Alexandra Mateescu

It's kind of funny the idea that a $20K robot housekeeper is a novel, dystopian loss of privacy when for millennia poor people have had *very* intimate views into the daily lives of the ultra-rich by working as maids, cooks, nannies, and butlers in their homes. Now they're just working remotely.

Graphic with a light background and the New Disabled South logo in the top right corner. Large bold text reads: ‘Apply: Food Assistance for Disabled People in the South.’ Text below explains that due to the government shutdown, people in the South will not receive their November SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) payments. New Disabled South is offering one-time payments to help people impacted by not receiving SNAP — $100 for individuals and $250 for households with two or more people. It notes that funding is first-come, first-served and that SSI or Medicaid recipients should read a disclaimer before applying. A call-to-action at the bottom reads: ‘Apply at ndsdj.org/snaphelp.’ There are small illustrations of a grocery bag and a grocery list.

Graphic with a light background and the New Disabled South logo in the top right corner. Large bold text reads: ‘Donate to Support Food Assistance for Disabled People in the South.’ The message says that New Disabled South is raising money to provide direct payments to people impacted by loss of SNAP funds, and invites donations. A black banner at the bottom reads: ‘Donate at ndsdj.org/snapdonate.’ A small illustration of a grocery bag with food items is on the left.

Graphic in Spanish with a light background and the New Disabled South logo in the top right corner. Large bold text reads: ‘Solicitar: Asistencia Alimentaria para Personas con Discapacidad en el Sur.’ The text explains that due to the government shutdown, people will not receive November SNAP payments and that New Disabled South offers one-time payments of $100 for individuals and $250 for households with two or more people, first-come, first-served. It also includes a note for SSI or Medicaid recipients. A black banner at the bottom reads: ‘Solicitar en ndsdj.org/snaphelp.’ A small illustration of a grocery bag and grocery list appears on the left.

Graphic in Spanish with a light background and the New Disabled South logo in the top right corner. Large bold text reads: ‘Dona para apoyar la asistencia alimentaria para personas con discapacidad en el Sur.’ The text explains that New Disabled South is raising funds to make direct payments to people affected by the loss of SNAP funds and provides information on how to donate. A black banner at the bottom reads: ‘Dona en ndsdj.org/snapdonate.’ A small illustration of a grocery bag with food items appears on the left.

We are offering one time payments to disabled folks in the South who will not receive their SNAP benefits this month. If you need help, please find more information and details at ndsdj.org/snaphelp.

If you’d like to donate to the fund, go to ndsdj.org/snapdonate

We take care of each other ❤️

Amazon is Building a Surveillance Empire on the Backs of Delivery Drivers. A new report from the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) exposes the dark underbelly of technology-driven workplace surveillance.” Above the text is an old school television with an antenna featuring a surveillance snapshot from a camera inside of an Amazon delivery van. The Amazon logo is upside down and is a frown. Around the television are disembodied eyes and ears.

🚨NEW🚨 from DAIR:

Today we are releasing "Driven Down", a new report on how workplace technology enables Amazon to steal wages, hide labor,
intensify poor working conditions, and evade responsibility.

Read the full report here: drive.google.com/file/d/1yBxy...

In the late 1990s a Russian/European space consortium announced plans to build and launch into orbit satellites that would reflect sunlight back onto earth. The scheme called for a chain of many satellites to be placed in sun-synchronized orbits at an altitude of 1700 kilometers, each one equipped with fold-out parabolic reflectors of paper-thin material. Once fully extended to 200 meters in diameter, each mirror satellite would have the capacity to illuminate a ten-square-mile area on earth with a brightness nearly 100 times greater than moonlight. The initial impetus for the project was to provide illumination for industrial and natural resource exploitation in remote geographical areas with long polar nights in Siberia and western Russia, allowing outdoor work to proceed round the clock.

