This post takes for granted that one is familiar with the first season of the Apple TV+ show Pluribus—I don’t make any effort to explain the premise of the show or to avoid any spoilers about it.

As I concede just about every time I write something related to anarchism, I don’t claim to be a serious student of this political philosophy, and I don’t know if I’m ready to declare my allegiance to it. Yet, there are two basic beliefs of anarchism that I find attractive and that keep me coming back to anarchist writing (both fictional and philosophical):

The beginning of this book felt like a bit of a slog, which felt tragic because I knew the book had all the elements I like in sci-fi! It eventually won me over, though, and I’m glad I stuck with it.

Wild escalation of digital labor issues in generative AI.

Good observations here. My respect for Anthropic was solely based on their seeming willingness to stand up for something, because otherwise, I have a lot of issues wirh them. This groveling makes that respect disappear.

Hate this so much. The company statements are weaselly and gross. This also demonstrates one of the worst things about this whole issue. I would never buy Meta smart glasses, but I know two people in my life who own them, and the privacy burden of this product isn’t borne by the owner of the device so much as by those around them. Barf, barf, barf.

On commence à voir pourquoi Andor s’est inspiré de cette série ! Au bout de douze épisodes, je commence à mieux connaître les personnages et à choisir des préférés parmi eux. En avant !

As soon as I saw this in a bookstore, I knew I’d need to read it, and I was happy to find an audiobook through hoopla (even if ew, hoopla). The details of the trial itself weren’t always easy to follow, but it was fascinating to learn more about a historical figure I was only loosely familiar with—and the final part of the book tracing Pétain’s continued significance was especially interesting.

Vicious and hilarious.

Masnick—who is far keener on the idea of generative AI than I will ever be—is unsparing in his critique of OpenAI here, and it’s worth a read.

Good observations on how messed up these prediction markets are.

Pretty sure The Onion accelerated the web publication of this deliciously vicious skewering of Sam Altman after last weekend’s making nice with the Pentagon.

The year or so that I spent living in France (alongside another year or so in French-speaking Switzerland) was under very particular circumstances—working with a group of mostly Americans doing volunteer work for a U.S.-based church—that led to some idiosyncratic experiences in the country. Perhaps one of the oddest was a small, shared, and superficial obsession with Marshal Ferdinand Foch of World War I fame. This grew out of the fact that the church we were working with rented an apartment on the boulevard Maréchal Foch in Grenoble; those of us who had been assigned to work in that area and live in that apartment had really fallen in love with Grenoble, which translated into constantly talking about Foch (the street) as a superior place to live. We didn’t know much about Foch (the person), but we knew he must have been pretty cool to have a street named after him, and we knew—with all the confidence of Iraq War-era Americans—that he must be better than Marshal Pétain, since Pétain had been a coward who surrendered to the Germans. (That Foch had been dead for nearly two decades at this point wasn’t really on our minds).

An important read on OpenAI’s seeming selling out.

I nearly completed a degree in international relations (traded it for a political science teaching minor near the end), and what impressed me about that experience is how less sure I was about knowing what I was talking about the longer that I studied things. Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be bothered by that same concern and is happy to insist that things will go a certain way just because he says so. Gift link.

About nine months ago, I wrote about abstraction being on my mind and my thinking about how games abstract human life in potentially problematic ways. Abstraction is still on my mind, not least because I’m continuing to read Jacques Ellul, whom I referenced in that post (among so many others). In particular, I think a lot about Ellul’s argument that efficiency and efficacy are the ultimate value in the technical society, and that everything essentially gets ground down to that. I also think a lot about how “efficiency” so often comes down to “less money for others, more money for me,” turning complex policy and other decisions into a single, self-interested abstraction.

Ça fait des années que j’ai envie de regarder cette série, et apprendre qu’elle a inspiré Andor ne fait que renforcer cette intention.

Je la trouve intéressante, et j’en apprends beaucoup. En fait, je dois avouer que c’est grâce à un livre que j’écoute au sujet du Maréchal Pétain que j’ai enfin décider de commencer la série. Je risque de ne pas finir le livre, mais pour la série, je crois que je vais continuer jusqu’à la fin.

Don’t think I’ve posted anything on this story yet because as the article points out, it’s hard to focus on this evil with so many other evils distracting us.

It’s not even March, and it’s the second time this year I’ve woken up to Trump treating the military like his plaything to do something reckless while I was asleep.

This line made me laugh-to-keep-from-crying:

Trump said the U.S. had “sought repeatedly to make a deal” but Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions.”

Hey, what happened to the deal we already had with Iran?

It takes a lot to get me on Anthropic’s side in any disagreement, but Pete Hegseth is a lot, so I guess this tracks.

Lots to love in this book, and I am tempted to give it full marks. It’s just clunky enough in its plot to dock it a few points, but the ideas in the book are powerful, and its message of hope is great. It also rewards the reader for knowing a bit about geopolitics, which I’m a sucker for.

Anthropic is weird, and their conscience is focused in some directions at the expense of others (Claude is trained on pirated copies of my research), but at least they have a conscience.

Very clever.

Look, I have complicated feelings about my Latter-day Saint mission experience, but I’d be silly not to take joy from learning that Ardis Parshall served in the same mission as me (and Lavina Fielding Anderson). Wish I’d read Keepapitchinin more regularly.

I liked this, but I’m predisposed to like it. It makes a compelling argument that may not convince those who really need to be convinced but that will further open the minds of the already open minded. It made me angry in a good way, but I still don’t know what the right next steps are for me to help make a difference.

Love that I get to worry about deepfake nudes, scramble to change the way I assess, and now pay more for tech—if it’s even available.