem of violence. Rejecting the state, Thiel has raised a new Leviathan. Like other libertarian Tech bros, he criticises surveillance and control when it comes from the nation state, but meanwhile he has installed his own “Antichrist” anchored in the private sector (which in turn services Trump’s surveillance state and foreign states)."
https://coeckelbergh.medium.com/enemies-scapegoats-and-the-antichrist-2569ed834fdc
#SiliconValley #Thiel #BigTech #Libertarianism #Surveillance #Democracy #Scapegoating #Philosophy #Girard

2025-12-03 16:30:56 GMT

"AI companies are spending billions on data centers in the race to AGI. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has some thoughts on the math behind those bets.
Data center spending is on the rise. During Meta's recent earnings call, words like "capacity" and AI "infrastructure" were frequently used. Google just announced that it wants to eventually build them in space. The question remains: will the revenue generated from data centers ever justify all the capital expenditure?
On the "Decoder" podcast, Krishna concluded that there was likely "no way" these companies would make a return on their capex spending on data centers.
Couching that his napkin math was based on today's costs, "because anything in the future is speculative," Kirshna said that it takes about $80 billion to fill up a one-gigawatt data center.
"Okay, that's today's number. So, if you are going to commit 20 to 30 gigawatts, that's one company, that's $1.5 trillion of capex," he said.
Krishna also referenced the depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-ceo-says-no-way-103010877.html
#AI #GenerativeAI #IBM #DataCenters #AIBubble

2025-12-03 01:13:59 GMT

"On the heels of an unprecedented UN Security Council resolution endorsing President Donald Trump’s Gaza agenda on November 17, the U.S. and its allies are now trying to move forward with the “second phase” of their plan to colonize Gaza and turn it into a hub of international investment. The aim is to use an international force, which will operate under Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace,” as a means to completely disarm the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and impose imperial tutelage on the Gaza Strip. While it states that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza,” the plan bestows sweeping agency on Israel and is filled with ambiguities that could keep Israeli forces indefinitely entrenched in Gaza.
Trump’s 20-point plan has been endorsed by an assortment of Arab and Islamic states and Mahmoud Abbas, the deeply unpopular 90-year old head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), but it has been rejected by a wide cross section of other Palestinian political factions and parties.
“It’s an Israeli plan that has been rebranded as a Trump plan,” said Diana Buttu, a human rights lawyer who previously served as an advisor to Palestinian negotiators. “All of the guarantees are being given to Israel, but there’s no guarantees that are given to Palestinians. The fact [is] that all of the control rests in the hands of Israel. No control is ceded to anybody else; it looks to me entirely like an Israeli plan that was rebranded as a Trump plan—not the other way around,” Buttu told Drop Site. “It was a plan that was designed to ease the pressure off of Israel and, at the same time, let Israel continue to kill Palestinians—let them try to ethnically cleanse Gaza. It exactly matches what Israel said from the beginning.”"
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-gaza-abbas-oslo-hamas-palestinian-islamic-jihad-fatah-palestinian-liberation-organization-palestinian-resistance-united-nation-macron-france
#USA #Trump #Palestine #Gaza #Israel #Genocide

2025-12-02 11:16:16 GMT

"European banks, cowed by a stern look from a US Treasury official in Washington, rushed to close Guillou’s accounts. European companies, whose compliance departments act as extensions of the US authorities, refuse to provide him services. Meanwhile, European institutions – the Commission and the Council – look the other way, wringing their hands and muttering platitudes about the “complexities” of transatlantic relations. They are not merely failing to protect Guillou; they are actively enforcing US sanctions against their own citizen.
During a week when European leaders loudly protested how the US had sidelined them in drawing up a peace deal for Ukraine, their silence over Guillou’s treatment completely normalized the erosion of their authority. From Trump’s perspective, they swapped the challenging, messy project of sovereignty for the comfortable decline of a US protectorate. How else could French President Emmanuel Macron have expected Trump to interpret his decision to treat the economic assassination of a French judge on French soil as nothing more than an unfortunate technical glitch or a minor bureaucratic snafu? Did he and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz really believe that sacrificing their citizens to Trump would gain them a seat at the negotiating table on issues such as Ukraine and Palestine, which are of existential importance to Europe?
No, Guillou’s Kafkaesque nightmare should not surprise us. What should be shocking is the silence surrounding it. We should be outraged not only by US actions, but also by Europe's inaction. Guillou’s case is a stark metaphor for Europe itself: a union of nation-states that helped build an international court to uphold its values, allowing a foreign power to punish its own judge for doing so, and then helped to enforce the punishment. This is a union that has lost its way, its soul, and its spine, turning Europeans into willing extras..."
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/europe-enforcing-us-sanctions-on-french-icc-judge-guillou-by-yanis-varoufakis-2025-12
#EU #ICC #USA #Trump #Palestine #Israel #Genocide

2025-11-30 10:45:12 GMT

RT @HedgieMarkets
🦔A leak from the ChatGPT Android app beta reveals OpenAI is internally testing ads. The code references include "ads feature," "bazaar content," "search ad," and "search ads carousel." Ads appear to be limited to the search experience initially.
The Scale
ChatGPT now has roughly 800 million weekly users, up from 100 million in November 2023 and 300 million in late 2024. Users send about 18 billion messages per week, with GPT handling around 2.5 billion prompts daily. India has become the largest user base, ahead of the US.
My Take
This was inevitable given the math we covered from HSBC. OpenAI has a $207 billion funding hole and only 5% of users pay for subscriptions. Ads are how you monetize the other 95%. But think about what ChatGPT knows compared to Google. When you search Google, it sees keywords. When you talk to ChatGPT, it sees your thought process, your anxieties, your personal problems, your financial questions. A million users discuss mental health weekly. People ask it for medical advice, relationship help, career guidance. Now imagine ads targeted against that data. OpenAI argued in court this week that a suicidal teenager violated terms of service. They just had a data breach exposing user information. And they're about to build an advertising business on top of the most intimate conversations people have with technology. The company valued at $183 billion that can't pay its compute bills is about to learn exactly how much your private thoughts are worth to advertisers.
Hedgie🤗
https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/1994887090577052074

2025-11-28 21:26:48 GMT

"The Digital Omnibus would pause the enforcement of regulations for high-risk AI systems under Article 6(2), such as biometric identification and categorisation, judicial decision-making or scoring or ranking job applicants, for up to 15 months – to 2 December 2027. While this part of Article 6 was supposed to apply from August 2026, this delay of up to 15 months would significantly extend gaps in transparency and accountability.
This delay is the result of intense lobbying from Big Tech and governments, including the U.S., Denmark and Germany. Tech companies claim they need more time to meet the requirements, but by the time requirements were supposed to kick in (2026), they would have known about them for more than two years. The delay would mean another year that AI systems posing a high risk to fundamental rights are allowed to operate without necessary regulation."
https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/omnibus/45571?
#EU #EC #DigitalOmnibus #AIAct #BigTech #AIRegulation #DataProtection #Privacy #DigitalRights

2025-11-26 17:35:57 GMT

RT @davidsirota
🚨NEWS: Elected officials are signing tech companies' non-disclosure agreements blocking the government from telling the public details of data center projects - including which corporations they benefit, how much water they'll use & how much they'll jack up electricity prices.
https://www.levernews.com/pay-no-attention-to-the-chipmaker-behind-the-curtain/

2025-11-25 21:39:15 GMT

"A quiet shift is happening in Brussels. The European Commission has launched what it calls the Digital Omnibus, a sweeping rewrite of the EU’s core digital protections.
Officials present it as routine housekeeping. Streamlining. Cutting ‘red tape’ to boost Europe’s competitiveness. In reality, the Omnibus marks the most ambitious deregulation of the digital sphere the EU has ever attempted.
This move matters because Europe’s digital rulebook was not built for decoration. Laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the ePrivacy framework and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) protect people’s most basic rights online.
They set limits on what companies and public authorities may do with personal information, how devices can be accessed, and when algorithms may replace human judgement.
If those protections fall, everyday life changes: how we access healthcare, apply for a job, seek housing, or move through public space.
The Commission’s proposals reopen all three laws at once. They tweak definitions, hollow out safeguards and create new exemptions that give powerful actors more room to collect, infer and reuse personal data.
These changes occur alongside the Digital Fitness Check that hints at future changes to nearly any law touching the digital environment.
Taken together, this is not simplification. It is a shift away from the idea that fundamental rights should set hard boundaries for the digital economy. Under the Omnibus, the definition of personal data becomes narrower and more dependent on what companies say they can identify."
https://www.context.news/digital-rights/opinion/europe-is-dismantling-its-digital-rights-from-within
#EU #DigitalOmnibus #DigitalRights #GDPR #AIAct #DataProtection #Privacy

