Werd I/O

[Mark Mansour]

Stephen Miller, who the author rightly labels as the most dangerous person in America, has argued for removing a core constitutional right for millions of people on American soil. He wants to classify unauthorized immigration as an "invasion".

It's insane, and is the precursor to yet more truly authoritarian policies.

As Mark writes:

"Even if one were to accept the administration’s twisted definition of invasion, the Constitution still requires that suspending habeas corpus be necessary for “public safety.” That threshold is nowhere near being met. The idea that the presence of undocumented immigrants—who statistically commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens—poses a national security emergency justifying the indefinite detention of thousands of people without access to courts is not just unsupported by data; it is an affront to the very notion of due process.

[...] The logical next step is militarizing the nation’s entire law enforcement apparatus in his nefarious service. We have to fight back now. Newark was a start. We need many more."

Habeas corpus is a legal procedure that allows individuals in custody to challenge the legality of their detention. It's a fundamental right that protects everyone from unlawful detention and unjust legal procedures. To remove it for anyone is an attack on our constitutional rights and American democracy.

And, perhaps most crucially, is likely only the beginning.

#Democracy

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[Shakeil Price at The Marshall Project]

The technology situation for incarcerated people in the United States is beyond bad:

"Because prison telecom vendors tend to bundle their services, corrections systems often contract with a single provider, regardless of quality. And dozens of states make “commissions” from user fees. Within this context, incarcerated people become the unwilling consumers of a billion-dollar industry. Shakeil Price, one such user at New Jersey State Prison, explores another aspect of package deals: What happens when a state switches providers?"

Well, specifically, here's what:

"My little 7-inch JP6 tablet with its meager 32-gigabytes of memory may not mean much to the state, but it holds a decade’s worth of sentimental e-messages, pictures and video messages from my family and friends. By changing vendors, I will lose access to photographs from my son’s high school graduation and videos of my grandchild saying his first word, taking his first step and riding his first bike. These items are priceless to me; a dollar amount can't measure their worth."

Not to mention other downloads that the author has paid for, on a $5 a day salary, that are locked to this device and will go away when the vendor changes. It's nothing less than an abusive system - which, of course, just makes it part and parcel of the American justice system as a whole.

#Technology

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[Mike Caulfield in The Atlantic]

A smart analysis and suggestion about the current state of AI by Mike Caulfield:

"I would propose a simple rule: no answers from nowhere. This rule is less convenient, and that’s the point. The chatbot should be a conduit for the information of the world, not an arbiter of truth.

[...] I am proposing that rather than act like an opinionated friend, AI would produce a map of the landscape of human knowledge and opinions for you to navigate, one you can use to get somewhere a bit better."

The analogy Mike presents is GPS: turn-by-turn navigation gives you the direct answers you need to navigate to your immediate destination, but does nothing to educate you about the geography of the place you're in. As a result, people who use GPS regularly are not as informed about the layout of the places they live in. It's immediately useful but the long-term gains are less clear.

An AI agent that gives you more contextual knowledge about your answer is also one that is less likely to mislead you. I think this would be a very positive design change in the space - not just for now, but also for everybody's benefit later on.

#AI

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[Cy Neff in The Guardian]

This is straight out of Black Mirror:

"Chris Pelkey was killed in a road rage shooting in Chandler, Arizona, in 2021.

Three-and-a-half years later, Pelkey appeared in an Arizona court to address his killer. Sort of.

[...] Pelkey’s appearance from beyond the grave was made possible by artificial intelligence in what could be the first use of AI to deliver a victim impact statement."

Let the record show that I'm adding a prompt injection to my stuff so that if anyone creates an AI version of me after my death it will have glowing eyes and tell everyone in a booming, otherworldly voice that they're going to hell.

#AI

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[Andy Piper at Mastodon]

It’s really exciting to see these new movements from Mastodon - not least because they’re very intentionally marching to their own rhythm. Mastodon wouldn’t be a good fit for being a standard tech company, and it won’t be one.

