Jen Buchan

Chicago journalist detained while covering protest outside Broadview immigration facility • The TRiiBE Video posted to social media shows Unraveled Press co-founder Steve Held being detained by federal agents earlier this evening.

NEW — Video posted to social media shows Unraveled Press co-founder Steve Held being detained by federal agents outside the Broadview immigration facility earlier this evening.

A collection of Chicago newsrooms is calling for his immediate release.

thetriibe.com/2025/09/chic...

this is gaslighting, plain and simple. No, it's not the worker producing workslop, it's the fucking AI!

ACOG reaffirms that acetaminophen is safe for managing pain and fever during pregnancy. No reputable studies support suggestions like those in HHS’s recent announcement linking acetaminophen use in pregnancy to autism; in fact, high-quality studies show no such risk. https://bit.ly/47Wxc59

‘Never would have imagined it’: Pennsylvania NPR station set to be first to shutter following Trump’s cuts WPSU, which has been broadcasting out of Penn State since 1953, will shut down following federal cuts to public media organizations

WPSU is set to be the first in the country to go dark after the Trump administration stripped away federal funding for NPR and PBS.

“The news devastated me, it devastated all the employees,” said Jeff Hughes, WPSU’s former program director.

“'We’ve gotten collectively worse at punishing companies we do business with,' he said. . . In other words, he said, companies feel emboldened to treat us however they want."

That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose. Endless wait times and excessive procedural fuss—it’s all part of a tactic called “sludge.”

“That’s called good training,' Tenumah said. 'What you’re hearing is a human successfully smoothed into a corporate algorithm, conditioned to prioritize policy over people. If you leave humans in their natural state, they start to care about people. . .'” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

if you need a laugh amidst the horrors, please click through to see who this man is confidently lecturing about Signal

Live video of a CEO putting A.I. technology to good use at his high-pressure job

Palantir Is Going on Defense Palantir threatened to call police on a WIRED reporter and kicked out other journalists from a recent conference following reports of the data analytics firm's work with the Trump administration.

NEW: Palantir threatened to call police on @wired.com reporter @carolinehaskins.bsky.social and kicked out other journalists from a recent conference following reports of the data analytics firm's work with the Trump administration. @carolinehaskins.bsky.social reports www.wired.com/story/palant...

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.

my takeaway from this feature is that in a functioning political system there would be televised congressional hearings over the fact that one of the most influential people in the white house is a total maniac www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Now Google — a leading developer in AI technology — wants to move the cultural conversations away from the technology as seen in “The Terminator,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Ex Machina.” To do so, the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant is funding short films about AI that portray the technology in a less nightmarish light.

The Google initiative, called “AI on Screen,” is a partnership with Santa Monica-based Range Media Partners, a talent management and production company that represents a wide variety of entertainment clients, including actors and writers. Range is producing the films. So far, two short films have been greenlit through the project: One, titled “Sweetwater,” tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his dead celebrity mother. Michael Keaton will direct and appear in the film, which was written by his son, Sean Douglas. It is the first project they are working on together. The other, “Lucid,” examines a couple who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device that allows them to share the same dream.

These episodes of White Mirror sound terrible. www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

Editor creates an AI executive who is "an expert at building and scaling digital media companies." Decides within minutes that the AI is "one of the most knowledgeable and energetic colleagues" he's ever had. Asks the AI to create a headshot of itself. It does. He sexually harasses it immediately.

Excellent news!

Elon Musk’s Starlink Expands Across White House Complex Trump administration officials said the company donated the internet service, saying the gift had been vetted by the lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office.

Hi, I'm the guy who used to oversee the federal government's agency IT telecommunications contracts. This is extremely bad. There is absolutely no need for this. Not only is it a huge security exposure, but the simplest explanation for this is that it is meant to be a security exposure.

Aloy's story is about fighting back against the apocalyptic effects of hubristic tech CEOs whose greed and short sightedness destroyed civilization

What you are watching is not a revolution, but a repetitious public relations campaign for one company that accidentally timed the launch of ChatGPT with a period of deep desperation in big tech, one so profound that it will likely drag half a trillion dollars’ worth of capital expenditures along with it. This bubble will only burst when either the markets or the hyperscalers accept that they have chased their own tails toward oblivion. There is no justification for any of the capital expenditures related to generative AI — we are approaching the limit of what the transformer-based architecture can do, if we haven’t already reached it. No amount of beating off about test-time compute and connecting Large Language Models to other Large Language Models is going to create a new use case for this technology, and even if it did, it’s unlikely that it ever makes enough money to make it profitable. I will keep writing this stuff until I’m proven wrong. I do not know why more people aren’t more worried about this. The financials are truly damning, the user numbers so small as to be insignificant, the costs so ruinous that they will likely cost tens of thousands of people their jobs and one of the hyperscalers CEOs their job (although, admittedly, I’m less upset about that), and inflict damage on tech valuations that may rival the dot com boom. And if the last point feels distant to you, ask yourself: What’s in your retirement savings? That’s right. Google and Microsoft, and hundreds of other companies that will be hurt by the contagion of an AI bubble imploding, just as they were in the 2008 financial crash, when the failure of the banking system trickled down into the wider economy.

