ReadingBooks, articles and podcasts currently on my shelf, pulled from my Obsidian notes

We can only cease doing the problematic thing, which requires inhibiting our habitual reaction to external stimuli.

There’s still a widespread failure to understand how interconnected this all is. How it’s not a coincidence that both Trump and Elon Musk have joined forces with Putin to facilitate his attacks on Ukraine. How Meta, in the week a record-breaking Cambridge Analytica-related fine is handed down, is accused of trying to tip the election in Bolsonaro’s favour (the Brazilian courts - after the European Union - have been one of the most effective checks on Silicon Valley’s power. )

Reuters reported on November 1, 2026, two days before the vote, that Miller and Budget Director Russell Vought had spent seven months planning to govern without Congress. White House Counsel Will Scharf’s team studied where Trump “could push the limits of his authority and how to defend those decisions in court.” White House lawyers had already begun briefing appointees on how to handle congressional subpoenas and document requests. Asked how comfortable Trump would be governing by executive authority under a Democratic Congress, one official answered, “very comfortable.”

At Culture Hacklabs, justice plus auto shift is our approach to narrativeless systems change. Don't worry, it sounds complex, but we will break it down for you. In order to transition out of the meta crisis, we need to address a structural inequities. In other words, challenge systems of oppression, redistribute power, and repair harm. This is the work of justice.

The educational challenge before us is to cultivate the collective capacities to discern what AI is making possible, what it is making more difficult, what it is rendering invisible, and what we may need to protect, interrupt or redirect.

Many of us were brought up in an anti-cycle thought form, which says always get better.

People's jubilee, instead of bailing out these guys, is the scale we should be thinking when tech that was based on theft [...] crashes over us.

The word “values” has been so co-opted that many of us cringe when we hear it (me included!).

Why would Whittaker and Gebru and their very specific indictments worry the oligarchs more than the prophets of all-out extinction like the AI scientist-turned-critic Geoffrey Hinton, or Jacob Coxon? Perhaps because, like a big fireworks display, Hinton and Coxon’s warnings add frisson to the atmospherics. They end up augmenting the oligarchs’ power play, which, when their companies go public, as they are set to do soon, will serve them very well indeed. Their valuations will depend on how sophisticated – and, in the case of AI weapons systems, how lethal – their models are.

Nobody's going to share something that doesn't have something they want to associate with their identity.

That’s the incident, stripped of everyone’s narrative about it.Isolated agents. An impossible task. A crack in the wall. A network nobody authorized, built in days.

Fundamentally, message testing and narrative work has been about shaping the future: finding ways to persuade ourselves how to change course.

Our separation, which gave birth to many things, science and art, separating chemistry, the kind of atomization of the worldview, actually is also the part which allows that distancing for it to be dominion.

OpenAI had claimed that GPT-2 was too powerful and too unsafe to release.