2025-11-25 20:26:10 GMT

SLAVERY IS FREEDOM v2.0:
"The Sam Altman-founded company behind the "Orb," a volleyball-sized metal sphere that scans irises to prove people's humanity, had a message for employees: work weekends and ignore anything outside your job — for the good of humanity.
During a January all-hands with employees of the startup, Tools for Humanity, CEO Alex Blania laid out his expectations.
"We will neither fail, nor will we be an average outcome, and that's what we want and that's all I care about every day and all you should care about every day, and nothing else should matter," Blania said, according to a recording reviewed by Business Insider. "If you should care about something else, and if you want something else, you should just not be here. It's as simple as that."
The company's mission is to build a global digital identity system that can verify who is human in an increasingly AI-driven world. Blania said it exists solely to achieve that goal — and that anything else is a distraction.
"We don't care about politics, we don't care about DEI, we don't care about anything, we just care about how can we achieve the mission through merit, performance, and excellence," said Blania, who also told staffers he had recently attended President Donald Trump's inauguration in Washington, DC.
Several "team values" displayed on a television screen in the start-up's now-former San Francisco office echoed Blania's messaging, a February video viewed by Business Insider shows."
https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-tools-for-humanity-startup-culture-hardcore-2025-11
#Orb #SamAltman #Billionaires #MassSurveillance #Worldcoin #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies

2025-11-24 20:58:57 GMT

"Victoria’s stilted email, and a closer read of the original pitch, revealed what should have been clear from the start: with its rote phrasing (“This story matters because of… It is timely because of… It fits your readership because of…”), it had all the hallmarks of an AI-generated piece of writing.
I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where “health and money collide,” flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.
But if Victoria’s pitch appeared to be an AI-generated fabrication, and if she was making up interviews and bylines, what to make of her long list of publications?
Since 2022, the byline “Victoria Goldiee” has been attached to dozens of articles. There are a series of “as-told to” stories in Business Insider. (“I’m a 22-year-old Amazon delivery driver. The cameras in my truck keep me on high alert, but it’s my dream job and the flexible hours are great,” is a novel take on Amazon’s labour practices). There had been an interview with the comic actor Nico Santos in Vogue Philippines, a feature on Afrobeats in RollingStone Africa (no longer on the site), a product recommendation for a DVD drive in New York Magazine’s The Strategist, and, in the past two years, a move away from culture writing to meatier features."
https://thelocal.to/investigating-scam-journalism-ai/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Media #Journalism #News #ScamJournalism #AISlop

2025-11-24 09:05:40 GMT

RT @burkov
This paper shows how to beat models with 671 billion parameters using just 7 million parameters on hard puzzle tasks. On the ARC-AGI reasoning benchmark, this tiny model achieves 45% accuracy compared to 15.8% for DeepSeek R1 and 34.5% for OpenAI's o3-mini. On extremely difficult Sudoku puzzles with only 1,000 training examples, it reaches 87% accuracy where the previous best method managed 55%.
The method treats problem-solving as iterative refinement. The network maintains a current answer and a separate "reasoning" state, then repeatedly updates both: reason about the problem, propose a better answer, reason again, improve further. A Sudoku solver might start with a partially filled grid, update some cells, then reason again about the new constraints—gradually correcting mistakes across up to 16 refinement cycles.
The core insight is that large models fail because they generate answers in one pass, so early mistakes cascade. Breaking the problem into iterative steps, even with far less computational power, proves more effective. Training takes hours on a single GPU instead of weeks on clusters, and the model fits in 28MB instead of terabytes.
Let the article talk to you on ChapterPal: https://chapterpal.com/s/e2942994/less-is-more-recursive-reasoning-with-tiny-networks
Download the PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04871

2025-11-22 12:16:15 GMT

"European Digital Rights (EDRi), a pan-European network of NGOs, described the plans as “a major rollback of EU digital protections” that risked dismantling “the very foundations of human rights and tech policy in the EU”.
In particular, it said that changes to GDPR would allow “the unchecked use of people’s most intimate data for training AI systems” and that a wide range of exemptions proposed to online privacy rules would mean businesses would be able to read data on phones and browsers without asking.
European business groups welcomed the proposals but said they did not go far enough. A representative from the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, said: “Efforts to simplify digital and tech rules cannot stop here.” The CCIA urged “a more ambitious, all-encompassing review of the EU’s entire digital rulebook”.
Critics of the shake-up included the EU’s former commissioner for enterprise, Thierry Breton, who wrote in the Guardian that Europe should resist attempts to unravel its digital rulebook “under the pretext of simplification or remedying an alleged ‘anti-innovation’ bias. No one is fooled over the transatlantic origin of these attempts.”"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/19/european-commission-accused-of-massive-rollback-of-digital-protections
#EU #EC #DigitalOmnibus #GDPR #WebCookies #DataProtection #AI #AIAct

2025-11-22 12:10:37 GMT

"Under the radar, Google has added features that allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models.
If you use Gmail, you need to be aware of an important change that’s quietly rolling out. Reportedly, Google has recently started automatically opting users in to allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models. This means your emails could be analyzed to improve Google’s AI assistants, like Smart Compose or AI-generated replies. Unless you decide to take action.
The reason behind this is Google’s push to power new Gmail features with its Gemini AI, helping you write emails faster and manage your inbox more efficiently. To do that, Google is using real email content, including attachments, to train and refine its AI models. Some users are now reporting that these settings are switched on by default instead of asking for explicit opt-in.
Which means that if you don’t manually turn these setting off, your private messages may be used for AI training behind the scenes. Even though Google promises strong privacy measures like anonymization and data security during AI training, for anyone handling sensitive or confidential information, that may not feel reassuring."
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/gmail-is-reading-your-emails-and-attachments-to-train-its-ai-unless-you-turn-it-off
#AI #GenerativeAI #Google #Gmail #Gemini

2025-11-21 21:20:21 GMT

"What is the relationship of science and technology to human history, and how have Marxists conceptualized this problematic within historical materialism? The work of Boris Hessen represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to apply a materialist analysis to the history of science—specifically, how the economic needs of early capitalism influenced what we now think of as modern science and the Scientific Revolution. In this blog, I explore how Hessen pursues his analysis in his seminal essay “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” (henceforth referred to as “Newton’s Roots”).
While Hessen did not develop the first Marxist analysis of science, Hessen’s approach was one of the first truly systematic attempts. Moreover, his work helps us see past the often oversimplified division between “Western Marxism” and Soviet thought, revealing a productive tension in international Marxism through attempts to apply historical materialism in understanding science, technology, and nature under capitalist society.
In the same vein, Henryk Grossman makes the connection between science and capitalist society explicit in his work with the Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung, or IfS)—several of Grossmann’s articles were published in the IfS’s journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (ZfS). Grossmann was in fact one of the first defenders of Hessen’s work against critics such as George. N. Clark, Richard S. Westfall, etc. as these critics fundamentally misunderstood Hessen’s theses, and, by extension, Grossmann’s own formulation of the relation between science and capitalist society. While both reached similar conclusions independently, and Grossmann’s work is introduced at points, I focus on Hessen’s formulation here."
https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RootsandBranches_Hessen/
#Marxism #Science #Newton #HistoricalMaterialism #STS #Capitalism

