Pinboard (robertogreco)
https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/public/
recent bookmarks from robertogrecoOpinion | The Problem With Google’s A.I. Overview - The New York Times2026-07-10T04:46:30+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/opinion/ai-google-gemini-search-questions.html
robertogrecoanne-laurelecunff curiosity ai artificialintelligence psychology neuroscience learning howwelearn search inquiry google openai anthropic chatgpt gemini claudehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5973d87e4095/Can the Classroom Ever Be Automated? | The MIT Press Reader2026-07-09T16:19:44+00:00
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/can-the-classroom-ever-be-automated/
robertogreco2026 audreywatters automation schools schooling edtech ai artificialintelligence historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:14d6aeb4013a/Philosophers call for their journals to require conflict of interest disclosures | Science | AAAS2026-07-09T06:17:18+00:00
https://www.science.org/content/article/philosophers-call-their-journals-require-conflict-interest-disclosures/
robertogrecovia:javierarbona 2026 philosophy ai artificialintelligence transparency craigcallender technology cailino'connor ethics annaalexandrova melandrews chatbots llms matthewliaohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:75699f629c6b/The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet | The New Yorker2026-07-09T06:09:55+00:00
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-ai-design-aesthetic-thats-taking-over-the-internet
robertogrecoanthropic claude genai generativeai 2026 kylechayka technology design art aesthetics sameness clauddesign taste mattström-awn davidmcgillivray celinenguyen grassdx newsletrix wesleywangmedia deploygraph ai artificialintelligence lucasgelfond llms charleseames rayeames eames modernism hilarygridley writerbuilderhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1391cb0c5898/The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic2026-07-09T05:52:51+00:00
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/
robertogrecorosehorowitz reading howweread literacy attention highered highereducation books internet culture online web 2026 yafiction amandakordeliski brianbannon education colleges universities reddit email messaging instagram maryannewolf bejaminpowers roberttownsend margaretrennix anthonyburgess gutenberg writing howwewrite walterong orality alexanderluria illiteracy neilpostman history benjaminfranklin thomasjefferson johnadams johnmcwhorter lingusitics samuallougheed marshallmcluhan media tv television johncheever annemariecortez schools schooling children childhood socialmedia tiktok youtube jeantwenge psychology martinpuchner society postliteracy gutenbergparenthesis danwillingham cognition thinking howwethink knowledge comprehension readingcomprehension johnhutton gloriamark video information text benjaminpowers jonathanfine elizabethdworak plato socrates oraltradition donaldtrump roderickhart joshuameyrowitz ronaldreagan reihansalam manhattaninstitute nuance politics rigor complexity algorithms liberalism barahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:628e87c4afc9/We Already Have Everything We Need to Regulate AI2026-07-09T03:03:16+00:00
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/we-already-have-everything-we-need
robertogrecohamilton ai artificialintelligence regulation taxes law legal unions labor work workers organizing 2025 opeanai anthropic wallstreet oversight corporations corporatism governance government markzuckerberg meta metaversehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4ded65297946/Feeding on Illusions - by L. M. Sacasas2026-07-08T05:46:28+00:00
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/feeding-on-illusions
robertogrecolmssacasas mandybrown ursulakleguin ursulaleguin 2026 ai artificialintelligence hannaharendt generativeai humannaess human friendship community process howwewrite chatgpt calligraphy friction matthewbattles genaihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1dbdeaccb434/Let AI Burn2026-07-08T02:36:11+00:00
https://www.wheresyoured.at/let-ai-burn/
robertogrecoedzitron ai artificialintelligence 2026 aihype economics aibubble siliconvalley circularfinancing finance anthropic openai nvidia llms sgi artigicialgeneralintelligence claude chatgpt chatbots google meta microsoft dotcombubble bigtech gpus generativeai justinkollar andrewodlyzko spacex coreweave nebius venturecapital vc toobigtofail markets datacenters speculation 2008 aig banking tarp softbank privatecredit globalfinancialcrisis greatrecession darioamodei samaltman satyanadella sundarpichai andyjassy jensenhuang markzuckerberg manufacturedconsent genaihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e51d7d49f6b9/Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Hell Is Other People - Locus2026-07-08T02:23:58+00:00
https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/
robertogrecocorydoctorow 2026 billionaires technofeudalism bullies siliconvalley ai artificialintelligence nerdreich sartre jean-paulsartre chatbots labor timcook apple jeffbezos amazon sweathshops exploitation bigtech elonmusk markzuckerberg meta spacex tesls xai twitter larryellison google effectivealtruism tescreal longtermism extropianism rationalism transhumanism singularitarianism singularity cosmism morality sundarpichai donaldtrump workingclass satyanadella media demoracy monarchy oligarchy power inequality humanity governance government philanthropicindustrialcomplex philanthropy charitableindustrialcomplex charities charityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ffe17d659c3a/The life-changing magic of touching stuff | The Vergecast - YouTube2026-07-08T02:03:07+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WEgL5xCTak
robertogrecoobjects senses tactile ianbogost davidpierce 2026 happiness tickets dematerialization material materials friction frictionmaxxing slow digital analog disconnection algorithms asmr ai artificialintelligence process life living gratification communing sensory sensors automation ownership connection smartphones addiction compulsion attention strangeness texture small frictionlessness experience convenience smoothness efficiency optimization socialmedia commodification commercialization amazon physical bodieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:142816d0c76e/Contemporary art: Progressive or pointless? - Doha Debates2026-07-07T15:50:04+00:00
https://dohadebates.com/arts-media/contemporary-art-progressive-or-pointless/
robertogrecoart making 2026 craft theory abstraction nadirnahdi wafaabilal samaryounes fendevilliers mollycrabapple materiality contemporary labor work time materials ideas dohadebates ai artificialintelligence expression experimentation gee'sbend craftsmanship ingenuity knowledge artisanship culturarelevancy legacy conservatism capitalism democraticsocialism politics policy culture tradition postmodernism language aesthetics design artmaking neuroscience education urbanplanning hospitals architecture elitism artists beauty value futurists sculpture power italianfuturism italianfuturists futurism academiahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f84556a45818/The radical reasons why you dream of making things by hand | Aeon Essays2026-07-06T10:56:02+00:00
https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-reasons-why-you-dream-of-making-things-by-hand
robertogrecolabor work slow human baking beekeeping leatherwork craft handwork jasonhabgood-coote johnthelwall epthompson robinveder weaving blacksmithing glassblowing sewing pottery matthewcrawford ai artificialintelligence luddism neoluddism luddites neoluddites svetlanaboym nationalism racialsupremacy fascism. johnruskin williammorris thoth plato socrates ancientegypt thamus rousseau karlmarx adamsmith donaldmackenzie grahamspinardi thoreau diy making heidegger jamesfox paulkingsnorth fordism nostalgia skills childhood woodworking knitting fishing repair maintenance theodoradorno calligraphy typewriters analog automation deskilling hobbies thomascarlyle augustuspugin popeleoxiv magnificahumanitas encyclicals catholicchurch architecture artsandcraftsmovement designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:78d4d03271ae/Fakes of the Future | Los Angeles Review of Books2026-07-05T05:21:54+00:00
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fakes-future-artificial-intelligence-llms-larb-quarterly-traffic/
robertogrecoai artificialintelligence llms chatbots howwewrite writing humanness fakes authenticity doubt human humans humanism krzysztofpelc 2026 fraud uncertainty confidence history photography aihallucinations recursion authorship handmade petrarch erasmus renaissance falsehoods culture chronology literature creativity machinelearning generativeai genai fabrication samueljohnson ossian homer napoleonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9fbaccbd431c/A speechwriter-turned-welder’s radical gospel of localism | Aeon Videos2026-07-04T08:31:08+00:00
https://aeon.co/videos/a-republican-speechwriter-turned-welders-radical-gospel-of-localism
robertogrecoskepticism libertarianism anarchism 1981 ronaldhallé peterladue philosophy politics barrygoldwater 1964 elites ai artificialintelligence energy education karlhesshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0fad44261672/A Prayer for Limits - by Matthew Battles2026-07-03T07:04:10+00:00
https://matthewbattles.substack.com/p/a-prayer-for-limits
robertogrecoOur relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them….
It is precisely within our limitations that the following find a place: compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others; a generosity that can emerge even in the midst of darkness and failure; spiritual experience and the worship of God…. Mysteriously, it is precisely in such moments that we can discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence of the Lord.
