Luke Stark

Tech companies are trying to use the ELIZA effect and cute animation to sell you devices that will surveil you constantly, convince you they're your best and only friend, sap you of your cognitive capacities, and push your purchasing habits and opinions in whatever way they please. That's it.

I spent the whole election cycle worrying about the result and thinking that Olivia Chow was running a "bad" campaign. I need to sit with that in the coming days. She blitzed this result, so her message was connecting, even if it wasn't with me. Was this result a surprise? Or am I out of it?

A classic

💯“It’s a mandate to stand up to Premier Doug Ford more, rather than taking the conciliatory tack that hasn’t resulted in saving any bike lanes. Oh, and removing bike lanes doesn’t win municipal elections…Chow also desperately needs to talk about police corruption. The silence was scandalous” #TOpoli

A high-turnout election! Bradford got more votes losing than all but 2 winners in Toronto's post-1997 history, and both those cases were incumbents running against relatively weaker challengers. Olivia Chow, of course, won *even more* making her the most vote-getting politician in Canadian history.

Another thing I've been saying!

691 words about Cheesecake. 434 words about rape.

They came from the future! In 1933, the theme of the Ontario College of Art's annual costume ball was "Neo Aeon," a new era. Students strutted in their best science fictional fashion creations. https://ow.ly/6x1T50ZQLAa

His electoral performance was Bad Badford. His supporters have been Had Hadford. His daughters call him Dad Dadford. But Olivia Chow? Tonight, she’s Glad Gladford.

National borders have *never* been containers for politics and political processes. I don't have time to write a full thread, so here are some resources.

You can do the same thing, buying a house and borrowing against it—ha ha, just kidding, normal people get taxed annually on their wealth via property taxes, the "you can't tax wealth, the economy will collapse!" rule applies solely to the super-rich.

Look, I know all the reasons we got here, but we really need to start seriously thinking about what we do in a world where The Markets punish whole countries for voting for decency, compassion, and fairness. We must stop pretending the capitalist machine is an objective, value neutral force.

he has been preying on the weak, the vulnerable, the susceptible for a long time now, and had destroyed many lives well before he latched onto Trump

Absolutely wild how much social media and the internet have become a house of mirrors telling you that everyone agrees with whatever the rich want you to think. Bradford vs. Chow wasn't even close. Are we the silent majority now?

The real AI apocalypse is not about robots messing with the power grid it is AI destroying the minds of kids, who, with educators pushing these tools, are at real risk of loosing the ability to write independently.

I felt I really needed to write about Rowling's essay, not because it's new, but because it's so poisonous and ugly that it felt like sanitizing her not to acknowledge it on my trans news site.

"Trump is offering pardons to any comer w/cash — incl. in what one watchdog group defines as three specific types: “reward pardons,” “corrupt pardons” aka political loyalty pardons, & “brokered pardons.” The going-rate for these pardons appears to run from $300,000 up to an astounding $50 million."

This is extremely hard hitting for a mainstream Democratic-aligned super PAC.

Uhh, excuse me, I think you'll find that the portal to the realm of a thousand nightmares actually has very legitimate and appropriate applications, such as providing easy storage solutions for renters. Don't blame us for what the end user does.

Even setting aside the two accusers whose stories are shakier, we have three strong and credible direct accusations. Then we have three more young women who have evidence of Trump participating in Epstein's trafficking ring.

This report is genuinely overwhelming, in terms of the evidence both against Trump and of a ham-fisted cover-up. Including one instance in which Ghislaine Maxwell was actually about to mention one of Trump's young accusers and Todd Blanche told her to stop talking. The media response is "yawn."

I know there's a lot going on but I feel it should probably be more of an above-the-fold story that members of Congress released a thoroughly documented report directly accusing the president of the United States of being a serial rapist.

It's really damning. The accusations are numerous and well-supported. But I was really struck by the descriptions of Trump's behavior -- the name dropping, strong-arming, and attempts to buy off silence. His gross rivalry with Epstein. It's all so familiar. It's shit he's been doing his entire life.

32% of eligible US voters chose Trump in 2024, yet it was presented in the American media as an amazing landslide. Lula's reelection was significantly bigger, but it will be presented as eking out a win.

Beyond disgusted by even more rape allegations against the President of the United States. "In total, more than 25 different women...have independently accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct." Report w/ new details: democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

Guys, we can win, we can also lose. The future is unwritten. More than that, it is changeable by us. You can go out there and chase the future you want. The cure to anxiety is not “everything will work out okay” but “I can make it work out better.”

“A couple of years ago, this was an emergency… Now that the pressure on wealthier people has softened, it is no longer a wartime effort. Now it’s just inconvenience.” My piece on how we forgot about housing policy:

Everything old in cybernetics is new again

the idea that a city's social services should be paid for one-by-one by these insane discretionary deals on a development-by-development basis is just madness. it's such a tremendous drain on the general prosperity in return for ???

i think cities should enable development according to impersonal rules and then levy impersonal taxes on land to pay for impersonal social services free_speech.png

one of the really useful takeaways from fukuyama's political order books is a clear conceptual understanding of what corruption *is* in its fundamental nature. and the answer... is patronage networks organized on personal connections! corruption is *inherent* in these discretionary systems!

GOLDMAN: “.. we are starting to see clearer signs that the AI impact is spreading beyond the technology sector. .. the share of US firms that have adopted AI in regular business functions now shows a statistically significant negative correlation with employment growth ..”

I'm going to try to do this cleanly. Today's right wing governments are networked to each other. Those networks are well-documented. You can read about them in books. Following the elections in one node of that network is good practice for understanding the U.S. node.

The political media is visibly chafing at the current situation, where Republicans are glaringly awful, fucking everything up, running deviant candidates everyone hates, and Dems are just being normal & winning. The force is out of balance. They are viscerally eager to go after Dems about something.

It's happening...

In Brazil, it appears that voters who opted for eliminated first-round candidates roughly broke even in the runoff (even if the candidates leaned right). But the big difference was: Millions of voters who cast 'null' or 'blank' ballots in the first round then voted for Lula.

Thread

Becca Lewis' thesis "Tech's right turn : the rise of reactionary politics in Silicon Valley and online" is our of embargo today! purl.stanford.edu/mn544hj9083

The whole thing smacks of gend- oh i give up

this is very "oh my god, he admit it" re the gendered dynamics around AI