Imran Ali

The Authoritarian Stack How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next

"Ideology fuels venture capital → capital captures the state → the state feeds the same private systems that built it. A new model of power — privatized sovereignty." www.authoritarian-stack.info

Bilge Ebiri: “Why Terrence Malick Is the Most Influential Director” Bilge Ebiri explores filmmaker Terrence Malick’s vision of grace and his far-ranging influence on American cinema.

"In his vision, our endless seeking makes us human and therefore holy…" yalereview.org/article/bilg...

We Are One Step Closer to Understanding Whales. What Now? | Atmos An AI model originally trained to make music can turn any sound—including human speech—into sperm whale clicks.

“What do we want the interface between us and whales, or us and the natural world, to look like… a rare opportunity for AI to expand human understanding beyond optimization and toward other forms of intelligence.” atmos.earth/science-and-...

Strata: The Consolations and Invitations of Deep Time “My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite… and I know the amplitude of time,” wrote Walt Whitman, knowing what stone teaches about trusting time. It tempers your sorrows to …

"That we live within this system, and the system lives within us. We carry its iron in our blood and its stardust in our bones, and its strength is our strength because we are it." www.themarginalian.org/2026/01/11/l...

The Politics Of Superintelligence | NOEMA Today’s tech “prophets” push a narrative that God-like artificial superintelligence is inevitable, and only they can ensure humanity’s safety from their creations.

"…the future of AI is a political field. It belongs not to those who warn most loudly of gods or monsters, but to publics that should have the moral right to democratically govern the technologies that shape their lives."
www.noemamag.com/the-politics...

The Last People Before the Internet Revisiting the AOL Instant Messenger era

"…the internet encourages us to see the past as a soup of content that mixes an infinite variety of times and places; our immersion is so complete that it inhibits our historical sensibility and ability to maintain a strong sense of temporal difference." kneelingbus.substack.com/p/the-last-p...

CENTERLESS CULTURE writing about the internet

"…fragmented cultural system cannot satisfy the human demand for meaning, identity, belonging, and status." terrraincognita.substack.com/p/centerless...

@tnaseem.bsky.social and I are thrilled to announce the launch of VEILED.Reality, our contribution to @bradford2025.co.uk's Artist-Led Awards.

An interactive design fiction on the future of hijabs - think smart veils + "shroud" computers ;)

Download our preview episode at veiledreality.faith

Love Against Probability You wouldn’t have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn’t have bet that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mu…

"It is all so improbable, this wild and wondrous world, against all we know about the universe. And yet here it is, and here we are, set on it to know that we are dying and live anyway, and love anyway." www.themarginalian.org/2025/11/24/l...

11 Discoveries That Changed My Worldview - The Great Simplification In this episode, Nate weaves personal reflections into an exploration of the human predicament, unpacking a series of chronological insights that have reshaped his worldview. What began years ago as a...

"…conscious life, you, me, all of us, is how the universe observes itself… And that realization opened a door that I've never closed. It led me straight into evolution, complexity, and the strange question of how self-aware stardust behaves."

www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-orig...

A Diverse World Of Sovereign AI Zones | NOEMA The emergence of virtual territories will reshape geopolitics.

“Data is now a sovereign substance, something over which and from which sovereignty is claimed. Cloud platforms take on roles traditionally performed by modern states, crossing national borders and oceans. Meanwhile, states morph into cloud platforms.” www.noemamag.com/a-diverse-wo...

"…colonialism profoundly disrupted local knowledge systems – and the cultural and intellectual foundations upon which they were built – by severing ties to land, language, history and social structures." aeon.co/essays/gener...

The Movies That Defined Gen X A Break From MAGA Madness for a Moment

"Parking lots, parade floats, dead ends, second chances. We were always almost—almost boomers, almost millennials, almost grown up before the world caught fire." markmcinerney.substack.com/p/the-movies...

Neo Model II Teleoperated Robot Surrogates Seek Asylum Teleoperated home robots request asylum as human operators cite harsh working conditions, raising ethical questions about AI labor and worker rights.

“I never expected it to start talking about asylum and asking for help almost whispering, like it was hiding from someone.”

nearfuturelaboratory.com/dispatches/a...

Piracy’s Back How streaming’s failures reawakened digital rebellion – turning piracy from a crime into an act of self-defence.

"We probably won’t go back to DVDs on shelves, but the spirit’s the same: taking care of the media you love, trading files, building collections, sharing culture hand-to-hand (or URL-to-URL). The internet started as a place for that." www.protein.xyz/piracys-back/

Inside Israel’s deal with Google and Amazon To secure Project Nimbus, the tech giants agreed to disregard their own terms of service and tip Israel off if a foreign court demands its data.