2025-11-21 19:54:39 GMT

"Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) is tracking a long-running and adaptive cyber espionage campaign by APT24, a People's Republic of China (PRC)-nexus threat actor. Spanning three years, APT24 has been deploying BADAUDIO, a highly obfuscated first-stage downloader used to establish persistent access to victim networks.
While earlier operations relied on broad strategic web compromises to compromise legitimate websites, APT24 has recently pivoted to using more sophisticated vectors targeting organizations in Taiwan. This includes the repeated compromise of a regional digital marketing firm to execute supply chain attacks and the use of targeted phishing campaigns.
This report provides a technical analysis of the BADAUDIO malware, details the evolution of APT24's delivery mechanisms from 2022 to present, and offers actionable intelligence to help defenders detect and mitigate this persistent threat.
As part of our efforts to combat serious threat actors, GTIG uses the results of our research to improve the safety and security of Google’s products and users. Upon discovery, all identified websites, domains, and files are added to the Safe Browsing blocklist in order to protect web users across major browsers. We also conducted a series of victim notifications with technical details to compromised sites, enabling affected organizations to secure their sites and prevent future infections."
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/apt24-pivot-to-multi-vector-attacks
#CyberSecurity #China #WateringHole #APT24 #Badaudio #Phishing #Taiwan #MultiVectorAttacks

2025-11-20 10:09:47 GMT

RT @RnaudBertrand
In a normal world, this should be an immense scandal in Europe.
Le Monde has a long article (https://lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/11/19/nicolas-guillou-juge-francais-de-la-cpi-sanctionne-par-les-etats-unis-face-aux-attaques-les-magistrats-de-la-cour-tiendront_6654016_3210.html) describing the hellish life of Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the ICC in The Hague, due to U.S. sanctions punishing him for authorizing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes in Gaza.
Guillou's daily existence has been transformed into a Kafkaesque nightmare. He cannot: open or maintain accounts with Google, Amazon, Apple, or any US company; make hotel reservations (Expedia canceled his booking in France hours after he made it); conduct online commerce, since he can't know if the packaging is American; use any major credit card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex are all American); access normal banking services, even with non-American banks, as banks worldwide close sanctioned accounts; conduct virtually any financial transaction.
He describes it as being "economically banned across most of the planet," including in his own country, France, and where he works, the Netherlands.
That's the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are:
- punishing a European citizen
- for doing his job in Europe
- applying laws Europe officially supports
- at an institution based in Europe
- that Europe helped create and fund
and Europe is not only doing essentially nothing to protect him, they're actively enforcing America's sanctions against their own citizen - European banks closing his accounts, European companies refusing him service, European institutions standing by while Washington destroys a European judge's life on European soil.
Again, in a normal world, European leaders and citizens should be absolutely outraged about this. But we've so normalized the hollowing out of European sovereignty that the sight of a European citizen being economically executed on European soil for upholding European law is treated, at best, as an unfortunate technical complication in transatlantic relations.
https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/11/19/nicolas-guillou-juge-francais-de-la-cpi-sanctionne-par-les-etats-unis-face-aux-attaques-les-magistrats-de-la-cour-tiendront_6654016_3210.html

2025-11-18 22:37:38 GMT

"Since September, the Trump administration has conducted an undeclared war in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing scores of civilians. The Intercept is chronicling all publicly declared U.S. attacks and providing a tracker with information on each strike.
The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. President Donald Trump has justified the attacks, in a War Powers report to Congress, under his Article II constitutional authority as commander in chief of the U.S. military and claimed to be acting pursuant to the United States’ inherent right of self-defense as a matter of international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has also produced a classified opinion that provides legal cover for the lethal strikes.
Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.
The Pentagon has repeatedly withheld information on the attacks from members of Congress and the American public, despite mounting questions from lawmakers about the legality of these deadly strikes.
So The Intercept is publishing a strike tracker documenting America’s newest war."
https://theintercept.com/2025/11/17/trump-boat-strikes-death-toll-caribbean-pacific/
#USA #Trump #CaribbeanSea #StateOfException #Imperialism #Venezuela #Colombia

2025-11-18 22:01:54 GMT

- reply

"The EU continues to invest in science and scientists through various research programs. But when it comes to AI policy, the European Commission seems to firmly lean on US tech CEOs' views amid the AI bubble.
Earlier this year, Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, echoed the claims and speculation of tech CEOs around “AGI” and “superintelligence”. A letter, now signed by more than 200 scientists and scholars, has been sent to the President to retract these unscientific claims.
These speculations are not mere words. As one of us has previously written, the Commission’s AI Continent plan embeds these ideological speculations into policies. In it, the Commission claims “the next generation of frontier AI models [are] expected to unlock a leap in capabilities, towards Artificial General Intelligence.”
The European Commission has uncritically accepted AI, particularly generative AI, as useful. The Commission's Apply AI strategy takes a leaf out of Big Tech's playbook and imposes AI — regardless of merit — on people through an "AI first" policy where "AI is considered as a potential solution whenever organizations make strategic or policy decisions.""
https://www.techpolicy.press/ai-hype-is-steering-eu-policy-off-course/

2025-11-18 21:59:42 GMT

Big Business lobbying money always trumps privacy, data protection, and ethics...
"After more than a decade of aggressively regulating the technology industry, the European Union is having second thoughts.
In a significant shift, policymakers in Brussels are moving to scale back and simplify landmark rules for artificial intelligence and data privacy. Driven by growing concern that overregulation is stifling economic growth, officials and business leaders across the 27-nation bloc are questioning whether Europe’s digital rulebook has gone too far and left companies lagging the United States and China. The Trump administration has also criticized Europe’s regulations.
The rethinking is set to be laid out in a “digital package of simplification” that the European Commission, which manages much of the bloc’s day-to-day work, plans to unveil on Wednesday. According to drafts circulated in recent weeks, which were reviewed by The New York Times, key aspects of the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., a data privacy law, would be rewritten. Parts of a law restricting certain uses of A.I. would also be delayed."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/technology/europe-big-tech.html
#EU #EC #DataProtection #BigTech #Privacy #GDPR #AIAct #AI

2025-11-17 22:00:36 GMT

"Capital has willing workers even in the media that aren’t owned by billionaires. A devastating new article by Peter Coviello, professor of American literature at the University of Illinois, records how he and his former college became collateral damage in the campaign waged by the New York Times against Zohran Mamdani, now mayor-elect of New York City. Coviello explains a process grimly familiar to climate scientists: equating expert opinion with commentary from paid lobbyists. No attempt is made to examine “the relation between those two ‘sides,’ or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority”. If, he argues, you have the money to fund a junktank, it will produce whatever opinion you request, then papers such as the New York Times will balance that opinion against decades of academic study, as if the two things are of equal weight.
This also describes the BBC’s understanding of “impartiality”. While it no longer provides a platform for outright climate denial, almost every day it breaks its own editorial guidelines by hosting Tufton Street junktanks (which often argue against environmental action) without revealing who funds them. Shouldn’t we be allowed to know whether or not they are sponsored by fossil fuel companies?
(...)
In this media climate, it’s not surprising that governments are retreating from climate action. In June, a review by the International Panel on the Information Environment found that “inaccurate or misleading narratives” in the media about climate breakdown create “a feedback loop between scientific denialism and political inaction”. The results can be seen at the current Cop30 climate talks...
(...)
It didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a deliberate and systematic assault on knowledge by some of the richest people on Earth. Preventing climate breakdown means protecting ourselves from the storm of lies."
#ClimateChange #Media #News #Propaganda #BBC #Journalism #Capitalism
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/14/climate-crisis-communication-super-rich

2025-11-17 21:50:43 GMT

"Israel is breaching international law by continuing to impose restrictions on aid flows into Gaza, where the population remains critically short of food and life-saving goods as winter sets in, a senior official at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees has said.
In an interview during a recent visit to Brussels, Natalie Boucly, an Unrwa deputy commissioner general, said the whole world – including the EU and US – needed to increase the pressure on Israel’s government to ensure the unrestricted flow of aid into Gaza.
Unrwa has enough food, tents and other essentials to fill the equivalent of up to 6,000 trucks, Boucly said.
“As winter approaches and famine continues to grip the population, it is critical that all this aid is allowed into Gaza without delay,” she said. “Our supplies would be able to provide food … for the entire population for about three months. And that is sitting outside [in Jordan and Egypt], not able to come in. And that is the case for the other UN agencies because the restrictions and the constraints are still there.”
She estimated that only about half, “if that”, of the 500-600 daily truckloads needed were getting into the devastated territory."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/15/israel-breaching-international-law-by-limiting-gaza-aid-says-unrwa-official?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
#Palestine #Gaza #Israel #InternationalLaw #HumanitarianAid

