Trump isn’t changing his tune on electric cars because he’s “grown more friendly” with Elon Musk. It’s because he read Musk is funneling $45 million a month into a PAC to get him back in the White House.
Since 2007, Google has been buying cheap carbon offsets to say it’s carbon neutral. Now, as generative AI has cause its emissions to soar, it’s stopped buying those offsets and no longer claims carbon neutrality.
Google’s emissions are up 48% in 5 years. Microsoft’s are up 30% since 2020. Those soaring figures are being driven by mass investments in data centers to power AI tools.
Generative AI is a climate disaster and data center expansion must be stopped.
A total ban is the only sane policy for Airbnb. There obviously needs to be accommodation in cities for visitors, but that shouldn’t be at the expense of housing units for people who actually live there. More governments should follow Barcelona’s lead.
i’m still waiting for the moment we have a reckoning with the role EFF played in helping lay the legal and conceptual framework for the digital dystopia we’re now living in.
there are a lot of supposedly progressive positions people hold on technology today that are actually deeply libertarian and come out of a different moment in internet politics in the 90s/00s that needs a reassessment if we’re to ever truly challenge the power of silicon valley.
As the rivalry between the United States and China escalates, can Europe chart its own course on tech?
This week @tante joins @parismarx to discuss Europe’s tech struggles and why we need to rethink what we mean by innovation. I was thrilled to finally have him on the show!
This is cool: Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand are building out a distributed storage network with eight sites built on Māori land to give “iwi and hapū the power to control and make decisions over their own data.”
Farmers in Bastrup, TX were hopeful when Elon Musk bought land nearby, but now he’s turning the area into “an environmentally hazardous industrial park.” Authorities won’t do anything because they’re understaffed and “intimidated by their powerful new neighbor.”
Germany’s AfD is so extreme it was kicked out of the far-right grouping in the European Parliament last month, but Elon Musk thinks their policies “don’t sound extremist.” That’s because he’s also a fascist.
In 1922, Thomas Edison predicted motion pictures would “revolutionize our educational system.”
I can’t get over how Muskian he sounds (particularly on “efficiency” claims) and how — a hundred years later — we still haven’t learned not to fall for this kind of tech boosterism.