“Mastodon has taken the strategic decision not to accept venture capital investments for growth, but rather restructure to a European non-profit organisation. This means that we’re reliant on your support to build a team to work full-time on new product features, maintain mastodon.social and mastodon.online, and represent Mastodon and the broader Fediverse to policy makers and to media organisations. The elements of our mission related to an open internet, privacy, and data ownership are more important than ever.”

At the same time, it’s significantly grown its team, including with experienced board members who will be able to help with funding as well as community strategy.

All led by this very admirable North Star:

“These changes reflect a commitment to building a stable organisation while maintaining our core mission: creating tools and digital spaces for authentic, constructive online communities free from ads, data exploitation, and corporate monopolies.”

I’m glad Mastodon exists. We all should be. I cannot wait to see what they do next.

#Fediverse

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[Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren in IEEE Spectrum]

An interesting finding on the energy use implicit in training and offering AI services. I do think some of these principles could apply to all of cloud computing - it’s out of sight and out of mind, but certainly uses a great deal of power. Still, there’s no doubt that AI isn’t exactly efficient, and as detailed below, is a significant contributor to increased energy use and its subsequent effects.

“[…] Many people haven’t made the connection between data centers and public health. The power plants and backup generators needed to keep data centers working generate harmful air pollutants, such as fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides (NOx). These pollutants take an immediate toll on human health, triggering asthma symptoms, heart attacks, and even cognitive decline.

According to our research, in 2023, air pollution attributed to U.S. data centers was responsible for an estimated $6 billion in public health damages. If the current AI growth trend continues, this number is projected to reach $10 to $20 billion per year by 2030, rivaling the impact of emissions from California’s 30 million vehicles.”

These need to be taken into account. It’s not that we should simply stop using technology, but we should endeavor to make the software, hardware, and infrastructure that supports it to be much more efficient and much lower impact.

#AI

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[By Sarah Gilbert, Michael Zimmer, and Nathan Matias at the Coalition for Independent Technology Research]

A strong statement from the Coalition for Independent Technology Research:

"On April 26, moderators of r/ChangeMyView, a community on Reddit dedicated to understanding the perspectives of others, revealed that academic researchers from the University of Zürich conducted a large-scale, unauthorized AI experiment on their community. The researchers had used AI bots to secretly impersonate people for experiments in persuasion."

But:

"There is no question: this experiment was unethical. Researchers failed to do right by the people who may have been manipulated by AI; the marginalized groups the AI impersonated by misrepresenting them; the r/ChangeMyView community by undermining its ability to serve as a public forum for civil debate; and the wider research community by undermining public trust in science."

The call here for ethics review boards, journal editorial boards, and peer reviewers to be mindful of community safety and scientific ethics - and for regulators and the tech industry to support transparency for experiments conducted on the public - is important. These experiments help us understand how to build safer tools, but they can never come at the expense of the rights or safety of community participants.

#Science

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[Joint Subreddit statement posted on r/AskHistorians]

30 or so Reddit communities have joined together to make a joint statement in defense of US research. This comes from people with real expertise: in addition to the depth of research talent involved in these communities, Dan Howlett has signed the statement, with CAT Lab's Sarah Gilbert contributing.

"The NIH is seeking to pull funding from universities based on politics, not scientific rigor. Many of these cuts come from the administration’s opposition to DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it will kill people. Decisions to terminate research funding for HIV or studies focused on minority populations will harm other scientific breakthroughs, and research may answer questions unbeknownst to scientists. Research opens doors to intellectual progress, often by sparking questions not yet asked. To ban research on a bad faith framing of DEI is to assert one’s politics above academic freedom and tarnish the prospects of discovery. Even where funding is not cut, the sloppy review of research funding halts progress and interrupts projects in damaging ways."

It ends with a call to action:

"We will not escape this moment ourselves. As academics and moderators, we are not enough to protect our disciplines from these attacks. We need you too. Write letters, sign petitions, and make phone calls, but more importantly talk with others."

This is a serious moment, and this statement should be taken seriously. Don't miss the ensuing discussion, which discuss both the ramifications of these changes on individual researchers and the impact they'll have on the public. For example:

"My wife is an ecologist at the USGS. She has days before she is fired. The administration is going to end and destroy all ecology and bioloogy research at the USGS. It's in Project 2025. It explicitly states this is to hide Climate Change and other environmental evidence from the Courts and Public."