I found myself wanting not merely to assent to these words, but to pray with them. It was a curious and inexorable feeling. I have not made a practice of composing and sharing prayers; but a spiritual confidante whose fellowship I trust has encouraged me to share this one. And so here is a prayer for our limits, offered not for intercession or supplication but in adoration:
It is through your love, O Lord, that we learn to love our limits,
which give force to our compassion
and shape to the fear we feel for others in their need;
which nurture our generosity even as we fall and fail;
which frame and enfold our measures of adoration.
Confronted as we shall be by rejection,
grieving as we must at the loss of all we hold dear,
quaking as we do in the face of our failures,
may we gather our wits, sense your nearness,
and come to rest in the embrace of our entanglement.
We suffer from these limits and we learn from them.
Without them, we would cease yearning even for love.
To love, to learn, and to desire is to wound and be wounded.
What a gift it is to be drawn into your woundedness,
into this adventure of failure and freedom, disappointment and dream.
In you, we affirm the tragedy and splendor and glorious mystery
of being your body together; with you, we choose the human."]]>matthewbattles 2026 popeleoxiv magnificahumanitas encyclicals ai artificialintelligence catholicchurch catholicism antónbarba-kay technology siliconvalley lmsacasas technocracy utility tools environment marshallmcluhan perception resistance matthewsitman samadler-bell jackhanson beauty grace life living limits incapacity illness age aging suffering vulnerability humanity humanism compassion wisdom experience prayer spirituality failure freedom disappointment entanglement human humanness humans knowyourenemy friction frictionlessnesshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d7e82e1856b5/Daring Fireball: 'Why Is Meta Destroying Its Engineering Organization?'2026-07-03T05:36:05+00:00
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/orosz-meta-engineering-culture
robertogrecoThe biggest problem: people stop caring about real work and focus on performative work. Let’s check the four ingredients that Meta’s leadership has decided to introduce to their workplace:
1. Tracking the keyboards and mouse clicks of all engineers, where legally possible
2. Reassign a good chunk of engineers to full-time data labeling
3. Let staff know that 10% of them will be laid off
4. Have a culture where devs optimize for any and all metrics measured during PSC
5. Measure token usage as part of PSC
Shake this mix up well, and what do you get? Two things:
1. Everyone overuses AI to boost their personal stats. An engineering workforce that pretends to work with as much AI, and as little human input, as possible. It’s a strange incentive where an outage caused by a failure to review code properly is not grounds for dismissal, but writing code by hand — instead of having an AI agent write it — could cost you your job.
2. Every longer-tenured engineer is seeking a new job, or at least considering it. Those who have been around at Meta longer term have seen enough.
PSC is “Performance Summary Cycle”, Meta’s stringent cut-throat performance review system. Orosz’s report is extraordinarily well-sourced by current and recently former Meta engineers. Towards the end of the piece, Orosz addresses the “just ask Meta AI to give you the account” Instagram account hijackings [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/meta-ai-ask-for-instagram-accounts ], which he describes, without hyperbole, as “the most embarrassing outage in Meta’s history”. Orosz’s sources report, unsurprisingly, that the breach was the result of AI — AI writing the code, AI reviewing the code, and AI taking over for human technical support.
As for who is responsible, it’s Zuckerberg and AI “genius” Alexandr Wang:
In June that year, Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI to reboot its AI efforts for a whopping $14.8B, and brought in Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang to take over Meta’s AI strategy. [...] Based on the investment made into Scale AI and Wang, it’s pretty clear that Meta — and Zuckerberg — is determined to build a state-of-the-art LLM that can be competitive with the latest versions of Claude and ChatGPT. But Meta has to start pretty much from scratch, and it’s up to Alexandr Wang to deliver. [...]
Zuckerberg has full control over the business, and has made the decisions to reallocate a good part of engineering folks to data labeling, to roll out tracking software, and to lay off 10% of staff when Meta achieved record revenue and profits. As the CEO, the buck clearly stops with him.
But it’s hard to unsee that — outside of layoffs — everything that Meta is doing is taken from the Scale AI playbook, and that surely comes from Wang.
It sounds like in addition to running Meta’s “AI strategy”, Zuckerberg has effectively put Wang in charge of engineering at Meta, and Wang is trying to replace human engineers with AI. During the transition, the job of engineers at Meta has changed from writing code to training AI systems that Zuckerberg and Wang aren’t even trying to hide are intended to replace the people. What the Oompa Loompas were to Willy Wonka, Zuckerberg wants AI to be for him.
I’m not sure it’s any more realistic. Meta has always been a bad company. Now it seems like a bad company that’s lost its fucking mind."]]>johngruber markzuckerberg meta ai artificialintelligence facebook alexandrwang 2026 gergelyorosz substack management web internet online coding culture morale work labor scaleai llms chatgpt claudehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ea8a86b4f275/My University Students Cheat. I Don’t Blame Them. - Macleans.ca2026-07-02T02:26:32+00:00
https://macleans.ca/society/my-university-students-cheat-i-dont-blame-them/
robertogrecojacobshelly highered highereducation academia education universities colleges grades grading assessment ethics cheating pedagogy ai artificialintelligence culture behavior ideas humanities gradeinflation memorization recall writing howwewrite howwelearn learning teaching howweteach economics motivation technology integrity academicintegrity societyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c1abc1e9db1d/Citations Needed: News Brief: Despite 9-Figure Infusion from Silicon Valley, Abundance Still Seeks Popular Support2026-07-02T01:36:19+00:00
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-despite-9-figure-infusion-from-silicon-valley-abundance-still-seeks-popular-support
robertogrecocintationsneeded abundance abundancemovement abundancenetwork billionaires neoliberalism capitalism economics democrats elections dylangyauch-lewis revolvingdoorproject abundanceinstitute regulation deregulation siliconvalley chrislarsen accountability greatmantheory power maga donaldtrump datacenters ai artificialintelligence abundanceagenda sanfrancisco thinktanks 2026 yimby yimbyism yimbys unions policy federalistsociety libertarianism washingtondc left nyc degrowth ideology cities nimby environment growth nimbys meta facebook energy infrastructure democracy fundraising dogma zackrosen californiayimby housing landlords steveballmer andrewcarnegie philanthropicindustrialcomplex philanthropy charitableindustrialcomplex charities dustinmoskovitz johnarnold mattyglesias billgates populism crypto cryptocurrencies law legal inequality manhattaninstitute mississippi mississippimiracle education schools schooling califorina privatization nimbyismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4e1a13eadbd2/We Uncovered The Master Plan That Peter Thiel Doesn't Want You To See - YouTube2026-07-01T07:23:08+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iLf2h_fo-w
robertogreconetworkstate power governance 2026 peterthiel palantir us politics gaza venezuela datacenters gilduran nerdreich billionaires oligarchy democracy deregulation corporations corporatism seanmorrow seasteading patrifriedman miltonfriedman seasteadinginstitute libertarianism joelonsdale siliconvalley thesovereignindividualy monarchism authoritarianism jamesdaledavidson williamrees-mogg 1997 crypto cryptocurrencies ai artificialintelligence automation work workers labor tescreal transhumanism extropianism singularitarianism singularity californiacommonsense cosmism opengov rationalism effectivealtruism longtermism ghislainemaxwell sandysprings privatization battleground newfounding highlandrim californiaforever samaltman reidhoffman marcandreessen solanocounty technology bigtech 8vc govtech surveillance drones weapons elonmusk donaldtrump maga trumpism government fear ciceroinstitute forcedlabor balajisrinivasan sanfrancisco chesaboudin panic doominfluencers pronomoscapital próspera roatán honduras greenlandhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3ba7434ee705/The AI Compass2026-07-01T02:25:39+00:00
https://bambamramfan.github.io/ai-compass/
robertogrecoai artificialintelligence emilybender luddites neoluddites luddism neoluddism jaronlanier resistance aihype aibubble danluu technology hollyherndon samkriss calnewport cartoonshateher corydoctorow labor edzitron finance economics mattlevine skepticism karaswisher aella katiagrace kelseypiper ethanmollick mattyglesias policy politics paulgrahan vc venturecapital siliconvalley peterthiel ezraklein kontextmaschine amandaaskell marcandreessen eliezeryudkowsky connorleahy samaltman lexfridman raykurzweil tescreal transhumanism extropianism singularitarianism singularity cosmism rationalism effectivealtruism longtermism 2026https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fe735ebb2688/The Richest Country Is Pretty Mid Now - YouTube2026-06-28T22:50:35+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FZy1lBNykA
