Notices by Miguel Afonso Caetano (remixtures@tldr.nettime.org)

"What we are witnessing in America is technofascism. This is fascism partnered with advanced surveillance technologies. And this is what we see playing out in Minneapolis in real time, and with one company playing a pre-eminent role: Palantir.

It’s not just Palantir. We’ve seen other data-harvesting monopolies and Silicon Valley companies paying homage to Trump: Meta and Google and OpenAI and Oracle and Amazon and Nvidia, many of which have financial and other links to Thiel. Palantir is the very tip of this extremely poisonous spear.

What is happening in Minneapolis is a trial balloon. It’s where Trump is testing the limits of his power. That includes his ability to suppress dissent, to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, to break people’s will. And surveillance is at the heart of this.

It’s no coincidence that ICE officers wear masks. For them, privacy is impunity. That’s what the killing of Alex Pretti showed last week: that no one would be held to account. But for everyone else, there was another lesson: that there is nowhere to hide.

Personal data is the key to Trump’s political project. It’s an essential part of ICE’s work, the foundation for what is now under construction, and Minneapolis is where you can see it being built: an authoritarian surveillance state."

https://www.thenerve.news/p/technofascism-us-america-fascism-trump-palantir-peter-thiel-uk-nigel-farage-reform

#USA #Trump #Palantir #TechnoFascism #Fascism #UK #Reform #ICE #Surveillance #PoliceState

"AI is expected to reshape society and labor markets, yet experts remain divided on whether AI will primarily displace human labor or generate new employment opportunities. Despite the importance of this debate, little is known about how the public perceives AI’s labor market impact—and how these perceptions affect democratic attitudes and behaviors. Large-scale survey data (N = 37,079; 38 European countries) indicate that the public tends to view AI as labor-replacing rather than labor-creating. Controlling for technology-related, political, and sociodemographic factors, these data further show that perceiving AI as labor-replacing (vs. labor-creating) is associated with lower satisfaction with democracy and political engagement with technology. Two preregistered, nationally representative experiments (N = 1,202, United Kingdom; replication study N = 1,200, United States) provide causal evidence for this relationship. Participants exposed to a labor-replacing (vs. labor-creating) AI frame report greater erosion of trust in democracy and lower willingness to politically engage with future AI developments. Together, our findings suggest that perceptions about AI’s labor market consequences—regardless of actual outcomes—may decrease democratic legitimacy and public engagement in shaping the future of AI."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2523508123?utm_source=TOC&utm_medium=ealert&TOC_v123_i4=&ref=d12164

#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #MassUnemployment #Democracy #PoliticalParticipation

"After proudly renaming the Pentagon from the Department of Defense to the Department of War, Trump now plans to raise the US military budget from $1 trillion to a staggering $1.5 trillion.

This means that, if Trump succeeds, the United States will soon spend more on its military than all of the other countries in the world combined, excluding China.

This is deeply hypocritical, because in his January 2025 inauguration speech, as he started his second term as US president, Trump declared that he would be a “peacemaker”.

Similarly, in the victory speech that Trump gave after he won the November 2024 presidential election, he claimed, falsely, that during his first term, “we had no wars”.

“I’m not going to start a war; I’m going to stop wars”, Trump promised.

He lied. In the first year of his second term, the Trump administration bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

When his first and second terms are combined, Trump has bombed 10 nations (the aforementioned seven, plus Afghanistan, Libya, and Pakistan).

This means Trump has bombed more countries than all other presidents in US history.

Moreover, Trump is threatening to attack at least four more nations: Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Greenland. He has vowed to colonize Greenland and forcibly turn it into US territory."

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2026/01/25/trump-bombed-10-countries-trillion-military-budget/

#USA #Trump #Militarism #Warmonger #Imperialism

"Britain’s reliance on Palantir, the controversial US data surveillance firm, is a “gaping national security vulnerability”, MPs and tech experts have said, as a Nerve investigation reveals how deeply embedded the company is in the UK’s critical national infrastructure.

The Nerve’s investigation shows the company, co-founded by one of President Trump’s most loyal allies, Peter Thiel, is enmeshed in Britain’s civil and defence structures to a far greater degree than previously realised. The Nerve has found at least 34 current and past state contracts across at least 10 government departments, local councils and police authorities.

The investigation also reveals previously undisclosed contracts between Palantir and AWE Nuclear Security Technologies, the agency that underpins Britain’s nuclear deterrence programme.

