John

the tech industry is about to invent books

Abomination

Can’t wait for Cunk On Tech

got frustrated recently at work about people writing using AI instead of using their brains! here's my take on it: sophiebits.com/2026/06/25/t...

Flight 1337: “Control, we’re experiencing engine failure, requesting assistance for emergency landing” Ground control: “Git gud, noob”

Just found out that one of my all-time favorite short films is available to stream/rent! (It's been on Kanopy for a while, but my library system uses Hoopla.) Deborah Stratman's LAST THINGS is speculative nonfiction about the end of time from the perspective of rocks.

“Fight Club,” the May 7, 2000 episode of The X-Files, featuring red & blue color-coded, kayfabe doppelgangers printing money & causing fights seems weirdly prescient. Especially considering the red state / blue state convention hadn’t solidified until the presidential election later that same year.

Transfer, 1968 by William Anastasi whitney.org/collection/w...

Will’s is paywalled, but I wrote on the subject of the “It’s not X, it’s Y” and AI detection last month - and in one week it became the most widely read piece I’d ever written for my newsletter (ie, six years!). mail.cyberneticforests.com/its-not-just...

Wait I thought Jesus wrote the declaration of independence

Sorry no way in hell you’re founding a democracy or a republic or whatever without an actual project manager.

Tired: the means of production Wired: internal mechanism —>

It’s no coincidence that Johnny Cash died the same year LinkedIn was launched.

Disappointed First Light didn’t use “hey bro” instead of “hello gorgeous” when Bond finds Hyperion.

Metrics!

so, this is deeply, deeply horrifying thedreydossier.substack.com/p/i-found-a-...

The Boroughs? More like Boomer Things

AI probably has some uses for retail. A much more realistic potential magic bullet here as I discovered when reporting on Finland’s massive grocery coop (50% market share) was no need for profit prospect.org/2023/10/11/2...

Just buy it with private equity, saddle it with debt, strip it of value, and watch it close. Duh.

I would have picked Aleksei German to direct Elden Ring

In the same manifesto, Palantir's owners argued that we need a national military draft, that soft power is over, and that we were too hard on Germany and Japan after World War II. I don't think that company should be allowed to exist anymore.

Boastful Quaker Oats ad, Chicago 1891

Imagine there’s no people, it’s easy when you prompt

Series of orange orbs.

Why We Fear AI is a book about the political economy of AI! If knowledge is power, then what is the attempt to put knowledge into an extremely expensive privately controlled thing about? www.commonnotions.org/why-we-fear-ai

Rationing my t-shirts.

The dirty UI tricks that Apple is pulling to get me to upgrade to its latest OS are despicable.

I started writing a BlueSky post about that Nature essay and kept going until it turned into a whole piece in Tech Policy Press www.techpolicy.press/the-illusion...

to be clear, this definition, by limiting intelligence to *cognitive tasks*, conveniently ignores embodied, relational, social and cultural nature of intelligence 9/

Merced by an AI-operated DHS drone while sleeping in my own bed because I posted a favorite Rumi poem on Bluesky

This is the real problem. Worse than eliminating jobs by replacing humans with machines, this whole AI push is just one more enclosure of the commons. Culture, language, knowledge itself are all fundamentally collective endeavors that they want lay claim to, control, and sell back to us.

remember when that cronenberg movie 'existenz' came out and it seemed like a fun and silly conceit for there to be freedom fighters taking on corporate conglomerates in an attempt to protect consensus reality from an ocean of digital hallucination

I think they might have better luck spending two thousand dollars holding a press conference where they detail who made the key decisions to collaborate with the Trump administration, how and when they were fired, and explaining what would stop that from happening again.

“If [wealthy, powerful people] can get us to accept that the future’s already settled, AI is already here, the end is already here, then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse.” — @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

Please don’t

I’ve been grinding rush mode exclusively since BF3, so I don’t need a lecture from the freaks who fetishize stats. But I recently discovered casual breakthrough in 6 and I’m having a blast. Don’t care if it doesn’t count. I absolutely love fucking up robots.