robertogrecobennjordan leveragism capitalism internet online google gemini ai artificialintelligence aibubble journalism rugpulls authoritarianism elonmusk donaldtrump spacex israel gaza anarchism economics economy integrity finance ip intellectualproperty well-being wellbeing precarity gold debt politics us bigtech spotify suno streaming law legal happiness fuckyoumoney inequality money labor wealth laborreflexivity growth borders border privateequity libertarianism tescreal nerdreich peterthiel billackman rulingclass transhumanism extropianism singularitarianism singularity xenophobia inflation extraction rationalism oligarchy larryellison markzuckerberg jeffbezos effectivealtruism longtermism governance government democracy poverty work police policing iranwar austerity retirement maga trumpism muskism wallstreet stockmarket nasdaq indexfunds 401k leverage power policy autonomy obesity surveillance survival fear ice bronnieware life living courage death guatemala coca-cola unions wisdom pollution environment humanrighhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e8e53f65ef4f/AI Can’t Fix the Student-Motivation Problem - The Atlantic2026-06-27T06:26:04+00:00
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/ai-tutor-education-human-investment/687678/
robertogrecoai artificialintelligence jennyanderson mikegoldstein teaching howwteach edtech technology chatbots llms schools schooling motivation salkhan salmankhan khanmigo openai samaltman learning howwelearn children students khanacademy kristendicerbo laurenceholt tutoring inequality ronferguson achievementgap criticalthinking rolandfryerjr maryburns social justinreich coopeartion care caring community condusion attentionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:061d6da24c04/The Algorithmic Order2026-06-27T06:22:48+00:00
https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-algorithmic-order/
robertogrecoaudreywatters 2026 edtech technology education schools schooling standardizedtesting testing coding natashasinger google chromebooks politics policy high-stakestesting rossweiner nclb educationreform reform teaching curriculum learning howwelearn howweteach pedagogy democracy technocracy australia uk us canada texasideology californianideology fredturner secularism christianity whitesupremacy surveillance military extraction extractivism texas bible individualism libertarianism neoliberalism mooc moocs quinnslobodian bentarnoff muskism fordism elonmusk henryford spacex starlink southafrica business society capitalism sciencefiction scifi futurism ailiteracy literacy ai artificialintelligence benwilliamson arjunappadurai theobaker stanford universities colleges highereducation highered academia lmsacasas emilybender nannainue language anthropomorphization socialmedia moralpanic regulation deregulationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:dc6b54329945/Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good2026-06-27T06:05:51+00:00
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1
robertogreco2026 software ai artificialintelligence medicine health brain skills deskillification technology marianalenharohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:262ec272fdf0/How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization • Buttondown2026-06-27T04:41:02+00:00
https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/how-to-talk-about-ai-without-adding-to-the/
robertogrecoemilybender nannaine ai artificialintelligence 2026 anthropomorphization cognition automation intelligence speechrecognition bias chatbots llms aihallucinations communitcation agency software humans biology metaphorhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:efa65bdf1187/Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools, by Natasha Singer (2026) | W. W. Norton & Company2026-06-27T04:38:20+00:00
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881943/
robertogrecoedtech bigtech schools schooling 2026 google apple computing computers chromebooks microsoft ai artificialintelligence llms natashasinger coding algorithmshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3300f0a7481b/LLMs as the Worst of Both Worlds: A Review of Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI - Front Porch Republic2026-06-26T08:35:43+00:00
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/06/llms-as-the-worst-of-both-worlds-a-review-of-cory-doctorows-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
robertogrecocorydoctorow joshuapauling 2026 ai artificialintelligence llms chatbots technology wendellberry neilpostman aihype aibubble economics automation garymarcus avs aihallucinations trucking labor work workers corporations corporatism government accountability elizahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d2d7f42fac5d/Pope Leo XIV's 'Magnifica humanitas' (with Jack Hanson) - Know Your Enemy - Apple Podcasts2026-06-26T08:30:11+00:00
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pope-leo-xivs-magnifica-humanitas-w-jack-hanson/id1462703434?i=1000773716438
robertogrecomagnificahumanitas 2026 popeleoxiv rerumnovarum popeleoxiii jackhanson donnaharraway cyborgs ai artificialintelligence humanism humanity reinholdniebuhr catholicchurch catholicism nature destiny human humans workers work labor augustinianism augustine staugustine saintaugustine society michaeloakenshott knowyourenemy war greed religion popefrancis us michaeloakeshott commonweal charlespéguy modernity profit capitalism privateproperty property authoritarianism democracy jdvance donaldtrump samadler-bell matthewsitman poverty augustinians sharing theology stevebannon latinamerica perú vaticanii vatican tradcatholicism globalsouth thirdworld humanrights global liberaldemocracy religiousfreedom freedomofreligion popebenedictxvi scripture thomasaquinas justice humandignity economics democraticsocialism politics adrianvermeule 1891 1937 1983 1985 discernment darioamodei anthropic antoniospadaro peterthiel towerofbabel language english audience desire homogenization tension growth friction mortality time placehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e0ae7f0359ad/The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow review – the real price of artificial intelligence | Science and nature books | The Guardian2026-06-26T08:25:18+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/22/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-by-cory-doctorow-review-the-real-price-of-artificial-intelligence
robertogrecocorydoctorow 2026 ai artificialintelligence aibubble aihype dorianlynskey economics technology ericschmidt chatbots elonmusk samaltman openai enshittification siliconvalley meta metaversehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:733dace9dc4e/Episode 11: Episode 11: Reverse Centaurs and AI, with Cory Doctorow - Dreaming Against the Machine - Apple Podcasts2026-06-26T07:16:50+00:00
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-11-reverse-centaurs-and-ai-with-cory-doctorow/id1890733564?i=1000773859398
robertogrecocorydoctorow 2026 ai artificialintelligence aihype aibubble greed growth sciencefiction scifi adambeckerhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e0ee37cacfb3/AI Was Never About Helping You | Cory Doctorow - YouTube2026-06-26T06:40:07+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPQNPJ0CEPo
robertogrecocorydoctorow charliewarzel 2026 ai artificialintelligence aibubble aircanada aihype accountability oligarchy democracy psychology power enshittification growthhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:20fc6022da2c/How The Deep State Is Plotting To Protect Corporate Power - YouTube2026-06-26T04:58:37+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RafuYcUolY4
robertogrecous donaldtrump maga trumpism lawenforcement fbi police policing surveillance moreperfectunion brianthompson luigimangione wealthy wealth inequality terrorism corporations corporatism workingclass workers robinhood danielboguslaw mccarthyism kenklippenstein socialfabric nsa politics occupywallstreet ows spencerreynolds dhs counterterrorism class classwar departmentofjustice security safety law legal data datacollection datacenters ai artificialintelligence repression supression technology bigtech deepstate conspiracy government nationalsecurity dea secretservice prices economics authoritarianism classgrievances domesticterrorism civilrights nspm-7 pambondi unitedhealthcare fear charliekirk assassinations revolutionn uprisings biggovernment healthinsurance health politicalprisoners anticapitalism luddism neoluddism neoluddites luddites dissent freespeech freedomofspeech 2026 josephmccarthy redscare economy protest protests fusioncenters dsac domesticsecurityalliancecouncil banks banking billionaires alienationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2c8681c518aa/AI's Social Scene Is Shifting to Curated Offline Events, Dinner Parties - Business Insider2026-06-26T01:15:39+00:00
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-social-scene-curated-offline-events-dinner-parties-2026-6
robertogrecoHosting an intimate dinner in sf for lore builders.
Founders, narrative architects, writers, world builders. Humans at the intersection of storytelling x culture x craft x storytelling x philosophy x design.
Keeping it to <10. Who should be in the room? 🫶
— Joumana (@JoumanaElomar) June 23, 2026 [https://x.com/JoumanaElomar/status/2069509402437222482 ]
Many of these curated events follow a similar blueprint: a promo that looks like an A24 film poster and grainy, film-like photos that make it feel more like a 90s-era house party than a tech founders' event.
"I think trusted (human) curation is so important now, even more than ever," said Michelle Fang, who leads Stripe Startups, a program offering financial support and resources to early-stage, venture-backed companies, and has a weekly newsletter that rounds up in-person tech events in San Francisco.
