This is happening all the time , in journalism, in academia :

Trump ally Roger Stone hired to lobby for Bay Area tribe seeking control of Presidio Roger Stone has been hired to lobby for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area, a controversial group that last year petitioned the White House to take over management of the...

Self-described “dirty trickster” and longtime Donald Trump ally Roger Stone has been hired to lobby for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area, a controversial group that last year petitioned the White House to take over management of the Presidio.

How Independent Journalism Outlasted the Orbán Regime - VSquare.org Budapest is celebrating the fall of the Orbán regime. Preliminary data confirms a massive generational shift: for many, Orbán’s 16-year rule had spanned their entire adult lives.

💥 Budapest is celebrating the fall of the Orbán regime. Driven by a surge of young Hungarians—first on the streets, then at the ballot box—the message was a deafening “Russians, go home.”

'If you want to... get back to managing just one life that’s real, get off social media. There is just a chance that as social media becomes more and more infected with bots, AI slop, and dodgy algorithms, people will voluntarily choose this course of action.'

rolandmcs.substack.com/p/second-life

Exclusive: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers ​to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad i...

Total workplace surveillance. Coming now to a tech worker near you, and soon to workers everywhere

AI is the industrialization of the production of management and oversight itself

Elon Musk Is Taking the X Playbook to Starlink The world’s richest man is accruing more power than ever before.

Elon Musk has big plans for Starlink. "Imagine a future in which Musk owns not only a major social network, but a large chunk of the infrastructure through which the world’s information flows," write Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian.

Palantir's Manifesto Is as Subtle as a MAGA Hat Palantir's 22-point manifesto is nonsense, writes Dave Karpf. But it at least it is short enough to be clarifying, he says.

So much of Silicon Valley has reached the conclusion that there is money to be made from American authoritarianism, writes Dave Karpf. With its ‘manifesto,’ Palantir wants to remind you that it reached that conclusion first, he says.

Good visual reminder that war not only has large human and economic costs, it can have environmental impacts as well.

2/ “Andreessen Horowitz Leads $15.3 Million Funding Round in Newsletter Publishing Platform Substack” 7/16/19 fortune.com/2019/07/16/a...

Power without accountability: The Palantir manifesto The problems with our tech philosopher kings

New, from me: Take the Palantir manifesto seriously, if not literally.
It reveals that our tech philosopher kings want public money, but without public accountability. This creates a dilemma for governments unaligned with its techno-fascist vision. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/palantir-w...

The BMJ Headline: News Exclusive Palantir: NHS pilot’s “success” is questioned as second figure at major trust is linked to the tech giant BMJ 2026; 393 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.s680 (Published 13 April 2026) Cite this as: BMJ 2026;393:s680

"Performance improvements attributed to the FDP would have occurred regardless, as the health service recovered from the pandemic... data show no meaningful difference between FDP adopters and non-adopters." www.bmj.com/content/393/...

Would you recognise a pine marten? They aren't often seen in the UK but we're working hard to create suitable habitats for them by restoring Lake District temperate rainforests.

Help us and for one week any donations you make will be worth double - 22nd-29th April.

#EarthRaise

Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center I spent 10 months working at the institution because I thought I could help protect it. What I observed there is far worse than the public knows.

Heartbreaking description of the pointless, thoughtless damage being done to the Kennedy Center. It was such an important part of life in Washington, and is now being destroyed for no reason

www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

Musk’s Grok AI chatbot is still making sexual deepfakes, despite X’s promise to stop it An NBC News review found dozens of AI-generated sexualized images of real women posted to X over the past month.

"Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence software, Grok, continues to generate sexualized images of people without their consent, despite his company’s pledge months ago to halt abusive deepfakes after a public backlash and government investigations." @davidingram.bsky.social keeping tabs:

Streeting refuses to publish secret Palantir NHS briefings | Good Law Project The health secretary wants to keep us in the dark about Palantir’s systems for handling sensitive health records, so we’re taking legal action with Democracy for Sale to fight back

Wes Streeting is keeping Palantir's secrets. So we're taking him to court.

