This sucks.

Another story for the “Reddit is bad, generative AI is worse” files.

The problems with AI are the problems with Ellulian technique.

Ugh, gross.

More digital labor considerations: While AI can certainly reduce work for some people, does it actually create more work for people in the aggregate?

Jeopardy voice: “What is ‘another example of AI being based on the exploitation of labor’?”

Flock is edtech—creepy edtech.

Every word in this story makes me angrier.

Constantly amazed at how cowardly the most powerful companies in the world are.

Religious freedom has to really mean religious freedom or else it’s a Trojan horse for Christian nationalism. What a great example of all of this.

To borrow an observation from a recent 404 Media podcast, I’m guessing Anthropic believes enough in Claude consciousness to prevent users from being cruel to it but not so much to actually prevent us from offloading work onto it as an always-available laborer that can’t say no unless it’s told to.

Getting rid of Flock is an important step but just the first one.

This headline captures a lot of the tension I feel going into this election. Despite obvious missteps, I do trust Gorton’s experience and probably wouldn’t mind her continuing to serve.

However, we don’t need a slow, deliberate panel to get rid of Flock. I think “it’s pretty irresponsible” to have adopted the cameras without anticipating the problems they ultimately brought. Where was the panel to warn us against surveillance and privacy infringement?

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.