The agency, formerly known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment, designs and manufactures the nuclear warheads carried by UK submarines. The Nerve has found £15m worth of contracts for “cloud support” on the Crown Commercial Service dashboard, an agency that works with the Cabinet Office and external suppliers.

These contracts are not on the government’s official contract finder website and the Ministry of Defence refused to either confirm or deny their existence. Palantir did not acknowledge or respond to the Nerve’s inquiries.

The Nerve’s research – shown in two infographics here – shows that Palantir has current and historic deals worth £388m with the MOD across at least a dozen contracts and extensions to contracts, and more than £244m with the NHS (12 contracts/extensions). Government agencies and authorities with smaller contracts include Coventry city council, Leicestershire police, DEFRA and the Homes for Ukraine scheme."

https://www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-technologies-uk-government-contracts-size-nuclear-deterrent-atomic-peter-thiel-louis-mosley

#UK #Palantir #Surveillance #Thiel #NuclearWeapons

"Meta has started blocking its users from sharing links to ICE List, a website that has compiled the names of what it claims are Department of Homeland Security employees, a project the creators say is designed to hold those employees accountable.
Dominick Skinner, the creator of ICE List, tells WIRED that links to the website have been shared without issue on Meta’s platforms for more than six months.

“I think it's no surprise that a company run by a man who sat behind Trump at his inauguration, and donated to the destruction of the White House, has taken a stance that helps ICE agents retain anonymity,” says Skinner.

As agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which are under DHS, have continued to terrorize immigrant communities and kill US citizens, activists have sought to track and record their activity online in a bid to hold them accountable. But as well as threatening to prosecute those they claim are “doxing” ICE agents, the Trump administration has pressured tech companies to block any efforts at crowdsourcing the location and activities of those agents.

ICE List has been operating since last June. Skinner says it is run by a core team of five people, including him, as well as hundreds of anonymous volunteers who share information about ICE agents operating in cities across the US."

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-is-blocking-links-to-ice-list-on-facebook-instagram-and-threads/

#SocialMedia #USA #PoliceState #Trump #ICE #Facebook #Meta #Instagram #Censorship

"What sparked Carney’s intervention was not Sudan, Venezuela or Gaza. It was the US threat to Canada and Greenland.

A western prime minister took umbrage only when the US, under President Donald Trump, threatened to treat the prosperous West in the same way it has long treated the Global South.

Let’s return now to Israel’s recent invasion of Unrwa’s headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem: a gross breach of international law and a direct attack on the United Nations.

Article 6 of the UN charter establishes that any state that persistently violates its principles can be expelled from the UN. The attack on Unrwa is part of a pattern of Israel’s criminal hostility towards the UN, including its refusal to respect orders from the International Court of Justice on Gaza, its slaughter of UN aid workers and its regular attacks on UN positions in southern Lebanon.

The case for expelling - or at the very least suspending - Israel from the UN is overwhelming. Yet neither Carney’s Canada nor Starmer’s Britain, nor any other western power, has so much as suggested the idea.

In his Davos speech, Carney set out Canada’s approach as follows: “We aim to be principled and pragmatic. Principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, respect for human rights. Pragmatic in recognising that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner shares our values.”

This is all well and good. But on the evidence so far, Carney is prepared to be principled when it comes to western countries like Canada and Denmark, and pragmatic when it comes to Palestine and Venezuela.

This is a fundamentally racist equation."

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/carney-wants-new-world-order-only-west

#Canada #Carney #Imperialism #USA #Trump #InternationalLaw #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide

"Critics see these disruptions as exacerbated by the deep cuts to federal funding, which total tens of billions of dollars, that underwrites academic research and researcher training. “The beauty of academic research is that people could stick with hard problems for a long time to make progress,” says Goldman. “We can’t create experts overnight.” At the same time, many foreign scientists face an uphill battle in securing visas to study or work in the United States.

Some scientists have spoken out, filed lawsuits and pushed back against what many say is a dismantling of what has long been the world’s leading science power. In May 2025, the Center for Open Science criticized the administration’s Restoring Gold Standard Science executive order for “positioning policymaking to ignore scientific evidence by holding it to unachievable standards”.

Nosek says his organization has a duty to push back against any administration attempts to “sow distrust and undermine the whole process” of science-research reform.

The US Congress has the power to determine which agencies are funded to what extent, and earlier this month, both houses of Congress voted to mostly reject the Trump administration’s proposed deep budget cuts for 2026 for a subset of science agencies including NASA, USGS, EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The future remains far from certain — especially as China makes steady gains in global scientific leadership.

