Brett Frischmann

To Live Inside a Lie Firing the top labor statistics official for doing the normal monthly jobs report is only the latest attempt to force everyone else to abandon reality too

Good @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social take on systematic lying as core to the MAGA project. Trump "degrades institutions by getting officials to lie or replacing them with someone who will." The official lie is an expression of power in and of itself:
www.arcdigital.media/p/to-live-in...

Why a NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose The Trump administration has asked NASA staffers to draw up plans to end at least two satellite missions that measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to current and former NASA employees.

"The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers... They are the only two federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases."

Look forward to reading and hearing more

Scarcity, Regulation, and the Abundance Society <p>Our economy, as well as our legal institutions, are built on scarcity. New technologies continue to democratize, decentralize, and disrupt production, offering the possibility that scarcity will be...

It was part of this incredible issue

www.frontiersin.org/research-top...

Abundance

Apparently it’s one of the hot topics/buzzwords.

My thoughts from a conference at Stanford a few years ago:

www.frontiersin.org/journals/res...

Opinion | What to Do When the President Acts Like a Five-Year-Old?

“Most children learn that flipping the board doesn’t make them the winner. It just means the game is over. In a democracy, the same lesson holds. We need our referees…& leaders who understand that losing the game fairly is far more honorable than winning by force.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/o...

That’s not really true. The whole issue here is that Meta designed the tracker to intentionally collect sensitive data, and despite Meta’s admonishment to developers to not send them sensitive data, Meta knows that many developers are sending them that data, which Meta also happens to profit from.

'DOGE lied': Expert floored as blistering report finds Musk team blew billions The Department of Government Efficiency wasn't so efficient after all. In fact, was extraordinarily wasteful, according to a Thursday report by the U.S. Senate's investigations subcommittee.When Elon ...

A Senate report reveals Elon Musk’s DOGE agency burned through $21B in six months. Cost-cutting moves like mass layoffs and axing programs like CFPB and USAID backfired—causing major losses and harsh humanitarian fallout.
www.rawstory.com/doge-2673797...

Hey UCLA, don’t pull a Columbia

Had same flashback

Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy Exercise your privacy rights in one step via the “Global Privacy Control” (GPC) signal, a proposed specification backed by over a dozen organizations.

In addition to GPC (global privacy control - globalprivacycontrol.org), let’s build and make legally enforceable a similar preference signal for GenAI (eg, don’t want it; don’t integrate into software i use), a global gen AI control.

But they’ll still shove it into everything, force-feed it to everyone (unwanted integration into software, unproven edtech etc), externalize costs, induce unpaid work. …

So many billions spent on the build out of infrastructure for a product that hardly anyone is willing to pay to use.

pivot-to-ai.com/2025/07/04/o...

On behalf of an incredible group of scholars in law, computer science, and information science, we filed an Amicus Brief in Shanahan v. IXL Learning (Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit).

ssrn.com/abstract=537...

Welcome to fascism

The unappreciated role of intent in algorithmic moderation of abusive content on social media | HKS Misinformation Review A significant body of research is dedicated to developing language models that can detect various types of online abuse, for example, hate speech, cyberbullying. However, there is a disconnect between...

There's a very different friction-in-design proposal in this paper

misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/the-...

The unappreciated role of intent in algorithmic moderation of abusive content on social media | HKS Misinformation Review A significant body of research is dedicated to developing language models that can detect various types of online abuse, for example, hate speech, cyberbullying. However, there is a disconnect between...

New article alert: Read, comment, and share!

The unappreciated role of intent in algorithmic moderation of abusive content on social media

misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/the-...

I think it’s a mistake to conflate the internet w/ user generated content platforms, and i think it is as mistake to think 230 as it has been interpreted & applied is essential to ugc/convos/collab. Of course, 230 has shaped in substantial ways what we’ve got.

Applications layer platforms are not the Internet.

Patterson v Meta Platforms, Inc. Patterson v Meta Platforms, Inc. - 2025 NY Slip Op 04447

No, "section 230 is [NOT] the scaffolding upon which the Internet is built" law.justia.com/cases/new-yo...

Such a frustrating myth.

But we are the best at nudging people to click and swipe

Why is the EPA administrator saying CO2 is "essential for life?" @eroston.bsky.social and I put together a glossary of the administration's climate language and the strategies behind the words

AI, dystopia, and the dangerous comfort of optimism | illuminem It’s tempting to believe we’ve evolved. That we’ve outgrown the cycles of history. That progress is inevitable and benevolent. But history—and the human psyche—tell a different story

Nice essay!

illuminem.com/illuminemvoi...

Working on a story about some utter nonsense that the Trump admin is doing, and it takes me over 1000 words to explain all the background nonsense that Trumpists are relying on, which is wrong, to even get to explain why the new thing is even more wrong. It's exhausting.

On Friday, in a 34-page unanimous ruling, the 1st Circuit denied govt a stay of Judge Young’s July 2 order declaring NIH’s cancellation of 100s of research contracts as “breathtakingly arbitrary & capricious.” Some interesting things...
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
1/5

Possible/likely next writing project (because I can't stop thinking about it):

Pernicious Legal Lies and False Idols: Anonymity, consent, abundance and democracy in a world reconfigured by digital networked tech

For MAGA, Ignorance is Strength Research cuts aren’t about shrinking government, they’re about killing science

"two first-rate economists, David Cutler and Ed Glaeser, have made a stab at estimating the impact of cuts at NIH. Their analysis suggests that these cuts might save $500 billion in federal spending over the next 25 years — while imposing more than $8 trillion in losses."

If the circumstances do not demand consent, then the state or community should not pretend otherwise by calling it consent.

5/5