In any case, this ultimately unworkable enterprise is one particular instance of a contemporary imaginary in which a state of permanent illumination is inseparable from the non-stop operation of global exchange and circulation. In its entrepreneurial excess, the project is a hyperbolic expression of an institutional intolerance of whatever obscures or prevents an instrumentalized and unending condition of visibility.

This story just jolted a memory of being shocked reading about a similar project in Jonathan Crary’s book “24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep” and then breathing a massive sigh of relief that it was abandoned. Guess we're in the century of reviving grotesquely hellish ideas...

Company's plan to launch 4,000 space mirrors alarms scientists Reflect Orbital says their light-on-demand idea has generated significant interest from commercial and government customers.

Nighttime, the enemy of capitalism. "The company...says its future constellation will deliver light on demand after sunset and before sunrise to paying customers on Earth, effectively extending the daytime hours."
www.space.com/space-explor...

AWS outage seemingly takes down Medicare website during open enrollment...
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Experts Warn This Real-World Effect Is The Most Unsettling Thing About 'AI Actor' Tilly This Hollywood newcomer has a long list of haters already.

“The notion of AI personhood is a marketing exercise and a legal maneuver that I don’t think we should buy into,” says D&S researcher @cariatida.bsky.social. “Tilly is not an actress any more than, like, Sid the sloth from the ‘Ice Age’ movies is an actor.” www.huffpost.com/entry/ai-act...

2 million rally in Italy for Gaza as general strike halts key services Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.

Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.

AI Actress Tilly Norwood Debuts at Zurich Summit as Industry Grapples With Emerging Tech: We Want Her ‘to Be the Next Scarlett Johansson’ AI actress Tilly Norwood has attracted the attention of multiple talent agents.

Opening up a talent agency and creating an army of AI actresses named Milly, Dilly, Lilly, Billy, Jilly (and so on) who are all completely identical to Tilly but cost less to underbid this so-called AI talent agency. variety.com/2025/film/ne...

Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirement Program Spent Twice as Much on Administrative Costs as on Health Care, GAO Says Republican lawmakers cite Georgia’s Pathways to Coverage as a national model for federal Medicaid work requirements that are set to take effect in 2027. A new report shows the program has spent at lea...

GOP lawmakers cite Georgia’s experiment as a model for the federal Medicaid work requirements set to take effect in 2027.

A new report by a government spending watchdog found that the nation’s only Medicaid work requirement program spent twice as much on administrative costs as on health care.

Technology is Turning Immigration Detention into an Invisible Leash | TechPolicy.Press Rights-based and community-centered alternatives to detention are possible, write Petra Molnar, Daniel Ghezelbash, Carolina Gottardo, and Antonella Napolitano.

Companies are marketing “alternatives” to immigration detention such as ankle monitors, GPS-enabled watches, and biometric reporting apps. But research by Petra Molnar, Daniel Ghezelbash, Carolina Gottardo, and Antonella Napolitano finds that tech doesn’t dismantle detention—it expands it.

Trump administration tackling the problem of home health care workers getting wages that are [checks notes...] too high.

Republicans: "transgenderism must be eradicated."

Trans people: "they're trying to eradicate us."

Republicans: "Saying we want to eradicate you is violent extremism."

My dad was a storyboard artist for a commercial art studio for 30 years, and he'd tell me how the transition from alcohol markers to digital in the early 2000s was quite rough and led to a lot of labor intensification. But it's stories like these that make me glad he's retired.

AI Could Have Terrifying Impacts on Fashion Models, New Research Shows Models highlight fears around AI impacts including easier use of “frankensteining” images, and more.

Anyway, some more coverage of our project and the Model Alliance's fantastic work advocating for fashion models here in Teen Vogue: www.teenvogue.com/story/ai-cou...

It’s the same stories we heard in early days of the gig economy–unlock side hustles, control your schedule, productivity galore. Playing out now through language around AI tools – our helpful and totally non-threatening digital twins, assistants, co-pilots, avatars, teammates, agents, and so on.

