Heleen Touquet

Ik zou toch een masker dragen. Ik had beetje keelpijn maar vooral heel moe

Tech Billionaires Already Captured the White House. They Still Want to Be Kings From Montenegro to Northern California, the tech elite dream of building cities where they make the rules. Is this, finally, their moment?

From Montenegro to northern California, the tech elite dream of building “network states”—cities where they make the rules.

“This is a colonial project, aimed at tech empire ... Colonization 2.0,“ I told @telliotter.bsky.social

via @wired.com

www.wired.com/story/tech-b...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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ICE Is Deporting People to Africa on Nearly Un-Trackable Military Flights Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is deporting people to African countries like Ghana on military flights that are nearly un-trackable.

The second secret flight landed in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Mali, according to pilot communications we obtained.

ICE, DHS, Air Force and the governments of those countries did not answer questions about whether that flight carried third-country nationals. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Sociologist Nathan Kalman-Lamb, based in Fredericton, said he was required to hand over his phone during a recent trip to a conference in South Carolina. "He claimed that it was just going to be a very cursory search," Kalman-Lamb said, explaining the officer's actions are legal. "But the document that he gave me said they reserve the right to copy all the contents of your phone and distribute them to every American military and intelligence agency."

FYI

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Every authoritarian regime that embraced this aesthetic inflicted violence and chaos on its society

Just today, I was asked by @amnesty.de journal about the conditions of protest in Germany and whether we are seeing a new quality of police violence at protests. You can guess my answer from this video. 2yrs ago we were discussing illegal pain compliance holds, now it's punches straight to the face

Was mss gewoon het nieuws?

Russian colonialism. A long 🧵

Some didn´t get the memo but Russia was - and is - a colonial power.

Let´s take a tour around this marvelous empire:

(I merged two threads here. That´s why the Balts are more thoroughly pictured)

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Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

Kan iemand het aan JM Dedecker laten weten?

Gaza scholarship students to be evacuated to Britain Nine Chevening scholars will be helped to leave before their courses start next month but dozens of other Palestinian students will be left behind

Good step that Chevening scholars from Gaza will be supported in getting to the UK, and hopefully this can be extended to others with university offers and scholarships
www.thetimes.com/article/bf52...

Scooby I am as white as a hotel towel, and the closest thing to Mexican I am was a single all inclusive resort stay in Cancun. I put a Mexican flag sticker on my old Tacoma abd was promptly pulled over by ICE in San Antonio. I'm happy to waste their time 1d RookaTX This is the way Scooby • RookaTX Their big question was like, "why the sticker" I told them it was on the truck when I bought it-and they suggested I remove it. Obnoxious creatures. 1d

White woman puts Mexican flag on her truck to waste ICE’s time.

When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.

Today's Danas front page. Headline reads "SNS...assembles in 50 locations in #Serbia in response to months of protest - The Struggle to Remain in Power at All Costs"

YouTube video by Middle East Eye Why leading experts say Israel is committing genocide | Expert Witness

This is now out, another expert lineup, I'm in it, and we're all saying the same thing. Now there's a broad agreement, across disciplines, and specialties. There is no excuse anymore for states to continue "business as usual". #Israel #Palestine #Genocide #ICJ www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhT5...

Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development | SRCD Journal | Wiley Online Library As increasing numbers of transgender, gender diverse, and queer youths come out to their friends, families and communities, their rights to express their identities in public life have become the sub...

Study finds that most kids who come out as trans when young stay trans; 12% of initially cis kids come out as trans; 33% of cis adolescents express queer romantic/sexual interest; young people see gender, sexuality as fluid. No sign of "social contagion". Striking rejection of cis and het norms.

'When people think of themselves as the 'good guys' regardless of the violence they inflict, there is ultimately no atrocity they are not willing to justify.'

Textbook example of how the debate on genocide is not a debate about evidence or interpretation - it's about cognitive dissonance...

I don’t know how to be around so many friends who—to my mind and I deeply hope I am wrong—seem so in denial about the totality of what both Trump and AI augur for any hope of a stable, much less just, society.

ted. In this context I feel obliged to state once more that - like the hundreds of protesters arrested last weekend - I too support Palestine Action. If this makes me a "supporter of terror" un- der UK law, so be it. My books, at least for now, are still published in Britain, and are widely available in bookshops and even supermarkets. In recent years the UK's state broadcaster has also televised two fine adaptations of my novels, and therefore regularly pays me residual fees. I want to be clear that I intend to use these pro-ceeds of my work, as well as my public platform generally, to go on support-ing Palestine Action and direct action against genocide in whatever way I can. If the British state considers this "terrorism", then perhaps it should investigate the shady organisations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith and the BBC.

Wow Sally Rooney. Fair play.

‘I feel obliged to state once more that… I too support Palestine Action. … If the British state considers this "terrorism", then perhaps it should investigate the shady organisations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith
and the BBC.’

The Gestapo violence is horrible--but it's noteworthy that almost every ICE attack that gets recorded includes bystanders at a minimum telling them they're evil, and sometimes being even more engaged. Proud that so many are standing up to the thugs.

Naked Oligarchy - Public Seminar Salvador Santino Regilme explores how billionaires captured power and hollowed out democracy.

"The choice is stark: rule by the many, or rule by the billionaires who already act as if they own the world.

Across the globe, extreme wealth has overpowered democracy."
publicseminar.org/2025/06/how-...

Perhaps an award for “Breakout Autocrat”?

Every article/story that associates a migrant with sexual violence should make clear that most sexual violence is perpetrated by local men (mostly white men) at home. Immigration is not the cause of increased sexual violence — misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, etc are the reasons why it persists.

Starte hier einen neuen Thread für die aktuellen Ereignisse in #Serbien. Es wurde vorgestern bereits eine Kundgebung von Student*innen, Schüler*innen und der Zivilgesellschaft für heute Abend in Valjevo angekündigt, wo von Do auf Fr besonders brutal gegen (junge) Menschen vorgegangen wurde.
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Ça, c'est non ! C'est contre nature.

And historically, sweeps focusing on homelessness at this point on the arc of expanding repression in a country are *always* about normalizing the expansion of who gets detained en masse from foreigners to citizens.

Israël hoopt na moord op Palestijnse journalist eindelijk af te zijn van alle negatieve beeldvorming Afgelopen zondagnacht heeft het Israëlische leger prominent Al Jazeera-journalist Anas al-Sharif vermoord, samen met vier andere medewerkers van het nieuwsnetwerk.

Israël hoopt na moord op Palestijnse journalist eindelijk af te zijn van alle negatieve beeldvorming

We may identify Russian propaganda on social media, but academics that act like agents of influence we refuse to call what they are: paid and/or ideologically driven propagandists and lobbyists for Russia, China, and their authoritarian allies.

Spot the difference ⬇️

‘A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians Revealed: The Israeli military undertook an ambitious project to store a giant trove of Palestinians’ phone calls on Microsoft’s servers in Europe

Because I am angry I will share this again. One of the reasons that Israel is able to target individuals so precisely is that it collects every phone call in Gaza and stores the recordings in Microsoft Azure, then uses AI to analyze and pick targets.