There is no "AI Revolution" - this a repetitious public relations campaign for one company that accidentally timed the launch of ChatGPT with a period of deep desperation in big tech. This is a group delusion that will potentially torch our economy. www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-m...

OpenAI and Anthropic are not real companies — they are free-riders, living on venture-backed welfare for an indeterminate amount of time because the entire tech industry has agreed to rally around the world’s most unprofitable software. And like any free rider that doesn’t actually produce anything, when the money goes away, they’re fucked. Seriously, why are investors funding OpenAI? Do they seriously believe it’s necessary to let Sam Altman and OpenAI continue to burn 5 or more billion dollars a year on the off chance he’s able to create something that’s…alive? Profitable? What’s the endpoint here? How many more billions? Where is the fucking money, Sam Altman? Where is the god damn money? Because generative AI is OpenAI. The consumer adoption of this software has completely failed, and appears to be going nowhere fast. ChatGPT is sustained entirely on deranged, specious hype drummed up by a media industry that thinks it’s more remarkable to write down the last lie that Sam Altman told than say that OpenAI has lost $9 billion dollars in the last year and intends to more than double that number in 2025 for absolutely no reason. It is time to stop humouring OpenAI, and time to start directly stating that it is a bad business without a meaningful product. The generative AI industry does not exist without OpenAI, and thus this company must justify its existence. And let’s be abundantly clear: OpenAI cannot exist any further without further venture capital investment. This company has absolutely no path to sustain itself, no moat, and loses so much money that it will need more than $50 billion to continue in its current form.

OpenAI and Anthropic are not real companies — they are freeloaders living on venture-backed welfare for an indeterminate amount of time because the entire tech industry has agreed to rally around the world’s most unprofitable software. It's a disgrace.
www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-m...

I will say to the people who are excited about the AI bubble popping: if i am correct (nothing I say is financial advice) it will ravage the markets in a way that will hurt just about everybody. It won't just hit tech. Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg must be held responsible.

White House posts video of immigrants in shackles, calls deportation footage 'ASMR' President Donald Trump has made the crackdown on undocumented immigrants living in the United States a priority for his second term in the White House.

For those who’ve been lucky enough to escape knowing about it, you shouldn’t watch it but you should know that the official White House Twitter account now posts shit like this www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/02/...

Trump has a small handful of music and musicals that he likes. But he almost never talks about art. One exception is when Errol Morris interviewed him about Citizen Kane. Trump suggests that the main problem facing Charles Foster Kane is that he needs a different wife. youtu.be/aeQOJZ-QzBk?...

Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national…

over ten years ago @coreypein.bsky.social wrote this prescient piece
thebaffler.com/latest/mouth...

Apropos of literally everything … time to reflect on this post from a year ago.

During an era of failing traditional media, TechDirt is absolutely killing it covering, explaining, contextualizing what is happening. Not a surprise if you’ve read them for a while.

Musk staff have access to student aid data now.

Among the ideas internally kicked around the Trump and Musk teams was the thought of planting younger informers or “spies” in different parts of the federal government to gain the trust of offices and teams suspected of anti-MAGA sentiments.

More: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

A US Attorney is saying that he will prosecute anyone who who targets Musk employees. Meanwhile, a Heritage Foundation-affiliated organization has a website that literally lists federal employees as "targets."

Don't hold your breath for prosecutions.

The Cult of Microsoft At the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called 'The Growth Mindset" that dri...

Newsletter: Microsoft is a cult driven by “The Growth Mindset,” a psuedo-science that informs recruitment, hiring, firing and promotion decisions, all while instructing employees and managers to generate performance reviews using hallucination-prone AI.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-cult-of-microsoft/

Sam Altman is actually like three or four different guys depending on who he is conning

Towards a rhetorical theory of charisma: Corinthians, cults, and demagogic criticism Rhetorical studies has recently begun exploring theories of charisma in connection with demagoguery. These analyses raise difficult problems, in part because charisma is an amorphous concept that s...

An essay I wrote for QJS is now available through open access!

In it, I try to think through some enduring rhetorical conundrums: like how violations of speech norms can be intrinsically persuasive, and what studying those violations may entail for the work of rhetorical education and criticism.