David Fenton

The “schools” our artificial kids — our AIs — attend are the tech companies. The teachers are the machine learning engineers. For a human kid, you can meet a teacher, read a curriculum, run for the school board.

But for the hundred AIs on your phone learning from you every day, there is no teacher to meet, no curriculum to read, and no board to run for. Your artificial children are being raised without your input, and the tech bros are choosing the lessons.

Plastic recycling was never a real idea. It was a lie, a strategy to avoid regulation, which is a different thing entirely, and Richard Wiles has Big Oil's own memos saying so. Same PR BS as the climate lying. And this one ends up inside all of us.

Agitation Nation's new episode features Richard Wiles from the @climateintegrity.org, the activist prying these documents out of the companies and putting them in front of juries.

Plastic recycling was never a real idea. It was a lie, a strategy to avoid regulation, which is a different thing entirely, and Richard Wiles has Big Oil's own memos saying so. Same PR BS as the climate lying. And this one ends up inside all of us.

It is not one plant and it is not one billionaire. There are thousands of these AI data centers going up across the United States, most of them with their own dedicated power supply, and a lot of that supply is polluting methane gas, which they wanna convince us is "clean natural gas".

We could be building every one of these centers on wind and solar and batteries and pulling the grid forward. That should be the law. Instead, we are handing the whole boom to the methane industry, the most potent greenhouse gas there is.

Plastic recycling was never a real idea. It was a lie, a strategy to avoid regulation, which is a different thing entirely, and Richard Wiles has Big Oil's own memos saying so. Same PR BS as the climate lying. And this one ends up inside all of us.

Agitation Nation's new episode features Richard Wiles from the @climateintegrity.org, the activist prying these documents out of the companies and putting them in front of juries.

Plastic recycling was never a real idea. It was a lie, a strategy to avoid regulation, which is a different thing entirely, and Richard Wiles has Big Oil's own memos saying so. Same PR BS as the climate lying. And this one ends up inside all of us.

Forty years ago, Ben & Jerry's became the test case for something a lot of people in our generation actually believed: that a company could have a conscience and still make money. We are now watching that get dismantled by the company's own owner. I talked to @yobencohen.bsky.social about it.

So here's what I can't put down. Was Ben & Jerry's proof that business can change the world, or proof that it can't survive being owned by people who don't care? Ben has an answer. It's more hopeful than mine.

Forty years ago, Ben & Jerry's became the test case for something a lot of people in our generation actually believed: that a company could have a conscience and still make money. We are now watching that get dismantled by the company's own owner. I talked to @yobencohen.bsky.social about it.

His advice to anyone starting something: you don't need to please everybody, you just need to please a few people a lot. Every company that dumped DEI the week Trump frowned at it did the reverse. Ben's read is that they never meant any of it to begin with.

Forty years ago, Ben & Jerry's became the test case for something a lot of people in our generation actually believed: that a company could have a conscience and still make money. We are now watching that get dismantled by the company's own owner. I talked to @yobencohen.bsky.social about it.

Ben and Jerry saw this coming. They wrote the conscience into the sale itself, with an independent board to guard it. A mission written into a contract lasts precisely as long as the owner feels like honoring it.

Forty years ago, Ben & Jerry's became the test case for something a lot of people in our generation actually believed: that a company could have a conscience and still make money. We are now watching that get dismantled by the company's own owner. I talked to @yobencohen.bsky.social about it.

For decades, the way onto a ballot was to work your way up — a staff job, a local office, then a run of your own. @faiz.bsky.social says voters have stopped rewarding that. What they want is someone who knows what their struggles are really like.

A farmer says I'm a farmer, and that is the entire pitch. @aoc.bsky.social was called a Marxist, she replied she was a waitress, so she knows what the working class goes through. Never having held office is no longer a weakness. Never having been part of the corruption has become the qualification.

Students on the left are not short of conviction. They are short of backing — money, an audience, somebody willing to publish what they find out. That is what the right built on campuses over ten years. Nobody on this side did.

Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir is starting now. What he proposes with @moreperfectunion.bsky.social is small and practical: pay them for video journalism they are already able to make, get behind the groups that exist on their campuses now, hand young people resources and they build the rest.

Trillions of dollars are going into data centers. @faiz.bsky.social's test for whether a project is worth it is simple: do working-class people in that county see any of that money?

The areas asked to absorb all of it are some of the most vulnerable rural areas in America. Many people haven’t even been told what a data center is, but are facing the extreme consequences of their irresponsible, sped-up building.

Trillions of dollars are going into data centers. @faiz.bsky.social's test for whether a project is worth it is simple: do working-class people in that county see any of that money?

@faiz.bsky.social ran Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign, and he named three decisions he would make differently. Not vague regrets — three specific calls, each with a date attached.

That is the job, he says. You work for a man who tells you what he actually thinks, and now and then you would have preferred he said it differently. But it works! Forty-five years of saying the same thing is why people believe him now.

@faiz.bsky.social ran Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign, and he named three decisions he would make differently. Not vague regrets — three specific calls, each with a date attached.