Critical takes on tech - BlogFlock

Talk: Slop Infrastructures - Cybernetic Forests

2026-08-09T17:12:53.000Z

What is the infrastructure of Slop? How does it get made, and how can we make sense of it?

In this 15-minute video, I walk through the slop pipeline as an interconnected social-technical system, fusing generative AI and the predictive algorithms of social media. I wrote this in March after being invited to contribute to the Slop Salon for a report to be published by Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs; this is a video version of that presentation.

The insights from that session were also published in a report, "AI Slop and the Information Ecosystem," which Columbia's Institute of Global Politics has made available to anyone, you can find that at the link.

In an effort to better organize and update my website, I've also uploaded the video to the (free) online course offerings, which I am now calling "Thinking Critically About AI Images."

You can click the card below to access the full course talks about the history of AI art, what makes generative AI different, and an overview of some of the issues including data provenance, surveillance, and more. It's a series of videos and transcripts, with guest speakers!

I've also added a short technical introduction to diffusion models based on a workshop I delivered for the metaLab@Harvard's Public AI Summit last summer (no connection to Zuckerberg's Meta).

Eryk Salvaggio: Critical AI & Culture | Thinking Critically About AI Images: Free Online Course — Cybernetic Forests.

Archived undergraduate class on the context, history and ethical issues of AI images, taught by artist and critical AI theorist, Eryk Salvaggio.

Hope you enjoy them or make use of them - if you're an instructor or educator please do use these materials in your classrooms if they're helpful! Please let me know if you do.

Where to Find Me

You can find me on bluesky, linkedin or instagram. You can also email me, and I'm always open to invited talks or writing opportunities.

Bernie Sanders has AI policy all wrong - Disconnect

2026-08-07T19:08:02.000Z

In December 2025, Senator Bernie Sanders became the first member of Congress to demand a moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers. The costs of the infrastructure that powers generative AI technologies like chatbots and image generators were soaring, but it was not clear that regular people were seeing much benefit. The ban was necessary, Sanders argued, to give “democracy a chance to catch up.”

Sanders could have also said that politicians needed to catch up to the public. Recent polling suggests more than 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of data centers near their communities. It’s no wonder why: People have been seeing their power bills soar, high-voltage cables rammed through their properties, their water supplies sullied, and their days disrupted by the incessant hum of air conditioners keeping the buildings cool. It’s hard to think of another issue that has so quickly galvanized Americans across the political spectrum.

By March, Sanders had partnered with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to introduce a bill proposing a national data center moratorium. Some states and city councils had already started to halt construction on their own, but the federal bill would ban construction “until legislation is enacted that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence,” such as environmental degradation and soaring electricity rates.

For anyone concerned about the effects of these massive structures and their energy demands, not to mention the tech industry’s reckless acceleration of the AI industry, there would seem to be little to quibble with in such a proposal. Data centers are a material problem for communities across the country, and the generative AI tools they power have been enabling a growing list of harms that policymakers are not acting quickly enough to rein in—if they’re acting at all. But unfortunately, Sanders’s advocacy did not end there.

The same month as the moratorium bill was introduced, Sanders released a video that began to set off red flags among experts who understand generative AI and question the grand narratives being floated by AI companies. In the video, Sanders is seen sitting at a long boardroom table facing a smartphone. The screen displays Claude, the chatbot made by Anthropic, one of the biggest players in the generative AI space, along with OpenAI and major tech companies like Google and Meta.

Over the course of nine minutes, Sanders proceeds to have a conversation with the chatbot on issues like privacy, democracy, and whether Claude would back his proposed data center moratorium. The bot responds with characteristic informality, providing answers that confirm the direction of the questions Sanders is prompting it with.

While Sanders has done admirable work bringing attention to the issue of data centers, his conversation with Claude showed that the senator does not ultimately have a good enough grasp of AI—and that has consequences for how he approaches it.

Part of the problem is that Sanders’s policy approach to AI has been a direct response to the exaggerated claims made by AI companies about their products. By now you’ve probably heard many of them: that AI is going to eradicate vast numbers of jobs, will be societally transformative on a scale we’ve never seen before, and could even gain sentience and turn on humanity.

Sacrifice your job for the glorious AI future

How tech CEOs use the threat of job loss to distract from how AI is really used against workers

You can see this in Sanders’s rhetoric. In a New York Times opinion piece published in June, he opened by echoing the industry’s narratives. “Artificial intelligence will almost certainly be the most transformational technology in the history of the world,” he wrote. “It will profoundly affect the life of every man, woman and child in our country.” For Sanders, the focus has become about making sure workers are not displaced by the technology and that the public shares the wealth it creates, as he argues for a policy to put a 50 percent one-time tax on the stock of large AI companies.

But what if that is not the reality of generative AI? Chatbots and image generators are not the economic and social revolution that tech billionaires insist they are. In 2024, author Ted Chiang called them “autocomplete on steroids,” and that’s a good way to understand them. We’re dealing with AI models trained on immense amounts of data and using unimaginable quantities of computation to produce text and images that are designed to seem as though they come from humans, but are really just pulling from a vast repository to best match the prompt they’re served.

It’s exactly why the “hallucinations” cannot be engineered out of the technology. As OpenAI’s own researchers admitted last year, they’re a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. That’s because there is no understanding or thought happening behind the prompt box on a chatbot. It’s just looking for the parts of its dataset that best match the query it’s given.

There’s also growing evidence that the supposedly transformative productivity and efficiency gains AI companies promised are not materializing. Businesses are in the process of pulling back on their AI spending because they aren’t seeing a return on investment, and it’s quite clear that in many cases bosses are using the excuse of AI to lay off workers so they can cut costs—not because AI is really replacing those jobs.

The real risks of AI are not the existential ones that people like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei obsess about and that Sanders has taken to repeating. Instead, they stem from the more tangible effects AI has on regular people’s lives: how dependence on chatbots can affect cognition and critical thinking, create addiction that isolates people from their human networks, and can even coach them down harmful paths of self-harm and suicide. That’s not to mention how AI has polluted the information environment, enabled the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes, and is actively degrading cultural production.

Sam Altman’s anti-human worldview

OpenAI CEO downgrades humanity in pursuit of goal to merge with computers

While she may have been an ally of Sanders on the data center moratorium, Ocasio-Cortez does not seem to have fallen for the deceptive narratives of the AI industry in the way that he has. In November, she warned about the threat of AI psychosis and of the economic damage that could follow the bursting of the financial bubble around AI. She has also been a leader in the effort to give AI deepfake victims the tools to hold perpetrators to account.

In my view, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez demonstrate two distinct approaches to AI policy motivated by very different understandings of the technology. Sanders is responding to the narratives floated by the industry, narratives that exist to exaggerate the capability of its products and distract from the real material effects the public is feeling from their rollout in the here and now. Ocasio-Cortez, on the other hand, is listening to experts who really understand how the technology works, and to victims who have felt those harms firsthand.

With data centers wreaking havoc across the United States and the wider world, a moratorium on their construction is essential. But responding to the generative AI applications they power requires properly understanding their real harms, not believing the deceptive arguments fed to us by the industry. We need policy that follows the evidence, not the hype.

This piece was originally published in The Nation.

The Odyssey as tech criticism - Blood in the Machine

2026-08-06T18:23:26.000Z

Greetings all,

I’m back in the states and about ready to get back to my regularly scheduled newslettering and podcasting. But first, I regret to inform you that I have some thoughts on the Odyssey. Yes, all the Odyssey discourse got to me, and during my vacation last week and I picked up a copy of the book (the old EV Rieu Penguin Classics translation, the only one the bookstore had left in stock). Then I downloaded the audio book so I could listen to it, as Homer intended, ish, and before long I realized I was essentially all-in.

The New York Times ran an op-ed called something like Why Can’t We Stop Talking About the Odyssey? (They keep changing the headlines in A/B testing but that’s what it was when I first saw it.) And my immediate reaction was welllllllllll. Here is one of the two earliest canonical works of human literature, originally composed and retold orally as an epic poem, from person to persons, made into a $300 million Hollywood blockbuster by the industry’s biggest auteur (and tech critics), at a moment when proclamations boom out that AI threatens to consume and/or subsume culture, when our politics are a furious mess, in part because so many of us no longer share overlapping standards of truth or belief, and the fight to define either is a neverending livewire spat on platforms writing our own oral history in realtime. Of course there would be a fight over what the Odyssey can mean, and what it can’t, where it fails and where it succeeds.

I finally saw the thing this week, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Granted, my expectations were low. I disliked Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer; it seemed to me to be too precisely the sum of its parts—the Batman director makes a dark superhero film about the atomic bomb—but Odysseus isn’t too too far off from a Batman, and this is more amenable to Nolan’s wheelhouse. (They both make up for their physical deficiencies with wealth, notoriety, and cunning, they are both riven with contradictions, and both have a penchant for grandiosity and violence etc etc etc.)

But of all the critiques and counter-critiques and counter-counter-critiques I’ve seen the one I’ve somewhat surprisingly seen the least amount of ink spilled over is the Odyssey (2026)’s rather central and yawning critique of technology.

TO THE EXENT THAT YOU CAN SPOIL AN ADAPTATION OF A 3,000 YEAR-OLD EPIC POEM, SUCH SPOILERS FOLLOW

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The Odyssey screen still.

There’s been lots of commentary about how Matt Damon’s Odysseus, who is wearied, laconic, and downtrodden throughout the movie’s 3-hour runtime, is a comment on the fallout of America’s war-making in the Middle East, and the decay in the liberal order it begot, or the crumbling of liberal values more generally. (Damon’s grim portrayal of Odysseus is also a source of criticism, since the epic’s Odysseus is cunning, talkative, and full of braggadocio in addition to being prone to bouts of hysterical weeping.) But less about the specific instigator for all that misery.

Near the end of the film, Odysseus reveals what appears to be the source of these many character years/viewer hours of guilt-ridden sorrow: In devising and unleashing the Trojan Horse, an innovation that exploited Troy’s inclination towards trust and hospitality and the fact that they respected the same gods, in order to facilitate the demolishing of the entire city, he was "breaking Zeus’s law forever.”

“Zeus’s law” is a Nolanian contrivance that basically amounts to a Grecian golden rule; treat others, especially strangers and travelers, how you would like to be treated. It’s a take on xenia, an actual Mycenaean concept.

The historian Spencer McDaniels explains:

Xenía held that every person had a sacred and inviolable duty to provide safety, food, shelter, and comfort to any stranger or foreigner who sought hospitality. Guests, in turn, had an equally sacred obligation to honor and respect their hosts and to not take more than they needed.

It’s a social contract, then; a shared set of values that Odysseus comes to believe he has destroyed utterly by inventing and successfully deploying the Trojan Horse.

Nolan’s Odyssey astutely picks up on the importance of xenía in the epic and takes it in an interesting, contemporarily relevant direction. Translating xenía as “Zeus’s law,” the film portrays the breakdown of xenía as a cosmic consequence of the sack of Troy that will lead inevitably to the collapse of civilization itself.

Not unlike, perhaps, building and dropping a nuclear bomb?

Ezra Klein produced a long video essay arguing that the Odyssey is the most important political film of the decade, that it’s an exploration of the collapse of the liberal order and how, in these days of politicians spurning their neighbors and conducting mean-spirited attacks, so many no longer feel the need to be good to each other. In this reading, the Trojan Horse, an innovation already legendary in Odysseus’s world, is then the key catalyst.

Now, Nolan’s disdain for modern technology is well known. He doesn’t own a smartphone, or even use email. And in a recent interview, Nolan shared his thoughts on AI, too:

“I think AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside… I’ve never seen a technology advancing so rapidly [that’s been] so completely rejected by the public,” he said. “Everybody’s suspicion of it is so extreme, particularly young people. The reaction to AI videos online and people my children’s age immediately calling it ‘AI slop’ and coining that term and just putting it in a box.”

I think it would be a stretch to argue that Nolan’s Odyssey contains any nuanced or meaningful critique of AI in particular. The tech criticism in the Odyssey, such as it is, is about as broad as it gets: When novel technology is used to destroy shared social values, it begets disaster for civilization. It’s the kind of sweeping criticism you might expect from a man who doesn’t have email, in other words, or who hopes his blockbuster will be seen by as many people as possible.

That’s certainly not to say such a sweeping critique is without value; Nolan certainly wants us to consider that the building of Trojan Horses is a deliberate act with obvious moral parameters. And that applies to Greek weapons of war, nuclear bombs, and AI products alike. (The director has noted in interviews that he couldn’t help but draw parallels between Oppenheimer and Odysseus in filming his latest.) The issue is that this makes for a pretty vague critique, and one that doesn’t really need to meaningfully engage with particulars, theory, or root causes beyond ‘sometimes men go too far.’

Interestingly, another top-grossing movie of 2026, Toy Story 5, registers a not-dissimilar brand of tech criticism; screens are bad for kids, we see, but only, it turns out, when they are too much, and when they take over kids’ imaginations and facilitate toxic behavior. Older tech toys for kids with less immersive screens are lovable and good, but somewhere a line was crossed from a healthy human coexistence with technology to a calamitous one, though that movie chickens out in identifying when or where that happened, exactly.

In this case, then, we must consider that the line was crossed thousands of years ago. Why not? The Odyssey was recited orally for centuries before it was written down, which itself was a famous act of technological transgression. Plato, writing centuries after Homer, told the myth of the Theuth, the god who had invented writing, and the Egyptian king Thamus, who played the role of the critic.

When it came to writing Theuth said, ‘Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.’ But the king answered and said… ‘If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.’1

It’s worth noting that the original Homeric Odyssey itself is generally optimistic towards technology, albeit in a somewhat misanthropic mode. ( notes that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued Odysseus and his crew ‘embody the principle of the capitalist economy’; a band of men set against the world and other men. Entrepreneurs, even. If Nolan’s Odysseus is more like a Viktor Frankenstein, plagued by what his inventions have unleashed on the world, then Homer’s is more the kind of entrepreneur we’re familiar with; headstrong, fast-talking, basking in the glory of his inventions one minute, complaining hysterically the next, with little time for reflections on the social impact of his devices.)

Throughout the epic, Odysseus’s efforts to get home are of course routinely thwarted by very human failures: his own hubris (screaming taunts at Polyphemus), his men’s meddling (opening Aeolus’s ox-skin bag of wind in sight of Ithaca), and the violent opposition of his foes. The way back, finally, then? A self-driving ship that can sail without the interference of failure-prone human hands. Odysseus’ last stop before finally making it home is at the palace of the Phaeacian king Alcinous, who promises him passage on such high-tech vessels:

For the Phaeacians have no pilots; their vessels have no rudders as those of other nations have, but the ships themselves understand what it is that we are thinking about and want; they know all the cities and countries in the whole world, and can traverse the sea just as well even when it is covered with mist and cloud, so that there is no danger of being wrecked or coming to any harm.