"…tech giants agreed to disregard their own terms of service and sidestep legal orders by tipping Israel off if a foreign court demands its data…" www.972mag.com/project-nimb...

Rewilding the Internet Once an open ecosystem, the web has become overgrown with ads and algorithms. To survive, it needs care – not code.

"The web isn’t just a channel anymore; it’s a living thing. It hums, glitches, grows back — something fragile, vital, alive. It’s an ecosystem" www.protein.xyz/rewilding-th...

The Age of Silicon Began Long Ago Blaschka's glass flowers and the magic in the model

"From a simple mixture of silica, ash, and lime, they’ve somehow managed to breathe life into the inert— to magnify the animate wonders of our world, and to catalogue its variety and the diversity of its forms." kirkgordon.substack.com/p/the-age-of...

Suppose the cautionary tale is read as a playbook? Suppose the cautionary science fiction tale isn't read as something to be avoided. Suppose it's read as a playbook?

“…those “stories” don’t have to be prose. They can be prototypes, experiences, systems. Whatever form shapes our understanding and opens our imagination.” nearfuturelaboratory.com/blog/2025/09... #designfiction

Taste Is Now Our Scarcest Asset How taste evolved from a personal sensibility to strategic infrastructure, preserving the one advantage machines cannot imitate.

"…remembered less for technical mastery than for the sensibility that guides their decisions. Taste shows in whom they hire, the work they create, details they insist upon. These may seem minor on their own, together they shape culture and identity." theintelligencefield.substack.com/p/taste-is-n...

Superhistory, Not Superintelligence Artificial Intelligence is really Artificial Time

"You’re not living as a witness to the rise of superintelligence. You’re living as an agent being augmented by supertime. You are living at the end of history, and entering a superhistory being created by machines." contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/superhisto... #artificialtime

The Last Days Of Social Media | NOEMA Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.

“…a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect.” www.noemamag.com/the-last-day...

Pakistan: Mass surveillance and censorship machine is fueled by Chinese, European, Emirati and North American companies Pakistan’s unlawful mass surveillance and censorship expansion is powered by a nexus of companies based in Germany, France, United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, Canada, and the United States, Amnesty In...

“There are human rights limitations to the search for profit in markets, but these have all been ignored. Pakistani people are paying the highest price.”
www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

Designing Futures Can storytelling prototype the future? Speculative architect Liam Young examines how imaginative narratives navigate tomorrow's challenges.

“A building is more than a physical collection of materials. It is a cloud coalesced out of a planetary network of flows and forces, material supply chains, cultures, and systems.” l-a-v-a.com/articles/des...

Polytunity - The Ideas Letter “Polycrisis” has become a ubiquitous descriptor for the multisector, intersecting problems afflicting the world—but the term masks the systemic nature of these crises and overwhelmingly reflects Euroc...

"Polycrisis is a descriptor that the establishment can agree on without challenging itself. It abstracts the causes of crises, making them appear as natural convergences rather than the systemic outcomes of extractive and exclusionary orders." www.theideasletter.org/essay/polytu...

Spain imposes total arms embargo on Israel to stop ‘genocide in Gaza’ Socialist PM Pedro Sanchez announces nine measures that need to be approved by the cabinet then ratified by parliament.

“This is an unjustifiable attack on the civilian population. Sixty thousand dead, two million displaced, half of them children. This is not self-defence … it is the extermination of a defenceless people.” www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/...

All the world’s polygons ŠUM – journal for contemporary art criticism

"We live to capture this world to give life to countless others. We capture the world so you can create your own." www.sum.si/journal-arti...

Think Harder, Not Just faster And four other lessons for today’s builder in my final post.

"Choose augmentation, not automation.
Don’t just ship.
Protect what makes us human.
Center the vulnerable, seen and unseen.
Build as citizens, not just coders."

technicallyoptimistic.substack.com/p/the-end-of...

IDF database suggests 83% of Gaza dead were civilians Classified intelligence reveals Israel killed 8,900 militants by May, indicating an almost unparalleled proportion of civilian slaughter.

"…civilians made up a greater proportion of the dead only in the genocides in Srebrenica and Rwanda, and during Russia’s three-month siege of Mariupol." www.972mag.com/israeli-inte...

Good Taste Is More Important Than Ever In a world of limitless AI-generated choices, people need to know how to choose best.

“Taste is born of human discretion—of growing up in particular places, being exposed to particular cultural references, developing a point of view that is inseparable from personality. In other words, taste is the human fingerprint on decision making.” www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...