Upcoming Event: 2026 Wiegand Memorial Foundation Lecture Title: Where Artificial Intelligence and Fiction Meet Speaker: Teresa Heffernan When & Where: Monday, February 23, 2026 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm, Campbell Conference Facility, University of Toronto M…

www.socialrobotfutures.com/2026/01/10/u...

The Long Con Comes To An End The Trump Administration Takes Off The Mask (Again)

as Phillips O'Brien also points out, this plan has been in negotiation for a long time, probably since Trump took office.

open.substack.com/pub/phillips...

www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

www.reuters.com/business/med...

Counterrevolution w/ Melinda Cooper Featuring Melinda Cooper on Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. Neoliberalism remade the American economy into an engine for the appreciation of assets stretching from the...

thedigradio.com/podcast/coun...

Trans health care "skeptics" lost a key ally—now they're having a meltdown The godfather of evidence-based medicine on rejecting anti-trans "misuse" of his work.

Trans health care "skeptics" lost a key ally—now they're having a meltdown www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion

The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion - The New York Times

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/t...

The conditions that have led to what’s happening in the US today exist in democracies around the world.
They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.

America’s Braudelian Autumn | Benjamin Braun & Cédric Durand Factions of capital in the second Trump administration

We wrote about the US ruling class taking the reins to manage its own decline. What do the Trumpist factions of capital want? Can that be squared with the interests of the MAGA base? Capable state managers could potentially thread the needle, but that's all gone. With @cedricdurand.bsky.social.

"Encouraging technology dependence and building a global panopticon fits with the goals and authoritarian dreams of billionaire technocrats who are abandoning democracy while funding their dystopic visions with tax dollars."

Angry judge roasts Biglaw lawyers for their "collective debacle" filing a brief where "~9 of the 27 legal citations in the 10-page brief were incorrect in some way" due to Generative AI

digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcont...

Lawyers will pay $31k for their sloppiness 🤖😵

If you want to see how upset the “New Right” is about the term “Woke Right,” see this lengthy post by the founder of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organizes NatCon. It’s wild. These screenshots are just the first part of the post. The post is looooong. 2/ x.com/yhazony/stat...

“Historical inevitability” in the techbro sense:

Qc125 Canada | Les 343 circonscriptions

The attacks on 338 continue today, this time in Eastern Canada :-(

Use the French version of the site, which is up and running: qc125.com/canada/distr...

Gore: Adorno was right

2/4. The entire practice of the Holocaust of the Jews involved zones of statelessness. It is easier to move people away from law than it is to remove law from people. Almost all of the killing took place in artificially created stateless zones.

NEOLIBERALISM IS DEAD. SAY HELLO TO TECHLORDISM - Yanis Varoufakis After 1971, neoliberalism was an ideology essential in legitimising the emancipation of financial capital from the regulatory shackles of the New Deal and the post-war Bretton Woods system. Today, a n...

NEOLIBERALISM IS DEAD. SAY HELLO TO TECHLORDISM www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/04/15/n...

The big idea: will sci-fi end up destroying the world? Skewed interpretations of classic works are feeding the dark visions of tech moguls, from Musk to Thiel

I wrote a piece for the Guardian's "big ideas" series on how techbros' failure to understand sci-fi novels is causing immense harm.

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

1517 co-founder Michael Gibson is a former Thiel Foundation VP & Thiel Capital principal who now advises Pronomos Capital (backed by Thiel & Marc Andreessen). During Thiel’s October “Hereticon” event, Gibson co-led a talk titled “Manifest Destiny:Greenland, Cuba, & the New American Colony.” 1/

A fascinating issue around Yarvin and Musk is how figures feted as visionaries by the techbro Right don't seem to have considered the possibility that gunmen and covert ops types needed to enforce their vision might turn around and seize power from intellectuals and oligarchs like Yarvin and Musk

"The U.S. government is asking Canadian grant recipients questions that threaten their academic independence... including whether their work is connected to DEI, is an “environmental justice” project or whether it protects women from “gender ideology.” Globe and Mail March 20, 2025

U.S. government is asking Canadian researchers whether their work deals with DEI, climate, gender Questions to grant recipients infringe on academic independence, Canadian faculty group says

www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/8a29018...

1/ Peter Thiel-who backs the "network state" movement & the construction of charter cities—wrote a preface for "The Sovereign Individual," a book that states in part as follows:

They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed How a group of Silicon Valley math prodigies, AI researchers and internet burnouts descended into an alleged violent cult

www.theguardian.com/global/ng-in...

So much of Musk's persona comes down to his fundamentally Fascist misunderstanding of Asimov's New Deal progressive vision of the future

As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity.

TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄

"In this paper, we conclude that the estimate of aerosol climate forcing () by the United Nation’s scientific advisory body (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) is an underestimate, and thus the Faustian bargain is worse than expected." Hansen et al 2025

"Climate sensitivity is a measure of the effect of rising levels of greenhouse gases on Earth’s temperature. It is usually defined as the eventual increase of global average temperature after a doubling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial levels." Hansen et al 2025