*Bonus points for anyone who knows the ancient Greek word for pilot or helmsman of a ship. It’s Kybernētēs, the word that the mathematician Norbert Wiener appropriated to describe cybernetics, how systems and machines could use feedback to regulate their behavior, to stay on course, and the reason that ‘cyber’ is in the lexicon today.

Embedded in one of the ur-texts of literature, then, we have an articulation of desire for automation, for a mechanized system that might replace flawed human judgment and labor, and transmit the wishes of the helmsman, ie the entrepreneur, into action. It could carry this man, he of given to “scheming” and “nimble wits,” who years earlier used his ingenuity to raze another human city to the ground, home. So the Odyssey, which I should add has genuinely been a blast to read, essentially describes the 3,000 year-old ambitions, or at least their seeds, that Nolan uses his adaptation to critique.

There is something to be said of the fact that our biggest entertainments have become so tech skeptical. Of course, for a wholly successful critique of technologies like AI you would have to name the forces inside the Trojan horse; the AI executives and Fortune 500 companies selling mass labor automation and promising to replace human art with cheap slop, the movie studios that have partnered with them, and so on. The technology is not spilling out into Troy on its own, unguided.

Reading the original, I daydreamed a bit about someone performing the epic the way it was originally intended; orally, on stages, in theaters or at festivals, over long hours. I thought about a performance of Gatz I saw years ago, an 8-hour play put on by the New York theater ensemble the Elevator Repair Service, about an office worker discovering a copy of the Great Gatsby in a drawer and then proceeding to read, in real time, every line of the book. About halfway through the play, the actor reading the text looks up and continues reciting the story from memory. The audience gasped. He finishes the entire book, and the play, that way. A performance like that—recited aloud, performed by human voices, from memory—today feels almost like it would in and of itself constitute an act of resistance against the AI onslaught and the types of broad, immoral forces Nolan conjures in his epics. I’d be first in line.

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Alright! That’s it for today; thanks for bearing with while a took a few days off, even if those days off wound up being less of a “relaxing during a short vacation” vibe than “the whole family got e. coli poisoning from swimming in a bacteria-infested bay” but hey, it takes all kinds. At least I had Odysseus to keep me company. See you all next week.

Our concern today is not that we won’t remember written texts, but that we’ll be wholly unfamiliar with them in general, as they come spilling out of generators at the press of a button. An MIT study found that most writers who used AI to produce essays couldn’t identify a quote from their own papers.

A more wholesome algorithm? - Disconnect

2026-08-05T19:50:42.000Z

By this point, I’m sure ~ the algorithm ~ knows I’m not a big fan of, well… it. Not to mention everything it powers. And it seems to be trying to serve me content that recognizes that.

I’m not a big Instagram user, but recently it started serving me content that seemed to echo my feelings about digital technology.

In a video posted by livefromthetrees, an older man with a bushy white beard and an inviting smile let me know I’d scrolled far enough. I was done for the day, could put my phone down, and get on with my life — preferably by going out into nature. It’s a wholesome video, and brought a smile to my face.

My Instagram feed isn’t all that bad anyway. It’s a lot of golden retrievers, people with tattoos, Lord of the Rings content, and the occasional more lefty comedian (think people like Gianmarco Soresi). As I watched these videos of the old man in the woods, I started being served up similar videos. One featured a grandma asking for negative thoughts, dispeling them one by one, then batting them away with a baseball bat.

I wondered if I played these videos enough whether the algorithm would fill my feel with more of this uplifting content, but I also wondered how social media would feel if we saw more content like that than the polarized posts and AI slop increasingly filling people’s feeds. I don’t want to know everything about these people’s lives, but the brief moment they entered my world brightened my day.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think training an algorithm is the fix to our social media woes. But it also doesn’t have to be what people like Mark Zuckerberg have made it — prioritizing ad profits and engagement time over conviviality and actual connection.

Now, to this month’s recap. First, a very cool update on the book front: Hyperscale got a great review from Publisher’s Weekly. “Timely and persuasive, this revelatory account is difficult to ignore,” it says. Don’t forget to preorder your copy to get the full story on the data center boom, the communities it’s affecting, and why it doesn’t have to be this way.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I also did some great interviews this past month. Thomas Dekeyser was on the show to unearth the history of people refusing new technology, while Hannah Cyrus and Alison Macrina explained how librarians are on the front lines of informing the public about technology (and helping them ditch AI). Check them out if you missed them!

The top 3 stories in this month’s recap look at the Summer of Ludd, snail-mail subscription clubs, and writers changing their styles in response to AI. Plus, find more important reads, and updates on labor, AI, data center news, and even more!

The full recaps are a special perk for subscribers who support my work. Thank you to those who’ve signed up, and if you haven’t, consider joining today!

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I hope your summer (or winter) is going well!

— Paris

Names, Sabbath, Universities, Bookstores, etc. - The Convivial Society

2026-08-03T05:16:05.000Z

Welcome to the Convivial Society’s Commonplace Book. As you know, this is an experiment, and we’ll see how it goes. Hopefully, you’ll find something of interest, but if you decide that you would rath…

Elon Musk’s tired schtick - Disconnect

2026-07-27T16:24:31.000Z

Civil war is coming to Britain, at least according to the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk. But in a new interview with The Economist, he declared there’s good news for the struggling nation: it will take 20 years for it to descend into civil war, but the AI and robot singularity is 10 years away. In short, the robots will have taken over, meaning the abundance they bring will negate any need for pointless squabbles.

There was a time when media figures, investors, and virtually anyone with much influence — not to mention all the relatively powerless people watching the world turn around them — would hang on the every utterance or musing of someone like Elon Musk.

Self-driving cars were constantly just around the corner. Trains in vacuum tubes were going to carry passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco far quicker and cheaper than high-speed rail. Tunnels for cars were going to negate the need for public transit. And a Mars landing was just ten years away — in 2011.

The 2000s and 2010s were a moment when a select group of men — and most of them were men — were treated as unparalleled geniuses as they lucked into riding an economic rocket created by the internet’s privatization into the stratosphere of wealth and power. But they couldn’t simply be treated as lucky; they had to be recast as uniquely talented and knowledgable to justify the gains our capitalist system was foisting upon them. None benefited from that more than Elon Musk.

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I would never deny that Musk had some skills, particularly in those early days. He did have some technical knowledge and seemed genuinely curious about the engineering dimensions of electric vehicles and rockets. But that does not mean he was a genius engineer. His skills were more in the realm of knowing how to package what he was doing to sell it to investors, to a media desperate for readers or eyeballs, and to a wider public disillusioned in a neoliberal reality where their lives keep getting worse.

Musk sold the illusion of progress, by repackaging science fictional fantasies as realities that could be achieved if only people like himself were showered with resources and power to bring them into being. In the process, his repetition of very basic facts about his industries tied up with those fantastical futures earned him a reputation as a visionary — one media around the world were happy to echo, even as he spread bullshit, showed himself to be increasingly vindictive, and more frequently made claims that were demonstrably false.

One has to wonder whether a new Elon Musk could actually rise in 2026, in an era of great skepticism of the tech industry and the exaggerated promises it makes to justify the investment that floods into it. Even more, it’s increasingly baffling how the media still acts as though what Musk has to say is really worth listening to.

Shame on the Elon enablers

Media and politicians created a monster and lost control of him

In his interview with The Economist, editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes vacillates between pushing him on issues like the DOGE cuts or how investors will actually make money on AI, to agreeing with him on a whole host of issues, including at times his mischaracterization of the political positions he pushes and the outcomes that countries are experiencing from them.

Musk demonstrates very clearly that he creates his own reality. It’s one where DOGE cuts to USAID did not result in any deaths, and that if they did it’s actually Bill Gates or MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) who are to blame for not stepping in to fund the programs being cut. It’s one where the far-right political movements Musk supports are actually just normal people being slandered by hostile media, and Musk’s own politics are centrist, or where Europe is actually a much more dangerous place than the United States because of all the Muslims immigrating there — despite the stats very clearly showing otherwise. It’s one where humanity is about to become the pets of a superintelligent AI that will create “amazing abundance” and render money useless, negating the need for Musk to pay more tax.

Beyond showing the richest man in the world is completely out to lunch, the interview should lead any right-minded person to question why the media continues to engage him in this way. He clearly despises them, despite relying on them for some degree of credibility, while actively using his social media platform and broader influence to try to make people mistrust them so they place more trust in people like Musk himself. Part of the answer lies in the scale of Musk’s influence.

The media continues to turn to Musk for the same reason he remains so wealthy and his companies remain so highly valued despite their poor performance. Chinese auto companies are eating Tesla’s lunch, as its robotaxis are a joke and its turn to robots is little more than a marketing stunt (once again, in the face of Chinese leadership), while his rocket company remains unprofitable and his AI efforts are second rate, at best, leading SpaceX/xAI to become a neocloud provider for Anthropic — not the major player that aligns with the forward guidance that was supposed to justify the SpaceX IPO.

The companies don’t crash because investors have simply put too many eggs in the Elon Musk basket. If he collapsed, they would lose billions, so his myth — or at least his position — must be maintained regardless of the economic reality of his companies. That ensures he remains powerful and wealthy enough to wreak political havoc and muse about unattainable sci-fi futures, despite not delivering on his promises to investors.

For media, it’s much the same: they’ve spend so long helping elevate him to this position, they can’t give up on him. No matter how many racist statements or fascist calls he puts out on social media, they’ll still publish headlines about his latest bullshit prediction devoid of the broader context about how many times he’s lied or failed to follow through in the past, not to mention his embrace of far-right political movements.

Elon Musk is a fascist

The richest man in the world intends his far-right project to go global

Elon Musk, in a way, is too big to fail. It doesn’t matter how meaningless what he has to say becomes, how poorly his companies perform, or how much political havoc he incites, he still gets to be taken seriously. The media could turn to so many people to get better insight — or even similarly unhinged musings — but those people haven’t been put in the position that Musk has, so their equivalent or better insights don’t have the same importance.

The interview put The Economist in the conversation and allowed its editor-in-chief to do a media tour of her own to talk about it, calling him an “extraordinary individual” and treating his brain farts about the future as things people should be taking seriously. The whole thing was a shameful display, ending with her declaring she is “not a Musk hater.”

Meanwhile, over on X, Musk was calling her a “traitor to the West” and an “unthinking NPC” as he continued echoing a far-right meme claiming they must “deal with traitors before invaders” — an explicit call to violence against people like Minton Beddoes. It’s long past time for establishment media figures to wake up and stop treating Musk like the character they built him up to be for so many years. But their interests still seem too aligned to be honest that the richest man in the world is a repugnant fascist who got this far with their help.

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Understanding as Proof of Error - Cybernetic Forests

2026-07-26T11:10:15.000Z

Clarice Lispector, Translation, and Artificial Intelligence

💡

Nerd Warning: 1/5 (Low).

I'm a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others - Which? Maybe I'll say them. – Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

To translate a work of literature is to select its absences. In a piece from 2018, Katrina Dodson wrote about translating the work of Clarice Lispector, called "Understanding is the Proof of Error," showing us clearly that the work of translation is tied to a labor of empathy.

Translation, she says, means noticing what the author left out. The chosen word carries the residue of the words-not-chosen — it does the work of what's missing, of what was selected against. Close readers find absences evoked in what arrives: the translator shapes text to make that absence felt. The machine works in the opposite direction. The word the softmax function returns is what's left after the alternatives are cut away. The discards leave no computational residue — nothing in them shapes the words to come. The translator's word-not-chosen has a different kind of residue, with absences arranged in ways that make the reader feel them.

Virginia Stonek on BlueSky

In the era of attention mechanisms, selected words steer the selection of what comes next. A language model builds each word's meaning from the words before it, then predicts what is most likely to come next. More than one word influences the next, but every word selected narrows the range of acceptable choices even further. An author's choices – what makes a literary voice – is choosing words that create frictions against what's expected. A human translator preserves not just these unlikely choices, but what the absence of the likely choice signals to the reader. In contrast to the friction a translator fights to preserve, a model by default produces the word that follows most smoothly.

The latest models generate "reasoning traces." These are longer, often behind-the-scenes texts that describe choices and deliberation, and can resemble this process of selection. It's the same mechanisms as earlier systems, just more of them, and tuned to produce an answer, rather than the deliberation that yields it. By design, a system optimized to advance to the end of a sequence has no reason to preserve what was "left unsaid." But an answer, or a resolution in the form of a stop-token, is not always what we need in literary work.

Dodson suggests that the words-not-chosen by the author are just as important to the human translator as the ones that are. But the words not chosen, the words that follow the logical assumption of what comes next, are the words an LLM is currently structured to reproduce. It keeps the text within a tight scope of possible meaning, but the human process of choosing one word over the other seeks out what is unsaid.

Understanding is the Proof of Error - Believer Magazine

I. CLARICE THE MYSTIC At a reading I gave in Seattle two years ago, a man with white hair told me he had once lived in Brazil and had named his daughter after Clarice Lispector. Later, he handed me a piece of paper on which he’d scrawled “Katrina: I’ve often thought of Clarice as something […]

A Literature Review

Some studies have tried to examine this. Castaldo et al, a pre-print focusing on GPT-4 and Mistral (2023-era models), addresses this question of authorial intent most directly. They find that the text produced by machine translation systems "exhibit distinctive emotional fingerprints, reflected in systematic differences in how emotional content is distributed, intensified, or attenuated throughout the text."

Ferstler et al, in another pre-print, focuses on GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro and what I understand to be an agentic translation process built with Claude Code: more modern than Castaldo. Most readers in the study preferred the human translator, though preference isn't a reflection of accurate translation. Rather, the readers found the machine versions to be clearer, but the human translations to be more literary and immersive.

Readers found the machine translations to be clearer, but the human translations more literary & immersive.

Fidelity to those choices, and that voice, is harder to test: the language is, quite literally, not the same. Within the same language, I've tried – as part of my critical technical practice – many experiments trying to get LLMs to write like I do. I have eight+ years of training material, and it still doesn't get it quite right. The scale of what we can write is also part of our voice.

The Failure of My Language

Dodson's piece takes its title from a Lispector line: "Understanding is the proof of error." I find it echoed in this passage, from The Passion According to G.H. –

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But – I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.

Inevitably falling short of perfection is part of being human, and a system designed only to reach perfection doesn't meet us where we are. A machine isn't "inhuman" because it makes mistakes, but because it cannot fail: it follows the rigid commandments inscribed in its structure and corpus without any distance or remainder. Lispector reminds us that the experience of being human is already constituted by a tension between what we cannot grasp and what we become by reaching.

"It is curious that I can't say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can't say it. More than anything, I'm afraid to say it, because the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say." – Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

The human strives for language because of a gap that language opens and cannot fill, but the machine constructs from language only that which language can say. There is no gap for language to fill, a lack of any lack, and therefore, no way for it to fall short.

Where is the human in the UN's definition of AI?

My latest for Tech Policy Press looks at the evolution of language describing "AI" in major policy projects, and shows how an existential risk frame has crept in, forcing human accountability out. The trend culminates most bizarrely in the UN's Independent Panel report: in it, we see not only how the definition reflects a "system from nowhere," but how that framing of the system constrains the options the report makes available to policymakers.

