Screenshot of text: "In an emailed statement, ProPublica spokesperson Alexis Stephens said the news outlet has never had layoffs in its 18-year history and that it is “committed to reaching a fair and sustainable first contract.” Stephens added that the union’s complaints about ProPublica’s AI policy were “unfounded.”" At the end of the paragraph, there is a button with a sparkle emoji that says "Dive deeper".

It feels a bit on the nose to be reading a WaPo article about ProPublica employees going on strike for, among other things, guardrails on AI in journalism, and seeing a little button telling me to “dive deeper” into this story using AI.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

The obvious question is to ask what is the point of the article. And the answer is means testing. By saying the rich don't deserve public goods it makes it easier to say someone just above the poverty line doesn't either. They want public goods to be shit.

📣 New! @cariatida.bsky.social, @aihathing.bsky.social & Sanjay Pinto argue for understanding the sprint to create the "AI-first economy" not as the logical march of progress, but as a series of deliberate economic decisions that risk harming workers in ways old & new. datasociety.net/library/last...

The snail farmer of London, his mafia friends, and a £20m vendetta against the taxman Terry Ball runs elaborate mollusc-based tax avoidance schemes that are costing London councils millions of pounds. Yet when London Centric tracks him down, an even stranger story emerges.

This reminds me of that tax avoidance scheme in London where property owners were filling up empty office blocks with live snails.

In the future, all urban real estate will be filled with either snails or human remains, I guess.

www.londoncentric.media/p/terry-ball...

Endlessly grotesque the way he's talking like some feudal lord invoking droit du seigneur over one of his female vassals...

A while back I saw an AI-generated "anti-woke comedian" Insta account advertising itself as "uncancellable." Which, I feel like, is probably a more direct endgame of these AI personas in cultural production; more so than job displacement, it's just the ambition of crafting an unaccountable cipher.

Nevada brothel workers are unionizing to protect their digital rights Management's new contract demands “everything”—and could hand their likenesses over to AI porn and sex bots.

"But as sex work has become an increasingly digital field, their major concern is the contract’s threat to their ability to protect their image and likeness, especially from potential AI uses."
www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Oh god, same. Part of why I transferred from Bard (on top of the massive student loans). I remember being starstruck at Botstein’s fireside chats in his home, it felt so democratic that students could casually talk about philosophy w the college President. The dissonance with reality is jarring.

Abolishing ICE isn’t enough – it’s time to center people’s humanity | Heba Gowayed and Victor Ray It’s far from radical to reject a system predicated on violence – despite what thinktanks might claim

Abolish ICE is not enough.

It's not about training -- Ross who killed Renee Good was a TRAINER. It's not about body cams -- we saw Alex Pretti killed with our own eyes.

We have to abolish the idea that violence ever made us safer, before it's too late.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

AI use for progress notes is causing serious privacy and clinical risks in aged care - Hellocare Workforce pressure is pushing aged care staff towards AI for clinical documentation, but public tools come with hidden dangers. From Privacy Act breaches to misleading progress notes, poorly governed ...

AI use for progress notes is causing serious privacy and clinical risks in aged care. Professional bodies need to act. AI shouldnt be used for client notes and reports hellocare.com.au/ai-use-for-p...

RETURN HOME x The Sameer Project "GIVE WARMTH TO GAZA" this Winter season...

Donation link to the Sameer Project's "Give Warmth to Gaza" campaign is here: chuffed.org/project/1491...

ICE agents shot a woman yesterday, but that wasn't enough cruelty, so Border Patrol went to a school and attacked people.

If he fixes the 17th Ave pedestrian footbridge over the Belt Parkway in Bath Beach that's been """"under construction"""" since 2021, I will truly believe in miracles.

Featuring a trans woman so prominently at his inauguration like this was an absolutely baller move by Zohran

Our study, using over 400 volunteer shoppers, found that Instacart offered different prices to different shoppers on 74% of the grocery items tested.

One Haitian woman “showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled,” her attorney said.

A disaster in the making for millions of care workers and the people they support: "[The Trump administration proposal] reopens a loophole allowing employers to broadly classify care workers as “companions” who can be paid less than minimum wage and are not eligible for overtime pay."

Remembering Alice Wong: Writer, Advocate, Friend Though we were in frequent conversation for a decade, I only got to meet my friend Alice Wong in person just once. And when I did, I  was a bundle of nerves—and that was before she cussed me out wi…

"Remembering Alice Wong: Writer, Advocate, Friend"

Steven W. Thrasher on Meeting and Collaborating with the Outspoken Founder of the Disability Visibility Project

published by @literaryhub.bsky.social | art by @mollycrabapple.bsky.social lithub.com/remembering-...

What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms | Eric Reinhart A dangerous faith in AI is sweeping American healthcare – with consequences for the basis of society itself

"...she used the same phrasing ChatGPT had given back to her: precise, clinical, flattened language...Her deep fears were now encased in borrowed phrases, translated into a format she thought I would recognize as legitimate medical concerns..." www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Discussion: Worker Led Movements against AI. With Tamara Kneese (Data & Society) and Sana Ahmad (Weizenbaum-Institute). November 17, 2025, 18h-20h, Online Event. Book Cover of Tamaras Book co-authored book „Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry”

⚠️ How are workers led movements against AI shaping climate action in the tech industry? Join us for a book presentation on worker led movements by Tamara Kneese (Data & Society) with Sana Ahmad (Weizenbaum-Institute). Register now: buff.ly/SnAZkHi @tamigraoh.bsky.social, @datasociety.bsky.social

Turns out a lot of Americans understand that trans people aren’t the reason shit is expensive and people are being starved

The basic takeaway from Wong and Warzel's Atlantic piece last week: big tech is financing data-centers at break neck speed by packaging securitized debt on hypothetical gains from super intelligence. Great. 🙃

Starvation is always a policy choice. Just like homelessness.

