BlogFlockWell I’ve finally done it. I’ve been threatening to start a regular audio enterprise here at Blood in the Machine Inc for quite some time, and now it’s officially happening. In the player above, embedded in the video below, and populating that long-dormant BITM podcast feed is what’s essentially a…
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. At the expense clogging your inbox, I’m writing again this week, briefly, in memory of David Cayley and in praise of the convivial life, which he embodied. Rest in peace, David.
I was saddened by…
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. In this mildly intemperate installment, I vent some frustration at the assertion that AI is “just a tool” and all will be well if we just use it wisely. As is often the case, mileage…
The Luddites are back. Again. As the wave of resistance to big tech, data centers, and AI grows, a reappraisal of the Luddites is underway. This happens periodically. At the beginning of the AI boom in 2023, as people looked to historical analogues for what might happen to jobs,…
Around the world, governments are going hard to present themselves as AI leaders willing to do whatever the industry wants to attract investment.
Last month, I spoke to Will Dunn on Tech Won’t Save Us about how this is playing out in the UK, where the government has gone…
I have a new paper! Here's the citation, then a…
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. I’ll tell you upfront that this is an odd piece in which I try to write my way through an intuition that the role of AI in society can be helpfully framed, at least in…
A few weeks ago, after a very successful "noisy systems" conference in Rome, I was getting on…
Let’s all stand up and give a slow clap to Anthropic. After sparking a major news cycle in the tech media with its April announcement that it had built an AI model, Mythos, so powerful, so dangerous that it threatened to upend the entire civilizational order—and that it was diligently…
Since Australia took up the cause of higher age limits on social media in 2024, the push for such policies has spread like wildfire. A ban on under-16s came into effect down under in December 2025, and since then another 41 countries have either implemented their own or begun taking…
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.