Fang said that when she first started the newsletter in 2023, she posted an average of 20 to 30 in-person events a week. That number has now risen to 70 to 80 a week.
"There's been a noticeable shift in both the frequency and types of events happening in SF, especially over the past year," she said.
AI has accelerated this trend dramatically, she said, as the AI boom brings an influx of talent who want to establish their community in the city.
While some of the events Fang has listed are traditional building workshops and hackathons, others include Pilates classes, peptide tasting parties — the latest self-optimization craze — and "intentionally curated" dinners.
It's a vibe shift from the large happy hours and networking events that defined post-pandemic tech socializing, said Fang. These smaller events don't require a big budget or venue, and with the speed of AI growth, people want to make sense of new concepts and the changes happening in real time, she said.
[image: "Dinner table with bowls of sushi and edamame at an event hosted by coworking and tech events startup Verci's / Verci, a coworking space and events startup, hosts monthly dinners and workshops for members. Ami Yoshimura/Verci"]
'Taste is a new core skill'
The taste conversation kicked off earlier this year when Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham wrote in a post on X that, as AI democratizes building, "taste will become even more important."
Two days later, OpenAI President Greg Brockman cemented the catchphrase on X, writing that "Taste is a new core skill." Since then, it's led the tech world to hyperfocus on AI companies and founders who are winning the taste battle.
Alongside the taste discourse, being offline has become a status symbol. Having the ability to de-digitalize is seen as a luxury and a way to connect with people more authentically, with in-person events being a means to achieve this, especially for those whose working lives already revolve around AI.
peak bengaluru and bangerlore pic.twitter.com/1imEhjhCBX
— prerna (@Prerrrrna_) June 7, 2026 [https://x.com/Prerrrrna_/status/2063545613632037129 ]
An event "only for hot people and nerds" in Bangalore, which appeared to be in collaboration with the early-stage Bangalore-based consumer tech company Faff, made the rounds on X earlier this month. The vibe is artfully arranged cheese boards, trendy cocktail menus (with AI puns), and grainy photos.
Ami Yoshimura, the 23-year-old cofounder of Verci, a members club and coworking space in New York, hosts events such as rooftop parties and multi-day retreats for founders and creatives. "Relationships, aesthetics, and telling a story" have become crucial ways to stand out in the hyper-competitive AI industry, he said.
Small parties, big bucks
It's not just San Francisco that is seeing this event boom.
new york tech week highlights:1. went blind into an event hosted by @join_ef and successfully met a group of really cool people with 0 degrees of mutual connection2. met/made some really good friends from url ➡️ irl shoutout fonzi and corgi team3. ended off the week with a… pic.twitter.com/CA3h0mwmLe
— sara kong (@saraknggg) June 8, 2026 [https://x.com/saraknggg/status/2064047927702782454 *]
Katia Ameri, a partner at A16z who spearheads Tech Week in San Francisco, LA, and New York City, wrote on X last month that New York was so far the largest Tech Week in history by events and attendees. The LA and San Francisco equivalents are coming up later this year.
Eliza Wu, cofounder of Corner, a social mapping app that describes itself as "Google but social," wrote in a post on X that there were over 600 RSVPs for a panel she was hosting at New York Tech Week.
Leading AI companies are also taking note. In April, Anthropic posted a brand events lead role in San Francisco, with a salary of up to $400,000.
There are four open marketing events positions at Anthropic, while OpenAI has two open positions for events, commanding over $200,000 salaries with options to gain equity too.
Anthropic is paying up to $400,000 a year for an events role.They're looking for someone to own the execution of brand experiences that translate Anthropic's values into physical moments.This person will produce everything from intimate thought-leadership gatherings to… pic.twitter.com/SWvmSarclY
— Andrew Yeung (@andruyeung) April 26, 2026 [https://x.com/andruyeung/status/2048545188608364593 ** (archived: https://www.are.na/block/47316282 )]
Andrew Yeung, an ex-Google and Meta product lead turned event host and angel investor, wrote on X in response to the job advert that it shows Anthropic understands that "they need to create visceral, unforgettable IRL experiences that make complex technology feel accessible and human."
"The massive opportunity now is offline, analog, in-person," he said.
But while the taste that goes into hosting a party is human, we are living in an AI world — and as with your job applications, an AI screener might still be standing between you and an invitation.
Wu, the cofounder who hosted a New York Tech Week event with 600 RSVPs, said she turned to Claude to winnow down her guest list.
She said she prompted the chatbot to scan through potential attendees' social posts to identify "markers of excellence" and to suss out the "quality of their thoughts."
With the help of Claude, only 300 people made the cut."
[* full text of https://x.com/saraknggg/status/2064047927702782454:
new york tech week highlights:
1. went blind into an event hosted by @join_ef and successfully met a group of really cool people with 0 degrees of mutual connection
2. met/made some really good friends from url ➡️ irl shoutout fonzi and corgi team
3. ended off the week with a bang at vega (shoutout ben & maddie)
i think when it boils down to WHAT constitutes a good event, it varies based off what your specific persona is trying to get out of it.
for me, events with well-catered hospitality that are more intimate (without just randomly throwing people together sloppily) call out more to me because you make more solidified relationships.
likewise, it’s good to put an online face to a name because that alone can unlock so much trust and future opportunities.
see you soon nyc!
** full text of https://x.com/andruyeung/status/2048545188608364593
Anthropic is paying up to $400,000 a year for an events role.
They're looking for someone to own the execution of brand experiences that translate Anthropic's values into physical moments.
This person will produce everything from intimate thought-leadership gatherings to large-scale industry activations.
The top AI research lab in the world recognizes that to cross the chasm and reach everyday consumers, they need to lean into hospitality. They need to create visceral, unforgettable IRL experiences that make complex technology feel accessible and human.
They understand that digital channels are getting increasingly saturated. Every feed is flooded with AI content... every inbox is overflowing.
The massive opportunity now is offline, analog, in-person.
The companies that win in the next decade won't just have the best product but the most emotional in-person presence and the most compelling storytelling.
If you're in events, experiential marketing, or brand activations, this is your moment. The biggest tech companies in the world are betting on you.