It's kind of funny the idea that a $20K robot housekeeper is a novel, dystopian loss of privacy when for millennia poor people have had *very* intimate views into the daily lives of the ultra-rich by working as maids, cooks, nannies, and butlers in their homes. Now they're just working remotely.

Graphic with a light background and the New Disabled South logo in the top right corner. Large bold text reads: ‘Apply: Food Assistance for Disabled People in the South.’ Text below explains that due to the government shutdown, people in the South will not receive their November SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) payments. New Disabled South is offering one-time payments to help people impacted by not receiving SNAP — $100 for individuals and $250 for households with two or more people. It notes that funding is first-come, first-served and that SSI or Medicaid recipients should read a disclaimer before applying. A call-to-action at the bottom reads: ‘Apply at ndsdj.org/snaphelp.’ There are small illustrations of a grocery bag and a grocery list.

Graphic with a light background and the New Disabled South logo in the top right corner. Large bold text reads: ‘Donate to Support Food Assistance for Disabled People in the South.’ The message says that New Disabled South is raising money to provide direct payments to people impacted by loss of SNAP funds, and invites donations. A black banner at the bottom reads: ‘Donate at ndsdj.org/snapdonate.’ A small illustration of a grocery bag with food items is on the left.

Graphic in Spanish with a light background and the New Disabled South logo in the top right corner. Large bold text reads: ‘Solicitar: Asistencia Alimentaria para Personas con Discapacidad en el Sur.’ The text explains that due to the government shutdown, people will not receive November SNAP payments and that New Disabled South offers one-time payments of $100 for individuals and $250 for households with two or more people, first-come, first-served. It also includes a note for SSI or Medicaid recipients. A black banner at the bottom reads: ‘Solicitar en ndsdj.org/snaphelp.’ A small illustration of a grocery bag and grocery list appears on the left.

Graphic in Spanish with a light background and the New Disabled South logo in the top right corner. Large bold text reads: ‘Dona para apoyar la asistencia alimentaria para personas con discapacidad en el Sur.’ The text explains that New Disabled South is raising funds to make direct payments to people affected by the loss of SNAP funds and provides information on how to donate. A black banner at the bottom reads: ‘Dona en ndsdj.org/snapdonate.’ A small illustration of a grocery bag with food items appears on the left.

We are offering one time payments to disabled folks in the South who will not receive their SNAP benefits this month. If you need help, please find more information and details at ndsdj.org/snaphelp.

If you’d like to donate to the fund, go to ndsdj.org/snapdonate

We take care of each other ❤️

Amazon is Building a Surveillance Empire on the Backs of Delivery Drivers. A new report from the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) exposes the dark underbelly of technology-driven workplace surveillance.” Above the text is an old school television with an antenna featuring a surveillance snapshot from a camera inside of an Amazon delivery van. The Amazon logo is upside down and is a frown. Around the television are disembodied eyes and ears.

🚨NEW🚨 from DAIR:

Today we are releasing "Driven Down", a new report on how workplace technology enables Amazon to steal wages, hide labor,
intensify poor working conditions, and evade responsibility.

Read the full report here: drive.google.com/file/d/1yBxy...

In the late 1990s a Russian/European space consortium announced plans to build and launch into orbit satellites that would reflect sunlight back onto earth. The scheme called for a chain of many satellites to be placed in sun-synchronized orbits at an altitude of 1700 kilometers, each one equipped with fold-out parabolic reflectors of paper-thin material. Once fully extended to 200 meters in diameter, each mirror satellite would have the capacity to illuminate a ten-square-mile area on earth with a brightness nearly 100 times greater than moonlight. The initial impetus for the project was to provide illumination for industrial and natural resource exploitation in remote geographical areas with long polar nights in Siberia and western Russia, allowing outdoor work to proceed round the clock.

In any case, this ultimately unworkable enterprise is one particular instance of a contemporary imaginary in which a state of permanent illumination is inseparable from the non-stop operation of global exchange and circulation. In its entrepreneurial excess, the project is a hyperbolic expression of an institutional intolerance of whatever obscures or prevents an instrumentalized and unending condition of visibility.

This story just jolted a memory of being shocked reading about a similar project in Jonathan Crary’s book “24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep” and then breathing a massive sigh of relief that it was abandoned. Guess we're in the century of reviving grotesquely hellish ideas...

Company's plan to launch 4,000 space mirrors alarms scientists Reflect Orbital says their light-on-demand idea has generated significant interest from commercial and government customers.

Nighttime, the enemy of capitalism. "The company...says its future constellation will deliver light on demand after sunset and before sunrise to paying customers on Earth, effectively extending the daytime hours."
www.space.com/space-explor...

AWS outage seemingly takes down Medicare website during open enrollment...
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Experts Warn This Real-World Effect Is The Most Unsettling Thing About 'AI Actor' Tilly This Hollywood newcomer has a long list of haters already.

“The notion of AI personhood is a marketing exercise and a legal maneuver that I don’t think we should buy into,” says D&S researcher @cariatida.bsky.social. “Tilly is not an actress any more than, like, Sid the sloth from the ‘Ice Age’ movies is an actor.” www.huffpost.com/entry/ai-act...