BlogFlock
Black Friday seems to get longer with every passing year, but even when a day becomes a week (or several) it still signals the holiday shopping season is in full gear with Christmas looming a month in the distance. As the trees go up, decorations adorn every facet of our…
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture … or so it was and now will be again.
Earlier this week, Deb Chachra, whose newsletter, Metafoundry, you should check out, likewise posted for the first time after a period of “hibernation” and cleverly titled that…
One of the more perplexing things about the AI bubble is how relatively little we have to show for it. Mostly, it’s chatbots, some coding automation, and slop. A lot of slop.
You can spend hours reading through eye-popping Nividia earnings reports and lengthy columns expounding on the transformative powers…
Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, we can finally speak in hindsight about what it was and how it came to be. Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gathering more users in less time than any product launch in history. But that specific…
Big tech’s ploy to halt state-level AI lawmaking is back. Silicon Valley’s allies in the Trump administration are pushing legislators to jam language that would prevent states from passing AI laws into the (otherwise unrelated) national defense authorization bill, and the president has drafted an executive order with the aim,…
Greetings from soggy Los Angeles -
I had big plans for this week, including writing a dispatch on the New Luddism conference at Columbia and an excellent tech-smashing tribunal in Brooklyn. I’d also hoped to finish an essay on the scourge of AI companions but that went long, and events…
Does Cory Doctorow even need an introduction at this point? If you spend any amount of time at all online, then you’ve encountered his work, his ideas, his words. But the ultra-prolific science fiction writer, digital rights activist, and coiner of the “Enshittification” verbiage that’s become universal shorthand for the…
Presenting my latest and final album as The Organizing Committee.
The new record, "Keeping Secrets From the Numbers," is available today on Bandcamp, and will be streaming on most platforms (aside from Spotify) in the coming weeks. It will be the last record as The Organizing Committee.
Greetings all,
I’m editing this piece en route to New York City, where I hope there will be enough overworked air traffic controllers to prevent my plane from landing in the East River. Provided that does not happen, I’m very much looking forward to visiting the place where, according to…
Geoffrey Hinton recently won a Nobel Prize for his work on backpropagation, a foundational piece of research that contributed to the emergence of contemporary artificial intelligence systems – particularly generative AI systems such as Large Language Models. I recently served as a panelist at the "Who's…
Thinking about technology, society, and the good life.
Tech critic Paris Marx provides the critical take on Silicon Valley you’ve been missing
A newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. Featured in Wired and Rolling Stone.
A newsletter about AI, Silicon Valley, labor and power.