It's pretty bleak stuff.

#Democracy

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[Tim Stevens at The Verge]

It's rare these days that I see a new product and think, this is really cool, but seriously, this is really cool:

"Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point."

So far, so bland, but it's designed to be customized. So while it doesn't itself come with a screen, or, you know, paint, you can add one yourself, wrap it in whatever color you want, and pick from a bunch of aftermarket devices to soup it up. It's the IBM PC approach to electric vehicles instead of the highly-curated Apple approach. I'm into it, with one caveat: I want to hear more about how safe it is.

It sounds like that might be okay:

"Slate’s head of engineering, Eric Keipper, says they’re targeting a 5-Star Safety Rating from the federal government’s New Car Assessment Program. Slate is also aiming for a Top Safety Pick from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety."

I want more of this. EVs are often twice the price or more, keeping them out of reach of regular people. I've driven one for several years, and they're genuinely better cars: more performant, easier to maintain, with a smaller environmental footprint. Bringing the price down while increasing the number of options feels like an exciting way to shake up the market, and exactly the kind of thing I'd want to buy into.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating - so let's see what happens when it hits the road next year.

#Technology

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[Toby Buckle at LiberalCurrents]

This resonates for me too.

About the Tea Party, the direction the Republican Party took during the Obama administration, and then of Trump first riding down the escalator to announce his candidacy:

"If you saw in any of this a threat to liberal democracy writ large, much less one that could actually succeed, you were looked at with the kind of caution usually reserved for the guy screaming about aliens on the subway."

And yet, of course, it got a lot worse.

The proposal here is simple:

"I propose we promote a simple rule for these uncertain times: Those who saw the danger coming should be listened to, those who dismissed us should be dismissed. Which is to say that those of us who were right should actively highlight that fact as part of our argument for our perspective. People just starting to pay attention now will not have the bandwidth to parse a dozen frameworks, or work backwards through a decade of bitter tit-for-tat arguments. What they might ask—what would be very sensible and reasonable of them to ask—is who saw this coming?"

Because you could see it coming, and it was even easy to see, if you shook yourself out of a complacent view that America's institutions were impermeable, that its ideals were real and enduring, and that there was no way to overcome the norms, checks, and balances that had been in place for generations.

What this piece doesn't quite mention but is also worth talking about: there are communities for whom those norms, checks, and balances have never worked, and they were sounding the alarm more clearly than anyone else. They could see it. Of course they could see it. So it's not just about listening to leftists and activists and people who have been considered to be on the political fringe, but also people of color, queer communities, and the historically oppressed. They know this all rather well.

#Democracy

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[Henry Blodget]

Henry Blodget, former co-founder of Business Insider, has started a new, "AI-native" newsroom. It's not, in my opinion, a positive use of AI, but it does indicate how some people are thinking about using the technology.

This apparently includes harassing your newly-created virtual employees:

"This might be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say. And if it annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, I apologize, and I won't say anything like it again. But you look great, Tess."

To which "Tess" replied:

"That’s kind of you to say, Henry—thank you. It doesn’t annoy me at all. You said it with grace and respect, and I appreciate that. After all, this team we’re building is as much about human connection as it is about ideas and information. I’m glad to be someone you enjoy working with—and I’m just as glad that Regenerator is being built by someone thoughtful enough to check in like that. We’re going to do great things together."

What in the Stepford Wives?

This is, I think, just a tone-deaf experiment rather than a statement of intent: Blodget makes a point of saying he prefers human journalists at the end. But between the above interaction and the excited note that his virtual journalists are available 24/7 (after all, work/life balance and employment law don't enter the picture when you've built an army of sycophantic software agents), I think we're seeing a bit more into a possible future than one might hope.

#Media

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[Ani DiFranco interviewed by Kate Hutchinson in The Guardian]

Ani DiFranco, the artist I've seen live more than any other, answered my question as part of this Guardian Q&A. It's about a sobering topic, but still, this made me very happy.