Nature’s careers team interviewed researchers to find out what a year of Trump administration policies has meant for their research and careers, and looked back at how Trump’s first year was covered by Nature."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00091-0

#USA #Trump #Science #DOGE #Austerity

RT @yarotrof
Trump’s “Board of Peace” looks very much like a plan to replace the UN Security Council with an imperial court of vassals in which he is chairman for life, even after leaving the White House, with veto over every decision and the sole right to designate a successor. And a $1 billion fee for aspiring permanent members.

https://www.ft.com/content/0ee79faa-86d3-4c01-a180-add6e164ac28?accessToken=zwAGSKwUmEg4kc8O55-qhtNMAdOhgK3W4WSsKA.MEUCIG90yhnpd6836G-pd4NwwXgCPPreNo-iI_ERePXH7fj_AiEAmYxxRC9xbqDYh43WecrbO_pFzaZu_3avjEKtNm0zUFw&sharetype=gift&token=b6692b27-71c2-4c84-90c8-4692ba31917b

RT @jasonhickel
It's not hypocrisy, it's capitalism.

The bizarre behaviour of Western states and leaders often seems to betray a moral double standard. But in fact it is all perfectly consistent with a single standard, namely, the objective of maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation in the core.

On Iran, they tell us they "support the protestors". But of course they violently brutalize protestors at home, and never support protests against the governments of their often brutal client states.

They say they support "women's rights". But of course they actively support a genocidal regime that has massacred tens of thousands of women, live-streamed to our screens.

They say they want to see "freedom" and "democracy". But of course they prop up several repressive dictatorships in the Middle East.

They say they value international law. But they violate it regularly, in spectacular fashion, as easily as they breathe.

They say they want to see "liberation". But their explicit objective is to impose a puppet monarchy with zero real sovereignty, permanently subordinated to the US and Israel.

Why? Because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation in the core.

This requires a massive flow of cheap labour and resources from the periphery. To keep it going, they do everything possible to crush any state or movement that seeks real sovereignty, because sovereign development in the South means that the South produces and consumes more for itself, so their resources and labour are less cheaply available for accumulation in the core.

This is why they are going after Iran. It's the same reason they are going after Venezuela and Cuba... it's the same reason they fantasize at going to war with China... it's the same reason they invaded Libya and Iraq... it's the same reason they assassinated Lumumba and Sankara. It's the same reason they prop up Saudi Arabia and the UAE...

https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/2011801479384825972

"Nordic governments are rejecting U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertions that Russian and Chinese vessels are operating near Greenland, warning that the claims are not supported by intelligence and are fueling destabilizing rhetoric, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

Two senior Nordic diplomats with access to NATO intelligence briefings told the FT there is no evidence of Russian or Chinese ships or submarines operating around Greenland in recent years, directly contradicting Trump’s justification for U.S. control of the Arctic territory.

“I have seen the intelligence. There are no ships, no submarines,” one diplomat told the paper.

Trump has claimed that Greenland is “covered with Russian and Chinese ships” and argued that the U.S. must take control of the island for national security reasons — rhetoric that has intensified in recent weeks."

https://www.politico.eu/article/nordic-officials-reportedly-dismiss-trump-greenland-claims-nato-defense/

#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Greenland #Denmark #Disinformation #Propaganda

"[i]n the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened.

Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House adviser Stephen Miller also described the incident as “domestic terrorism,” while President Donald Trump posted on his social network that Good “ran over the ICE Officer.”

Videos of the incident, taken by bystanders, show almost every element of McLaughlin’s statement to be false. There were no riots at the scene, and no rioters. The vehicle appears to be driving away from the armed federal agents, not toward them, and no one was run over. And there is no evidence that terrorism of any kind was involved.
(...)
The blatant lies about Minneapolis serve several purposes. They perpetuate the false narrative that federal agents are in constant peril and therefore justified in using lethal force at the slightest hint of danger. They assure federal agents that they can harm or even kill American citizens with impunity, and warn those who might be moved to protest Trump’s immigration policies of the same thing. Perhaps most grim, they communicate to the public that if you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/ice-defense-minnesota-killing/685549/?gift=SCYx-5scVta3-cr_IlgTyb8Q5BokqAExuClP-mrxf8s

#USA #Trump #Fascism #ICE #PoliceState #Militarism #Militias

"Two decades ago, Richard N. Haass, a senior foreign-policy official in the George W. Bush administration, confessed that he would go to his grave not knowing why the United States had invaded Iraq. “A decision was not made,” Haass told me. “A decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.” I thought of this astonishing remark after Saturday’s military action in Caracas. President Donald Trump and his advisers have thrown out numerous justifications for seizing the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bringing them to New York for trial. None of them makes sense.

