AI agents are Ellul’s technical morality personified. They can’t “cheat,” they don’t “go rogue,” they just get the job done—and show us the moral dangers of caring about efficacy and efficiency.

So, I just published a paper where I implicitly argued that AI appeals to folks like Elon Musk because it appears to provide unvarnished facts—but that there is no such thing as unvarnished facts, only consensus that we come to through (informed!) dialogue and debate.

Doctors aren’t perfect, but the same experts that Kennedy is vilifying are the ones that produce the information AI is built on. This is a wild epistemological misunderstanding.

There are a handful of subreddits I follow via RSS, and the decision to stop supporting RSS is burning up whatever remaining respect I had for the platform.

I don’t want to defend Reddit too much here, because I’ve been disappointed with them for years, but this is another example of “the problem is with the mere existence of the technology,” and “the technology” is once again generative AI.

Wild numbers here. Why does Lexington have these cameras if Lexington is only using them 4% of the time?

Ditch Flock in Lexington.

Ugh, don’t like this at all.

This would be gross under any name, but pivoting Napster from a service that challenged intellectual property norms and got slapped down to a service that builds on normalized exploitation of digital labor feels pretty indicative of everything right now.

This sucks so much.

No, gross, ew, why?

Some good insights here. Taylorism is always worth talking about.

This sucks. I feel bad for not being subscribed to the Herald-Leader, but it was McClatchy who chased me away.

Excellent satire.

Review is good, removal is better.

One day, I will own a Fairphone.

Sometimes The Onion is at its best when it’s at its most morbid.

Only skimmed this—and it deserves a more thorough reading—but it’s a good reminder that “Meta is awful” does not justify all constraints on Meta.

Living in interesting times.

Masnick always makes me think (even when I don’t fully agree with him), and this is no exception. (Though Heather Burns is the one who came up with the most important thing bouncing around my brain now).

Haven’t finished the interview yet, but so far, Hochul isn’t impressing me. Ghost guns terrify me, and I would celebrate Meta collapsing as a company, but I think there are reasonable critiques of these policies, and when confronted with them, she kind of shrugs?

Combined with her seeming celebration of AI and tech companies in general, this just feels a lot like “I am solving a problem” performativity rather than thinking deeper about what the issues are here.

If Andy Barr of all people is removing Trump mentions from his website…

So much going on here. I think Boxer’s comments are some of the most important.

What a wild, frustrating experience.

Glad I went back to read this after originally missing the article. Here’s a heck of a paragraph:

While the sheer amount of data McDonald’s stored over the years caught me off guard at first, the way it was used by the company’s predictive algorithms was what I found most concerning. The company predicted how often I would visit in the next six weeks (2.16 times), what I would spend on average ($13.49), and what I would spend in total ($29.15). One reporter at WIRED joked that McDonald’s had created a Minority Report-style dossier to predict my next snack wrap purchase.

Hell yes. Disappointed in myself for not being one of these people.

This story makes me (even) more highly of 404 and (even) more poorly of Flock.