Companies like H&M have posed the idea that models can amplify their earnings w/ “digital twins” – a second self they can put to work. Instead, models end up in a race to the bottom to outbid their own sleepless, poreless AI selves while often losing control of their likenesses in shady contracts.

Fashion modeling might seem on peripheries of a lot of labor struggles, but I'd argue it’s a telling microcosm of some of its most starkly extractive uses in creative industries: baldfaced treatment of precarious isolated workers as little more than data sources for capture in an AI 'assembly line.'

Fashion’s Data Doubles In their research on how AI is reshaping modeling work, Alexandra Mateescu, Zoë West, and Sanjay Pinto find a situation ripe for labor exploitation.

Sharing a snapshot of a project I’ve been working on w/collaborators Zoe West & Sanjay Pinto at Cornell ILR School, looking at genAI in the fashion modeling industry. AI-generated models have been turning up a lot - H&M, a Guess ad, Luigi(!) in Shein’s catalog… datasociety.net/points/fashi...

Circuit Breakers Early Bird Registration A national conference for all workers, organizers, and activists in the tech industry to come together and learn, build communitx, strategize, and recognize our collective power. bit.ly/circuitbreakers2025

NEWS ALERT: Early bird tickets now available for Circuit Breakers, our annual US tech labor conference! Repost please!

🗽 New York City, Oct. 18-19th

✊ Conference will feature workers from the wider tech labor movement

🎟️ Snag your early bird tickets here: techworkerscoalition.org/circuit-breakers

Flyer reading CRAFT FAIR FOR GAZA / Proceeds will go to mutual aid orgs operating in Gaza / Sunday, Sep 7, 12-6 pm, 729 Nostrand Ave, Brooklyn

CRAFT FAIR FOR GAZA!
Tomorrow! 629 Nostrand Ave. 12-6 PM

🙃

Department of Labor halts enforcement of minimum wage, overtime rights for home care workers On July 25, 2025, the Wage & Hour Division (WHD) at the U.S. Department of Labor announced that WHD investigators would stop enforcing the Department’s 2013 regulation extending the protections of the...

And relatedly: www.epi.org/policywatch/...

Administrative burden by design- but with even less ability to trace decision-making processes.

Mind you, OIG & Senate were previously investigating Medicare Advantage insurers for their high rates of denied payments oig.hhs.gov/reports/all/...

Scams and Shadow Workers: A Black Market is Selling European Accounts for AI Training - AlgorithmWatch AI data annotation companies are losing control of their supply chain. Criminal networks are taking over the work account management.

Black markets always reveal how things really work: "This is a colonial model adjusted in the digital age: European citizens may use their status and residency to be paid for doing nothing, while taskers in the Global South only get a fraction to do all the work” algorithmwatch.org/en/scams-and...

I wrote about this in 2020. This shit isn’t new and people are just capitalizing on the AI hype cycle slate.com/technology/2...

Disabled Americans Fear What Medicaid Cuts Could Do to Them The White House says roughly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts won’t limit home- and community-based care. Health care experts disagree.

"Reductions could come in several forms. States could place further restrictions on who qualifies for coverage, cover fewer hours of care or lower pay for home health workers. Or they could eliminate waiver programs altogether." www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/w...

There's also the "AI is only threatening the fake bougie hobby jobs, and now only the real (super manly) working class jobs will remain."

Data Centers Aren’t the Future of American Prosperity Tamara Kneese and Maia Woluchem cut through lobbying points and speculative myths to focus on what the evidence reveals about the tech industry’s claims.

In our new policy brief for @datasociety.bsky.social, @mwoluchem.bsky.social and I break down the myths and industry talking points attached to data centers. Who benefits from unbridled data center growth and who is most at risk when such speculative ventures fail?

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: liberals and liberalism have turned transphobia into a mainstream, everyday, top tier, omnipresent social crisis. It was a niche problem driven by conservatives. Liberals blew it into the screaming global moral panic it now is.