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What is an 'Elon Musk'? - Blood in the Machine

2026-07-24T09:01:15.000Z

Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world merely because he’s good at selling cars or rockets at a profitable margin. That might have sufficed for richest men in the world of decades past. But Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, however briefly, for a lot of reasons, and being good at moving a particular product is not chief among them. Musk sells a vision. Musk harnesses the state to implement his corporate goals, to secure his companies’ foundations beyond the vicissitudes of common capitalism. Musk mediates his message on social platforms, which he owns and controls, and uses to bend politics to his will. The list goes on.

This formula has been emulated by the most recent crop of tech titans; your Sam Altmans and Dario Amodeis, whose path to power lies in selling a vision over simple goods, who work the state to buffet their businesses, and who paint a bleak picture of the future through which their products will help you survive. To understand what’s going on here, not just with Tesla or SpaceX or OpenAI or Anthropic, but the modern American economy itself, I sat down with the historian and author Quinn Slobodian, who has put a name to this tendency: Muskism.

Slobodian is the co-author, with Ben Tarnoff, of the book by the same name, which I fully and heartily recommend. We dig into all of the above, and a lot more; including the under-examined role that growing up in apartheid South Africa played in influencing Musk’s present-day ideology and tastes.

I very much enjoyed this discussion, and think you will too. Understanding Muskism, after all, could not be a more urgent project.

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In case you missed last week’s show, you can check that out here, or here:

Finally, as I have mentioned, I’m in Paris this month, as my wife is teaching a documentary film class, and I’ve thus far been working through most of our stay. All that changes next week, however, when I will do as the Parisians do and log off and take a week’s proper rest and enjoy the city with the fam.

I may re-up an old story or just go dark for the week, but either way, I’ll be back before you know it. Until then, hammers up.

"Everyone hates AI" in Paris - Blood in the Machine

2026-07-22T22:17:45.000Z

“Tout le monde déteste l’IA.” That phrase, printed in plain black and white, was one of the first things that caught my eye in the neighborhood in Paris where we’re staying this summer. It’s an advertisement for the cover story in the July issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, posted on what seemed like every other newsstand I walked by:

Tout le monde déteste l’IA. Everyone hates AI.

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I picked up a copy. My French is strictly limited to clumsy greetings and obnoxiously pronounced guidebook phrases, but a quick Google translation shows that the opening paragraphs indeed go pretty hard:

Une houle contestataire enfle aux Etats-Unis contre le culte de l’automatisation, les ravages du tout-numerique, la proliferation des centres de donnees, l’arrogance et le pouvoir des elites dela tech la corruption des elus quie se prosternent a leurs pieds.

Or, in English:

A wave of protest is swelling in the United States against the cult of automation, the ravages of everything digital, the proliferation of data centers, the arrogance and power of tech elites, and the corruption of elected officials who grovel at their feet.

Parisians have proven to be pretty hostile to AI themselves. When the AI wearable company Friend, whose CEO Avi Schiffmann is French-American, launched an ad campaign in the Paris Metro—much like it did in New York City’s subway—people tore down the posters or put stickers over them to subvert its message.

While the Friend posters are gone—Schiffmann had to suspend the launch of his product in Europe, given that the always-on, always-listening AI device likely runs afoul of multiple data privacy laws—there’s plenty of other anti-AI mischief on display in the city of light. Most notably, there’s another ad series all over the Metro comprised of what appear to AI-generated images. It has not been received kindly.

As you can see, at multiple stations, the ads have been tagged as AI SLOP.

Or more colorfully:

Not quite as savvy as Everyone Hates Elon’s recent subversions of Meta’s AI glasses ads in London, perhaps, but still:

French attitudes towards AI, according to a recent poll from the Centre pour la Securité de l’IA (CESIA), are in some ways, nearly as pessimistic as Americans’. Just 8% of respondents said they wanted to accelerate AI development, compared to 42% who said they wanted to slow it down “significantly” or pause it altogether.1

Like in the US, citizen concerns about AI over a great many subjects are shared across the political spectrum. Also as in the US, proposed data center projects are being met with growing opposition, and politicians are beginning to join the fray. Pushing for stronger AI regulation is the popular political position.

Unlike the US, France and the EU are currently capable of regulating the tech industry. This of course is why you hear American tech executives grouse about Europe so much. It’s a complex policy landscape with plenty of its own struggles—I’ve been contacted by Parisian union members who are enmeshed in battles with keeping AI out of their workplaces, for instance—but France is, nonetheless, capable of strong tech regulatory action on a level Americans are unaccustomed to. A timely example: Just last week, France’s national gambling authority banned Polymarket, the bet-on-everything app that’s a strong contender for the most predatory and openly noxious startup to rise to prominence in recent years.

In conversations, in the media, and even in the graffiti, the opposition feels more theoretical and philosophical; less vitriolic, less sweat-drenched. Perhaps because, as I and others have argued before, how much you déteste AI tends to depend on your economic and class position; what AI stands to take away from you, and where that might leave you. France, with its more generous social safety net, longstanding cultural dedication to craftsmanship and the arts, and more robust public spaces, generally feels more insulated from the threat vectors of Silicon Valley-shaped AI; ie, job automation, AI slop, and chatbot addiction. Generally.

Now, sure, this is a big, zoomed out generalization that admittedly risks the ‘columnist talks to his cab driver’ization of the issue at hand, but I was a columnist, and old habits die hard, so too bad: Walking around Paris, I do feel like I’ve seen fewer faces buried in phones in the way they are in US cities, certainly in my hometown of LA. I have seen not one but two people, on two separate occasions, walking down the street with their nose in a paperback. In a business district, no less. That’s beautiful. There are plenty of people staring at screens on the metro and waiting in lines and such, but they are eclipsed by the throngs at restaurants, the device-free bodies in parks and public places. The vibe is different.

Obviously, you can’t make too much of some loose anecdata based on hanging out somewhere for a few weeks, but it certainly feels that some of the ingredients to the antidote to Silicon Valley’s antisocial AI age are to be found around here. Robust communal spaces, culture that places unambiguous value on human arts, and policy that’s unafraid to pull punches in regulating—or banning—toxic and exploitative commercial tech. It’d be a start, anyway.

A dispatch from the days of Ludd

Embracing com space, logging off, centering community; why, these are exactly the things that the new Luddites, fresh off their Summer of Ludd, are pushing for.

has a beautiful piece about the wider movement, and her (all of our?) potential place in it, over at n+1. I could have excerpted pretty much any bit of this, so here’s one snippet at random:

Social media platforms, in my lifetime, helped ordinary people find one another, narrate their lives, organize against power, pressure institutions, and make visible much in our culture that had long been deliberately unseen. They had caused the culture to shift in infinite ways, many of them ridiculous and terrible, some of them tilted toward social justice and historical honesty. Marriage equality, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, mutual aid networks, disabled communities, gay kids in hostile towns finding one another—it seemed only truthful to say that the age of social media and smartphones helped make these more possible. And some of those shifts in mass opinion were easy-come, easy-go: mercurial, shallowly held, easily co-opted; the reactionary backlash we are now living through seems evidence enough of that.
The platforms are rancid now. The incentives of capitalist forces and quantification have mined and fracked them into an arid, increasingly joyless desert. But for a time, they changed the conditions under which people could encounter one another and be encountered by the world. The Luddiverse, I could see, was trying to make this happen again.

Mathews, I might add, is author of the excellent novel about millennial life, precarity and late capitalism, All This Could Be Different, which I discovered through… n+1’s annual book quiz. Coming full circle here.

A new survey on generative AI’s impact on performing artists

The brilliant director and algorithmic theater-maker Annie Dorsen is conducting a survey on how generative AI is impacting the livelihoods of performing artists and workers in the industry. I pitched in (a little) with some advising on the survey, which I now encourage any and all readers to whom this applies to take. Share it with anyone who might be interested, please! The more good data we get about how generative AI is impacting labor, the better.

The survey is here. An FAQ is here. It’s organized by SMU DataArts and supported by the Mozilla, Doris Duke, and Ford Foundations. Here’s a rundown:

This pathbreaking study examines the real-world impacts of generative AI on performing artists working in theater, dance, and live music.
Who should take this survey?
This survey is for anyone who works in the performing arts, at any career stage or in any creative role: performers, directors and choreographers, designers, and technicians.
Why are we doing this survey now?
While there has been significant discussion about AI and the arts, there is very little information about how these technologies are actually affecting artists’ work, income, career opportunities, and creative practices. This research aims to fill that gap.
The findings will be used to inform policy discussions, funding priorities, advocacy efforts, and field-wide support strategies for artists navigating the rapidly changing landscape of generative AI.

OK OK. That’s it for today. On the podcast later this week, I chat with Quinn Slobodian, co-author of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, about SpaceX, AI, the world’s richest man and what, exactly, he’s a function of. Stay tuned for that, it’s a great conversation.

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Finally, this work is made possible by readers who chip in a few bucks a month to help me keep the lights on; if you find value in this stuff, and you’re able, consider pitching in, too. Many ludditic thanks to all who already do. Until next time—au revoir, saboteurs.

Also perhaps of note: Another poll finds that 39% of French people say they use AI at least once a week.

Ann Friedman Had the Bestseller and the Followers. It Still Wasn’t Enough. - escape the algorithm

2026-07-22T13:15:31.000Z

Anti-viral is presented in partnership with Sublime, a creative thinking tool and communal search engine designed to help you collect, connect, and create from what inspires you — away from infinite feeds and AI slop. Sublime is my favorite kind of business — the small kind! — and they’re building my favorite kind of tool: thoughtful, single-focused, centered around what is distinctively human.

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This is the fourth installment of Anti-viral, a new series presented in partnership with Sublime, where I talk to creatives about the meaningful work that algorithms overlook, and what they would do more of if attention was no object.

Today I’m excited to share a conversation with , a journalist and essayist who thinks about questions of community, technology, and why the world is the way it is. Together with Aminatou Sow, Ann co-hosted the trailblazing podcast Call Your Girlfriend and co-authored the book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close. She also teaches writing workshops with Jade Chang. You can keep up with her work by subscribing to The Ann Friedman Weekly.

In this series, I’m interested in any and all forces that influence whether things get made and find an audience, whether or not they use the canvas of code. I’m thrilled that Ann took the bait and agreed to chat with me about a book project that nobody wanted to buy. Our wonderful conversation touches on creative hauntings, confronting external markers of success, and what’s wrong with traditional publishing.

Photo by Ryan Schude

Tell me about your book project that never came to be.

I went back and reread the proposal in advance of this conversation and had to stop because I was like, this is good. I was so mad all over again. In 2020, a book that I co-wrote with my friend and collaborator Aminatou Sow, Big Friendship, was released, and I spent most of 2021 on a quest for what book I was going to try to write by and for myself. This also coincided with becoming a homeowner in 2021.

I think a lot of the best work comes from a place of wanting to read something meaty and satisfying about an experience I’m having. And I wondered, where is the book about transitioning from renter to homeowner, and everything that entails—financially, culturally, emotionally, socially? There are definitely some books that nibble at different aspects of this, but there wasn’t anything like what I wanted to read.

So I spent many months working on a book proposal about the less tangible aspects of owning a home. I think my agent’s exact quote was, “That sounds very commercial,” which in agent-speak is ding, ding, ding.

So I was feeling confident about being able to write this book. It felt rich to me because it was rooted in my personal experience, but there was a lot of fun reporting to do. And it mirrored conversations I was having with friends and in my personal life, which is also a good tell for me that I want to write about something: if I want to keep talking about it.

Then the book first went out to Simon & Schuster, which published Big Friendship, because many authors have a clause in their contract that gives their publisher the right to either bite on or refuse their next book. They passed very quickly on this, which I was fine with. But then my agent sent this proposal to lots of other editors. And every single one of them was like, hell no.

Sometimes if an editor is kind of interested, they’ll ask a few more questions, or they’ll kind of push back and be like, “What if we framed it this way?” And this proposal received none of that. It just received a hard pass. The general reasoning was: we don’t think there’s an audience for this book. If publishing thinks there’s an audience for a nonfiction book, they buy it. It’s all about presumed sales, it’s all about presumed audience, and this book had none of those things, to their eyes.

[Editor’s note: nonfiction books are typically sold “on proposal,” meaning that rather than write the full manuscript, authors draft a long document that makes the case for what the book will be and why it will sell.]

What is it about this particular project that is still haunting you after all these years?

Here’s what’s so good about it. The topic is actually pretty narrow: owning a home. But it touches so many contentious, emotional, unresolved issues of this moment: how I feel about the modern state of America, what it means to be in middle-aged adulthood right now. It touches really big stuff while still being specific.

And it’s quite serious. Where do you live? How do you put a roof over your head? Questions of land ownership. But also, it’s kind of superficial and fun. There was a real throughline of this book that was about design, aesthetics, and the funhouse mirror of social media when it comes to the home. I know every topic that’s deep also has its lightness, but it had a really nice mix of those features.

In the idealized version of this book that will truly never be—because no idealized version of a book ever really comes to fruition—it was satisfying because it was all of those things. I still might write a version of it, but it will disappoint me in the act of writing. I will disappoint myself.

Was the rejection more about whether the book had a built-in audience, or about whether you were positioned to sell to that audience?

The feedback was twofold. One was: people don’t buy books about buying houses. Homeownership is not a topic that sells in this more reported, essayistic category. People only want to know how to do it, the mechanics of saving for it. And I wasn’t pitching a practical guide to becoming a homeowner.

The other problem was: you are not a housing market reporter. You write about friendship and “women’s stuff.” If you wanted to pivot and position yourself as a housing expert with a talking-head gig on MSNBC, maybe we would buy a book about homeownership from you. One editor said, “We would literally buy anything else from you.” So it was really quite universally negative feedback. Most things in life are more mixed than that. Most things in writing are more mixed than that. And this was just a hard pass from all corners, for reasons of perceived audience.

What story do you think those publishers are telling about why this project wouldn’t draw readers?

I’ll tell you something that my agent frequently says, which is that people pick up a book either to be entertained—swept away by a story—or to learn something to solve a very concrete problem in their lives. I would like to believe that my work, and some of the best essayistic reporting in this category, do both of those things. It’s not pick a lane: there are juicy stories, and you’re going to learn something about how you approach the world.

Maybe it’s not solving a problem in the sense of, how do I buy a house? But figuring out how to ask the right questions is why I read a lot of things. And that seems to be universally acknowledged as a bad way to sell books right now.

I’m content to acknowledge that maybe you and I are weirdos. Maybe we read in a way that most people don’t. I do sometimes read purely for story, or purely to get concrete advice about something. But I would say all of my favorite books, and most things I pick up, are a combination.

The other thread I’m hearing is this idea of personal brand. You had a popular podcast with your best friend, so now your brand is “friend,” and you’re allowed to write a book about friendship. But you hadn’t yet built your brand as a homeowner. It feels like an inherently internet-age logic.