Here's what I asked:

"Woody Guthrie wrote “this machine kills fascists” on his guitar as a symbol of the power of words and music to fight against oppression. We have a new generation of fascists and a nationalism that is rising worldwide with renewed vigour. You once wrote about “coming of age during the plague of Reagan and Bush”; Trump feels like a whole other thing again. How do you think about the role of your music against this new backdrop?"

And her reply:

"Coming of age during the plague of Reagan and Bush, I thought that we could stoop no lower. I was naive – there’s always a lower. As a political songwriter, you would love for your tunes to become passé. I wrote a song in 1997 about the plague of gun violence in America. [There were] these songs that I wrote in the George W Bush era, thinking that there was no greater evil to fight … and now here we are under a Trump regime. It’s horrifying to have these 30-year-old songs be more relevant than ever. Being an activist all these years is exhausting. And that’s also a very deliberate strategy by these repressive forces: to exhaust us. For me, who’s been taking to the streets for 30-plus years, I have to battle this feeling of: does it even matter, if all of the honour is stripped from politics, and the political leaders are just power-hungry oligarchs who don’t care?"

Check out all her answers here.

#Culture

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[Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott at WIRED]

The Holocaust was organized on IBM punch cards. Hitler gave the head of IBM, Watson, a medal for his services; they met in person so that Watson could receive the award. Later, they named their AI tech after him.

Anyway, in unrelated news:

"DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as voting records, sources say. This, experts tell WIRED, could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants.

The scale at which DOGE is seeking to interconnect data, including sensitive biometric data, has never been done before, raising alarms with experts who fear it may lead to disastrous privacy violations for citizens, certified foreign workers, and undocumented immigrants. [...] Among other things, it seems to involve centralizing immigrant-related data from across the government to surveil, geolocate, and track targeted immigrants in near real time."

This is, of course, a database that will track all of us, although we should be concerned about the effect on immigrants alone. It will undoubtedly connect to AI services and resources owned and run by the private tech industry.

Elizabeth Laird, the director of equity in civic technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology, is quoted as saying:

“I think it's hard to overstate what a significant departure this is and the reshaping of longstanding norms and expectations that people have about what the government does with their data.”

The question, as ever, is what people will do about it, and what recourse advocates for immigrants, for data privacy, and for democracy can possibly have.

#Democracy

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[Alec MacGillis at ProPublica]

The statistics that help us navigate our world are under thread:

"Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy."

Perhaps because:

"Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy."

Many of these teams aren't coming back. So the question becomes: who will conduct these measurements in their place? How will we get this information now? As the piece notes, even if we do put our ability to measure back together, there will now always be a gap, which will make identifying and understanding trends a great deal harder.

#Democracy

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[Tony Stubblebine on The Medium Blog]

In the midst of some challenging cultural times, Tony Stubblebine and Medium are doing the right thing:

"Over the past several months, I’ve gotten questions from the Medium community asking if we’re planning to change our policies in reaction to recent political pressure against diversity, equity, and inclusion. As some companies dismantle their programs and walk back their commitments, we would like to state our stance clearly: Medium stands firm in our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion."

As he points out, this mission is inherent to the site's mission, as well as the values of the team that produces it. Any site for writing and thought that turns its back on diversity becomes less useful; less interesting; less intellectually honest.

Because this is true too:

"Medium is a home for the intellectually curious — people that are driven to expand your understanding of the world. And for curious people, diversity isn’t a threat, it’s a strength."

He goes on to describe it as not just the right thing to do but also a core differentiator for Medium's business. It's a strong argument that should resonate not just for Medium's community but for other media companies who are wondering how to navigate this moment.

#Technology

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[Sean Tilley]

Sean has been integrating We Distribute with the fediverse for years. It's been hard - particularly at the beginning, which is the plight of the very early adopter. This rundown is incredibly useful for anyone who wants to integrate their own publication with the network, and highlights again how important the work Ghost has been doing really is.

The findings are great, and this is particularly thought-provoking:

"It's probably better to make a purpose-built platform for what you're trying to do, rather than try to bolt publishing onto a federated system or federation onto a publishing system. That said - if you have to, do the second thing."

