BlogFlock
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…
I've been doing a series of experiments: taking the some diffusion-based image glitches and applying them to diffusion video models to…
As AI sweeps through the American education system and US tech workers stare down the specter of mass layoffs, thousands of IT employees across the statewide University of California system have voted to unionize. They join over 6,000 tech workers already represented by University and Professional Technical Employees (UPTE), expanding…
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, the media and talking heads quickly adopted the company’s mantra that the world had changed. Generative AI was about to revolutionize everything, and that included presenting a challenge to some of the juggernauts that had previously defined the digital economy. None was more…
When a commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida intoned that “AI is the next industrial revolution,” she was met with a chorus of thundering boos from the graduating students in attendance. The mass disapproval left the orator, Gloria Caulfield, Vice President of Strategic Alliances for Tavistock Development Company,…
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.