Totally. Maybe I could have found some loophole if I were assiduously documenting a home renovation on Instagram, or if I freelanced for Architectural Digest. Maybe there would be a side door I could get in, with something approaching the career I have now, as opposed to being a market analyst. The appeal of that is less than zero.

Ann Friedman and her co-author, Aminatou Sow. Photo by Milan Zrnic.

What is your relationship with attention in general—with being perceived as a public figure?

I feel fine about being perceived. I like to have a say in which aspects of my life are perceived. When I used Instagram or Twitter, I was not showing the interior of my home. I have a robust quilting practice, but you will never catch me posting any quilts, because it’s protected. Texting friends, yes, but documenting for the internet, no. My child will never be on the internet posted by me. I spend a lot of time unchecking boxes from daycare that are like, can we post photos of your child? Are you kidding me?

Did the rejection change how you felt about the value of the project?

I thought it was a great idea, and I still do. My reaction was: something is wrong with publishing. Maybe if I had gotten feedback that was like, look, we agree that there’s a space for this book, but the way you approached it wasn’t quite right, or we need to add this angle, then I would have done a little bit more soul-searching. But my feeling was, it’s not my job to convince you to want this.

I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to convince a huge system like publishing or Hollywood that something is inherently valuable. I was obviously not going to become a talking-head commentator on cable news about the housing market. So my options were: sell it to a really tiny press, where I wouldn’t be making any money up front, which was not a financial possibility for me; or set it aside and think about what else I might want to do.

I work as a journalist. My job is selling words. So these words didn’t sell; I’m going to find new words to sell. I feel quite practical about it in a lot of ways. Maybe after another project, if no one has beaten me to this, I can come back around to it.

And I’m fully aware that maybe one viral Atlantic article about homeownership hitting right before I pitched this idea would have changed everything. It’s not logical. As much as it seems like there’s a formula, what editors want to acquire is subject to whims that I don’t control.

What do you think is wrong with publishing?

Every big industry that produces creative work, or funds creative work, has a risk-taking problem. They do not want to take a risk on something unless they are absolutely certain there will be an audience for it. And that’s doomed to fail from the start.

How many things have you personally loved in your life where you’re like, wow, I never would have thought I would love this, but it was great? That is the way we consume things. From an investment perspective, any industry that is investing in creative work is so small-c conservative. Finding a way to cater to that conservatism while still making things that you want to make is the trick.

The other option is to not expect any payment upfront, fund for yourself the making of exactly what you want to make, and then, once you demonstrate an audience for it, say, “Haha, now you can pay me.”

Time for you to launch your homeownership Substack.

If I were to time travel back to late 2021 and talk to the version of Ann who didn’t want to give up this project, that is exactly what I would advise her to do. I would say: start a really juicy, journally, bloggiest-personal-Substack-you-can-think-of newsletter about your experience as a non-homeowner → maybe-I’ll-be-a-homeowner → trying-to-be-a-homeowner → being-a-homeowner trajectory.

She didn’t want to do that. And that’s fine.

Given that you are so haunted by this idea, why have you never written about homeownership in your newsletter?

There is a sweet spot for when to write about something personal for me, and it is when I feel a little bit of resolution—when I feel like I’m starting to come to some language for what has happened to me, but I’m not quite there yet. In 2021, as I was working on this book proposal, it was still pretty fresh.

Then there was a period of time where I was like, okay, it’s all going in the proposal. I’m going to save it for that. I don’t want to burn this publicly. And I do think a book is the right venue for a lot of this. I don’t actually think a 1,500-word essay is how I want to talk about becoming a homeowner. It doesn’t feel like enough space for everything I want to tease apart.

Then there was honestly a period of grieving this book proposal, where I was like, I don’t want to touch it now. It feels tainted. A proposal takes months and months. It takes effort, reporting, revision. I was done for a while.

The question of what books get made feels so cosmically important. And at the same time, the way those decisions actually happen feels so cosmically random. On an individual level, everyone I’ve met in publishing is passionate and acting in good faith and genuinely loves the book as an artifact. But on the level of the machine, it feels so tragic to think about all the books that aren’t written based on such an imperfect measure of value.

The counter to that is small and independent presses, which do not have the budget to fund reporting work upfront, but do publish things that are more driven by a logic of “I like this and so someone else will too” as opposed to: “What is the exact market niche? What table will this be featured on? Which celebrity book club is likely to pick this up? Will BookTok like it?”

I think that once you let go of major publishing buy-in equals value, or equals this is a good idea, and accept that it is just random, you’ll be better oriented towards publishing.

What’s an example of a book that the publishing industry would not have predicted you would like, but that changed you?

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a great example. A book that’s not going to light any marketing person’s loins on fire. It’s a book that is a little academic, a little personal, and frankly a little journalistic. She’s talking about a moment in time, what it was like to be in a specific place, in a specific relationship, with the politics of the moment. That book was riveting to me. I actually drooled on myself while reading the final third of The Argonauts.

I read it as someone who was not queer, not interested in having children—demographically, other than being a woman of words in California, not aligning with what a marketing professional might have said was the demo of that book. And I know so many people who just had their views of family, self, and relationships rocked by that piece of writing. A friend of mine always keeps a copy on her table because that book is the reason she decided to have children. That book has it all.

That book changed me, too. It was one of the first things my partner and I talked about when we met, and it’s quoted in our marriage vows.

Green flag. Talking about The Argonauts on an early date: green flag.

I can’t imagine that book was sold on proposal.

Exactly. And granted, I don’t know what number book that was for her. She’s a prolific, experienced writer with serious-writer, faculty-type accolades appended to her name, so maybe she was a safe bet to do what she wanted. And I don’t know who published it, was it Graywolf? [We both run to grab our copies]. It was published by Graywolf, so it’s a small press. That is no coincidence to me: a Big Five publisher was not “boi-oi-yoing” to that idea.

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.

There’s a throughline between homeownership and publishing, where these innate human needs—shelter, groundedness, expression, connection—are co-opted into financial instruments, which in turn corrupts those initial human needs: People end up without shelter. People can’t publish books. As someone who has thought about ownership a lot, how do you think turning both books and homes into financial instruments changes what those things are?

We don’t think or talk about it enough. That was one reason I was excited to write about it at book length. It is not only people who are shut out from having a home or owning a home who experience the warping effects of turning where you live into a financial product. In the same way, it is not just people who are shut out of traditional publishing who are affected. It’s also people who do get published traditionally, and who bend their work to fit into that space.

Maybe more than anything, it’s just talking about it and acknowledging it. I don’t think the homeownership book would have ended with a call to abolish private ownership of homes or anything like that. I think it would be: What are we really talking about when we talk about this? What are we really craving when we say we want it? What are we really feeling shut out of?

What do you think a publishing economy would look like that valued this kind of work more highly?

I think it would empower individuals with considered, but probably flawed, taste to make decisions based on what they wanted to read and what they wanted to see in the world. That is why I say that if someone had read that proposal and been like, “Ugh, not for me,” I would have been like, “I get it.” But the idea that it’s outsourced to some nebulous idea of the crowd makes me not respect the feedback.

I don’t have close friends who are editors at Big Five publishers. And I do wonder sometimes about the toll of not being able to just leap at something because you like it, even though it seems like there is no “market value.” Much like turning a home into a financial product also hurts homeowners, it’s probably not great for your soul to be in it for the love of words and then cater to the abstractions of a market.

It’s interesting to have this conversation as someone who has a general, documented following, because you hear this over and over: publishers want someone who can demonstrate that they can sell a book. I’ve known many writers who pitched really worthy books and were told, you don’t have enough of a following. Come back to us when you have a magic number of Instagram followers. I’ve advised people to just buy followers while their book is out on submission. This is how stupid the whole system is.

The publishing police are going to come for you.

[Laughs] My God, are they? What’s the worst they can do? Cancel the contract for this book I’m working on? At this point that would be a blessing. Come for me.

But what I think is worthwhile about telling this story is that I don’t have that problem. I have Instagram followers. I have newsletter subscribers. I have people who are familiar with my work because I’ve been working for so long. And still, it wasn’t enough to just do what I wanted.

We spent a lot of time and effort trying to make Big Friendship a bestseller. And one reason was that I thought it would mint me for the next project. I thought it would be this silver bullet—she’s published a bestseller. Sure, we wouldn’t normally greenlight this, but you go ahead, girl! I thought I wouldn’t be in the position I was in because we had just barely crested that bestseller status. And it wasn’t enough.

Understanding that it doesn’t matter, it’s quite liberating. Not that I’m not going to try to sell the next book. I’ll try to get people to read it; I will have spent years of my life on it. But the idea that there’s any kind of reward from the system for becoming a bestseller, I’m over it. There’s none. That’s not part of my calculus anymore. In that way, I guess it was a very worthy experiment in whether I care about external markers of success from the publishing industry. Who cares about a bestseller if you can’t do the thing you want?

You can keep up with Ann’s work by subscribing to The Ann Friedman Weekly.

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What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars? - The Convivial Society

2026-07-19T00:22:37.000Z

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. I’ve thought from time to time about occasionally re-posting an essay from the archive, or even from the old blog with material going back 15 years. (Some of these pieces were read by dozens of you!) And after soliciting a bit of feedback, I’ve decided it might be a worthwhile endeavor.

In this case, you have one of my favorite pieces about a topic that remains deeply significant if also under-appreciated. It was first posted in January 2021(when barely a tenth of you were subscribed). I was reminded of it because the post was originally inspired by news regarding Starlink satellites, and just a few days ago it was reported that Space X has now applied to the FCC to put another 100,000 satellites in orbit. The piece has been lightly edited, mostly by having some material moved to the footnotes.

Cheers,
Michael

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”

— Wendell Berry, “To know the dark”

Reading Dante’s Divine Comedy poses any number of challenges to modern readers. This should not, I’ll quickly add, deter modern readers from the attempt, which, in my view anyway, will more than repay the effort. In any case, one of these challenges may be the curious astronomical dimensions of Dante’s poem. You may know, for example, that each of the three cantiche that make up the poem—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—ends on the same Italian word, stelle, or, in English, stars. Moreover, the final portion of Dante’s journey, related in Paradiso, is literally a journey through what we think of as space and what Dante, and his contemporaries, imagined as a series of concentric spheres with earth its center and the realm of God beyond the farthest sphere. It’s also clear that Dante believed the starry heavens were meant to draw our eyes toward God. At one point, he refers to the stars as God’s “lure.”

But perhaps most interestingly, in the middle part of his journey, as he ascends the mountain of purgatory, which Dante imagines as an island in the southern hemisphere, the character of Dante displays a remarkable awareness of where the stars and planets are located in the sky at any given moment. He frequently alludes to the position of the sun relative to the constellations of the Zodiac, and he is intimately familiar with the paths of the planets (including the moon) through the sky as well as the seasonal position of the stars. Within the first few lines of Paradiso, he casually invites readers to imagine the time of year when the sun rises where four circles—the horizon, the equator, the zodiac, and the colure of the equinoxes—intersect to form three crosses in conjunction with Aries! I’m inclined to think that few modern readers would even know where to begin with such instructions.

I can’t speak to whether Dante’s astronomical proficiency was common in his time—after all, Dante was not exactly your average medieval Florentine—but he did have the same experience of the starry sky as human beings had enjoyed for millennia before him and centuries after. Of that much we can be sure.

As science journalist Jo Marchant explained in the opening pages of her recent book, The Human Cosmos, the earliest existing examples of Paleolithic art may very well have included elaborately coded depictions of the night sky. Marchant’s book goes on to explore the remarkable role the stars have played in human thought and culture since then. In short, human beings have payed meticulous attention to the stars and experienced them as a source of wonder, admiration, and even reverence. Seen in this light, our own relationship to the night sky appears as a remarkable, and perhaps tragic, anomaly.

The sight of the star-filled sky, a unifying human inheritance across thousands of years, has been all but lost to the majority of people who now live in urban and suburban settings. By one account 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way. In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon. I suspect that some of you reading this may be among those who have never seen the arc of our galaxy grace the night sky. For my part, I can count on one hand with fingers to spare the opportunities afforded to me to witness the undiminished night sky over the course of my four decades [plus] on planet earth.

Bruno Gilli/ESO - http://www.eso.org/public/images/milkyway/

I began to think about the loss of the night sky as I was reading about the latest SpaceX launch carrying another batch of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites. SpaceX currently aims to place 12,000 of these satellites in orbit and is seeking permission to eventually place upwards of 40,000. The goal is to create a global broadband network making the internet accessible to even the earth’s most remote regions. Musk has said that, thanks to Starlink, anyone “will be able to watch high-def movies, play video games and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed.” With the latest launch a few days ago, there are now 952 Starlink satellites in orbit. By comparison, there have been about 8,000 total satellites put into orbit since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. We should note, too, that SpaceX is not alone in these efforts. Amazon’s Project Kuiper has also secured FCC approval to put 6,236 satellites in orbit.

Musk’s ambitions have caused more than a little controversy among astronomers, who fear that this blanket of satellites will hamper their efforts to study the universe from earth-based telescopes. Since the launch of the first Starlink satellites in 2019, which were brighter than 99% of the other 200 orbiting human artifacts visible to the naked eye, SpaceX has responded to these concerns with measures to darken the satellites and equip them with visors to reduce their impact on earth-based astronomical observations. But while these measures have helped to some degree, scientists say the problem remains. Starlink satellites remain brighter than a recommended 7th-magnitude threshold, which would put them beyond visibility to the naked eye.

Starlink satellites as they appear in DELVE Survey of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory

The Starlink satellites are clearly not responsible for the loss of the starry sky. That process has been underway for more than two centuries and has been the consequence of what are now much more mundane technologies that we hardly think of at all. But I began to think of the ambitions of the Starlink project as somehow amounting to a final twist of the knife. Perhaps this is a bit too dramatic a metaphor, but if we think that the loss of the star-filled night sky is a real and serious loss with significant if also difficult to quantify human consequences, then the final imposition of an artificial network of satellites where before the old celestial inheritance had been seems rather like being tossed cheap trinkets to compensate for the theft some precious treasure. One might also interpret the development in more symbolic terms, almost as a modern-day Tower of Babel, which is to say as a defiant and hubristic gesture of human self-sufficiency, a self-referential enclosure of the human experience, a literal immanent frame (to borrow a term from philosopher Charles Taylor).

But Starlink was only a point of departure leading me to consider the costs of the unrelenting drive toward artificial illumination, a technological development most of us now take for granted. The loss of the stars, after all, could only happen because of a more general loss of darkness. Our relationship to the night, like most human things, is not simply given. It has a history, which varies from culture to culture. The conflicting and evolving way human cultures have thought about the night, and the darkness that accompanies it, has been the subject of numerous essays and books. (Craig Koslofsky’s Evening’s Empire: A history of the night in early modern Europe comes to mind). That said, until recently in human history, these various cultural constructions of the night arose out of a fairly uniform experience of the daily patterns of light and darkness and the ubiquitous presence of the stars, which have been the subject of scientific, philosophical, religious, and artistic interest across cultures from times immemorial. The transformation of this relatively uniform human experience began as new technologies of illumination became available throughout the modern era. In his aptly titled In Praise of Shadows, Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki has written of the attitude of the characteristically modern and Western individual: “from candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.”