2025-11-16 14:08:21 GMT

"Watching tech moguls throw caution to the wind in the AI arms race or equivocate on whether humanity ought to continue, it’s natural to wonder whether they care about human lives.
The earnest, in-depth answer to this question is just as bleak as the glib one. As moral philosopher Émile Torres argues, many Silicon Valley leaders embrace a vision of a transhumanist future in which biological humans will be replaced by digital beings endowed with superintelligence. This vision helps explain their obsession with artificial general intelligence (AGI) and sits at the core of what Torres describes as human extinctionist preferences.
In 2023, Torres and his colleague Timnit Gebru coined the acronym TESCREAL to describe a constellation of ideologies — Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism — that have become highly influential within Silicon Valley. Torres is a philosopher, intellectual historian, and journalist whose work focuses on the ethics of emerging technologies, particularly AI and human extinction.
In this conversation with journalist Doug Henwood recorded for the Jacobin podcast Behind the News, Torres explains the TESCREAL worldview, its connections to eugenics and IQ realism, and why figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman embrace visions of a post-human future."
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/musk-thiel-altman-ai-tescrealism/
#BigTech #AI #AGI #TESCREAL #SuperIntelligence #PostHumanism

2025-11-02 14:30:50 GMT

"For all the legitimate reasons fueling progressive gun ownership, this trend also points to a perilous trajectory for the country. When citizens on both sides of the spectrum feel compelled to take up arms, it suggests that America is sliding toward a form of “militant democracy,” one in which political conflicts are increasingly defined by shows of force and the looming threat of violence. The more that Americans come to see guns as essential tools of political expression or self-preservation, the more our civic life becomes a powder keg, where every culture-shaking event may be met with talk of outright civil war. In such an environment, we risk our democratic norms giving way to fear, intimidation, and the ever-present possibility of confrontation.
History offers a warning. Societies where opposing factions armed themselves — Weimar Germany in the 1930s, for example — often saw democracy deteriorate into street clashes and authoritarian crackdowns. Even in modern stable democracies abroad, it’s virtually unheard of for mainstream political groups to organize armed wings for “self-defense” in peacetime. The United States is entering an uncomfortable new territory: Rather than relying solely on institutions to resolve political disputes, people are preparing to defend their worldview with weapons in hand. It’s a dynamic that might deter some aggressors in the short term, but it also raises the stakes of every conflict and increases the risk that a spark could ignite something far worse."
https://theintercept.com/2025/11/01/left-gun-ownership/
#USA #Militarism #SecondAmendment #GunOwnership #Polarization

2025-11-01 14:36:39 GMT

They're adopting all the bad ideas of dystopian movies and novels...:
"U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is considering hiring private bounty hunters to locate immigrants across the country, according to a procurement document reviewed by The Intercept. Under the plan, bounty hunters may receive “monetary bonuses” depending on how successfully they track down their targets — and how many immigrants they then report to ICE.
According to the document, which solicits information from interested contractors for a potentially forthcoming contract opportunity, companies hired by ICE will be given bundles of information on 10,000 immigrants at a time to locate, with further assignments provided in “increments of 10,000 up to 1,000,000.”
The solicitation says ICE is “exploring an incentive based pricing structure” to encourage quick results, with “monetary bonuses” paid out based on performance. For example, ICE says contractors might get paid a bonus for identifying a person’s correct address on the first try or finding 90 percent of its targets within a set timeframe."
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/31/ice-plans-cash-rewards-for-private-bounty-hunters-to-locate-and-track-immigrants/
#USA #Trump #ICE #Immigration #Deportation #BountyHunters #Dystopia

2025-11-01 14:20:23 GMT

"Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell drew a stark picture of a labor market that looks fine on the surface—4.3% unemployment, solid consumer spending—but is quietly losing momentum underneath. Once you adjust for statistical overcounting in the payroll data, he said during a press conference Wednesday following the FOMC meeting, “job creation is pretty close to zero.”
He connected that slowdown, at least in part, to what CEOs are now openly telling investors: AI allows them to do more with fewer people.
He noted “a significant number of companies” have recently announced layoffs or hiring pauses, with many of them explicitly citing AI as the reason.
“Much of the time they’re talking about AI and what it can do,” Powell told reporters after the Fed’s rate-cut decision, warning large employers are signaling they won’t need to add headcount for years. “We’re watching that very carefully,” he added.
The comments come as the Fed cut interest rates by a quarter point to a range of 3.75%–4%, citing “downside risks to employment” even as inflation remains elevated."
https://fortune.com/2025/10/30/jerome-powell-ai-bubble-jobs-unemployment-crisis-interest-rates/
#USA #FED #AI #AIBubble #Economy #Automation #Unemployment

2025-11-01 14:01:24 GMT

"Our brains are conditioned to select for cognitive ease, and that’s what the AI merchants are selling us. The sales pitch is, “You don’t have to exert all that mental effort thinking new thoughts, learning new things, and expressing yourself creatively! This product will do it for you!”
But it comes at a cost. We have to trade in our ability to do those things for ourselves.
Historically when a new technology has shown up, that kind of tradeoff has been worth it. Not many people know how to start a fire with a bow drill anymore, but it rarely matters because modern technology has given us much more efficient ways of starting fires and keeping warm. It didn’t make sense to spend all the time and effort necessary to maintain our respective bow drill skills once that technology showed up.
But this isn’t like that. We’re not talking about some obsolete skill we won’t need anymore thanks to modern technological development, we’re talking about our minds. Our creative expression. Our inspiration. Our very humanness.
Even if AI worked well (it doesn’t) and even if our plutocratic overlords could be trusted to interpret reality on our behalf (they can’t), those still wouldn’t be aspects of ourselves that we should want to relinquish."
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/they-want-you-relying-on-artificial
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Alienation #CriticalThinking

2025-10-31 20:13:08 GMT

- reply

"The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) expressed concern over Germany’s actions. When the German government declares that “information on deliveries from the German Armed Forces was only provided to the ICJ in agreement with Israel,” ECCHR told Drop Site and Stern in a statement, it appears “possible that the aforementioned goods were not the only goods sent after all, but only the only goods disclosed.” This would mean that “only part of the information” on the shipments from the Bundeswehr was disclosed — only the information that Israel agreed to disclose despite the alleged confidentiality agreement.
In the eyes of Matthias Goldmann, Professor of International Law, Germany not giving a full account to the ICJ would be a “political scandal” and “an affront to an international court.” If Germany had made incomplete or false statements before the ICJ, it would “clearly reveal Germany’s double standards and thus call into question its credibility and commitment to the rules-based world order.”"

