Society

AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy, and beginning to approach the railroad boom

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the historic protests in Seattle that shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization, but it also marks the time when the first Independent Media Center came to life. Amid the clouds of tear gas, hundreds of volunteer reporters documented what unfolded. That week indymedia.org received 1.5 million visitors — more than CNN — and produced a daily video report and newspaper. It was the first node in a global citizen journalist movement. We speak with those who know the story best. Jill Freidberg is co-founder of the Seattle Independent Media Center and co-produced the Seattle WTO documentary “This Is What Democracy Looks Like.” Rick Rowley is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and independent journalist with Midnight Films, as well as co-producer of “This Is What Democracy Looks Like.” Tish Stringer and Renée Feltz are co-organizers of the 20th Anniversary Indymedia Encuentro taking place this weekend at the Rice Media Center. Stringer is film program manager at Rice University and author of a book on Indymedia, “Move! Guerrilla Films, Collaborative Modes, and the Tactics of Radical Media Making.” Feltz was at the Seattle WTO protests and helped found the Houston Independent Media Center. She’s a longtime Democracy Now! producer and reporter, including for The Indypendent, a newspaper that grew out of New York City Indymedia.

In the last week, we’ve had no less than three different pieces asking whether the massive proliferation of data centers is a massive bubble, and though they, at times, seem to take the default position of AI’s inevitable value, they’ve begun to sour on the idea that

Everyone’s offering their thoughts on enshittification these days. I notice this phenomenon…seems like there are conversations that go on which I tap into for a bit before the move alon…

This whole attempted censorship of adult games on gaming platforms is becoming a thing. Collective Shout—a group out of Australia that wraps itself in a feminist flag while behaving like the religi…

A reader recently sent me ​a Substack post​ they thought I might like. “I bought my kids an old-school phone to keep smartphones out of ... Read more

Roxanne Shirazi, a librarian at CUNY, recently commented on the AI hype in her field: I attended a library vendor AI demo/upsell today and I wish I could explain to them that everything they are selling could be achieved by hiring like two more people in our library. And yet this entire team was dedicated...

Drinking Sunday coffee in the hyper-normal

But Today Doesn't Feel Like Yesterday

An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

Cosmos is — or was — a popular science magazine published by the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. David Ho is an oceanographer at the University of Hawai’i. Cosmos posted an articl…

I very rarely talk about payments on this blog, but every once in a while I get to talk about something I think might be interesting: network tokens! Who has my card number? Many years ago, merchants selling products online and in person were handling your card details directly. That

A manifesto for funding AI-native nonprofits

Trying to ‘let it rip’ in early 2020 was a disaster.

Why False Equivalence Is One of Democracy’s Most Dangerous Lies

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Weeknotes 350 - Can AI truly perform critical thinking as it does not have a clue? How to bring in humbleness through our own interactions? This and more from last week's news on human-AI-thing collabs.

Valve Corporation recently came under pressure from payment processors to purge Steam, the popular PC gaming storefront, of “certain kinds of adult-only content.” The news rippled across tech …

In her new book “Bad Company,” journalist Megan Greenwell chronicles how private equity upended industries from health care to local news—and the ways workers are fighting back.

On December 30, 2024, a stunning event captured the attention of both locals and space experts when a massive metal ring crashed from the sky into a Kenyan village southeast of Nairobi. The 2.5-meter diameter object, weighing approximately 500 kilograms, landed in a field without causing injuries but immediately sparked…