The decisive turn, of course, came with the advent of electrification, in the late nineteenth century. One of the best accounts of the progress of electrification in the United States, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940, was written by the historian of technology, David Nye.1

Nye went on to devote a couple of chapters to electrification in a later book, American Technological Sublime, a work I continue to think is indispensable to understanding the role of technology in American culture. As the book’s title suggests, Nye examined how new technologies, of a certain scale and power, generated experiences of the sublime in those who first observed them in action. For example, among other technologies, Nye considers the railroad, bridges and skyscrapers, the atomic bomb, and Apollo XI. According to Nye, these technologies occasioned a quasi-religious response of awe and fear from the public and they were often introduced with elaborate civic fanfare and ritual. The result is what amounts to the cultivation of a functional civil religion centered on technology, which served as a unifying force within an otherwise fractious society.

Electrification, and the electrified cityscape in particular, served as one of Nye’s case studies of the technological sublime. It would be hard to overstate the degree of wonder and fascination that electric lighting generated in those who witnessed it for the first time, often in the presence of spectacular displays of artificial lighting produced for various turn-of-the-century world’s fairs and exposition.2

Nye’s thesis suggests that, in the American case at least, the loss of the night sky might be described as the surrender of the natural sublime for the sake of the technological sublime. Any lament of the loss of the night sky must reckon with the wonder electric lighting also elicited at its advent. But the two were far from equivalent and the costs of the exchange were not readily apparent.3

Pan-American Exhibition, Buffalo, NY. Robert Allen Reid,1901. (Public Domain)

At the time there were, of course, some who noted that something of consequence was being lost. “We of the age of the machines,” Henry Beston wrote in the 1920s,

“having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of the night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or poetry of night, who have never even seen the night.”

Curiously, this is a thoroughly modern lament. I don’t think Dante could have written it. The pre-Copernican cosmos, with the earth at its center surrounded by a series of concentric spheres on each of which a planet was embedded like a jewel, was a relatively cozy place. A man or woman looking up to the stars did not, as we might today, see a vast, cold, dark emptiness that made them feel small and insignificant, perhaps especially to the degree that we have lost sight of the stars themselves. They saw instead a well-ordered cosmos in which they felt themselves at home. They saw, too, a realm bathed in light and, odd as it may seem to us, suffused with music—the so-called “music of the spheres” or musica universalis, itself a fascinating topic.4

Setting the medieval digression aside, Beston is mostly preoccupied with what we might call abstract, unquantifiable costs incurred by electrification, to which we’ll return shortly. But there are other costs, of course. Many that we find it easier to talk about and which have indeed been widely discussed, usually under the heading of “light pollution,” which the International Dark-Sky Association defines as “any adverse effect of artificial light, including sky glow, glare, light trespass, light clutter, decreased visibility at night, and energy waste.”

Paul Bogard’s 2013 The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light is probably about as a good a survey of the consequences of light pollution as you’re likely to find. Bogard traces the rise of the regime of artificial lighting and its less than benign consequences for both humans and non-humans, from the well-documented interruption of the body’s natural sleep cycles and the consequent poor health outcomes to the disruption of natural ecosystems and waste of resources. We hardly ever think of it this way, but electrification can be understood as a massive and unprecedented social and environmental experiment. And I’d say the result are not in yet.

Much of this amounts to a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the limits of our creaturely frame and the kind of techno-social environment that it requires. As Jacques Ellul might have put it, we have built a techno-social environment that is in many respects inhospitable to human beings as such, although it serves the interest of some humans quite well. Techno-scientific advances once sought to improve the human lot. Now they as often arise for the sake of the techno-scientific enterprise itself or the economic order that sustains it, generating spurious needs while failing to meet basic ones. In turn, whole industries and markets arise to produce techniques designed mitigate the harm done by a human-built world whose structures and rhythms undermine the possibility of genuine human freedom and flourishing.

Moreover, darkness and the starry sky have succumbed to that all too familiar pattern whereby a public good, commonly shared or freely accessible, has been transmuted into a luxury item available only to the privileged classes in the form of Dark Sky tourism. To glimpse the night sky, which had for the whole of human history until the last 50 to 70 years, a blink of an eye, all one had to do was step outside in the evening. Now you might have to pay for the privilege.5

“Two things,” Kant famously observed, “fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Is there a relationship between the two? Is there any sense in which we get not only our spatial bearings but also our psychological and emotional bearings from observing the beauty and rhythms of the star-filled sky? Are we bearing an unacknowledged burden of mental and physical exhaustion because the night no longer brings most of our labors to a close and bids us rest. Is there anything to be said for the inspiration the night sky has given to the human imagination?

We are doomed, it seems, to abide the loss of all that we cannot quantify. Absent shared ethical frameworks or normative accounts of human flourishing, modern societies tend to resort to quantification as an ostensibly neutral and value free lingua franca suitable for the public sphere. Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize and defend human goods that cannot be objectively measured. And should some effort be made to quantify them, they are likely to be reduced, impoverished, and exploited.

What do we lose when we lose the stars? What has it cost us to conquer the night?

Perhaps only the poets can say.

The Convivial Society is sustained by those who value the writing and have the means to support it. You can do so by becoming a paid subscriber.

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While all of the essays remain public, paid subscribers have access to a new section of the newsletter, the Commonplace Book, where I’ll post eclectic selections from assorted readings with minimal commentary.

Additional Links and Resources

I encourage you to check out the International Dark Sky Association. There are, in fact, relatively simple things that can be done to improve the situation and some cities across the United States have already taken action.

“The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness”
World Atlas Night Sky Brightness
Dark Site Finder
“Missing the Night Sky”
“Under attack: How humanity is losing the night sky” [newer article from 2025]

Thomas Hughes’s Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 is another notable account of the same.

These fairs and expositions, by the way, also offer a fascinating window on technology and American culture from roughly 1870 to 1970. The work of Robert Rydell is especially useful here: All the World’s A Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 and A World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions.

As is often the case, I find myself thinking that Ivan Illich’s insistence on the need to recognize thresholds of productivity. The point is not to reject new technologies or the conveniences they offer, but rather to identify the limits beyond which these technologies become counterproductive and even destructive.

An even more arcane aside: Even in the post-Copernican world, the idea of astral musical harmonies played a crucial role in the development of Kepler’s theory of elliptical orbits, see his Harmonices Mundi. It also helped Immanuel Kant improve on Newton’s account of the lunar influence on tidal patterns! You can begin to make sense of the seemingly odd grouping of the latter four of the medieval liberal arts, the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

This is not unlike Ivan Illich’s argument in “Silence is a Commons.” “Just as the commons of space are vulnerable, and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic,” Illich argued, “so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modern means of communication.” “Such a transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resource,” Illich went on to insist, “constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation.” And as with silence so with darkness. Illich understood that commons of this sort were “more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads.”

Xbox workers speak out about layoffs, AI, and how big tech brought a crisis to gaming - Blood in the Machine

2026-07-17T20:03:06.000Z

On July 6th, Microsoft announced that it was laying off 4,800 workers, largely from its Xbox gaming division. This comes almost exactly one year after the tech giant announced it was terminating 9,100 employees. It’s now a disconcertingly routine occurrence in the tech industry: thousands of jobs gone in an instant, accompanied by little more than a corporate memo and some platitudes about AI.

The cuts are so imposingly large, the headlines so alarmingly frequent, and the tech companies so aggressive in their comms strategy that it’s easy to grow numb to the fact that there are real humans on the other end. To the fact that we now regularly see a small city’s worth of lives upended, careers cut short, and friends and colleagues thrown out of work. That an untold number of games, products, and works of art are suffering as a result. id Software, the studio behind some of the most legendary (and successful) game franchises of all time—Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake—was acquired by Microsoft in 2021. Executives laid off half the studio’s employees this month. The remaining employees have no idea how they’re supposed to move on, what the plan for them is moving forward.

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I know this because this week I sat down with three Microsoft workers for a special edition of the Blood in the Machine show. Two of these workers have been impacted by the layoffs, one saw longtime friends lose their jobs. All three are fighting back.

All three have, at an exceptionally difficult moment, at personal and professional risk, stepped forward to share their stories, and to reveal what it’s like to work in the gaming industry, at a tech giant, in the age of AI and corporate consolidation. Both tech and gaming have been targeted by zealous managers embracing AI, and both have been made precarious by waves of destabilizing layoffs.

In our wide-ranging conversation, Morgan Goin, a level designer with ZeniMax Online Studios, who worked on games like Elder Scrolls, Autumn Mitchell, a senior quality assurance tester at Bethesda (the studio behind the Fallout games), and Chris Hays, a lead services programmer at id Software, candidly shed light on the crisis big tech is inflicting on games, how AI is impacting the industry, and how they’ve organizing to confront their trillion-dollar overlords through layoffs and hardship.

They’re all members of the Communication Workers of America, and the union has responded to the layoff news by organizing a series of protests, attended by hundreds, and filing an unfair labor practices complaint against Microsoft. I’m told we should keep our eyes peeled for a major event in August, too.

I’m still experimenting with the audio edition of BITM, but conversations like this one are exactly the ones I want to be having. I cannot thank Goin, Mitchell, and Hays enough for joining the show and sharing their stories and insights. For updates on their fight, you can follow the ZeniMax Workers Union on social media and find updates on the CWA’s website.

As always, if find value in this work, or if you support this newsletter, show, and the mission, consider becoming a paid subscriber so we can continue to host and produce more conversations like this one. If you already chip in, many thanks, you make this possible.

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Finally, now that I am officially a Podcast Guy, I have been informed I need to make this ask: please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your shows. You can subscribe to the channel on YouTube, and if you’re so inclined, upvote the episode and all that stuff too. And do let me know what your thoughts are about the whole audiovisual experiment here, in the comments or wherever; I’ve been pretty thrilled with the results and the feedback’s been great, but who knows.

OK! That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading/watching/listening. Until next time, hammers up.

Making music from death row - escape the algorithm

2026-07-17T15:24:15.000Z

It’s rare that I talk about my day job in this newsletter, but in my capacity as Director of Product at The Marshall Project—the nonprofit newsroom focused on criminal justice—I recently had the honor of designing a project called Redemption Songs. Each week, reporter Maurice Chammah tells a story of American mass incarceration through one song by an incarcerated artist.

This week, I’ll highlight the account of a rapper on death row recording an album over a prison phone line. In an age of frictionless streaming, I can hardly think of a better embodiment of the art of escaping algorithms than that.

The series is still running, Maurice is a genius, and you should drop whatever you’re doing and subscribe.

With ‘Live on Death Row,’ Rapper Rrome Alone Condemns the Death Penalty

Listen if you like: Run the Jewels, Ice Cube, Public Enemy

Fifty years ago this month, the death penalty as we know it today was born. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed executions to return across the country after a four-year moratorium. Since then, death row has been covered in books, podcasts and documentaries. Because I have made some of these myself, I am especially blown away by the concise punch of the song “Live on Death Row,” in which the rapper tells you pretty much everything you need to know on the subject in just over three minutes.

Rrome Alone is the moniker of Alim Braxton, who is on death row for killing another incarcerated person while serving time for two murders in his native Raleigh, North Carolina.

“Though I can never justify my crimes, I believe in the possibility of redemption,” he writes in his book, “Rap and Redemption on Death Row,” which The Marshall Project excerpted in 2024. “Rap is only a tool. My ultimate goal is to make amends for the crimes I have committed and to help innocent people on Death Row win their release.”

“Live on Death Row,” a standout track on his 2024 album, “Mercy on My Soul,” positions Braxton as news correspondent “reporting straight from the trenches / Separated from the angel of death by mere inches.” He had friends voice the roles of news anchors, and says the concept was inspired by the death row writings of journalist and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal.

“I said I wanted to be a reporter in the middle of a hurricane, wind blowing all around,” Braxton said of the chaotic production by Nick Neutronz. The lyrics are a sweeping indictment of the American death penalty, from the way “every life hinges on poverty, gender and race / And the pay of the attorney defending your case” to the indignities of a last meal: “You might get steak on your last night / Before the State send you to the next life.”

Like the rappers Mac Dre and G. Dep, Braxton developed techniques to record vocals over phone lines. To deal with split-second delays in his landline phone connection, he used rap songs on the radio as a kind of metronome to steady his delivery. More recently, he got access to a tablet, which allows him to communicate with producers from his cell. Last year, one of Braxton’s outside collaborators took their ongoing experiment further, running a photo and audio of him through AI to make him look like he’s talking on video.

Braxton says that when the other men on death row heard the song played on a local radio station, there was “elation,” because “somebody here was getting attention for doing something that wasn’t bad.” I asked if corrections officers were angry about the line “Cupcake parties for the COs / After an injection from the needle.” Braxton said they were indifferent, probably because few of them had been around for North Carolina’s last execution in 2006.

Since he recorded “Mercy on My Soul,” Braxton’s lyrics have centered his faith; he studies Arabic and recites the Qur’an. In the recent song “Mu’min and Kufar” (“Believer and Disbeliever”) he writes about twins in a womb, debating whether there is life beyond their current state. You can hear a heartbeat, which Braxton said is his mother’s own, recorded during a medical exam. And there is an interfaith dimension: He based the story on a Christian video he saw on his prison tablet.

Braxton is in a surreal but common situation on death row: He technically faces execution, but North Carolina hasn’t actually carried one out in two decades. The last governor commuted death sentences, but state lawmakers recently passed a new law aiming to shorten death row appeals and restart executions.

So he’s effectively serving a life sentence with a slim but fluid chance of execution. He wants to use whatever time he has to fight for people he believes are innocent on death row. He writes about them on a Substack and pushes journalists and podcasters to cover their cases. Despite his own circumstances, he says he feels lucky to be able to contribute art and activism to the world: “When I was sentenced, a judge said to me, ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’ I later reflected and thought, ‘You know, God has indeed had mercy on my soul.’”

This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

Global dependence on US tech was always the plan - Disconnect

2026-07-15T15:00:34.000Z

For the past year and a half, the world has been forced to wake up to the great drawbacks that have come from dependence on the platforms, services, and infrastructures provided by US tech companies. What was once framed as a driver of economic growth and dynamism now gives an increasingly hostile US government an unimagined degree of leverage over other countries and their governments. It might seem to have come out of nowhere, but in truth it’s long been part of the plan.

I originally wrote this piece for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, but they’ve allowed me to share it with Disconnect subscribers. There’s some specific mention of Canada as a result, but the takeaway is the same for many parts of the world.

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In November 2019, time was up for Evo Morales. After election results started coming in, the Organization of American States questioned the validity of the results, casting his lead into doubt. Those questions enabled the Bolivian military to force him from power, even though later analysis—including from major U.S. media—confirmed the OAS analysis had been “flawed.”