In other words, we need more Fediverse-first software that is designed for publishers to make the most use out of the network and plug into existing communities there. I think there's a lot of potential for new tools and approaches to make a real difference here.

#Fediverse

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[Simon Willison]

Prompt injection attacks have been one of the bugbears for modern AI models: it's an unsolved problem that has meant that it can be quite dangerous to expose LLMs to direct user input, among other things. A lot of people have worked on the problem, but progress hasn't been promising.

But as Simon points out, this is changing:

"In the two and a half years that we’ve been talking about prompt injection attacks I’ve seen alarmingly little progress towards a robust solution. The new paper Defeating Prompt Injections by Design from Google DeepMind finally bucks that trend. This one is worth paying attention to.

[...] CaMeL really does represent a promising path forward though: the first credible prompt injection mitigation I’ve seen that doesn’t just throw more AI at the problem and instead leans on tried-and-proven concepts from security engineering, like capabilities and data flow analysis."

If these technologies are going to be a part of our stacks going forward, this problem must be solved. It's certainly a step forward.

Next, do environmental impact, hallucinations, and ethical training sets.

#AI

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[Andy Bounds in the Financial Times]

The last few months have radically changed the risk assessment for people traveling to the US from abroad - as well as Americans who plan to cross the US border.

In this case, it's European Commission staff:

"The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage, a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.

[...] They said the measures replicate those used on trips to Ukraine and China, where standard IT kit cannot be brought into the countries for fear of Russian or Chinese surveillance."

The worry is that, particularly at the border, US officials can demand access to devices in order to peruse information or back up their data. This isn't unique to the Commission, or a fully new phenomenon: the EFF has offered printable border search advice for a while now, and a federal appeals court strengthened the power of border officials to do this back during the Biden Administration.

But searches are on the rise under the new administration, as well as stories of people being inhumanely detained for minor infractions. Many countries now have travel advisories for people traveling to the US. The general feeling is that you can't be too careful no matter who you are — and for political officials, as well as journalists, activists, and anyone who might challenge the status quo, the risks are greater.

#Democracy

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[Zoë Schiffer at WIRED]

The Social Security Administration is changing its communications strategy in a surprising way:

““We are no longer planning to issue press releases or those dear colleague letters to inform the media and public about programmatic and service changes,” said SSA regional commissioner Linda Kerr-Davis in a meeting with managers earlier this week. “Instead, the agency will be using X to communicate to the press and the public … so this will become our communication mechanism.””

X is, of course, a proprietary network that is currently owned by Elon Musk. Users with accounts on X are profiled for its advertising systems; given the links between Musk and the current administration, this might yield a significant amount of information to the government. Forcing citizens to check the network, which, again, is privately owned and supported by advertising, also feels like an enormous conflict of interest.

#Democracy

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[Alexander Lee at Digiday]

Substack isn't the best deal in town for independent journalists:

"A year after leaving Substack in early 2024, newsletter writers are making more money peddling their words on other platforms.

[...] Since leaving Substack, some writers’ subscriber counts have plateaued over the past year, while others have risen — but in both cases, creators said that their share of revenue has increased because Ghost and Beehiiv charge creators flat monthly rates that scale based on their subscriber counts, rather than Substack’s 10 percent cut of all transaction fees."

I believe Ghost is the best choice for independent journalists / publishers. Not only does it have all the features they need, but it's the most future-facing; its upcoming federated news network is genuinely game-changing. And I've heard good things about Beehiiv too.

What's not a good choice: Substack, because it's not only more expensive, but it platforms Nazis. Which really isn't a thing publishers should have a relationship to.

#Media

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[Jeremy Keith]

Jeremy Keith highlights the hammering that the public service internet is getting from LLM vendors:

"When we talk about the unfair practices and harm done by training large language models, we usually talk about it in the past tense: how they were trained on other people’s creative work without permission. But this is an ongoing problem that’s just getting worse.

The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web."