[two images of the job posting]
]]]>ai artificialintelligence siliconvalley technology 2026 royashahidi small humanities liberalarts culture taste anthropic claude aislop paulgraham elizawu corner saraking amiyoshimura joumanaelomar michellefang stripestartups social events community aibubble gregbrockman openai status offline online socialmedia internet katiaameri a16z andreessenhorowitz andrewyeung google meta nytechweek sanfrancisco society analoghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7c5d13ca6f52/Attack of the Trillionaire: Elon Musk's Fascist Clown Car2026-06-25T08:27:19+00:00
https://www.thenerdreich.com/attack-of-the-trillionaire/
robertogreconerdreich davekarpf 2026 elonmusk palantir spacex fascism argentina javiermilei donaldtrump maga deregulation tesla billionaires usaid muskism privatization governance government us siliconvalley marcandreessen georgewbush ftc sec twitter technology crypto cryptocurrencies alexkarp petehegseth anthropic ai artificialintelligence labor work aibubble edzitron democracy democrats republicans surveillance mussolini benitomussolini ruthben-ghiat robertpaxton jasonstanley technofaschism polymarket memestocks kalshi gambling society propaganda mattmahan california media networkstate elsalvador balajisrinivasan newzealand antichrist jdvance thesovereignindividual aynrand libertarianism meta finance californiaforever solanocounty gretchenwhitmer michigan georgia missouri utah datacenters northcarolina google bigdata data andreessenhorowitz a16z gavinnewsom garrytan jebbush curtisyarvinhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7bed6769c1d3/Your AI Is Not a Tool - by L. M. Sacasas2026-06-23T10:09:03+00:00
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/your-ai-is-not-a-tool
robertogrecolmsacasas 2026 ivanillich marshallmcluhan technology culture ai artificialintelligence philosophy ethics medialiteracy tools perception society degradation asceticism senses sensory experience slow small leomarx blaisepascal jacquesellul evanselinger woodrowhartzog obscurity andrewmccluhan toolsforconviviality stoics stoicism stevenjohnson charleyjohnson media resistance antónbarba-kay popeleoxiv pschye environment cognitiveuploading cognitiveoffloading absorption humanism subverison sensation sensing reality socialfabrichttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b00a407f0bb3/(One) Good AI Is Here - Anil Dash2026-06-23T09:55:14+00:00
https://www.anildash.com/2026/04/28/one-good-ai-is-here/
robertogrecoanildash ai artificialintelligence 2026 llms williamgibson corridordigital nikopueringer cgi chatgpt openai corridorkeyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8869cf664bff/Operation Kill Everybody | Oswaldo Zavala2026-06-20T10:26:04+00:00
https://thebaffler.com/latest/operation-kill-everybody-zavala
robertogrecooswaldozavala warondrugs us israel iran donaldtrump elsalvador nayibbukele javiermilei argentina gustavopetro colombia hamas hezbollah palestine claudiasheinbaum mexico lula luladasilva brazil brasil hilarygoodfriend nicolásmaduro venezuela petehegseth honduras juanorlandohernández chavismo latinamerica caribbean kristinoem trendearagua philippines rodrigoduterte middleeast extermination ecuador danielnoboa bernardoarévalo indigoolivier reedbrody amygoodman warcrimes tonygarza felipecalderón jackbauer kiefersutherland plancolombia méridainitiative amlo andrésmanuellópezobrador politics policy toddmiller eisenhower dwightdeisenhower abughraib anduril palantir petethiel ice migration immigration policyforeignpower border borders ai surveillance artificialintelligence geogroup ritasegato donroedocrtrine monroedoctrine trumpcorallary interventionism juanbatistaalberdihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5e41d16d5781/Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI2026-06-20T08:59:24+00:00
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/understanding-the-luddites-in-the
robertogrecobrianmerchant luddites luddism neoluddites neoluddism resistance technology 2026 history labor work workers ai artificialintelligence bigtech hasanminaj miriamcherry berniesanders benshapiro chatgpt google openai industrialrevolution automation nedludd elonmusk ushttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b44c4354ec33/In Defense of Our Country: On the Need to Resist AI and AI Data Centers - Front Porch Republic2026-06-17T10:41:15+00:00
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/06/in-defense-of-our-country-on-the-need-to-resist-ai-and-ai-data-centers/
robertogrecoteddymacker ai artificialintelligence resistance datacenters 2026 local us constitution thomasjefferson johnadams vaclavhavel tonimorrison ebwhite robertsinsheimer robertellsberg philipsherrard thichnhathanh gandhi technology chatgpt cognition cognitivesurrender anthropic darioamodei jimfarley lilashroff berniesanders tuckercarlson rondesantis aoc alexandriaocasio-cortez davidorr democracy automation humanity human humans humanism transhumanism tescreal elonmusk guillaumeverdon consciousness nickland samaltman stuartrussell michaeltoscano china pierreteilharddechardin land understanding revolution danielpolikoff aloneness hustonsmith jaronlanier trust society relationships work lanor simonweil erwinchargaff jessejenkins openai robertdavieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ffa1c0086ad4/Tolstoy and the Illusion of Inevitability | THR Web Features | Web Features | The Hedgehog Review2026-06-17T10:22:04+00:00
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/tolstoy-and-the-illusion-of-inevitability
robertogreco“Traveler, there is no road. The road is made by walking.” —Antonio Machado
Machado’s famous line suggests that the future does not exist in advance, waiting to be discovered, but comes into being through a choice among possible actions. Many possibilities exist at any given moment. The one that becomes actual depends on coincidences and chances as well as choices, all producing events whose significance emerges only as they unfold.
That, as it happens, is also Leo Tolstoy’s argument in War and Peace. In the book’s battle scenes, plans dissolve into confusion, causes multiply beyond reckoning, and outcomes hinge on fleeting, unrepeatable moments. On the eve of the Battle of Borodino, the novel’s hero, Prince Andrei, reflects that what lies ahead is not a determinate sequence but “a hundred million chances…decided on the instant.” What matters is less the perfection of a plan and more the ability to respond to what no plan could anticipate, by means of what Tolstoy calls “alertness.”
For Tolstoy, this is a feature not of war alone but of reality in general. History, far from representing the execution of a grand design, is rather the result of countless interacting elements, each shaping and reshaping what can happen next. New possibilities are always emerging as earlier ones are left unrealized. Life more closely resembles an evolving system than a solved equation. Events are contingent in Aristotle’s sense of the term: They “can either be or not be.” After all, if things could only happen one way, human action would collapse into the mechanical execution of what was already implicit in the present. “If human life could be [entirely] governed by reason,” Tolstoy writes in the book’s epilogue, “the possibility of life is destroyed.”
And yet again and again, in our aspiration to a hard science allowing for prediction, we are drawn to deny this. That is one reason War and Peace has never lost its relevance.
The Recurring Dream of Certainty
Since the scientific revolution, Western thought has repeatedly returned to the hope that contingency might be an illusion. As Newton explained the baffling complexities of planetary motion by four simple laws, perhaps, many imagined, the same could be done for human affairs. Thinkers as diverse as Marx, Skinner, and Malinowski have shared this dream, with each promising, in his own way, to reveal necessity beneath apparent disorder.
Complexity, for such men, is conceived of as a surface phenomenon, concealing an underlying simplicity that, once uncovered, will render the future knowable. Pierre-Simon Laplace insisted that events are certain, not probable: In speaking of their probability, we are really speaking of the chances our guesses may be accurate, but the events themselves are certain. Time and again, the apparent contingency of events is presented as evidence of our own ignorance. If we knew enough, we would see that events could not have happened otherwise.
But there is another possibility: that contingency is real—that the world is not merely complicated but fundamentally generative, that new possibilities are not simply revealed over time but produced within it, through the interaction of elements that cannot be fully anticipated in advance.
This is the world Tolstoy describes, one where knowledge cannot precede action, only emerge through it.
Time and the Limits of Foresight
Tolstoy’s deepest insight concerns time itself. In a deterministic view, time is a neutral space where events unfold according to fixed laws and the future lies already implicit in the present, waiting to be revealed. But in Tolstoy’s world, time is generative. Each moment reshapes what can happen next. Possibilities interact, combine, and disappear, their significance becoming visible only as events unfold.
One might say that the system is constantly generating variation—new configurations, new alignments, new opportunities—but without any overarching mechanism that selects among them in advance. Selection happens locally, in real time, through action. The closer one looks, the more things fail to simplify, as in the Newtonian model, and ramify instead. What happens to be taken up is what persists.
This is why most Austrian and Russian generals in War and Peace are consistently wrong. They believe they possess a science of warfare—a system capable of anticipating outcomes. Before Austerlitz, they insist that “every contingency has been foreseen.” The result is Napoleon’s greatest victory—yet their confidence remains intact, attributing failure to imperfect execution, never to the limits of prediction itself. As so often happens, the conviction that events must conform to a science makes the supposed science unfalsifiable.
The wisest general, Kutuzov, appreciates that people conceive only of a few possibilities while there are thousands. Famously, in the Council of War before Austerlitz, he advises not more planning but “a good night’s sleep.” What matters most is the alertness to seize opportunities that cannot be anticipated in advance.
This distinction—between a world that can be mapped and one that must be navigated—extends beyond warfare. Wherever outcomes depend on unfolding interactions, local knowledge, and irreversible time, no complete science is possible. One can orient oneself, but one cannot blaze the path in advance.
The Illusion of Inevitability
If the future is open, why does the past so often appear inevitable? Tolstoy offers several answers, including what he calls “the law of retrospection.”
Once events have occurred, we can reconstruct the paths that led to them. We identify signs that seem to foreshadow the outcome we now know. Alternatives fade from view—not because they were not real, but because they left no trace. The result is a powerful illusion: What happened begins to seem as if it had to happen.
Tolstoy asks us to imagine a group of men hauling a log, all pulling in different directions. Wherever they happen to wind up, someone will say they planned to do so.
This retrospective projection—which one of us has called backshadowing—reshapes our understanding of history. We look at earlier moments and conclude that the outcome was implicit all along. The more coherent the explanation, the easier it is to forget that things might have turned out otherwise. To avoid backshadowing, we must practice sideshadowing—recognizing that other outcomes, some of which we can imagine, were genuinely possible.
That is just the insight that those who believe they have discovered a hard science allowing for prediction in the social world forget or deny. And yet they cannot foresee their own future.
Tolstoy’s narrative resists this illusion by preserving the density of lived experience—the sense that at each moment multiple futures were genuinely possible. History, in this view, is not a line but a branching structure, most of whose branches vanish without record.