Bolivia’s left-wing president was overthrown based on a lie and the political right kicked off a massive wave of repression. After the coup, questions swirled about why Morales had been forced from office. One answer in particular caught a lot of people’s attention: that the United States wanted access to the country’s vast lithium reserves, which would be necessary to power the electric vehicles (EVs) and battery storage that were key to the energy transition.

Eventually, a Twitter user put that charge to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. If anyone was to benefit from such a move, it would be him. His response didn’t help quell the questions. “We will coup whoever we want!” Musk replied in July 2020. “Deal with it.”

It was nothing new for Musk to make brash statements, but his response today looks like an early indication of where the industry was going. This was before his acquisition of Twitter, his open championing of Donald Trump, and unapologetic embrace of extreme right-wing politics. But his response also signalled something else.

For years, Silicon Valley had framed itself as the home of a progressive libertarianism. It was not like the old guard companies, it claimed, and wouldn’t replicate the social harms that accompanied their business models in pursuit of maximizing profits at any cost. That narrative helped buy tech companies goodwill as they grew in size and expanded globally, but it also masked the expansionist—even imperial—project they were undertaking, one which Musk’s tweet cast a new light on just as the mask was starting to come off.

The imperial project of U.S. tech

As far as the public was concerned, the internet was framed around a series of libertarian notions. John Perry Barlow, one of the co-founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation, said as much in a 1996 manifesto that shaped internet politics for decades to follow. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” he wrote. “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Barlow wanted the internet to be akin to a virtual hippie commune, and he felt that meant governments had to be kept far away. But by casting government as the enemy, he left the door open to another powerful societal force to shape the course of the internet’s development: corporations. Barlow’s framing, which came to define much digital rights activism, conflicted with the way many in government saw the potential the internet offered to maintain the power of the United States.

In 1989, several years before the effort to privatize the internet would kick into high gear, then Senator Al Gore was pushing a bill that would direct more money into funding high-performance computing technologies. He was interested in the field, but he saw another benefit to spurring innovation in the sector. “The nation which most completely assimilates high-performance computing into its economy will very likely emerge as the dominant intellectual, economic, and technological force in the next century,” he told his fellow senators when introducing his bill.

The United States is a rogue state

Donald Trump’s “attack on sovereignty” in Venezuela has terrible consequences for the world

As far as Gore was concerned, the advancement and adoption of those technologies would not just be a form of modernization or serve to boost the economy, it would also assure the continuation of U.S. power. He may have been a champion for the “internet superhighway,” but he also saw how a global expansion of the network that would facilitate the entry of U.S. companies into countries around the world would be in the interest of the U.S. government.

As countries became dependent on the products and services of U.S. tech companies, it wasn’t just the companies themselves that prospered. Their profits flowed back to the United States and the U.S. government gained leverage over those countries; leverage it began to openly flaunt once Donald Trump returned to office. The imperial nature of the project Washington and Silicon Valley had been collaborating on for decades was revealed for all to see, and the tech billionaires behind it shifted their rhetoric to reflect it.

Silicon Valley’s right-wing turn

There was a day when at least some Silicon Valley executives believed in the “don’t be evil” slogans they championed, but their commitment to any notion of social good eroded with every additional billion added to their net worths. Today, Elon Musk openly promotes white supremacy as tech companies fall over themselves to sign massive contracts with the Pentagon. If you listen to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, that’s all in service of defending Western civilization and, more specifically, the dominant role of the United States.

In a 22-point manifesto posted to the company’s X account on April 18, Karp argued that Silicon Valley “owes a moral debt” to the United States and needs to defend not just its power, but to build weapons to help its military. Western pluralism, in his view, was a fatal mistake, as some cultures had simply “proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” There was no point in trying to put them on the same level as the West.

Rather than trying to push the government away, Karp and his new alliance of openly right-wing billionaires were explicitly championing the essential nature of the alliance between Silicon Valley and the Trump administration. It’s a political bet as much as it is a statement of how the politics of the tech industry have shifted.

Elon Musk is a fascist

The richest man in the world intends his far-right project to go global

Under the Biden administration, Silicon Valley felt its first sustained threat of domestic regulation as branches of the government brought lawsuits against the tech companies for anti-competitive actions and broader social harms that have arisen from their products. That was one reason they openly embraced the political right, but it was far from the only one.

The reality is that right-wing politics has long had a foothold in Silicon Valley; its adherents were simply operating out of the public spotlight during the era the industry was trying to present itself as a more progressive force. But there’s also the question of power—now that tech companies are some of the most influential companies in the world, they want to defend their power and market share. They rightfully see aligning with right-wing political movements as the best way to achieve it.

As the global power of the United States is threatened, so, too, is their global market share. If the U.S. government can’t push other countries around, it’s easier for those countries to crack down on U.S. tech companies or even get rid of them. More still, as Chinese tech companies become more globally competitive, U.S. tech executives need the United States to contain China to protect their bottom line.

The new political orientation of Silicon Valley is a far cry from Barlow’s declaration three decades ago, but it’s a more honest description of the relationship that has long existed between the tech industry and the U.S. government. It may have taken different faces in different moments, but the global expansion of the tech industry has always been part of the U.S. imperial project.

The need for digital sovereignty

The U.S. empire has long depended not simply on military might, but also economic coercion to maintain its global dominance. Unlike the European colonial powers that preceded it, the United States has engaged in less direct colonization of overseas territories; instead, it mastered the use of economic dependence to keep countries in line.

For a long time, that power was used primarily against the Global South; its Western peers in places like Europe or Canada were able to prosper from the system it built and even become exploiters of their own. But Trump’s return to office in 2025 corresponded with a shift in how the United States deployed that power. Seeing its geopolitical advantage in jeopardy, it became much more willing to deploy economic coercion against its supposed friends as much as its foes, and technological dependence has emerged as a key aspect of its leverage.

World leaders must stop appeasing Donald Trump

Conceding to Trump’s demands only guarantees new threats. It’s time to reject the US and its tech companies.

Countries like Canada are waking up to that new reality. In recent months, Prime Minister Mark Carney has begun regularly speaking out against the changing U.S. role in the world. But his action is not living up to his rhetoric—certainly not on the digital front. Work on a sovereign cloud hasn’t moved beyond the talking stage, the government hasn’t joined European allies in considering how to wean public functions off Microsoft and other U.S. services, all while it pushes companies to become more dependent on U.S.-based generative AI tools that offer dubious promise.

Concern about the influence of the United States is nothing new in Canadian politics. Left-wing activists have long criticized the country as little more than a vassal of the United States, especially since the original North American Free Trade Agreement. But defending Canada’s sovereignty in the 21st century will require much more than increased military spending and trade diversification. It requires the government to get serious about digital sovereignty.

Until Canada gets off U.S. tech platforms and services, the government, major companies, and even much of the modern military hardware the government is procuring from the United States is in jeopardy. The U.S. government can request Canadian data stored in the servers of U.S. cloud companies, it has weaponized our use of those services to expand its surveillance apparatus, and it can even suspend access to any of those services at a moment’s notice.

The libertarian framing of the internet as a place of freedom and expression was a potent mask for a project U.S. lawmakers always understood was imperial in nature: to defend its government’s power and geopolitical position. Now it has countries around the world exactly where it wants them. They have to choose: will they act quickly to take back that power, or accept the subservient position the United States has designed for them?

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Getting off US tech: a guide

I’m in the process of dropping US tech services. Here’s how I did it, and options you should consider.

What VAR tells us about AI - Blood in the Machine

2026-07-13T22:23:44.000Z

I’ve been watching far too much World Cup this summer. It’s great. I’m in Paris, where it’s playing everywhere; in bars, brasseries, on people’s phones on the metro. At night, you can hear cheers erupting from blocks away no matter where you are, for France whenever they’re playing, sure, but also for Argentina and Messi, or for any quality goal really. You also hear plenty of guttural jeering (France’s round of 16 match against Paraguay was especially rich for this) and a good deal of that jeering is now directed at VAR, the virtual assistant referee.

VAR has been the center of at least three (four? five?) stories in sports news the last couple of weeks, and one major story everywhere else, too, with the Folarin Balogun red card that Trump notoriously pushed FIFA to overturn. You’ve got that now-epochal, corruption-tinged Balogun trainwreck, plus VAR handing a Swiss player a yellow card for taking a dive, England scoring after a goal kick hit the skycam and VAR staying silent, a disallowed Egypt goal against Argentina because VAR determined a foul had been committed approximately three hours before Mostafa Ziko put the ball in the net, and, my absolute favorite, a Croatia goal that would have leveled a game against Portugal in the unbelievably tense and exciting final moments getting wiped off the board because the sensors in the ball indicated to VAR that it had in fact subtly brushed overs a players’ head, which the ref did not see because no one possibly could, thus changing the offsides calculus in Portugal’s favor.

The more that I’ve watched these games that grind to a halt for a prolonged and often confusing technological intervention, the more that I’ve read the reams of angry tweets and columns and seen the sports-knowers complaining, the more I simply cannot help comparing VAR to that other ubiquitous, elite-beloved technological intervention, AI. I mean, it’s right there. And I do think it’s well worth asking what role this widely unpopular socio-technical construct (like AI, VAR is at once a technology, a system, a product, and a cultural fixture) is really playing. What does VAR actually do versus what its administrators say it does? Who does VAR ultimately serve? And last but not least, why does VAR persist if so many people despise it?

These are, of course, exactly the kind of questions we routinely ask about AI around here, and beginning to answer them might crack the door to better understanding how AI is interfacing with culture beyond the pitch.

A quick note that this work is made possible by subscribers who chip in a few bucks a month to support it. I try to paywall as little as possible and to keep posts like this one free to read. I can only do that because a small percentage of readers help me keep the lights on. If you find value in this stuff, and you’re able, consider joining their ranks. Thanks, and hammers up.

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For those gleefully unaware, VAR is the semi-automated system through which a match official uses video footage and data, now including information collected from sensors embedded in the soccer ball itself, to review and aid in the making of key officiating decisions during a match. Most fans absolutely hate it.

Photo of a VAR video screen, by Артем Гусев. Creative Commons license SA 3.0

I’m no great scholar of football (or soccer, to all you plebes who have not read a handful of BBC articles about the sport and have thus not been inducted into the upper echelons of the European sport-understanding elite like me) but even I know that VAR made a big stink when it was introduced, and that said stink has never really evaporated.

After being piloted by the Netherlands’ national football league, VAR was more widely integrated into bigger leagues about a decade ago, and formally adopted by the International Football Association Board, football’s main rule-making body, in 2018. The statement IFAB issued at the time announced that “the philosophy of VARs is ‘minimum interference – maximum benefit’ which aims to reduce unfairness caused by ‘clear and obvious errors’ or ‘serious missed incidents’.” A major driving factor was, according to IFAB and FIFA officials, the growing discrepancy between what the ref could see on the ground and what audiences at home and in the stands could see with access to higher-resolution footage and replays they could check on their phones.

“With all the 4G and Wi-Fi in stadia today, the referee is the only person who can’t see exactly what is happening and he’s actually the only one who should,” Lukas Brud, IFAB secretary at the International Football Association, told WIRED about the genesis of VAR in 2018. “We knew we had to protect referees from making mistakes that everyone can see immediately.”

VAR was, in other words, a technological intervention developed to respond to another technological development. The sport’s administrators felt it necessary to promote and protect the integrity of their product (licensed broadcast rights, which bring in many billions of dollars for FIFA, the Premier League, and the like each year) with innovation. You can see the reasoning clearly enough: if viewers at home repeatedly saw that a foul called was clearly not, the game would risk losing face, and, eventually, audiences.

VAR had nonetheless been vehemently opposed by Sepp Blatter, the old school ex-president of FIFA, through the first half of the 2010s, but was embraced and approved by his successor, Gianni Infantino, after Blatter was ousted in the wake of a corruption scandal. It’s been a consistent point of contention and widely detested ever since.

The knocks against VAR are many. Critics argue that VAR impedes the flow of a game for which flow is paramount, causing holdups while officials analyze a play. They grouse that VAR is still too often wrong despite those holdups, and is used too inconsistently and with bias despite all the central claims to create an infallible techno-authority over on-field rulings. VAR promises to eliminate human error, to streamline decision-making processes, to harness cutting edge technology in service of fairness and justice. And yet, what it seems to do, in practice, is make people enjoy the thing it was nominally built to improve, less.

In a poll of 7,000 football fans published just a few months ago, in March 2026, 91% of respondents said the sport is better off without VAR and 81% said they preferred watching matches without the technology. 92% said VAR killed the “spontaneous joy” of celebrating a goal. Just 2% agreed with the statement that “VAR makes football more enjoyable.” Since its implementation in the UK’s Premier League, YouGov polls have consistently found that large majorities of viewers believe VAR “works poorly.”

In other words: It’s a ubiquitous automation and surveillance system, adopted and maintained by those in positions of power with promises of progress and improvement, despite inspiring widespread disdain among those it is promoted it as serving (football players and fans). Its public poll numbers are in the gutter. It even has its own instantly identifiable acronym. VAR is, there is little doubt, the generative AI of the football world.

Furthermore, according to the surprisingly robust academic literature on VAR, the system hasn’t even had much of an impact on gameplay itself at all. In an April 2026 paper published in the journal of Intelligent Sports and Health, economist Seife Dendir analyzed data in 15,000 matches played before and after VAR and found that “VAR appears to have had no effect on goals, red cards or penalty kicks” (emphasis his).

Dendir also notes that

The results indicate that among ten match statistics, the only robust change involved offsides, which decreased in the post-VAR period by 0.5–1.2 per match. For the other statistics, the estimated impact of the VAR is not statistically significant or robust across estimators and leagues. We conclude that the VAR, by and large, does not impact basic game play in professional soccer.

Dendir uses his findings to argue that people shouldn’t hate on VAR so much since it’s not really changing the nature of the sport as played on the pitch, but I think you can argue essentially the opposite, too: VAR may hold up matches, de-beautify the beautiful game, and incur an overwhelming majority of fans’ hatred, but at least it’s not doing anything particularly meaningful, either.

So what is VAR doing, then?

The first we already hit on—it is, in theory, helping to protect the credibility of the leagues in charge of officiating football matches, as well as their profit streams. It’s a product the leagues are selling. VAR can be seen as a big, performative demonstration that soccer leagues are using all the technology and power at their disposal to make the game as good and fair as possible. In a highly technologized age, VAR offers a technological solution that executives and bureaucrats can point to as their Having Done Something to keep up with the times. Even if fans dislike it. Yet again, it’s hard not to see parallels between the implementation of VAR and the widespread, top-down AI adoption, ordered by FOMO’d managers at Fortune 500 companies everywhere over the last three years—often to little meaningful or even detrimental effect to the organization, as recent stories are revealing.

But it’s more than that. VAR is also what Dan Davies might call an accountability sink. Even if VAR doesn’t, per the statistics, work overwhelmingly better than old fashioned human refs making the calls, it’s nonetheless a system the leagues can hold up as an effort to deflect any criticism that matches are unfairly or poorly officiated. It’s not FIFA’s fault if Swiss forward Breel Embolo was thrown out of the game for taking a dive to draw a foul, an offense perpetrated by literally every other player on the pitch that and every other day; it’s VAR’s.

