Society

How two competing definitions of "freedom" evolved over the last 250 years—and why they remain largely unreconcilable

America has not been attacked like this since 9/11. Six unelected people forcing their christian nationalist agenda on a population of three hundred and forty million is not a Democracy. It is tyra…

Please just automate this shit away and let us live.

Title insurance is grossly overpriced relative to actual risks involved. Why is that?

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel proposed that the agency require mobile providers to unlock customers’ mobile phones within 60 days of activation. New unlocking rules would allow consumers the f…

As generative AI fills our feeds with regurgitated mush, our innate trust in individuals over brands will determine the winners of both attention and revenue. Everyone in media should be racing to …

Well, obviously I am online. But “being online” now seems to mean being on socially-networked platforms. Don’t you think that the surface of the Internet feels super flat right now?&nbs…

Note: From the 19th through to the mid-20th century, educational institutions — from elementary schools to colleges — sought to not only develop students’ academic abilities, but to cultivate, as one textbook from 1849 put it, their “virtuous and noble sentiments.” In 1916, the Character Education Institution, a kind of think-tank for research on moral […]

Although it’s often said that the era of ocean liners came to an end by the 1950s with the rise of commercial aviation, reality isn’t quite that clear-cut. Coming out of the troubled 19…

Throwaway computers are the new plastic.

Many years ago (more than I care to admit), I went to spend a month at my mother’s house in Florida. She had a nice big back yard but didn’t tend to it very much, so nature had taken ov…

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Things that were heralded as “laborsaving” devices gave rise to a whole new industry, and to more labor.

That is not how fair use works.

Wolves of K Street co-author Brody Mullins on the history of modern lobbying.

The end of Chevron deference will touch on everything from broadband policy to climate change.

For decades, people have been trying to figure out how to create a cigarette without many of the downsides. Cigarettes sans the things that make smoking the biggest cause of preventable death in America like tar, carcinogens, etc. Cigarette companies tried to create “safe,” combustion-free smoking devices as far back as the 1980s. They were

The Conspiracy Capitaliser is a research project by Robert Collins to investigate and understand the intersection between AI, social media and profit. Comprised of a device, as a non-human participant, it allows the user to explore a wide spectrum of untruths which can be produced by AI systems and to experience, first-hand, the ethical dilemmas ahead of us as a technologically entangled society.

An anarchist walks out of a punk show to smoke. On her vest are anarchist patches with various standard slogans, “No Gods No Masters,” “Death To Transphobes,” “Kill Your Local Rapist,” “All Cops Are Bastards,” “Punch Nazis,” “From The River To The Sea Palestine Will Be Free,” “Make Total Destroy,” “The Only Good Cop Is...

The LLM is for spam

As I start writing this, I am sitting in the inner courtyard of a beautiful hotel is Santiago (Chile); what I’m planning to write has been stirring in my mind for much too long… © 2019 …

Grief-laden vitriol directed at AI fails to help us understand paths to better futures that are neither utopian nor dystopian, but open to radically weird possibilities.

Large numbers of migrants from China are crossing into the U.S. and finding work on marijuana farms. Some of the businesses are accused of exploiting workers and violating state growing rules.

That was quite a night. Not surprisingly, I woke up late this morning. I simply couldn’t sleep because I was buzzing from what I had just witnessed—and I still am. On paper, it was a wild game of t…

Posted on Friday 21 Jun 2024. 636 words, 18 links. By Matt Webb.

The largest system of incarceration in human history