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We’re less than two months out from the release of my new book Hyperscale, and the good news keeps coming! In August, the book made the longlist for the Financial Times Business Book of…
AI executives like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have been forecasting an incipient AI jobs apocalypse for three years now. So where is it? Well it’s here, kind of. But instead of replacing tens of millions of workers, it’s mostly making them miserable.
Yes, across the US,…
Take a look at this chart from a new report published by Glassdoor, the popular website where workers publish ratings of/complaints about/screeds of righteous fury aimed at their workplaces. Chris Martin, Glassdoor’s resident economist, analyzed how and how often AI was mentioned in workers’ write-ups about their jobs and…
New fronts are opening up in the opposition to big tech. The anti-data center movement is rolling, AI is unpopular as ever, and now, a widespread backlash to Meta’s new AI glasses—termed Pervert Glasses by the masses—is unfolding at breakneck pace. Silicon Valley, of course, is in denial about all…
Just take a second and scan these headlines. You’ve probably seen many more just like them.
You’re also perhaps familiar with the gist of what that they describe: Americans overwhelmingly hate data centers. They overwhelmingly dislike Flock surveillance cameras. And now it seems they overwhelmingly despise Meta’s newest product, AI-infused…
Going back decades, there’s been a faction in Silicon Valley whose chief interest was not coding, consumer technology or even business, but power. In some ways, the story of the last ten years of the tech industry has been the story of that faction, perhaps best embodied by Peter Thiel…
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture, both rather broadly construed. In this installment, I simply offer some observations about the recent discussions of the risks posed by AI in light of the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident a few weeks back. I suggest that while our…
"The system from nowhere" is a…
There are fresh signs that the AI bubble is wobbling. Again.
In recent weeks, a much-vaunted AI-focused hedge fund, Situational Awareness, run by Valley wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner lost $35 billion; nearly its entire fund. South Korea saw its largest-ever stock market collapse as investors pulled bets on AI chips and…
Thinking about technology, society, and the good life.
A newsletter about AI, Silicon Valley, labor and power.
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.