In this way, VAR strives to impart the impression that those who implement it—FIFA, Major League Soccer, the Premier League, whoever—are neutral and free from bias.

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This is very obviously not the case. Like every other mode of officiating, VAR is itself an intensely bias-addled system; it’s supposed to be invoked only when certain conditions are met, and only in certain circumstances, but how and when to invoke VAR remains an inevitably biased decision. There is a lengthy document listing all of the VAR rules, called the VAR Protocol, that must be interpreted, at all times, by a team of invisible, off-screen humans. In the controversial Folarin Balogun decision, before Trump and the FIFA top brass bungled their way into the mess, the ref looked at slow-motion footage of the striker’s cleats hitting the Bosnia defenders’ leg; slowed down, artificially displayed, it looked awful, and likely contributed to the red card ruling, which was nearly universally decried as overly harsh shortly after.

Or look at the aforementioned Egypt vs Argentina game. In an extraordinary sequence, an Egyptian player wrested the ball from an Argentinian, Egypt played the ball down the pitch, weaved through Argentina’s defenders, resulting in a quality goal, as they say. VAR was invoked, and it was all wiped away.

Meanwhile, in the same game, a similar-looking play in which an Argentinian player made what looked like serious contact on Egypt’s Mo Salah and initiated a sequence that led to a goal in the opposite net, was left untouched. VAR was never even activated; the invisible technician decided it wasn’t worth a look.

And somehow, the sensors in the ball that sprang to life after brushing a Croatian player’s hair failed altogether to detect getting slammed into a skycam cable, allowing England to capture possession and score their first goal against then-leading Norway.

There are numerous actions in nearly every match that could warrant a VAR intervention. It’s up to the human to decide. VAR in other words has not removed bias, but rather moved it around the field, and maybe obscured it from direct view a little.

That VAR decision in Egypt-Argentina has led to probably the most unsustained fury in the World Cup so far (though the Swiss are plenty outraged too) with Egypt’s coach Hossam Hassan alleging that the game was stolen, that FIFA wanted to see Argentina, which hosts the biggest superstar player in the world in Lionel Messi on its team, advance over the North African one:

“We haven’t seen respect or fair play,” he said. “A penalty [for us] was ruled out, it was not even checked by the VAR and our second goal was remarkably, for whatever reason, disallowed… We have all seen the shirt pulled back [by Alexis Mac Allister] and not even a VAR check.”

This feeds into the longstanding criticism that FIFA preferences Europe and teams with star players, that it preferences audience and the profit motive. And it’s hard to discount Hassan. I’ve watched a number of these games, as well as Senegal-Belgium, which I haven’t even mentioned yet; it was a hell of a match with Senegal ahead 95% of the way. Belgium made an epic comeback, but Senegal stabilized, and it looked to be heading to a penalty shootout when VAR controversially awarded a penalty kick to the Belgian side in the waning minutes of overtime.

Look at which way the bulk of the above-described VAR decisions broke; towards Lionel Messi’s Argentina, towards Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal, towards European stalwarts Belgium over the poor African nation of Senegal. Towards England over Norway. Towards the teams with superstars and/or rich fanbases, towards Europe. This is why this otherwise enthralling World Cup has struggled to shake the conspiracy theories, the allegations of fixing, the stink of corruption (well okay, FIFA is pretty much always dealing with the stink of corruption). The Athletic described the teams left standing as “the final four of FIFA’s dreams,” and there are plenty of fan theories that posit that’s by design. One is literally referred to as “VAR-gentina.” FIFA has ably helped it all along, demonstrating that it is quite willing to put its thumb on the scales if there is a strong enough profit motive (suspending Ronaldo’s pre-Cup red card to let the superstar play), or if the US president tells it to (Trump calling Infantino to repeal Balogun’s red).

Do I think the refs themselves are fixing games or are in the tank for any particular team? I do not. But I do think that when it’s clear enough which outcomes a power structure prefers, edge case decisions and neutral technological prognostications bend towards them. It’s little wonder that VAR is maligned for being seen as party to, or even sometimes driving, such machinations. From its mere continued existence in spite of fans’ rejections to its apparent administration of FIFA’s will, VAR is a subtle instrument of power.

The irony of this is, again, that if it were left up to fans and players, if the surveys are to be believed, VAR would probably be abolished altogether, or at least seriously and deeply reformed. Even otherwise ardently pro-tech voices take issue with VAR; the Big Technology newsletter ran a story decrying VAR arguing that “Automation Makes The World Cup Worse.”

I agree. So often with VAR, as with AI, the technology’s deployment becomes so intrusive that it erases its stated raison d’etre, its very purpose elusive to the point of being lost. Speeding up and slowing down footage to try to extract intent through the pixels? Rewinding the game to reassess a decision because some guys in a video terminal spotted a foul in the playback? Using cutting edge follicular sensors to ascertain whether or not a ball grazed a human hair or not? What is all this for? Who besides FIFA is finding satisfaction in this process or its outcomes? What does this have to do with football, or why we play and watch it?

VAR has done little to streamline or take the bias out of officiating the game; it has inserted into it a new set of imperatives and biases that serve different functions and parties. It has slim upside, and, if you ask the fans, lots of downside.

Now, if you’re a sports fan and a VAR hater, here’s a quick ask: think about how generative AI is impacting other fields and practices we deem crucial. After all, AI, like VAR, is intruding, often unnecessarily, sometimes absurdly, sometimes disastrously, into key arenas of human practice, against the will of most and for the benefit of the few. Education, the arts, writing, journalism; all awash in AI—and why? So executives, administrators, and opportunists might squeeze a little profit, sate their FOMO, or exert some power. Large numbers of Americans dislike AI with a vehemence a Liverpool fan can well understand. What VAR is doing to football, AI is doing to so much else.

VAR, like AI, is made to feel inevitable, like it’s an ineluctable feature of a modern world. It’s not. It’s a technical system put in place by a scandal-plagued sports association. So maybe, as a thought experiment, it’s worth considering—what if we turned it off?

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A Note of Thanks - The Convivial Society

2026-07-13T00:14:46.000Z

Friends,

If you’re reading this, you are currently or have recently been a paid subscriber to The Convivial Society. This newsletter has always operated with a patronage model, which is to say that t…

A critical tech reading list for summer 2026 - Disconnect

2026-07-11T16:17:52.000Z

Since finishing up the edits on my book Hyperscale (which you can preorder now!), I’ve had a lot more time to read for pleasure — and it’s been so wonderful. I’ve become particularly taken with the fiction of Emily St. John Mandel, a fellow Canadian. I really enjoyed Station Eleven when I read it some years ago, but more recently I’ve read Sea of Tranquility and have now moved on to The Glass Hotel.

There’s still some tech-related non-fiction in there, including most recently Thomas Dekeyser’s Techno-Negative, but I’m looking forward to a summer of reading even more fiction. I’m not even sure what fiction that will be yet, but I’ve found it to be such a palate-cleanser after an intense year of work on a non-fiction book. I hope you’re getting some time to read these days too!

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Now, onto this quarter’s reading list. The coming months are packed with books I’m quite intrigued by, not just my own. You’ll find some of them on this list, and more on the one for next quarter. Happy reading!

— Paris

These lists of forthcoming books are a special perk for paid subscribers. You can find previous ones on our reading list page, along with a list of recommended reads that’s available to anyone.

Meet the new Luddites rebelling against big tech - Blood in the Machine

2026-07-10T12:44:33.000Z

The year has been marked by the rise of open, widespread, and increasingly spirited backlash to AI, data centers, and big tech. As such, the stage was well set for the Summer of Ludd, a series of protests, performances, talks, and meetups in New York City organized around the idea that we need to get people into the streets and break Silicon Valley’s grip over our lives.

There were mock trials of big tech, plays staged detailing the Luddites’ true origin story, marches, and teach-ins. By just about any count, it was a smashing success; the event drew favorable coverage everywhere from the Washington Post to WIRED to the Economist. It was even, amusingly, transmuted into a clickbait MSN listicle produced to maximize on-screen engagement.

I sadly couldn’t be there on the ground for the proceedings, so I did the next best thing: I invited the Luddite documentarian, organizer, and activist Amanda Hanna-McLeer, who was there for the festivities, and who directed the Luddite Recreations play that ran throughout the week in Tompkins Square Park, to give us the rundown.

Hanna-Mcleer has been documenting the youth-led Luddite movement for years now; as she explains, it started with the Luddite Clubs students formed to reject social media and organize offline activities in high schools and colleges across the nation. In many ways, the Summer of Ludd is a culmination of that movement thus far.

It also, however, Hanna-McCleer notes, feels like the beginning of something else, something even bigger.

We get into all of that: the size of the crowds, the enthusiasm among so many people have for logging off and plugging in, and how the people who encounter the new Luddites are increasingly open to movements that challenge big tech.

One simple reflection of all this is the positive news coverage I mentioned above. I can comfortably say from my experience as a tech journalist, that even five to ten years ago, these kids and activists would have been mocked and scorned. Instead, most people immediately get where they’re coming from. Their message about fighting big tech, anyway, if not the gnome hats. Progress is progress.

Events like the Summer of Ludd—which not only protest big tech but proactively envision an alternative, participatory future; one grounded in community, commonality, and sociality—are dovetailing with data center protests, AI-critical labor movements, and students (and everyone else!) roundly booing AI. It does feel like the ground is shifting in some real and interesting ways, and that new spaces are opening up. Here’s to hoping.

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Some related reading:

Now for some other stories about our rapidly unfolding dystopia that caught my eye this week, and about those fighting to keep it at bay. BUT FIRST, before we move on: Today’s edition of BITM is sponsored by DeleteMe, whose mission is hunting down and, yes, deleting the data that brokers have hoovered up about you over the years and made available to their clients. DeleteMe is Wirecutter’s top-rated data removal service, and I’ve used it myself, to locate and eradicate scores of sites that were listing and selling personal info like my home address and phone number. If you’re interested in taking DeleteMe for a spin, sign up here and use the code LUDDITES for 20% off an annual subscription. OK! Onwards.

A treasury report drafted by Trump officials outlines fears of the AI bubble bursting

This is a bit of news that seemed to glance the surface without breaking through. I didn’t see this too widely reported, but thought it was pretty telling nonetheless. The report isn’t public, but was obtained by journalists; including those at NOTUS, who report that

This draft report inside the Treasury Department is set to warn of the risks posed by the artificial intelligence market, likening key aspects of it to the dotcom bubble that upended the U.S. economy when it burst in the early 2000s.
Career Treasury analysts found that AI firms are more deeply entrenched in the U.S. economy than their dotcom predecessors and pose significant risk to the entire system if financial conditions change, productivity goals are missed or various choke points stymie growth.
A downturn in the AI market would send shockwaves throughout the entire economic ecosystem, the analysts wrote.

What’s so notable isn’t really the message, which should be pretty familiar to critics of the AI bubble by now, but the way that it breaks from the narrative put forward by the Trump administration, which is, to the public, endlessly optimistic about AI’s transformational power.

Waymo called the police on teen riders who were playing with a toy gun and allegedly drinking

The Waymo stopped, detained the kids until the cops could arrive on the scene, which they did, and then approached the vehicle with guns drawn.

404 Media reports:

On Monday, the San Mateo Police Department posted on Facebook: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”
The police department continued in the post: “Two 15 year olds up to trouble in a Waymo this afternoon were detained after Waymo reported they were drinking and shooting from the vehicle. After calling us and stopping the car, we were able to safely remove both subjects and determined they were shooting Orbeez from the car as they sipped on afternoon libations while being chauffeured around town in the driverless vehicle.”

Pretty grim stuff! And your regular reminder that Waymos are continuously surveilling both the inside and the outside of their vehicles, collecting data that is recorded and made available to authorities, and now, apparently, proactively intervening when an automated system or someone at Google decides a criminal act has occurred—and putting teens at legitimate risk of being shot for being dumb teens. It seems only a matter of when, not if, we see an interaction like this that ends more tragically.

Big data center resistance news:

The largest-ever proposed data center, a 2,100 acre, 22 million square-foot facility slated for Prince William County in Virginia, has officially been cancelled.

The project failed after receiving sustained pushback from a local historical society—it would have been built on top of a famous Civil War battlefield and the graves of all the soldiers killed there—and a local homeowner’s association.

Meanwhile, all of Scotland is considering a “sweeping” data center moratorium.

The Guardian reports:

Last Sunday the Scottish National party (SNP)’s national council passed a motion to freeze all new datacentres in Scotland. That motion has been sent to the Scottish government to consider.
It could apply to all datacentre projects that have not yet received planning permission…
The move emerged as the Guardian on Monday revealed how the developer and the UK government misrepresented the technical feasibility of a massive datacentre hub in Scotland in the face of community fears that their land would be subsumed by the development, and promised jobs and investments would never materialise.
This site, in Lanarkshire, was to be an “AI growth zone”, a key element of the government’s strategy to build national AI infrastructure in rural areas of Britain.
The SNP’s resolution came amid signs of a wider upheaval in the UK’s AI strategy as Andy Burnham prepares to replace Keir Starmer in Downing Street. He is reportedly considering a review of several critical planks of Starmer’s technology policy.
The Guardian previously reported that an “AI growth zone” in North Tyneside was more of a publicity stunt than a viable project, despite being supposedly backed by the maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI. Several other big UK AI projects have been found to be “phantom investments” after the government failed to audit investment numbers or jobs claims.

And I was surprised I didn’t see this making more of the rounds:

Apparently, Meta’s data centers contaminated Cheyenne, Wyoming’s wastewater system with a “rare bacterial contaminant”

According to the Cowboy State Daily news:

Cheyenne’s Board of Public Utilities isn’t accepting industrial wastewater associated with data center systems until further notice after a contractor for Meta Platforms contaminated the city’s wastewater system, prompting months of cleanup.
The announcement was made by the Board of Public Utilities (BOPU) on Thursday in conjunction with naming the Meta company as the source of the initial contamination.
It also comes more than four months after the Meta company — which is building a huge $800 million data center in south Cheyenne — disrupted the city’s reclaimed wastewater system with a rare bacterial contaminant.

I’ll just leave that one there without further comment.

Microsoft is cutting nearly 5,000 jobs, many of them at Xbox

According to Reuters, Microsoft is cutting 4,800 jobs and overhauling its Xbox unit, and AI is once again at the forefront, in a bit of a different way.

The “Chief People Officer” Amy Coleman told employees in a memo that “the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI [...] At the same time, what  is  true is that AI is changing how work gets done.” The comment reflects the changing attitudes around AI; a year ago, the market probably would have rewarded Microsoft for saying AI was behind the cuts. Now it’s more of a liability. For its part, the Communication Workers of America, the union that represents many of the Xbox workers, has vowed to fight:

Claude Cummings Jr., President of CWA said “make no mistake – whether our members have a contract in hand, or are still at the bargaining table, CWA members at Xbox have the power and protection of union membership. When Microsoft decides to treat the workers who built Xbox as expendable, it should know who they’re dealing with. This is not just a fight with the thousands of workers across Xbox; it’s a fight with each and every member at CWA — hundreds of thousands of people strong.”