AI and Narrative Certainty
In the age of AI, this dream of certainty has taken a new and more persuasive form. Artificial intelligence can process vast datasets, identify patterns invisible to human perception, and generate explanations with remarkable coherence. Faced with such capabilities, it is tempting to believe that uncertainty can finally be overcome—that the future can be rendered legible in advance.
But the deeper effect of AI lies in its ability to reorganize the past. Given sufficient data, AI systems can produce narratives that make outcomes appear coherent, even inevitable. They can identify correlations, reconstruct causal chains, and highlight what they regard as signs foreshadowing what followed. The result is not necessarily false, but it is selective.
In this way, AI functions less as a predictor than as a powerful engine of narrative compression, reducing the apparent space of possibilities by presenting a single path as the path. What was once understood as a field of possible alternatives becomes retrospectively legible as an inevitable sequence, reducing many “futuribles” to one. The danger here lies in premature coherence, the sense that complexity has been resolved when it has only been reorganized into a persuasive form.
A Compass Rather Than a Map
Tools do more than extend thought; they reshape the environment in which thought occurs. AI, for instance, introduces a distinctive bias by generating what is statistically coherent, what resembles patterns derived from accumulated data.
In an evolutionary system, what persists is not necessarily what is best in any absolute sense but what is most easily selected under prevailing conditions. AI changes those conditions in the intellectual world, lowering the cost of generating variations while subtly guiding selection toward what is already legible within its patterns.
Over time, this can narrow the space of perceived possibilities by making them less visible, less accessible, less likely to be pursued. Certain forms of thought—those that resist simplification, that depend on sustained attention, or that emerge from direct engagement with the world—become comparatively fragile.
What follows from Tolstoy’s ideas, on the other hand, is not that prediction is useless or that analysis should be abandoned, but rather that we must think in terms of a compass rather than a map. A map assumes a fixed terrain and a determinate path, while a compass provides direction without specifying the route. In a world of genuine contingency, only the latter is available. One can choose a bearing, but the path itself is discovered through movement. Orientation is not foresight.
This is the force of Machado’s insight: The road is made by walking not because we lack information but because the path does not exist until it is created.
To accept this is to adopt a different understanding of knowledge, not as a complete representation of what will happen, but as a capacity to respond intelligently to what does happen. It is inseparable from time, from attention, from the ability to recognize significance as it emerges.
The impulse to eliminate contingency is understandable. Uncertainty is uncomfortable: It resists control and frustrates planning. But it is also what makes agency possible.
A world in which everything could be predicted would be a world in which nothing could be otherwise. Action would lose its meaning, since outcomes would already be fixed. The openness of the future is not a defect in our knowledge, but a condition of human life.
Artificial intelligence does not change this condition—but it can make us forget it. By rendering the past as if it had been inevitable, it invites us to imagine that the future is already written. Against this, one must insist on what Tolstoy and Machado understood in saying that the future remains unwritten, not because we have failed to compute it but because it does not yet exist."]]>tolstoy garysaulmorson julioottino antoniomachado fleeting alertness certainty uncertainty foresight prediction predictions contingency time variation selection local localism slow small complexity simplicity inevitability retrospection localknowledge knowledge irreverability science 2026 backshadowing sideshadowing coherence cohesion control human humanism planning plans narrativecompression future data ai artificialintelligence conditions possibility possibilities simplification orientation compass direction maps mapping liveexperience experience history action reason technocracy futuribles compasses canon humanness life living warandpeace bfskinner bronisławmalinowski karlmarxhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9d990d00b4a4/The SpaceX IPO Is A Giant Unworkable Con Orchestrated By An Overt White Supremacist Huckster2026-06-17T10:09:36+00:00
https://karlbode.com/the-spacex-ipo-is-a-giant-unworkable-con-orchestrated-by-an-overt-white-supremacist-huckster/
robertogrecokarlbode ai capitalism elonmusk fraud aibubble spacex ipos us economics politics media mainstreammedia journalism nazism fascism whitesupremacy tesla oligarchy boosterism jasoncalacanis starlink joerogan donaldtrump maga governance government regulation oversight power controlhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d14ee8348fa2/Matthew Butterick | Extinction-level capitalism2026-06-17T10:06:00+00:00
https://matthewbutterick.com/extinction-level-capitalism.html
robertogrecomatthewbutterick capitalism ai artificialintelligence spacex openai anthropic elonmusk capital philosophy government politics politicaleconomy technology luddism luddites brianmerchant economics samaltman darioamodei billgate marcandreessen technooptimism well-being wellbeing society history langdonwinner policy democracy liberaldemocracy liberalism environment gildedage inequality opec johnlocke illiberaldemocracy latecapitalism jamesglabraith robertreich karlmarx mancurolson skynet stephenhawking sciencefiction scifi nickborstom stuartrussell engineering reclamation west governance power control usexceptionalism americanexceptionalism bigai google carlbenediktfrey law legal edzitron labor work workers wages employment unemployment greatdepression taxes taxation markets revolution technofuedalism venezuela hugochávez nicolásmaduro randynewman communism property industrialrevolution resistance citizenship knowledgework gdp productivity erikbrynjolfsson knowledgeworkers biglaw llms resources norway humanhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5e1b267caf28/Report on the State of Reports About The Humanities2026-06-17T09:57:25+00:00
https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/report-on-the-state-of-reports-about
robertogrecotimothyburke vanderbilt 2025 academia highereducation highered critique criticism ethics daviddeirmeier eowilson niallferguson ai artificialintelligence franzfanon kwameanthonyappiah seanwilentz trumpismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:bae3e0645db1/AI Is Not Conscious, But It Is Our Unconscious2026-06-17T09:54:25+00:00
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/ai-is-not-conscious-but-it-is-becoming
robertogrecolmsacasas consciousness unsconscious erikhoel ai artificialintelligence thinking howwethink hannaharendt llms whauden alfrednorthwhitehead technology automation slow marshallmcluhan aipsychosishttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2aa407feabd4/Monopoly Round-Up: The Pope and a Silicon Valley Trillionaire Fight Over God2026-06-17T09:53:05+00:00
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-pope-and-a
robertogrecomattstoller 2025 elonmusk transhumanism spacex ai artificialintelligence popeleoxiv catholicchurch catholicism tescreal inequality encyclicals humanity humanism society humnanity human humans aibubblehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b65252fe55df/When the Music Stops - by Dougald Hine - Writing Home2026-06-14T09:30:13+00:00
https://dougald.substack.com/p/when-the-music-stops
robertogrecodougaldhine elonmusk economics technology globalization ai artificialintelligence datacenters sweden monopoly inequality aibubble bubbles 2008 greatrecession globalfinancialcrisis culturewar culturewars politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5eb26147b229/Bullet Points: digital futures' past2026-06-14T09:29:45+00:00
https://davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/new-post-6653
robertogreco2015: The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.
What happens when the data flow is asymmetrical – but in favor of creators? What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download? If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing, and mashing, who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be a consumer?
No one. And that's just fine. A world where production outpaces consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from Economics 101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in theory succeed in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't matter. What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. As with blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination.
—Kevin Kelly, We Are the Web
There’s a nice puzzle to unwind here. Reading that first paragraph, it strikes me that Kelly is at least a little bit right. In 2026, we kind of do live in a world where, on average, everyone is more-or-less an online writer of sorts. If you count Twitter/X and Instagram and TikTok, we are absolutely awash in content. This is the world of social media streams, and it is a different world, a different culture, than what came before. Kevin Kelly saw this abundance coming, and tried to take seriously what marvels it would portend.
Except… well… when I ask my students “was Kevin Kelly right?”, they all get pained looks on their faces, glancing around the room to see who is going to step up and try to articulate the disconnect. What emerges is that Kelly was right about the abundance of content, but the abundance was beside the point.
You can see the tension emerge by focusing on the second and third paragraphs. Everyone isn’t busy uploading far more than they download (or, today, stream). Even the biggest bluesky sickos read far more than they post. A great many people still sit back and veg out, only occasionally contributing to the maelstrom. And the audience absolutely does matter online, because that’s where the money is.
What Kevin Kelly couldn’t see in 2005, because he was focusing on the new abundance, was that attention was about to become the dominant scarce resource. Hence, the attention economy. Hence Google/YouTube and Facebook becoming multi-trillion dollar businesses by algorithmically sorting attention and selling ads against the eyeballs.
