Notices by Frank Pasquale (frankpasquale@mastodon.social)

“These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-political-science-concept/677536/

“U.S.A.I.D. is no longer monitoring bird flu in 49 countries as it was three weeks ago; it has stopped working with at-risk youth in Central America to prevent gang violence that spurs migration; it is not cleaning up fields poisoned by Agent Orange in Vietnam; it is not eradicating polio; it is not collaborating with communities to reduce vulnerability to radicalization. The costs of dismantling these programs will be felt for generations to come.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/opinion/usaid-trump-samantha-power.html

“Though modern economists have long since jettisoned the moral hierarchies of its Victorian forebears in favor of an abstracted vision of self-interested, utility-maximizing agents, their assumption that utility can be infinitely generated through the acquisition of wealth still contains within it the kernel of its origins in the hierarchy and insatiability of wants.”
https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/vibe-goes-down

“The 98-year-old pump room is about as big as a public bathroom with two stalls. The four pumps inside — the two pneumatic ones that pre-date the Great Depression, and two newer electric ones — are responsible for removing water from the tracks throughout the area.
The subway station sits in a geological bowl, and heavy rain can easily overwhelm the pumps.”
https://gothamist.com/news/a-state-of-collapse-how-the-mta-put-riders-on-the-fast-track-to-ruin

“Consider Tesla. Imagine that it pays no corporate or carbon tax in the US but makes 5% of its sales in Britain. The UK Treasury would calculate what Tesla should have paid in the US if British tax law applied there and collect 5% of that amount. Similarly, Britain would step in to tax Elon Musk proportionally to the amount of his wealth that originates from the UK (which, since his fortune is mainly in Tesla stock, can be estimated to be about 5%).”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/20/trump-threatens-a-global-trade-war-europe-must-unleash-a-radical-alternative

“The Fake History Hunter X account dug into an AI-generated image that went viral on Instagram recently. It was shared last week by a Spanish-language boomer engagement farming account for “rock music culture”.

FHH was able to trace the image back to an AI “artist” going by C-GasmX-arT. But it’s now all over Google Image search results, mixed in with real images from Woodstock. Which exposes a serious issue with how Facebook is currently interacting with Google.”
https://www.garbageday.email/p/tiktok-doesn-t-need-america

“Zuckerberg’s recent arc fits the bill surprisingly well: A wealthy 40-year-old man with a sullied public reputation starts listening to Joe Rogan and develops an interest in mixed martial arts and other hypermasculine hobbies, grows annoyed by the woke left and angry at the mainstream media, rebrands himself as a bad boy, and adopts the label of a “classical liberal” while quietly supporting most of the tenets of MAGA conservatism.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/meta-facebook-trump-mark-zuckerberg.html

“The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.”
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis

“No one is talking about what happens when we limit human contact to those who can afford to pay a premium. Technology does not arrive on a blank slate, but intersects with existing inequalities, and in this case it amplifies the stratification of human connection. In 2025, the affluent will get their connective labor from humans. The rest will get theirs from a machine.”
https://www.wired.com/story/wealth-inequality-personal-service-access-artificial-intelligence/

“Treating “AI companion companies” as innovators operating at the edge of our capabilities to recognize sentience tends to mask how they are selling entertainment products to audiences like any other media company.”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/reality-raids

“When workers own the platforms, they can decide what data they want to collect and how they want to use it. In Indonesia, couriers have created “base camps” where they can recharge their phones, exchange information, and wait for their next order; some have even set up informal emergency response services and insurance-like systems that help couriers who have road accidents.” Cc Trebor Scholz
https://spectrum.ieee.org/shipt

“When you pose the question to an LLM, what you are really asking is, “Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of text, what are the words most likely to follow the sequence ‘what country is to the south of Rwanda?’” Even if the system responds with the word “Burundi,” this has a different relationship to reality than the human’s answer, and to say the AI “knows” or “believes” Burundi to be south of Rwanda is a category mistake.”
https://www.theverge.com/c/24300623/ai-companions-replika-openai-chatgpt-assistant-romance

“With generative AI, we’re once again witnessing a core problem with entrusting technological development to a handful of self-mythologizing executives and founders in Silicon Valley. Instead of systems that are democratically and ethically constructed, built to serve humans and not just managers, whole constituencies and not just consultants; systems that could be very useful in some less-than earth-shattering ways, we get the smoke and mirrors.”
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

Delong: James C. Scott’s most famous book, Seeing Like a State, “mark[ed] the final stage in the intellectual struggle that the Austrian tradition has long waged against apostles of central planning.”
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-omnivorous-james-c-scott/

“The perfect postapocalyptic vehicle isn't a big ugly truck. It's a bicycle — light, reliable, easy to fix and scavenge parts for, able to move cargo, doesn't need any power except you and calories. And the thing that will actually get us through an apocalypse — or, preferably, prevent one — isn't driving a steel-plated War Rig. It's working together.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-cybertruck-apocalypse-inequality-2023-12

“The two main architects of a performativist sociology, Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie, seem to have moved on to other subjects, while the critical power attached to performativity is now firmly rejected by several heterodox economists precisely because of its lack of a critical spirit with respect to economic theories”
http://journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/2746

“A court system that could not control him as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/

“JPMorgan warns that if left unchecked, Spotify’s platform could become littered with AI-generated rubbish, potentially exploding from 100mn songs to more than a billion in a few years. UMG’s “artist-centric” model will dissolve the financial incentives for these AI tracks to proliferate, the analysts say.”
https://www.ft.com/content/b85ab5af-bd03-4da8-971a-316e7c7897dc

“Algorithmic recommendations now do the work of discovering and pursuing interests, finding community and learning about the world. Kids today are, simply put, not learning how to be curious, critical adults — and they don’t seem to know what they’ve lost.
A week before meeting the students, I introduced the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/opinion/big-tech-algorithms-kids-discovery.html

“The current “existential threat” framing is effective because it fits on a rolling news ticker, diverts attention from the harms being created right now by data-driven and automated technologies and it confers huge and unknowable potential power on those involved in creating those technologies.”
https://rachelcoldicutt.medium.com/on-understanding-power-and-technology-1345dc57a1a