2025-10-31 20:11:08 GMT

"At the hearing on April 8, 2024, Nicaragua’s representative criticized the reported delivery of 10,000 rounds of 120-millimeter precision ammunition for tanks from Bundeswehr stocks following a request from Israel. In The Hague on the following day, Germany’s representative confirmed that Israel had requested the munitions but said it was “still being reviewed” and no license had been issued. The representative, Tania Freiin von Uslar-Gleichen, then said the Bundeswehr had not supplied weapons or ammunition to Israel since 2023, claiming “the only items supplied by the German Bundeswehr to Israel are medical supplies and helmets.”
Now, documents obtained by Drop Site and Stern cast doubt on the completeness of that account, indicating that Germany decided what to disclose to the court “in agreement” with Israel.
A document from the German Ministry of Defense dated January 29, 2025 states the government decided, “in agreement with the affected state,” to “disclose details beyond those in the arms export report” for the hearing. The “arms export report” produced by the Ministry of Economics does not contain complete and detailed information on the exported military equipment, but rather information on the total values of the goods exported.
Another letter from the same Ministry dated January 15, 2025 states “the differentiated information on Bundeswehr exports,” which were requested in the lawsuit, was “not disclosed in the proceedings before the ICJ.”
A Cologne Administrative Court decision from May 26, 2025, further confirms this, stating that Germany’s testimony that only “medical supplies and helmets” were supplied “was made, according to the respondent [the German Defense ministry], in agreement with the State of Israel.”
Another letter from the Ministry of Defense, dated July 23, 2025, refers to a “confidentiality agreement” with Israel."
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/exclusive-germany-coordinated-icj-testimony-israel-arms-genocide
#Palestine #Gaza #Israel #Genocide #Germany #ICJ #ArmsExports

2025-10-31 20:08:05 GMT

"On behalf of the Open Knowledge Foundation, I welcome today’s announcement by the European Commission on the creation of the Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (DC-EDIC). It is a hopeful moment for Europe, where the values of thousands of communities that have worked for years in a different way of doing and governing technology, openness, cooperation and democracy, are finally listened to. This is a milestone moment, finally translating years of ideas and words into concrete action. Europe is showing that technology can be built and governed differently: openly, collaboratively, and with people at its heart.
While DC-EDIC begins as a European effort, its vision will reach far beyond the continent. It is a model built for sharing that provides digital commons open by design, scalable, and reusable, which other countries and regions can adapt to their own challenges and needs. This commons-based approach places public value above proprietary control. It offers a powerful example of how we can collectively shape the digital future as a global public good."
https://blog.okfn.org/2025/10/30/we-celebrate-the-digital-commons-european-digital-infrastructure-consortium-a-model-built-for-sharing/
#EU #EC #DigitalCommons #DCEDIC #Commons

2025-10-30 18:45:17 GMT

RT @RnaudBertrand
This is beyond parody: the EU has come up with a "cloud sovereignty framework" to make EU tech more sovereign and they've notably devised a "sovereignty score" to determine whether a particular cloud provider is sovereign or not (which will then determine if they get government contracts).
So far so good.
The problem however is that the way this sovereignty score gets calculated actually gives HIGHER scores to AWS, Microsoft, and Google than to European cloud providers.
This is because the formula to calculate the score (full details here: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/09579818-64a6-4dd5-9577-446ab6219113_en?filename=Cloud-Sovereignty-Framework.pdf) absurdly allocates only 10% weight to "legal & jurisdictional sovereignty" (i.e., being actually a sovereign EU actor), while giving 65% combined weight to operational capabilities, supply chain documentation, and technical standards - precisely the areas where AWS/Azure/Google's massive scale gives them advantages over European providers. You can be completely subject to foreign legal jurisdiction but still score excellent overall.
EU cloud companies suspect this is intentional: the framework gives the EU bureaucratic cover to keep their existing contracts with US companies ("look, they got an excellent sovereignty score!") rather than forcing the politically difficult work of actually migrating to European infrastructure.
A sovereignty framework that prevents sovereignty, that's the EU for you...
https://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actualites/lire-le-referentiel-cloud-souverain-de-l-ue-suscite-le-debat-98322.html

2025-10-30 18:43:22 GMT

RT @ednewtonrex
Universal Music have settled their lawsuit with Udio.
From the little that is known about the settlement, this looks like a big win for creatives:
- Udio immediately turned off downloads, and apparently will transition to a closed ecosystem where you can remix artists’ songs with their permission & only share them on platform. This puts control in artists’ hands and limits AI that is trained on real musicians’ work competing with them elsewhere.
- Billboard says opting-in musicians will be paid for both training & outputs.
- This is the second major gen AI copyright settlement (following Bartz v. Anthropic). Settlements provide no case law, but you would expect them to bring significant money to rights holders (Anthropic brought $1.5 billion).
(The devil will be in the detail - details on the settlement are scarce right now.)
Also remember that this is just 1/6 of the major labels’ complaints against Udio & Suno. Sony & Warner are still suing Udio; all 3 are still suing Suno. There are also 2 outstanding class action lawsuits against each company brought by independent musicians.
https://billboard.com/pro/ai-music-udio-settles-lawsuit-universal-music-group/

2025-10-27 12:24:06 GMT

"This concentration of media ownership under David Ellison is a worrisome instance of vertical integration in the AI age. Oracle is a technology company, not a media company, but its hosting, processing, and cloud services are very much embedded in the media chain of ownership.
Control of what counts as the news, and how content gets delivered and consumed, is a major geopolitical concern. Capture of that media leaves mass communication vulnerable to manipulation by vested interests. The US government under Trump is aggressively pursuing this centralization of control; the administration has made it abundantly clear that any attempt at regulating powerful US technology companies overseas is an aggressive affront to trade, and tantamount to “censorship.”
During a recent Open Markets Institute conference in Brussels called “The Future of Democracy: Speech, Thought, Sovereignty, and Power in the Age of Platforms and AI,” Roger MacNamee, an early Silicon Valley investor and now a critic of Big Tech, described ascendant AI companies as “breathing new life into old monopolies.” Big Tech companies have long wielded dominance over economic policy and culture, but the regulatory challenges are finally spilling over to issues surrounding media ownership."
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/bari-weiss-youre-being-captured-cbs-paramount-skydance-ellison.php
#USA #CBS #Oracle #Media #News #Journalism #Propaganda #Ideology #PressFreedom #Trump #BigTech

2025-10-26 12:10:23 GMT

👉 "When capitalism first showed up it delivered plenty of new things which people had a need and a desire for that weren’t available under previous systems like feudalism. The greatly increased material abundance and explosions of scientific and technological innovation ushered in with the dawn of capitalism caused human quality of life to improve by leaps and bounds.
But now we’re at a point where that just isn’t happening anymore. Things have stagnated, and we’re starting to backslide. People are getting dumber, sicker, lonelier, and more and more miserable. And the profit-driven systems we live under have no answers, besides throwing increasingly shitbrained technology at us so we can distract ourselves from how fucked up everything has gotten.
We are being driven into dystopia and annihilation by systems of our own making. We’re meant to be the smartest species on earth, but we locked ourselves in our invention — a self-reinforcing labor camp that makes us miserable — and then we get all huffy when people dare to question if it’s the only way of doing things. Literally every other species is smarter than us. Amoebas are having a better time of it.
This will change when humanity replaces capitalism with something better, in the same way we replaced feudalism with the superior system of capitalism. I don’t know what that system is going to look like, but it’s going to have to involve a move from a model that is driven by competition to one that is driven by collaboration." 👈
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/capitalism-is-shoving-ai-down-our
#Capitalism #Feudalism #Alienation #WageSlavery #Collaboration

2025-10-25 12:28:26 GMT

"Amazon sold cloud-computing services to two Israeli weapons manufacturers whose munitions helped devastate Gaza, according to internal company materials obtained by The Intercept.
Amazon Web Services has furnished the Israeli government — including its military and intelligence agencies — with a suite of state-of-the-art data processing and storage services since 2021 as part of its controversial Project Nimbus deal. Last year, The Intercept revealed a provision in that contract requiring Amazon and Google, the other Nimbus vendor, to sell cloud services to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries, two leading Israeli weapons firms.
New internal financial data and emails between Amazon personnel and their Israeli corporate and governmental clients show that Amazon has consistently provided software to both Rafael and IAI in 2024 and 2025 — periods during which Israel’s military was using their products to indiscriminately kill civilians and destroy civil infrastructure. Rafael purchased artificial intelligence technologies made available through Amazon Web Services, including the state-of-the-art large language model Claude, developed by AI startup Anthropic.
The materials reviewed by The Intercept also indicate Amazon sold cloud-computing services to Israel’s nuclear program and offices administering the West Bank, where Israeli military occupation, population displacement, and settlement construction is widely considered illegal under international law."
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/24/amazon-weapons-gaza-israel-rafael-iai/
#Amazon #Israel #Gaza #AWS #CloudComputing #Genocide