Maduro ruled Venezuela viciously and illegitimately, but Trump has no qualms about doing business with the vicious and illegitimate—he prefers them to democratically elected leaders. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told skeptics in Congress that the operation wasn’t an act of war at all, but a simple arrest based on Maduro’s indictment for drug trafficking. Then why, at the end of last year, did Trump pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras who had been convicted of the same crime by an American court and sentenced to 45 years in prison?

If narco-terrorism is a threat to U.S. security, Venezuela is a relatively small player in the global narcotics trade; the chief drug it exports, cocaine, is not a mass killer of Americans like fentanyl is, and the probable destination of the alleged drug boats that U.S. forces have been bombing off the Venezuelan coast was Europe."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/venezuela-iraq-hypocrisy/685547/

#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Iraq #Venezuela #Oil #FossilFuels

"On Wednesday afternoon, ICE agents carrying out an operation in south Minneapolis were briefly obstructed by a car blocking traffic. ICE agents approached the female driver, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, yelling, “Get out of the fucking car,” and one of them attempted to open the driver’s-side door. After the driver backed up to turn around and move, another agent drew his gun and unloaded three shots into the car. The car barreled into a light pole about 100 feet down the road, and the driver was quickly pronounced dead.

This is confirmed by eyewitness accounts and videos from multiple angles. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while confirming the broad details, claims that the ICE agent acted in self-defense to avoid being run over by the vehicle.

These are the kinds of disputes that the courts are equipped to handle. Because if an agent shot directly into a car and killed the driver without some credible fear of personal harm, it would be called murder. And federal agents can indeed be prosecuted for murder.

States can prosecute anyone for violations of state law, regardless of their rank or authority. Murder is a felony in the state of Minnesota, as it is in every other state. Within the last several years, we saw Minnesota successfully prosecute a murder, committed by a law enforcement officer, that was documented on tape and broadcast to the world."

https://prospect.org/2026/01/07/ice-agents-can-be-charged-with-murder/

#USA #Trump #Minnesota #Minneapolis #ICE #Immigration #PoliceState #Militias #Militarism

"President Donald Trump’s Cabinet officials are scheduling their first formal calls with oil company CEOs to press them to revive Venezuela’s flagging oil production, four people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO.

Calls that Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum are planning with chief executives represent some of the first official outreach that the administration has made to the U.S. companies after months of informal discussions with people in the sector, these people said — days after President Donald Trump told reporters that “our very large United States oil companies” will “spend billions of dollars” in Venezuela.

However, the companies’ executives remain wary of entering a socialist-ruled country that was plunged into political upheaval after U.S. forces took strongman Nicolás Maduro into custody over the weekend, following decades of neglect in its nationalized oil fields, according to market analysts and industry officials.

Industry officials are also discussing what types of incentives would be needed to get them to return to the country, according to two industry officials familiar with the plans who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. Those could include having the U.S. government signing contracts guaranteeing payment and security or forming public-private joint ventures.

Even if they don’t yet have fully formed ideas for what would get them to invest in Venezuela, Trump’s insistence is difficult to ignore, said one former administration agency head who was granted anonymity to discuss the evolving matters."

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/05/trump-venezuela-oil-fields-00710893

#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Oil #BigOil #FossilFuels

"The United States’ oil industry appears wary of President Donald Trump’s repeated pledges that companies are going to spend billions of dollars upgrading decrepit Venezuelan oil infrastructure following the capture of Nicolás Maduro.

The companies themselves have stayed largely silent since Saturday, when Trump promised that the American oil industry would “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

None has provided on-the-record statements about their plans beyond Chevron, which said it was focused on protecting its assets in the country. And the American Petroleum Institute, the leading industry association for American oil and gas companies, has not met with the Trump administration about this issue.

Rather, oil analysts have made clear that American and multinational oil giants don’t have an economic incentive to pony up investments in Venezuela, despite it being home to the largest oil reserves in the world.

Unless the Trump administration can address the serious safety issues, fear of regime instability, and longstanding legal concerns, the president’s pledge to “take the oil” remains a giant question mark.

“I really don’t know, who are the players that win from this?” said Ed Hirs, an energy markets analyst and professor at the University of Houston. “It’s not obvious, that’s for sure.”"

https://www.notus.org/energy/trump-pledge-us-oil-investment-venezuela-industry-silent

That's Late Stage Capitalism for you:

"More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found.