He also couldn’t see that, once the money got big, content creation would stop becoming defined by scrappy amateur “prosumers,” and would instead become defined by the influencer industry. Hustlers would go on to make millions gaming the algorithms. Those are the defining features of the digital culture my students inhabit. The new abundance was just a starting point. The new scarcity was what defined the boundaries of both culture and industry.
This strikes me as a common mistake among tech futurists. It is relatively easy to tell a story that says (1) our society has been defined by this one scarce resource. (2) But technology is about to make that resource abundant. This changes everything. (3) Just imagine the wonderful possibilities once this new era of abundance has arrived.
They’re missing a critical fourth step: (4) With every new abundance, there will be a new scarcity. And how we manage that scarcity will tell us what sort of society we will be living in. Look toward the scarcity, not the abundance.
***
This all goes double for the AI future. SpaceX went public today.
Elon Musk is a trillionaire now, and his Space/AI/Social Media company is worth something like $2.2 trillion, with revenues of around negative $4 billion. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed to go public as well. Anthropic has had one profitable quarter, OpenAI has hahahahaha who are we kidding? OpenAI isn’t even trying to turn a profit. Why would they bother attempting to make more money than they spend? That isn’t how financial capitalism even works anymore.
These companies sell stories about the digital future to investors who give them money in exchange for shares of their storytelling company. These shares can be re-sold at a later date to some greater fool, often at a profit. SpaceX is worth $170/share today, not because investors broadly believe the company will generate several trillion in revenues, but because investors narrowly believe they will find someone who will buy their shares for at least $171/share at some later date.
The stories these companies tell about the digital future all revolve around abundance. And they are, if you have spent a few years studying this stuff, just the haziest, laziest stuff. Like, I’m sorry, “a country of geniuses in data center?” “We’re going to solve all of physics?” “Intelligence will be on tap, and then we’ll meter it like electricity?” The money has gotten so out of hand that these fellas aren’t even trying very hard anymore.
It would be nice if someone, anyone, could ask the AI barons this one simple question: If “intelligence” is about to become abundant, then what will the new scarcity be?” How will we organize ourselves in response to that scarcity? Who will profit from it, and who will be made more vulnerable as a result?
I can’t tell you what the world will look like in 2036. But I am damn certain that, with these guys in charge, it won’t be a utopia defined by limitless abundance. Of course it won’t. Let’s not be suckers, alright?
One final thought… zoom out far enough, and the history of the digital future looks something like this:
First, Silicon Valley built hardware that got smaller and faster and cheaper and better.
Then, Silicon Valley built software that became the mediating layer of the global economy.
And then, the finance industry ate the software industry. Every tech company today is a finance company.
Software ate the world, and then finance ate software, and now here we are.
It isn’t quite as simple as “after the Great Financial Crisis, all the finance guys moved to Silicon Valley so they could keep doing the same bullshit without all the regulatory scrutiny.” But that’s a close-enough approximation of recent history.
You cannot explain the actions of Silicon Valley today without paying attention to how the ludicrous excesses of financialization define the strategic behavior of the whole damn industry."]]>davekarpf 2025 elonmusk kevinekelly spacex ai artificialintelligence anthropic openai scarcity siliconvalley software finance financialization greatrecession globalfinancialcrisis intelligence socialmedia twitter tiktok instagram alvintoffler bittorrenthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:eb402de28bd7/Premium: The Silicon Valley Bubble (Part 1)2026-06-13T01:52:19+00:00
https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-silicon-valley-bubble-part-1/
robertogreco2026 edzitron siliconvalley technology ai aibbubble artificialintelligence aihype anthropic opeanai samaltman ipos johncarpenter danielaamodei broadcom google markzuckerberg elonmusk darioamodei llms facebook meta microsoft oracle amazon economicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c51a29a727ed/The Humane Localism of Pope Leo XIV - Front Porch Republic2026-06-13T01:44:35+00:00
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/06/the-humane-localism-of-pope-leo-xiv/
robertogrecolocalism popeleoxiv catholicchurch catholicism 2026 nathanbeacon ai artificialintelligence magnificahumanitas globalism local smalll dignity humanism human humans davidmcpherson limits wendellberryhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d6450d7d2c3d/The AI movement to end humanity | The Gray Area - YouTube2026-06-12T13:24:08+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b30d7FR8YP0
robertogrecosigalsamuel seanilling ai artificialintelligence aisuccessionism tescreal elonmusk eugenics transhumanism singularity singularitarianism effectivealtruism cosmism rationalism intelligence hierarchy 2026 religion mortality longtermism humanity humans technooptimism marcandreessen consciousness humanextinction purpose christianity humanism belief salvation transcendence politics technology human philosophy antihumanism antihumanhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b3fddb76f742/Content Violation2026-06-12T10:01:07+00:00
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/content-violation/
robertogrecoxioweiwang 2026 pierpaolopasoloni film dante inferno fascism italy italia falsepermissiveness antifascism society politics technology consumerism power ai artificialintelligence llms bytedance grok xai google kling generativeai genai seeedance chatgpt gemini hiltonals salò authoritarianism rolandbarthes siliconvalley technofascism nanobanana brutality mauriceblanchot marquisdesade nietzche baudelaire frictionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2c1677d660f5/To Dwell in Possibility • EQUATOR2026-06-12T09:21:09+00:00
https://www.equator.org/articles/to-dwell-in-possibility-vatican-AI
robertogreco2026 antoniospadaro gavinjacobson popeleoxiv magnificahumanitas catholicchurch catholicism ai artificialintelligence transhumanism donaldtrump humandignity humanism humans human dignity philosophy towerofbabel encyclicals llms popefrancis religion hannaharendt augustine staugustine saintaugustine popejohnpaulii popebenedictxiv technology freedom algorithms morality siliconvalley digitalcolonialism colonialism colonization globalsouth slavery laudatosi' christianity openai anthropic christopherolah ecology jrrtolkien peterthiel palantir mithril lordoftherings war venezuela iran dougburgum jdvance migration peace multilateralism disarmament theology violence popeleoxiii testembenevolentiae marcelofigueroa emilydickinsonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c794b5fc0340/Let’s save the Enlightenment baby from its muddied bathwater | Aeon Essays2026-06-12T02:11:29+00:00
https://aeon.co/essays/lets-save-the-enlightenment-baby-from-its-muddied-bathwater
robertogreco2026 enlightenment elianeglaser emmanueleze charlesmills kehindeandrews kant johnlocke voltaire davidhume henrydundas progress willhutton justice accountability socialfairness science siliconvalley peterthiel jdvance curtisyarvin darkenlightenment democracy equality inequality stevenpinker reason humanism globalsouth left leftists socialjustice davidbell economics power misinformation disinformation deepfakes ai artificialintelligence kateclanchy zizek intellectualhumility humility josephwright jeanlerondd'alembert montesquieu adamsmith jameshutton thomasreid mosesmendelssohn dorindaoutram marywollstonecraft angelasaini carllinnaeus humanity rousseau hierarchy hierarchies haiti china altruism humanitarianism jonathanisrael slavery abolition webdubois anticolonialism richardwhatmore discord frenchrevolution donaldtrump tolerance identitarians nationalism petergay ethnocentrism morality universalism objecttivity society corporations corporatism billionaires eleanorroosevelt humanrights pcchang totalitarianism thttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4596863a6be8/You Can and Should Blame Young People When They Act Like Lazy Cheaters, Actually2026-06-12T01:21:58+00:00
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-can-and-should-blame-young-people
robertogrecofreddiedeboer cheating ai artificialintelligence schools schooling learning howwelearn education 2026 genz generationz zoomers genalpha llms highered highereducation colleges universities academia ethics behavior responsibility discipline laziness effort workethic coercionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3b686dd63ac4/What Would It Look Like If the AI Bubble Popped?2026-06-12T00:31:48+00:00
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/what-would-it-look-like-if-the-ai
robertogrecomattstoller ai artificialintelligence aibubble bubbles finance 2008 globalfinancialcrisis greatrecession dotcombubble dotcombust investment stockmarket wallstreet nvidia google meta realestate economics crisis siliconvalley siliconvalleybank banks banking zohranmamdani federalreserve covid-19 coronavirus pandemic regulation deregulation newdeal greatdepression us deanbaker sarahmyserswest spacex ipos larrysummers robertrubin barackobama debt gigeconomy crypto cryptocurrencies jpmorgan florida housing datacenters taiwan southkorea korea consumers consumption wealtheffect privateequity ponzischemes berniemadoff donaldtrump fdic utlities politics openai samaltman amazon microsoft china hankpaulson japan russellsimmons fintech johnkennethgalbraith embezzelmenthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:31ae93981e59/Ten times | A Working Library2026-06-12T00:24:43+00:00
https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/ten-times
robertogreco[C]ertainly, companies will be interested in tracking their customers with AI, whether as targets of ads or as imagined thieves. For most companies, however, there is an even bigger target at which to point their AI technologies: the people they employ. When companies do so, the ostensible purpose is usually simply described as increasing productivity. After all, who could be opposed to getting more done with less work? Alas, increases in productivity are deeply interwoven with two other purposes: first, the automation of supervision and control—management. Second, the reduction of wages, for instance by increasing the pool of workers that can be hired for particular tasks—deskilling, outsourcing, and globalization. [Blix & Glimmer, Why We Fear AI, page 79]
It’s worth teasing something apart here. When workers talk about increasing their productivity, they often speak of getting more work done in the same amount of time. As they develop skill, or as the work becomes more automated or more regular, they are able to do more of it. But when companies talk about productivity, they are much more likely to be talking about the cost of the work. The descriptions are, at some level, equivalent, but they emerge from very different political standpoints and have entirely different impacts on people’s lives.