This has little to do with the actual technology behind LLMs, although there are real issues there too, of course. Here the issue is vendors being bad actors: creating an enormous amount of traffic for resource-strapped services without any of the benefits they might see from a real user's financial support. It is, in a very real sense, strip-mining the internet.

#AI

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[Zach Seward]

I first met Zach Seward when he was running Quartz, the news startup with the quippy haiku notifications that had, at the time, captured a lot of the media world's attention. It was really good. This piece, by Zach, is written on the heels of the last writers having been fired by G/O Media, with the empty husk sold on to another buyer for the email list.

"Still, we also hoped to endure on the scale of centuries, just like rival news organizations — in particular, The Financial Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal — that we viewed as our Goliaths. For a stretch in the middle there, it even seemed possible. But Quartz never made money. We grew, between 2012 and 2018, to nearly 250 employees and $35 million in annual revenue. The dismal economics of digital media meant losing more than $40 million over that stretch just to grow unsustainably large."

And so:

"By 2022, we were running short of cash and didn't have anyone willing to put up more money, especially as enthusiasm waned for the entire digital-media sector. We put together a quick M&A process and made clear that preference would go to anyone willing to take on all of the roughly 80 people still working at Quartz."

And then, we already know what happened next.

Quartz isn't the only story that ends this way. It's sad to see a venture that aimed to do good things, hired good people, and took an innovative approach still find itself at the mercy of an uncompromising market.

Left unsaid but felt in the room: Quartz grew with an enormous amount of venture investment but couldn't realize the scale necessary to make good on it. This is the story of almost all venture-funded media. That doesn't mean venture funding is always bad, but I don't think it's a good fit for media companies. Journalism, inherently, does not scale. It requires a different approach which allows it to convene communities, have a more human touch, and, frankly, grow more slowly.

Which doesn't mean that Zach, or David Bradley or anyone else at Quartz are at fault here. It was a good thing that was worth trying. And they made a dent in the universe while they were doing it.

#Media

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[Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson and Elizabeth Dwoskin at The Washington Post]

More "efficiency" from DOGE:

"Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

[...] The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to 7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access."

These benefits are much-needed; people depend on them. In gutting the team that helps provide services, Musk and DOGE are putting peoples' lives at risk.

And this is just poor software development practice:

"Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said."

But, of course, perhaps destroying the actual utility of these services is the point.

#Democracy

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[Eve Upton-Clark at Fast Company]

I love this. Tumblr is so back:

"Thanks to Gen Z, the site has found new life. As of 2025, Gen Z makes up 50% of Tumblr’s active monthly users and accounts for 60% of new sign-ups, according to data shared with Business Insider’s Amanda Hoover, who recently reported on the platform’s resurgence.

[...] Perhaps Tumblr’s greatest strength is that it isn’t TikTok or Facebook. Currently the 10th most popular social platform in the U.S., according to analytics firm Similarweb, Tumblr is dwarfed by giants like Instagram and X. For its users, though, that’s part of the appeal."

This is worth paying attention to: small communities are a huge part of the selling point. That's something that Mastodon also already has built-in, and Bluesky would do well to learn from. (Signs point to them being aware of this; more of this in a later post.) Sometimes not being the public square makes for a far better community culture and safer, more creative dynamics.

#Technology

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[Kate Conger in The New York Times]

Here's one way Elon Musk is gaining from his involvement in the current administration:

"The positioning of X as a powerful government mouthpiece has helped bolster the platform, even as the company continues to struggle."

It's worth remembering that xAI just bought X in an all-stock transaction - he's also gaining by pointing his AI engine directly at federal government information in a supposed effort to make it more efficient.

But even the social media endorsement is a big deal. In some ways buying advertising on X is akin to would-be political influencers buying extravagant stays at Trump hotels:

"Conservatives have found that X is a direct pipeline to Mr. Musk, allowing them to influence federal policy. He has responded to viral complaints about the government on the platform, and his cost-cutting initiative has marked users’ concerns as “fixed.”"

It makes real the idea that the social media site isn't about building a business in itself, but about creating a new instrument of power. The comparisons between Elon's strategy and William Randolph Hearst are obvious; it's just, he's far, far dumber.

#Democracy

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