The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.

Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.

The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop. One-third of the 500 videos were “brainrot”, a category that includes AI slop and other low-quality content made to monetise attention.

The findings are a snapshot of a rapidly expanding industry that is saturating big social media platforms – from X to Meta to YouTube – and defining a new era of content: decontextualised, addictive and international.

A Guardian analysis this year found that nearly 10% of YouTube’s fastest-growing channels were AI slop, racking up millions of views despite the platform’s efforts to curb “inauthentic content”."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/27/more-than-20-of-videos-shown-to-new-youtube-users-are-ai-slop-study-finds

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedVideos #AISlop #YouTube

"The moment the British government began proscribing political movements as terrorist organisations, rather than just militant groups, it was inevitable that saying factual things, making truthful statements, would become a crime.

And lo behold, here we are.

The Terrorism Act 2000 has a series of provisions that make it difficult to voice or show any kind of support for an organisation proscribed under the legislation, whether it is writing an article or wearing a T-shirt.

Recent attention has focused on Section 13, which is being used to hound thousands of mostly elderly people who have held signs saying: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” They now face a terrorism conviction and up to six months in jail.

But an amendment introduced in 2019 to Section 12 of the act has been largely overlooked, even though it is even more repressive. It makes it a terrorism offence for a person to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” and in doing so be “reckless” about whether anyone else might be “encouraged to support” the organisation.

It is hard to believe this clause was not inserted specifically to target the watchdog professions: journalists, human rights groups and lawyers. They now face up to 14 years in jail for contravening this provision."

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/12/22/jonathan-cook-britain-has-officially-criminalized-journalism/

#UK #Starmer #Censorship #FreedomOfSpeech #Journalism #PoliceState

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has a new definition of “reasonable expectation.” According to the justices, it’s no longer reasonable to assume that what you type into Google is yours to keep.

In a decision that reads like a love letter to the surveillance economy, the court ruled that police were within their rights to access a convicted rapist’s search history without a warrant. The reasoning is that everyone knows they’re being watched anyway.

The opinion, issued Tuesday, leaned on the idea that the public has already surrendered its privacy to Silicon Valley.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

“It is common knowledge that websites, internet-based applications, and internet service providers collect, and then sell, user data,” the court said, as if mass exploitation of personal information had become a civic tradition.

Because that practice is so widely known, the court concluded, users cannot reasonably expect privacy. In other words, if corporations do it first, the government gets a free pass."

https://reclaimthenet.org/pennsylvania-court-rules-no-privacy-in-google-searches

#USA #Pennsylvania #Google #Privacy #Surveillance #PoliceState

LoL. Would you expect any different outcome than this out of a industry built upon "citation cartels" where articles are made to be cited but not to be read?

"What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals.

“There have been lots of AI-generated articles, and those typically get noticed and retracted quickly,” Heiss tells Rolling Stone. He mentions a paper retracted earlier this month, which discussed the potential to improve autism diagnoses with an AI model and included a nonsensical infographic that was itself created with a text-to-image model. “But this hallucinated journal issue is slightly different,” he says.

That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations. This leads to students and academics (and any large language models they may ask for help) identifying those “sources” as reliable without ever confirming their veracity. The more these false citations are unquestioningly repeated from one article to the next, the more the illusion of their authenticity is reinforced. Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to."

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-journal-research-fake-citations-1235485484/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Hallucinations #Chatbots #LLMs #Science #AcademicPublishing

“Bad research isn’t new,” Moser points out. “LLMs have amplified the problem dramatically, but there was already tremendous pressure to publish and produce, and there were many bad papers using questionable or fake data, because higher education has been organized around the production of knowledge-shaped objects, measured in citations, conferences, and grants.”

Craig Callender, a philosophy professor at the University of California San Diego and president of the Philosophy of Science Association, agrees with that assessment, observing that “the appearance of legitimacy to non-existent journals is like the logical end product of existing trends.” There are already journals, he explains, that accept spurious articles for profit, or biased ghost-written research meant to benefit the industry that produced it. “The ‘swamp’ in scientific publishing is growing,” he says. “Many practices make existing journals [or] articles that aren’t legitimate look legitimate. So the next step to non-existent journals is horrifying but not too surprising.”

Adding AI to the mix means that “swamp” is growing fast, Callender says. “For instance, all of this gets compounded in a nearly irreversible way with AI-assisted Google searches. These searches will only reinforce the appearance that these journals exist, just as they currently reinforce a lot of disinformation.”