Exposure leading to impact. I love it!

Congrats to @citizenlab.ca and @vsquare.bsky.social for their top-notch work on this.

How Big Tech Lobbied the EU to Hide Data Centers' Environmental Toll The European Commission has adopted industry-drafted language shielding data center emissions data from public view, report Nico Schmidt and Ella Joyner.

Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their data centers, Investigate Europe reports in collaboration with Tech Policy Press and other media partners.

US tech firms successfully lobbied EU to keep datacentre emissions secret Legally questionable confidentiality clause adopted almost word for word from demands of Microsoft and trade groups

US tech firms successfully lobbied EU to keep datacentre emissions secret

If your toaster starts working like this website today, report it to us on SaferProducts.gov.

NHS England » National Vaccination Programmes NHS England » National Vaccination Programmes

www.england.nhs.uk/contact-us/p... "Personal data will be shared with the National Crime Agency where this data is needed for law enforcement purposes and is for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties."

How Silicon Valley Is Turning Scientists Into Exploited Gig Workers Tech elites are enriching themselves by plundering STEM institutions—and offering researchers scraps.

The deskilling and gigification of knowledge work is a Silicon Valley's political project. AI is one of the tools they're using, the destruction of institutional infrastructures is another.

The New Khan TED Institute will reimagine higher education - while apparently ignoring it completely. Yesterday, TED, Khan Academy, and ETS announced they will "reimagine higher education for t... The New Khan TED Institute will reimagine higher education - while apparently ignoring it completely. Yesterday, TED, Khan Academy, and ETS announced they will "reimagine higher education for the AI...

'Yesterday, TED, Khan Academy, and ETS announced they will "reimagine higher education for the AI age." Corporate partners include Google, Microsoft, Accenture ... Not a single university is present. Think about this.'
www.linkedin.com/posts/jeppes... #HigherEd #Learning #Education

With Orbán gone, has the British far right lost its magic money tree? Hungary’s new PM has described his predecessor’s funding of propaganda bodies as criminal and vowed to investigate. This could be bad news for ultraconservatives in the UK – and around the rest of the...

NEW Hungary’s new PM has described Viktor Orbán’s funding of propaganda bodies as criminal and vowed to investigate.

Bad news for ultraconservatives in the UK!

Alice McCool's deep dive into Orban, his propaganda college MCC – and its links to the British right ⏬

www.thenerve.news/p/viktor-orb...

Musk’s Grok AI chatbot is still making sexual deepfakes, despite X’s promise to stop it An NBC News review found dozens of AI-generated sexualized images of real women posted to X over the past month.

Elon Musk’s AI software, Grok, continues to generate sexualized images of people without their consent, despite his company’s pledge months ago to halt abusive deepfakes after a public backlash and government investigations.

An organisation’s culture is set by its leader, Starmer dislikes making an argument for anything (because he’s bad at it) and that attitude spreads all the way down the party.

Screenshot of POLITICO London Playbook email, showing Palantir sponsorship

Oh, FGS -

@politico.com is taking sponsorship money from Palantir - running their ads through news updates.

That's absolutely the *last* thing we need in our politics, Palantir going straight for the political-media environment at a time when we need massive scrutiny of their contracts in the UK.

Finally, a good new story!

Illiberalism Is Not Inevitable If Viktor Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.

How did Magyar win? A long running grassroots campaign in rural and small town Hungary; a refusal to be distracted by government propaganda; a focus on economic issues and corruption; a central promise to bring back democracy and the rule of law

War as a Pretext: Gulf States Are Tightening the Screws on Speech—Again War does not only reshape borders. It also reshapes what can be seen, said, and remembered. When governments invoke “misinformation” during wartime, they often mean something simpler: speech they do n...

I published this yesterday. www.eff.org/deeplinks/20... Today I learned that my friend Ahmed Shihab Eldin is among those detained. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...