BlogFlockWelcome 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…
The data center protest movement has gone nationwide. From Vermont to Oklahoma to Indiana to California, communities are organizing to halt the tech industry’s drive to build out data centers in their neighborhoods. This week, the New York state legislature passed a one-year moratorium on data center construction and sent…
For months I’ve been wondering what a social media feed would look like without all the Americans. It’s certainly no major observation that US discourse often dominates those platforms, at least in the English language, and even those of us outside the country itself are still sucked into the hour-by-hour…
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. The gaps between posts have been longer than I’d hoped, and, in my experience, writing is a bit like going to the gym: the longer you stay away, the harder it is to get back. Getting…
When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language.
"It's not x, it's y."
It’s been a big week for Anthropic, the tryhard “good guy” of AI; the startup that has built its brand as the “ethical” AI lab by positioning itself as an alternative to the unscrupulous OpenAI, from which Anthropic’s co-founders famously defected. That positioning, by way of some canny marketing work…
A few weeks ago, I had crossed the Atlantic and found myself in Frankfurt. I was there to speak on a panel about “authoritarian intelligence” (yet another of the alternative takes on what the letters AI could stand for), but it was just the first stop on a much longer…
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.