wrote about this and more reflections on this alternate internet of Chinese apps & design

news.spencer.place/p/the-chines...

is Claude conscious? is the Pentagon feminist? is mastercard a queer ally? is this TV show my friend?

happy birthday to women

Iran Protest Death Toll Could Top 30,000: Local Officials According to two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health who spoke with TIME.

"As many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone, two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health told TIME—indicating a dramatic surge in the death toll."

time.com/7357635/more...

I see we've reached the "Coca Cola considering water a competitor" stage of things in the valley - honestly this looks like about as garden variety an example of silly adherence to an overdrawn mission as you'll see

an attempt to articulate something hopeful in the face of a never-ending stream of horror. it felt like good time to reflect on design as politics, as someone who was born in the US and now works for the NHS.
mikegallagher.org/posts/design...

Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro! You’ll have noticed how previously normal people start acting like addicts to their favourite generative AI and shouting at you like you’re trying to take their cocaine away. Matthias D…

Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro!

pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/g... - text
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWng... - video

Totally agree. Design carries the notion of project, so in a sense designers literally project an ideal onto the current world. To form such ideal without engaging in politics, or without recognizing how politics shape one's practice is frankly dangerous

“What we put into the world, as action or artefact, is how the world is made.

Design is a way of engaging with the greater conversation of how to live together on a planet with limited resources.

Design is thus politics.”

@mikegallagher.bsky.social

this should be the moment for you all to stop fetishizing a literal company. working at big tech is cringe af now. go read some marx

this is why so many "designers", while claiming to be progressive, has converted to become the guard dogs of fascism (national design studio, palantir product design team, openai design team, etc). if these people lived under 1930's germany, they'd be eagerly designing concentration camps

defending them just because they make eye candies and their products feel smooth and intuitive... you guys are in love with their metaphors, illusions and images. you guys are completely consumed by the spectacle they've prepared for you

a company that has zero problem with child labor, that pushes people to abandon iphones every single year for a new one, that prefers pointless visual upgrades over making their products more sustainable and convivial, should have zero problem with humanwashing tactics and general apathy

they might be a good example for the business world, but not for the design world. so dont be surprised at their lack of care for human dignity, dont be surprised at tim cook bootlicking the sadist maga movement who takes pleasure in gunning down your neighbors

while tim cook is riding trump in the white house, maybe it's time to deconstruct the myth that apple is a good example for the design world: their products are by default ecocidal, their aesthetics do not age well at all, their creative choices are rooted in the racist philosophy of modernism.

i think the "immigration turns high trust societies into low trust societies" people were already on really shaky ideological ground but now they're watching neighbors helping one another and calling them paid antifa agitators

No way we let Sweden get over the line on this ahead of Ireland.

Tell your friends. This isn’t just any old petition, this mechanism has EU clout.

Generative AI is not just the instrument and aesthetics of fascism, but it has permanently sewn itself to fascism in a fucked up human centipede of scammers and grifters and guys who've long ago forgotten how to think.

this is not the first fight.

this will not be the last fight.

we do this in memory of those who came before us and fought too.

we do this for love of those who will come after us.

there is good in this world and it is worth fighting for.

BlueSky won’t let me share the video, but you can see one of the ICE agents rip a gun out of this man’s waistband *before* the shooting starts.

From this angle, it’s hard to see how this was anything but an execution, unless simply carrying a gun is now illegal in America.

If you work for ice please understand that your kids will laugh at a character based on you dying in an action movie before the end of the decade. They’ll be in movies for really little kids. Like Phineas and Ferb shit. There will be an action figure of you with a detachable head

a panoramic of the destruction of tokyo from the prologue to Akira, made using overlapping letters and punctuation from a typewriter a black spherical explosion, wiping out a city, at a scale where the largest buildings look minuscule

screenshot of an ai shill who frequently gets around 500-1k likes for promotional posts of no interesting value

what is going on at bsky point app, 1k likes for ai slop damn

"hey gemini where should i put this plant?"
"in the sunlight"
"wow so helpful!"

every AI ad is like

“hey gemini, what would i have for lunch?”

and then the phone is like

“sandwich”

and the guy is like

“wow”

Wrote about digitally cloning your loved ones, immortality, death cults, and Silicon Valley. Plus: an old essay on Russian Cosmism and its perversion by today’s accelerationists.

thetechbubble.substack.com/p/silicon-va...

Thankful for all my fellow luddites today. Hammers up

🤖🔨❤️

A bit of a vulnerable post by me but we need your help to get us through what has been a more difficult period than 2020.

It would be really appreciated if you could read and share in your networks too 💛

bell.bz/its-been-a-v...