I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out:
www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...
I actually think they hate being told no because they hate women, but at the end of the day, it’s all power built on misogyny
Literally spent the last few weeks writing the part of my book about “disruption” narratives as a masculine redemption myth
So the Palantir surveillance state is good for MAGA misogyny. Got it.
I'm suing Grammarly over its paid AI feature that presented editing suggestions as if they came from me - and many other writers and journalists - without consent.
State law requires consent before someone's name can be used for commercial purposes.
www.wired.com/story/gramma...
AOC came out swinging against age verification legislation and somehow the entire tech press seems to not have noticed?
eBay's story shows how the cyberlibertarian dream died: founder Pierre Omidyar’s (left) vision of a self-governing community was supplanted by ex-Bain Meg Whitman’s (right) idea of a well-lit marketplace. an emerging discipline called “Trust and Safety” would come to synthesize both.
my (first!) article, “From the virtual community to ‘Trust and Safety’: eBay (1995–2007) and the rise of platform governance” is out on Big Data & Society! it is a history of content moderation at eBay, where they coined the term Trust and Safety 🌐 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Everyone should read @tomasgna.bsky.social's brilliant article about eBay and its creation of centralized "trust and safety" efforts!!!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
“Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside."
Read every word.
Brian Niccol of Starbucks took home the award for the most nonsensical disparity between CEO and employee income: He earns $95,801,676, while the median salary for a Starbucks employee was a mere $14,674. trib.al/EOv81eF
if you are a writer, you don't HAVE to write about the looksmaxxing movement. in fact, it's actually possible to not write about it
New from 404 Media: Proton Mail, the privacy-focused email service, gave authorities data that let the FBI unmask an anonymous 'Stop Cop City' protester. It was payment data linked to the anonymous email account. From that, FBI ID'd them, then tracked their movements www.404media.co/proton-mail-...
This blog post by @davekarpf.bsky.social is really worth reading and reflecting upon.
This is horrifying because it implies the Iranian school mistargeting was down to Claude layer in Palantir systems. What’s more horrifying is that if the rest of the article is accurate AI was a massive force multiplier for US/Israel strikes.
As I've been saying for days: this feud with Hegseth -- in which Anthropic looks principled, and Claude looks so valuable that the Pentagon can't live without it -- has been terrific marketing for Anthropic www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
The concerning background:
-CEO of the Thiel Foundation
-Managing Director at Thiel Capital
-Managing Director of Clarium Capital (hedge fund led by Peter Thiel)
-Managing Director of Mithril Capital Management (VC fund founded by Peter Thiel that funds Palantir)
-Co-founder of the Thiel Fellowship
Wonder what it’s like to live in a society where there are regulations on capitalist excesses
x.com/SecWar/statu... Anthropic has just been designated as a "Supply Chain Risk to National Security." This is so fucking insane it is hard to describe how insane it is.
My goodness.
The new Ellison-controlled media combine will check the boxes for all three types of capture: capitalistic, oligarchic, and authoritarian.
lpeproject.org/blog/the-ame...
The left is not "missing out" on AI. It's winning the argument. Americans worry about AI and dislike tech CEOs. They're mobilizing against data centers. They support regulation, even refusal.
Calls for the left to embrace AI are an effort to change the terms of the debate in Silicon Valley's favor.
While the Trump admin works with right-wing creators, a White House staffer moonlighting as an anonymous MAGA influencer makes it nearly impossible to distinguish official government messaging from 'organic' online support.
More here:
www.wired.com/story/a-whit...
historical detail I can't help but bring up: by some accounts, the event that instigated the British soldiers to open fire on Crispus Attacks and the rest of the crowd in the Boston Massacre was a soldier being hit by a snowball