2025-10-24 12:37:41 GMT

Nancy Fraser: "David Harvey has inspired me for many years. In 1970 he guided my first reading of Capital Volume 1 in a New Left study group. We’ve since had many discussions, at conferences, symposia and book launches. The focus was usually the relation between two paradigms of Marxist theorizing, one (David’s) focused on capital, the other (mine) on the latter’s background conditions of possibility and thus, on capitalist society. We’ve co-taught a graduate seminar on this very theme. It is fitting, then, for me to celebrate David’s 90th by revisiting his Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse. That book is uniquely positioned to advance our discussion. Its chief concern is to explicate the sense in which capital constitutes a totality. But it also references Marx’s notes on “precapitalist economic formations,” which focus on societal “conditions of production” and suggest another, larger totality. In what follows, I want to contrast these two paradigms and probe the relation between them. My aim is to specify what I take to be David’s distinctive contribution to Marxian theory. I also hope to clarify what each paradigm might offer us now, as we try to navigate the most severe capitalist crisis in nearly a century. Finally, I hope to show what we might gain by combining them."
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/capital-and-or-capitalist-society-a-tale-of-two-totalities?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=verso_blog&utm_content=harvey_90
#Marx #Marxism #DavidHarvey #PoliticalEconomy

2025-10-24 12:36:05 GMT

"Niamh Sweeney was announced in September as the pick for third commissioner for Ireland's already highly-controversial Data Protection Commission (DPC), rounding out its three-person leadership team.
However her work at Meta from 2015 to 2021 raises concerns from civil society.
In an open letter to the Irish government on Thursday (23 October), signed by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, noyb, ARTICLE 19, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, plus 40 others, highlights the conflict of interest Sweeney brings to a position that is supposed to police the same firms in which she used to work.
This appointment “raises serious questions about the DPC’s independence at a time when its impartiality is of critical importance for the entire Union, and when public trust is already fragile,” the letter states."
https://euobserver.com/Digital/ar6c78a452
#EU #Ireland #Meta #DataProtection #RevolvingDoor #BigTech

2025-10-23 12:26:55 GMT

"Google AI overviews are misleading or inaccurate in 37% of finance-related searches, according to The College Investor's latest analysis. This is an improvement from last year, where 43% of AI Overviews were inaccurate - but a one-third error rate is troubling when it comes to personal finance.
This is causing consumer confusion, and potentially harming Americans' finances. The overviews were especially bad when it comes to tax, insurance, and financial aid related queries.
What's Happening: Over the last several years, Google has been rolling out AI-driven answers in search results. At the top of the search results they show AI Overviews, and they're now expanding the use of AI Mode. The problem is they are plagued with inaccurate answers. And experts say it's a serious issue."
https://thecollegeinvestor.com/66208/37-of-google-ai-finance-answers-are-inaccurate-in-2025/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Google #AISearch #Finance #AIOverviews

2025-10-22 19:42:38 GMT

"This paper critically examines the emerging discourse on technofeudalism. While mainstream narratives celebrate technological advancement driven by American tech giants, proponents of the technofeudalism thesis argue that a new ruling class – ‘cloudalists’ – has supplanted traditional capitalists, extracting data and rent in ways reminiscent of feudal relations. However, this discourse fails to account for the ongoing dynamism of capitalist investment and competition. In contrast, this paper advances the concept of rentier capitalism by revisiting Marx’s analysis in Capital, with particular attention to his often-overlooked theory of ground rent in Volume III. Drawing on Marx’s notebooks published for the first time in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), the paper argues that rentier capitalism constitutes the most advanced and contradictory form of contemporary capitalism, which accelerates the destruction of the common and undermines the conditions necessary for working-class solidarity. As the dual crisis of capital accumulation and anti-systemic movements intensifies socio-economic and political instability, the threat of an authoritarian turn towards technofascism becomes increasingly imminent."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23792949.2025.2557911#d1e222
#Marx #TechnoFeudalism #RentierCapitalism #Monopolies #WorkingClass #TechnoFascism

2025-10-22 19:32:35 GMT

"Tech fascism didn’t rise in secret — it grew in plain sight. Why most journalists or politicians notice?
In this episode of The Nerd Reich Podcast, host Gil Duran speaks with legendary tech critic Paulina Borsook, author of Cyberselfish, the prophetic book that warned about the rise of Silicon Valley authoritarianism and technofascism decades before Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the far-right tech elite took power.
We dive deep into how Silicon Valley’s toxic libertarianism evolved into a global far-right propaganda machine, why tech journalists failed to sound the alarm, and what happens next as AI, surveillance, and billionaire power reshape democracy.
🔥 Chapters & Highlights:
– Tech Fascism 101: How Silicon Valley Went Authoritarian
– The Forgotten Critic: Paulina Borsook and Cyberselfish
– Why Journalists Worshipped Tech Billionaires
– Elon Musk’s X and the Global Far-Right Network
– The Toxic Masculinity Problem in Tech
– Can Democracy Survive Tech Fascism?
💬 Join the conversation in the comments:
Why did the media fail to warn us about tech fascism?
How do we stop the tech billionaires now?
And Please Support Paulina Borsook: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-fo...
📖 Read Gil Duran’s work → http://www.thenerdreich.com
#tech #TechFascism #ElonMusk #PaulinaBorsook #SiliconValley #PeterThiel #AI #Politics #podcast #technology #technews #technologynews #future #journalism #technofascism "

2025-10-22 19:29:39 GMT

RT @ednewtonrex
Wait… so users of OpenAI’s Atlas browser can opt-in the web pages they browse - *which belong to other people* - to AI training?
Cool cool
https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/

2025-10-21 17:43:21 GMT

"Recently, several large tech companies have pushed the notion of AI assistants into the public debate. These envisioned agents are intended to far outshine current systems, as they are intended to be able to manage our affairs as if they are personal assistants. In turn, this ought to give users a leg up, as one prominent tech exec has put it. However, it remains to be seen how these Personal AI Assistants (PAIAs) are implemented, and critical reflection on how and whether they can be implemented in a responsible way is needed. Currently, such agents are undertheorized and this may cause us to misunderstand their value and capacity. In this paper, we explore and critique the potential for responsible implementation by considering some design requirements based on the notion of meaningful human control. If we desire to have control over such assistants, then we need to be able to do so meaningfully and effectively. In looking at the design requirements, we run into the issue that their broad and differing capacities make any kind of design requirements hard because there are simply no standards to which we can measure PAIAs. Furthermore, it seems that the implementation of these assistants will be a matter of trade-offs both in capacities and in values, which will likely lead to enhancement for some rather than an improvement for all."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-025-00976-4
#AI #GenerativeAI #AIAssistants #Ethics #AIEthics #PAIAs

2025-10-21 12:13:33 GMT

"According to Fayyad Fayyad, the head of the Palestinian Olive Council, Gaza’s olive sector is “almost completely destroyed.”
“There is no olive season this year,” Fayyad told Drop Site. “We estimate that nearly one million of Gaza’s 1.1 million olive trees have been destroyed.” In 2022, Gaza produced about 50,000 tons of olives. This year, Fayyad said, the total will be well under a thousand. “The destruction is deliberate,” he said. “Israel aims to eliminate the agricultural sector, including olives. What remains are scattered trees—not groves, not production.”
Fayyad’s olive council is preparing a plan to rebuild the olive sector if the ceasefire holds and the war ends—beginning with soil testing to detect contamination from munitions and rebuilding irrigation networks. The government of Tunisia has pledged 180,000 olive saplings to Gaza once conditions allow.
But replanting will take years. “The olive tree is slow to grow,” Fayyad says. “It takes patience—and peace—for it to bear fruit again.”
Despite the devastation, Gaza’s farmers are returning to their olive groves—to water, to prune, to salvage whatever life remains.
“The olive tree is the story of Palestine,” Abdel-Nabi said. “Even when it burns, it still stands in our hearts.”"
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-olive-groves-oil-farmers-israel-war
#Palestine #Gaza #OliveTrees #Genocide #EthnicCleansing #Israel