Popular AI agents built by Anthropic and OpenAI can be easily exploited and turned against their users.

My friends at AI Now have some startling new research on AI agents, and concluded that they should essentially, as it stands, never, ever be used in conjunction with critical digital infrastructure:

AI Now’s latest research demonstrates a critical attack vector on popular AI agents, built by Anthropic and OpenAI, when used for defensive purposes that actually turn the agent against its user. Attackers can use these models’ existing weaknesses to execute malicious code on a system deploying an AI agent when used for often-advertised defensive purposes. Specifically, users relying on these agents to assess the security of open or third-party sources are instead exposed to the very risks these agents are meant to identify and defend against. This exploit is achievable through prompt injections, a common exploit tactic where attackers can manipulate large language AI models by “injecting” harmful instructions through the data or input they ingest.

The full report, Friendly Fire, is by Heidy Khalaf and Boyan Milanov, and you can read it here.

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Alright, that’s about it for this week. Before I go, I will also recommend Ed Zitron’s piece on letting AI burn; as I mention in the pod this week, OpenAI and Sam Altman especially are already openly angling for a government bailout in the event of the AI bubble bursting. They want the Trump administration to take a 5% stake in the company, and are selling this as a way of spreading the “benefits” of AI. This is nonsense, and a self-serving hedge. Ed makes the case that the AI industry, which has garnered historic levels of investment for comparatively tiny revenue generation, must be allowed to fail in the event that its backing begins to unravel, which seems common sensical to me.

Also recommended: Gaby Del Valle’s rather horrifying piece on ICE agents growing propensity for making house calls to their online critics. Also: has a new newsletter, which will focus in part on tech, AI, and end times fascism. Check it out.

OK OK OK. I know I promised more writing, and I have an essay drafted about the World Cup, VAR, automation and AI that I am very much looking forward to sharing here, but I didn’t want to overload the inboxes today, so look out for that soon. In general, it’s honestly just been a LOT to be in the very hot city, corralling the kids, and trying to get this podcast/video thing off the ground, so the next 2-3 weeks may simply be a bit less writing and focusing on getting the show in good shape (and actually going outside in this vibrant and delightful city). Hope that’s cool.

Until next time, everyone—hammers up.

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Feeding on Illusions - The Convivial Society

2026-07-08T04:09:10.000Z

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. You may have noticed that over the last month or so new installments are coming your way at an unusual clip of about once per week. I don’t know that this pace will continue indefinitely, and some of you might prefer if it didn’t. But it has been helpful to write more frequently, so thank you for indulging me and supporting my work. Below, in old school blog fashion, you’ll find me riffing on a post from Mandy Brown who is, in turn, channeling Ursula Le Guin. As always, I hope you find it helpful. One last thing, I’m trying to keep up with reader emails, but please forgive me if I miss a few along the way.

Cheers,

Michael

I regret to say that I have not read much of Ursula Le Guin’s writing. At some point along the way, I read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” but that’s about it. This is a matter of regret because I know her work is highly regarded by many people whose opinion on such matters I implicitly trust. It’s also the case that whenever I encounter some fragment of her writing, it always strikes me as wise, provocative, and generative.

This was once again the case when I recently read a slice of dialog from one of Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, The Tombs of Atuan (1970), in a brief, bracing reflection published by Mandy Brown’s on her rich and beautifully conceived website, A Working Library.

The excerpt features an exchange between a wizard and young women after they have escaped great danger but are now weary and hungry with a long way to go before they might find some food. Knowing something of the wizard’s power, the young woman wonders whether he might not be able to make life a little easier for them.

“Can you find food for us?” she asked, rather vaguely and timidly.
“Hunting takes time, and weapons.”
“I meant, with, you know, spells.”
“I can call a rabbit,” he said, poking the fire with a twisted stick of juniper. “The rabbits are coming out of their holes all around us, now. Evening’s their time. I could call one by name, and he’d come. But would you catch and skin and broil a rabbit that you’d called to you thus? Perhaps if you were starving. But it would be a breaking of trust, I think.”
“Yes. I thought, perhaps you could just…”
“Summon up a supper,” he said. “Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.”

Perhaps you’ve already intuited where this is going. “Is this not precisely what it’s like to read or watch or listen to slop?” Brown asks. “What you read isn’t really writing or drawing or art—it isn’t the creation of a mind reaching for the world—but illusion.”

I find that this little slice of dialog manages to capture something essential about the experience of our current media environment better than an elaborate analysis or argument. There’s so much in it that readily re-presents our experience to us: the desire for efficiency and convenience, the willingness to risk the rupture of a delicate trust (not with a rabbit to be sure, but with one another), and, of course, the feeling of feeding endlessly at the digital trough and never feeling satisfied, feeling, in fact, hollow, depleted, and alone as a consequence, hungrier than when we started. Better than an elaborate study or technical paper, this scene reinforces our native intuition that a simulation, however compelling or sophisticated, will always be an illusion. And we will know this chiefly by attending to our own subsequent experience: “when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.”

This, in particular, is a wonderfully evocative formulation: “the creation of a mind reaching for the world.” There is solidarity to be had in that motion and in that effort. A motion and an effort that always presumes both the world and the other with whom we share it, for the act of creation, however humble or sublime, is elicited by the existence of the other who is to receive it.

Nearly four years ago, which is hard to believe, I wrote about the estranging quality of AI-generated images. This was, I think, some time before we started referring to the proliferation of such images and texts as slop. What struck me, then, about the output of generative AI was how isolating it felt:

To encounter a painting or a piece of music or poem is to encounter another person, although it is sometimes easy to lose sight of this fact. I can ask about the meaning of a work of art because it was composed by someone with whom I have shared a world and whose experience is at least partly intelligible to me. Without reducing the meaning of a work of art to the intention of its creator, I can nonetheless ask and think about such intentions. In putting a question to a painting, I am also putting a question to another person.

Only another person can be said to be “reaching for the world” through their work, whatever shape that work takes, and by reaching for the world in this way they are simultaneously building or at the very least tending to the “world,” in the sense that Hannah Arendt used that word to mean the relatively stable realm of human things—material culture, traditions, communities—that welcomes us at our birth and outlives us, a realm held in common, mutually intelligible, and of a scale hospitable to the human person. Such a world would not only sustain conditions for friendship, it would also foster an experience of community even in the absence of others by mediating an experience of purpose and presence and relationship.

This is not at all like the world we mostly inhabit, and as Brown is quick to note, “it’s not only AI.” “A good deal of commercial content is more or less the same,” she argues, but AI is not thereby inconsequential to our situation: “AI accelerates that production process, makes it slicker and smoother, makes the illusion seem more real,” Brown notes. “Makes ever more of it, at greater and greater scale, until you come to believe there is nothing else out there. But it remains a deception. You think you’ve had your full but all the while you’re starving.” Slop can only be binged. The simulation never satisfies.

Coda

By pure happenstance, I also recently stumbled upon an article published by an independent type foundry based in the Netherlands, Mass-Driver. The article, “From human hands,” explains why the firm has committed to never using AI in the design and production processes. It was an instructive piece that offered, in my view, a hopeful complement to the foregoing considerations. I learned something about the origins of the letter A and the evolution of typeface. For example:

In ancient Rome, holding a flat brush in the right hand, a writer could make a cleaner line if they began and ended with a short horizontal flick; this was the origin of the serif. And their wrist was less comfortable rotating the brush to always face its direction of travel, so they would have found it easier to hold at one angle, making strokes of different widths — thicker when pulling it downwards and to the right. Our letters still feature this same stroke modulation today. Did the signwriter know their idea would outlast their civilisation?

I was struck by this observation because it illuminated the human traces embedded in the strata of our material culture, the embodied and gestural origins of our treasury of symbols and signs. It is not just that the signwriter’s “idea” would outlast their civilization, it’s that their idea emerged out of an experience of bodily limits and constraints to which I can relate. “ChatGPT,” by contrast, “will never invent a new calligraphy technique, because it has no wrists to feel uncomfortable. A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.”

Read the whole thing. It’s bracing.

And as so much of this turns on how we frame our limitations, either as mere impediments to be overcome or as the very conditions of our flourishing, I’ll leave you with a few lines of “A Prayer for Limits,” recently composed by , and with the invitation to dwell on the remainder here.

It is through your love, O Lord, that we learn to love our limits, which give force to our compassion and shape to the fear we feel for others in their need; which nurture our generosity even as we fall and fail; which frame and enfold our measures of adoration.

…

We suffer from these limits and we learn from them. Without them, we would cease yearning even for love. To love, to learn, and to desire is to wound and be wounded.

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The seductive nature of ride-hailing apps - Disconnect

2026-07-07T18:43:54.000Z

This year on Disconnect I’m trying to interrogate how we use technology and what capacities we have to change it. But that work is only possible because of readers like you.

Become a paid subscriber today so I can keep examining the parts of the tech industry the billionaires prefer us to ignore. Thanks for your support!

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Before May of this year, I had never used a ride-hailing app. I had been in an Uber before — precisely two times, when friends had called them after a night out — but never had I actually downloaded the application to my phone to get the full experience.

That changed when I went to South Africa. After having a number of people warn me about my safety and advise me not to use taxis, paired with how the malaria meds I was on were messing with my mental health, I finally gave in. I couldn’t bring myself to download Uber. Having written about its exploitative business model for a decade, that was still a bridge too far. So instead I opted for Bolt, the European alternative.

It didn’t take long for me to see how so many people have been seduced into abandoning taxis for ride-hailing services over the past decade and a half — their attacks on workers’ rights, harms to transportation networks, and exploitation of customers be damned.

The user experience of the ride-hailing app makes you feel like you are in complete control. You are Big Brother for the exploited drivers trying to make a meager living from driving people around.

When you open the app, you can see the cars plying the roads of the digital map on your screen. You choose which kind of driver you want, and can send them specific instructions. You watch them make their way toward you, until you enter the vehicle where very frequently you control the music and might even be offered snacks and amenities — all in the hope you’ll give the driver a good rating at the end. They likely won’t even try to speak with you unless you strike up a conversation. I’ve had some drivers tell me they can drive around for hours with customers not saying a word to them — an incredibly dehumanizing experience.

All of these design decisions and impositions on workers are designed to give drivers the illusion of control, authority, and ultimately of power. It doesn’t matter that Uber has been known to fake the vehicles shown on the screen, has fought being covered by disability legislation, has been sued for failing to address sexual abuse by drivers, has tracked customers, and even used the data it holds to push up fares while driving down driver pay. Once you get used to that feeling of control, it’s hard to quit — something I found myself even after I left South Africa.

Once I arrived in Lisbon, I wanted to stop using Bolt, but I found it hard to give up that sense of control. I downloaded a local taxi app and when I used it I was flooded with worries that weren’t previously there: Would the driver even find me? Would I know how long it would take them to get there? Were there even many taxis in the area? Would I be able to easily pay in the car? They were mostly foolish concerns, but were borne of giving back a certain degree of autonomy to the driver and the anxiety of being in a place I wasn’t familiar with.

Back in Canada, using taxis was no problem. I deleted the Bolt app — it wouldn’t work there anyway — and simply went back to the companies I was used to relying on. I didn’t think twice about it. But a few weeks later in Copenhagen, I needed to get a ride somewhere and my mind immediately went to downloading Bolt again. The sense of security it claimed to provide had worked its way into my psyche. I didn’t give in, but I was fascinated by the staying power it had over me.

The whole experience was an instructive one for me. My writing about the tech industry started with criticism of the gig economy, so I’ve long felt those services were not something I could reasonably use without a degree of hypocrisy. To this day, I still haven’t used a food-delivery app. But actually downloading a ride-hailing app showed me how so many people have gotten hooked on them and resist any pressure to return to using taxis, even as ride-hail prices have risen since the pandemic.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how the digital services and platforms we’ve come to rely on over the past couple decades have affected how we act, how we see ourselves, and how the world around us even functions. I feel like we’re all becoming familiar with that when it comes to things like social media apps, which is part of the reason the efforts to regulate them are getting so much attention. But there are so many smaller, pernicious ways our lives have been transformed by the screens and apps that have been pushed on us in recent years — and in most cases we don’t take the time to consider how they affect us.

I feel like the ride-hailing apps stood out so much to me because they’ve become so normalized for so many. Most people are used to the experience of using them now, and it’s been optimized over time to lock people in and make them overlook the drawbacks of these businesses. Yet, I was coming in after all that work had been done and the rapid way it affected how I saw taxis was startling as someone who’s never felt the need or compulsion to download Uber.

Very quickly, I was finding it hard to imagine doing anything other than using a ride-hailing service. I couldn’t help but think about how many other apps and services have affected us in similar ways that we never stop to question.

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Critical takes on tech - BlogFlock

Talk: Slop Infrastructures - Cybernetic Forests

What happens when AI image models meet social media algorithms?

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Bernie Sanders has AI policy all wrong - Disconnect

The Odyssey as tech criticism - Blood in the Machine

A more wholesome algorithm? - Disconnect

Names, Sabbath, Universities, Bookstores, etc. - The Convivial Society

Elon Musk’s tired schtick - Disconnect

Understanding as Proof of Error - Cybernetic Forests

Clarice Lispector, Translation, and Artificial Intelligence

A Literature Review

The Failure of My Language

Where is the human in the UN's definition of AI?

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What is an 'Elon Musk'? - Blood in the Machine

"Everyone hates AI" in Paris - Blood in the Machine

A dispatch from the days of Ludd

A new survey on generative AI’s impact on performing artists

Ann Friedman Had the Bestseller and the Followers. It Still Wasn’t Enough. - escape the algorithm

What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars? - The Convivial Society

Additional Links and Resources

Xbox workers speak out about layoffs, AI, and how big tech brought a crisis to gaming - Blood in the Machine

Making music from death row - escape the algorithm

With ‘Live on Death Row,’ Rapper Rrome Alone Condemns the Death Penalty

Global dependence on US tech was always the plan - Disconnect

The imperial project of U.S. tech

Silicon Valley’s right-wing turn

The need for digital sovereignty

What VAR tells us about AI - Blood in the Machine

A Note of Thanks - The Convivial Society

A critical tech reading list for summer 2026 - Disconnect

Meet the new Luddites rebelling against big tech - Blood in the Machine

A treasury report drafted by Trump officials outlines fears of the AI bubble bursting

Waymo called the police on teen riders who were playing with a toy gun and allegedly drinking

Big data center resistance news:

Apparently, Meta’s data centers contaminated Cheyenne, Wyoming’s wastewater system with a “rare bacterial contaminant”

Microsoft is cutting nearly 5,000 jobs, many of them at Xbox

Popular AI agents built by Anthropic and OpenAI can be easily exploited and turned against their users.

Feeding on Illusions - The Convivial Society

Coda

The seductive nature of ride-hailing apps - Disconnect