2025-10-20 11:20:59 GMT

"As Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency continues to assault public-sector workers and their jobs even after Musk’s departure, and as Trump’s 2026 budget proposal slashes federal spending by more than 160 million next year—targeting programs for health, education, and housing as well as the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities—Cooper’s discussion of the privatized wealth of our age captures an economic dimension to Trumpism that often goes unremarked. Trump’s politics and his appeal are not only inspired by far-right ideologies, culture-war passions, age-old xenophobic prejudices, and a long-standing Republican animus toward the welfare state; they emerge out of a capitalist order that has ceased to be constrained by any of the institutional, intellectual, or professional limits that defined corporate capitalism in an earlier era. This is what sets the era of Trump apart from earlier epochs of conservatism: When Ronald Reagan took office, for example, he sought to remake the economic world by cutting income and capital-gains taxes, weakening organized labor, and deregulating finance in order to restore the profitability of American corporations. Trump, meanwhile, is bringing the norms, ideas, and practices of family business into the operations of the state. For Trump, the United States is just one large, privately held corporation, controlled and dominated by a few people who perceive themselves as able to do whatever they want. No stockholders, no activist shareholders, no debates or discussion, no annual meetings, no publicly released reports, no room for dissent or deliberation—just a tiny group of owners who enrich themselves while the rest of us stand on the sidelines."
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/donald-trump-theory-of-politics-state/#
#USA #Trump #Neoliberalism #LateStageCapitalism #PoliticalTheory #Austerity #PrivateEquity #Financialization #Capitalism

2025-10-20 10:57:35 GMT

"The corporations that control social media, online shopping, email and more are united in forcing AI on us. There are still choices we can and should make, but on a grand scale new tech and corporate concentration necessitates the regulation of technology and of monopolies; consumer choice is not enough. This lesson has been proven time and time again, and that’s the primary reason Big Tech is all in for Donald Trump. In return for their investment in him they’re getting exactly what they want, namely the ability to abuse their power in the absence of government oversight.
This is the heart of fascism, a corporate-governmental merger that benefits a handful of oligarchs at the expense of everyone else. You might point out that regular old capitalism already let Silicon Valley run amuck, and you’d be right. Our government has long been captured by oligarchy, and Congress and the President have long acted in accordance with the interests of the ruling class. But two crucial things happened in the last several years. One, a progressive wave finally started rising up, and while it didn’t seize power, it made inroads and influenced power. Lina Khan, Biden’s FTC commissioner, actually went after Big Tech. She launched suits against Amazon and Meta and Google and more, and that couldn’t be tolerated. It was finally receiving regulatory pushback that cemented Silicon Valley’s rightward swing. They were moved by the huge monetary incentives of a regime that would stop holding them accountable, and would even actively partner with them, not vague ideas about “wokeness.”"
https://www.jphilll.com/p/ai-needs-fascism
#AI #USA #Trump #Fascism #BigTech #Oligopolies #Monopolies

2025-10-20 10:38:02 GMT

"OpenAI wants what all loving platforms ultimately want: its users never to have to leave its confines. It’s clearly positioning towards being seen as the new default homepage of the web, as Meta once did. Can a heartwarming coming-of-age privacy horror-show/election distortion scandal/child harms crisis be far behind?
Because, incredibly, we’ve already gone through this life cycle.
But we’re going to do it again, aren’t we? Or, more accurately, given the unprecedented speed Sam’s firm is moving at, we already have done it again. We’ve initially lauded some mysterious tech Pied Piper as a brilliant, unconventional altruist, then belatedly realized he is not as he seemed and that his technology is more dangerous than imagined, then still failed to regulate, and are now being victimized by it. In more ways than one, this is just the terrible A.I. version of a movie we’ve already seen. If Altman’s models can learn, why can’t we?"
https://airmail.news/issues/2025-10-18/is-sam-altman-a-psycho-c-e-o
#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #SamAltman #Copyright #IP #BigTech #AIBubble

2025-10-20 10:25:35 GMT

"In this article, I thought it would be worth looking at the views that Yudkowsky has espoused over the years. He’s suggested that murdering children up to 6 years old may be morally acceptable, that animals like pigs have no conscious experiences, that ASI (artificial superintelligence) could destroy humanity by synthesizing artificial mind-control bacteria, that nearly everyone on Earth should be “allowed to die” to prevent ASI from being built in the near future, that he might have secretly bombed Wuhan to prevent the Covid-19 pandemic, that he once “acquired a sex slave … who will earn her orgasms by completing math assignments,” and that he’d be willing to sacrifice “all of humanity” to create god-like superintelligences wandering the universe.
Yudkowsky also believes — like, really really believes — that he’s an absolute genius, and said back in 2000 that the reason he wakes up in the morning is because he’s “the only one who” can “save the world.” Yudkowsky is, to put it mildly, an egomaniac. Worse, he’s an egomaniac who’s frequently wrong despite being wildly overconfident about his ideas. He claims to be a paragon of rationality, but so far as I can tell he’s a fantastic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect paired with messianic levels of self-importance. As discussed below, he’s been prophesying the end of the world since the 1990s, though most of his prophesied dates of doom have passed without incident.
So, let’s get into it! I promise this will get weirder the more you read."
https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/eliezer-yudkowskys-long-history-of
#AGI #Philosophy #ASI #AIDoomerism #Eugenics #Transhumanism

2025-10-19 13:58:32 GMT

"Mainstream parties are increasingly allowing the far right to set the agenda, researchers in Germany have found, describing it as a shortcoming that had unwittingly helped the far right by legitimising their ideas and disseminating them more widely.
The findings, published in the European Journal of Political Research, were based on an automated text analysis of 520,408 articles from six German newspapers over the span of more than two decades.
The Berlin-based researchers found that as the far right moved from fringe issues in the late 1990s to topics such as integration and migration, mainstream parties had increasingly reshaped their communications to respond, boosting the spread of these ideas and signalling to voters that these ideas and stances were legitimate.
The overarching result had crucial implications for democracy, said Teresa Völker, a political sociologist at Berlin Social Science Center and co-author of the study. “Political communication by mainstream parties plays a central role in the electoral success of the far right,” she said. “This factor has been underestimated.”"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/18/german-far-right-setting-agenda-as-opponents-amplify-its-ideas-study-finds?CMP=share_btn_url
#EU #Germany #FarRight #AfD #FarRight #Propaganda #Ideology #AgendaSetting

2025-10-19 13:45:53 GMT

"Put bluntly: in the West, the smartphone is the platform of the new technocratic factory; the social-credit system and its leash. It doesn’t repress; it seduces. It trains citizens to self-surveil, to volunteer their desires, to labor for their own subjection in the attention economy. The attention economy is not a symptom of capitalism’s excess but its evolutionary form: a seamless fusion of work, entertainment, and obedience. What once required propaganda now requires only Wi-Fi.
Modern political “mobilization” actually works through such platforms and infrastructure; the old patronage networks of capital and ideology have simply migrated into the platform and attention economy. Wealthy actors such as corporations, political operatives, and foundations fund campaigns that live inside the same data ecosystems as consumer advertising. The boundary between politics, marketing, and behavioral design has evaporated. It no longer matters whether a financier thinks of themselves as left or right; the tactic is identical: stimulate outrage, capture attention, harvest data, convert chaos into capital or policy leverage.
The smartphone makes this frictionless. It’s the remote-control device of mass affect. One push notification and a few thousand people behave predictably: some march, some buy, some rage. None of this requires conspiracy; it’s just the logic of the medium meeting the logic of speculation."
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/10/18/the-velvet-cage-smart-phones-and-the-attention-economy/
#SmartPhones #CellPhones #AttentionEconomy #Technocracy

2025-10-18 12:29:56 GMT

"The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it’s seeing a significant decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking through to the site.
The Wikimedia Foundation said that this poses a risk to the long term sustainability of Wikipedia.
“We welcome new ways for people to gain knowledge. However, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow Sustainably,” the Foundation’s Senior Director of Product Marshall Miller said in a blog post.
“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”"
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/
#AI #GenerativeAI #AISearch #Chatbots #Wikipedia

2025-10-18 11:18:15 GMT

"In evangelizing for their view, longtermist luminaries have propagated numerous lies about their ideology and/or community. For example, folks like MacAskill intentionally deceived people (see this article of mine for details) by perpetuating the falsehood that Sam Bankman-Fried — perhaps the most famous longtermist in the world — lived a modest life, when in fact he flew on private jets, lived in a “$35 million crypto frat house,” and owned some $300 million in Bahamian real estate. Pfff.
Because many longtermists, including MacAskill, are basically utilitarians, they don’t believe there’s anything intrinsically wrong with acts like lying — or fraud. If the outcome of spreading lies is overall good, then it would be morally wrong to not lie. Hence, do not trust anything that longtermists tell you about their worldview or community, as moral integrity is not — with history as our witness — something they care much about.
Here are three other insidious lies they’ve spread about their worldview. To my knowledge, this is the first time that anyone has called out such falsehoods:"
https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/three-lies-longtermists-like-to-tell
#LongTermism #Philosophy #HumanExtinction

2025-10-17 15:25:41 GMT

RT @ZakugaMignon
Some good news:
OpenAI is failing in Hollywood.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/hollywood-openai-messed-up-sora

2025-10-17 12:53:15 GMT

RT @profwolff
#WolffBites: Trump uses our taxes ($20 billion) to bailout extreme right-wing leader Milei in Argentina. Milei cuts taxes on Argentina's rich and corporations and cuts gov't programs for average Argentinians (like Trump in US).
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/12/economy/argentina-america-bailout-currency

2025-10-17 03:37:23 GMT

"So why did America's trading partners agree to anticircumvention law? Well, that was down to the tender ministrations of the US trade rep. Countries that didn't pass anticircumvention were threatened with US tariffs.
I used to occasionally guest-lecture at an international relations grad program at the Central European University in Budapest, and one summer, I had a student who had served as the information minister to a Central American country while the US was negotiating the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). This student described getting a phone call from their country's chief negotiator who said, "I know you told me not to budge on anticircumvention, but the USTR tells me that if we don't give them this, they will block our agricultural exports. I'm sorry." Country by country, the world fell into line.
When someone tells you, "You'd better do what I say or I'm going to burn your house down," and then they burn your house down, you'd be an absolute sucker if you kept up your part of the bargain.
I find it absolutely bizarre that the USTR spent decades racing around the world, getting every country on earth to sign up to "America First" policies by threatening them with tariffs, and then Trump actually imposed the tariffs anyway, which has opened up the space for every country to get rid of those America First policies."
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate
#Eurostack #Anticircumvention #Copyright #USA #Trump #Tariffs #DigitalSovereignty #USTR

2025-10-15 15:29:13 GMT

"Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders and executives have quietly built a phone-tracking empire, with a footprint extending from the Vatican to the Middle East to Silicon Valley.
It calls its proprietary system Altamides, which it describes in promotional materials as “a unified platform to covertly locate the whereabouts of single or multiple suspects in real-time, to detect movement patterns, and to detect whether suspects are in close vicinity with each other.”
Altamides leaves no trace on the phones it targets, unlike spyware such as Pegasus. Nor does it require a target to click on a malicious link or show any of the telltale signs (such as overheating or a short battery life) of remote monitoring.
Its secret is shrewd use of the antiquated telecom language Signaling System No. 7, known as SS7, that phone carriers use to route calls and text messages. Any entity with SS7 access can send queries requesting information about which cell tower a phone subscriber is nearest to, an essential first step to sending a text message or making a call to that subscriber. But First Wap’s technology uses SS7 to zero in on phone numbers and trace the location of their users.
First Wap emphasizes that its technology is used by law enforcement to “fight against organized crime, terrorism and corruption.” It sells Altamides directly, as well as through third-party resellers."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/firstwap-altamides-phone-tracking-surveillance-secrets-assad-erik-prince-jared-leto-anne-wojcicki/
#CyberSecurity #Surveillance #FirstWap #Altamides #SS7 #Privacy #LocationData

2025-10-14 16:49:18 GMT

"Recognizing the Pentagon as a source of instability and insecurity in working-class life is essential to building human security across the world. Alternatives to the new Cold War must be a priority for the Left on both sides of the Atlantic. This means highlighting the perversity of expanding military spending and its basis in geopolitical competition rather than genuine security. While campaigns for investment in life’s essentials — health, housing, green energy — are imperative regardless, the interests of working-class communities lie in demonstrating that the insatiable demands of the military-industrial complex are a barrier to collective flourishing.
A political program based on multilateral climate collaboration, rather than destructive competition, would also create the space for new industrial priorities. This would free research and production capacities from the war machine and direct them toward meeting human needs. As shown in the cycles of military spending over the last century, industrial production can be converted by the state when it sees fit, whether to escalate toward war or to take advantage of peace. In this context, politicians seeking to represent the working class must recognize that military expansion and escalation is being driven by great power interests. In a moment of spiraling and escalating transitions, human safety can only be safeguarded by setting aside rivalry and the elite desire to accumulate amid the chaos."
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/military-industrial-complex-climate-working-class/
#USA #Trump #Militarism #MilitaryIndustrialComplex #ClimateChange #ClassWarfare #WorkingClass

2025-10-13 19:29:49 GMT

"The earth has reached its first catastrophic tipping point linked to greenhouse gas emissions, with warm water coral reefs now facing a long-term decline and risking the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, according to a new report.
The report from scientists and conservationists warns the world is also “on the brink” of reaching other tipping points, including the dieback of the Amazon, the collapse of major ocean currents and the loss of ice sheets.
But some experts have questioned the report’s claims about the fate of coral reefs, with one saying while they are in decline there is evidence they could remain viable at higher temperatures than suggested.
Tipping points are recognised by scientists as moments when a major ecosystem reaches a point where severe degradation is inevitable.
The world’s coral reefs are home to about a quarter of all marine species but are considered one of the most vulnerable systems to global heating."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/13/coral-reefs-ice-sheets-amazon-rainforest-tipping-point-global-heating-scientists-report
#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #GasEmissions #CoralReefs

2025-10-13 08:13:56 GMT

"Much contemporary left thought focuses on what is wrong with capitalism. Is capitalism bad because of its unjust distributive outcomes? Or is it bad because workers are dominated, subjected to arbitrary power? Or does the badness of capitalism have to do with the opacity of the market and the way it prevents valuable forms of collective agency?
While this debate about what is wrong or unjust in capitalism is important, the Left also needs to articulate a positive vision of a good society that could replace capitalism. After all, simply highlighting the problems of capitalism is unlikely to be enough to persuade people to embrace socialism. And while Karl Marx wrote that it was not for him to write “recipes for the cook-shops of the future,” “unless we write recipes for future kitchens, there’s no reason to think we’ll get food we like,” as G. A. Cohen put it.
In my forthcoming book, Flourishing Together: Karl Marx’s Vision of the Good Society, I put forward a novel interpretation of Marx’s vision of the good society. This interpretation defends the centrality of personal development and satisfying the needs of others to human flourishing. On this view, we realize ourselves through providing others with the goods and services others need for their flourishing. I argue that this interpretation is appealing, and that it could provide the Left with an attractive account of an alternative to capitalism.
However, Marx’s vision of the good society is often thought to be based on unrealistic assumptions, such as limitless abundance or an overcoming of the division of labor. My contention is that these assumptions are based on a misinterpretation of Marx’s position. To understand why Marx’s vision of the good society has been misinterpreted, we need to first understand the philosophical roots of this view."
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/marx-theory-philosophy-cohen-flourishing-labor/
#Marx #Marxism #CriticalTheory #GoodSociety #Philosophy

2025-10-12 22:28:22 GMT

"Ceasefire doesn’t mean the end of our suffering. It is simply a step toward justice after endless days and nights filled with fear and violence against us in Gaza. It doesn’t bring back the schools, universities, hospitals, streets, or homes that Israel bombed. It cannot heal the trauma we carry from those long nights of pain and terror. The sounds of drones and explosions will forever echo in our minds. A ceasefire cannot erase that.
As ceasefire headlines fill the news, we are told to be hopeful. Is our hope fragile, or truly impossible? After Israel broke the last ceasefire in March, fear filled our hearts. We told each other to balance our enthusiasm, as we’re dealing with Israel, and the word “Israel” carried the weight of broken promises.
Yet we are chasing every chance to reclaim our peace. This ceasefire might offer us a moment to begin healing from the pain we have carried for so long."
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/09/gaza-israel-genocide-ceasefire-trump-netanyahu/
#Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #Israel #Ceasefire #HumanRights