For example, the automation of management improves productivity by reducing the number of managers needed to keep work moving, at times even down to zero. As Blix and Glimmer note, Amazon warehouse workers may find their experience of management is entirely subsumed under automated video surveillance in which there is little human oversight—or, in which the human oversight is itself automated and distant. But we see the same automation drive in more so-called professional labor, too, e.g., when a software engineer is evaluated on the number of pull requests they submit, or a doctor is measured by the change in blood pressure of their patients. Both moves replace human judgement with a purportedly objective system that can do the work of supervision without a supervisor. If when you look for productivity increases you’re only looking for people doing more work, you may miss the fact that a lot of those people are no longer around.
Likewise, we are wont to assume that deskilling looks like someone doing more menial work after most of their work has been automated away. The copywriter who once generated sentences and ideas from their brilliant, creative mind but is now tasked with babysitting a sycophantic LLM that spits out uncanny but plausible-sounding versions of the same is an obvious victim. But deskilling shows up in other ways, too: the copywriter who retains their job as an actual writer—because such work remains valuable underneath an avalanche of slop—finds that they are pressured to do more and more work, at lower and lower wages, because there are legions of other people who can do it, too. The deskilling occurs at the level of the community, not only the individual.
In other words, a synonym for “increase in productivity” is “fewer workers.”
This is the real-life version of the industry fable of the so-called “10x engineer,” a mythical engineer that allegedly adds 10 times the value of a normal one to a company, and the real mechanism behind it: the value that is “added” is literally the wages that the other nine workers are no longer paid, and which thus remain on the credit side of the company’s ledger. [Blix & Glimmer, Why We Fear AI, page 107]
This puts those now-ubiquitous AI mandates in a slightly different light: if every engineer (or copywriter, or doctor, etc.) is required to develop the skill to use these tools, then all of them are eminently replaceable by anyone else. So long as lots of other potential 10x workers are waiting in the wings, there will be downward pressure on wages for that lone, last-standing worker. Maybe, they think, if they work really hard and become that mythical 10x engineer, surrounded by an army of obsequious agents bent to their will, they will succeed in earning all of the wages of the nine workers they replaced. But ten times zero is still zero."]]>mandybrown 2026 ai artificialintelligence productivity efficiency llmshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fc82cca14b28/A Much-Needed Reaction to The Dark Enlightenment - Front Porch Republic2026-06-11T23:20:25+00:00
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/06/a-much-needed-reaction-to-the-dark-enlightenment/
robertogrecoWe can secede by removing children from state-run schools, converting currency into gold or cryptocurrency, relocating to states with lower taxes, obtaining a second passport, or expatriating to a tax haven. We can secede, and many have, by joining gated communities to create private governments in miniature.
If laws get in the way of tech oligarchs’ desires, they can “exit” and find a new land where they make their own rules. One in which the “creators” of the bold synthetic future are singularly capable of making history. At its most extreme, its advocates propose breaking society into tiny states, each governed by a CEO (what Slobodian calls zones). Some proponents support racial separation, with the belief that “elites” will enhance the IQs of their progeny if they associate and breed with each other. This dark enlightenment view envisions a future where dominant humans merge with machines and achieve superintelligence.
It is no accident that the Pope opens the encyclical with a contrast between two familiar biblical passages—the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of the city wall in Nehemiah. In the Tower of Babel story, the Pope highlights the fallacy of building a tower that could reach heaven, but he locates its problematic nature not as an arrogance of wanting to know the true nature of God, but as hubris through expecting that humans can create an artifact that overrides the diversity of the human creation. The other story Pope Leo invokes is the book of Nehemiah, one that foregrounds our shared obligations to one another and the importance of the entire community in building.
I read this passage and imagined that, as the kids say (or said? I can’t keep up with the latest lingo), Pope Leo was “subtweeting” Peter Thiel. When Thiel proclaims, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he is offering a view that the diverse political community may undermine his ability to build his own Tower of Babel. Freedom for the dark enlightenment school suggests that if calls to slow down AI development conflict with elite aims, those calls must be sidelined for the good of technological advance.
This desire to reduce liberalism to economic liberalism is taken to its extreme in the dark enlightenment. This philosophy advocates the acceleration of capitalism and technology even if that goes against popular will or liberal rights protections. Because proponents of this view prioritize the agency of techno-capitalism, they advocate for the rule of techno-corporate power unimpeded by a view of democracy that restricts innovation and freedom.
This perspective is amplified by Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” where he chides those skeptical of AI as lacking in boldness. His call to “conquer” nature through technological advance has Tower of Babel echoes. When he declares in his manifesto: “we believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives cowering in fear of the lightning bolt; we are the apex predator. The lightning works for us,” he is placing a dangerously outsized faith in the ability of science and technology to solve the world’s problems.
The idea that liberal democracy and the messiness of diversity of opinion produces feckless outcomes is not a new Idea. Dark enlightenment thinkers are inspired by readings (mis-readings) of a broad set of thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, Bataille, and the Italian Futurists. Undoubtedly a dark enlightenment view appeals to some because it is transgressive and shocking. There’s a punk element to upsetting the normies. With Italian Futurism, there is something thrilling about the promise of living on the moon or having robot helpers. Compared to the messy and frustrating work of consensus building in liberal democracies, techo-authoritarianism has the effervescence of technological advance. How does sclerotic bureaucracy and deliberation compete with “move fast and break things”?
Yet competing with it is exactly what Pope Leo is asking us to do. In the section “Building for the common good,” Pope Leo calls for
accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected. Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations.
Our current tech-oligarchs aren’t the Carnegies building libraries and museums for the public good. They aren’t even the Bill Gates of a decade ago, investing in mosquito nets to prevent malaria. For that matter they aren’t even who they were ten years ago when Jeff Bezos was investing millions to work to eradicate global climate change.
It is worth noting that the encyclical is not anti-AI. It gives the remarkable advances of large language models over the last three years their due. But the important thing it does is situate these advances within a broader call to ensure that they serve the common good, even if that vision of the common good conflicts with those drawn to the dark enlightenment."]]>josémarichal popeleoxiv encyclicals 2026 darkenlightenment society technofascism politics quinnslobodian democracy capitalism oligarchy technooligarchy peterthiel marcandreessen technooptimism ai artificialintelligence italianfuturists italianfuturism futurism authoritarianism technofeudalism nietzsche deleuze gilledeleuze deleuze&guattari guattari félixguattari bataille jeffbezos llms billgates climate climatechange globalwarming commongood catholicchurch catholicism accelerationism tescreal transhumanism singularitarianism singularity cosmism extropianism effectivealtruism rationalism longtermism crypto cryptocurrencies magnificahumanitas towerofbabel elitism freedomhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8978fa1c2db5/Reflections on the Machine - The Ideas Letter2026-06-11T23:07:39+00:00
https://www.theideasletter.org/issue/reflections-on-the-machine/
robertogrecoain artificialintelligence data society popeleoxiv magnificahumanitas xiaoweiwang selinaxu 2026leifweatherby tylershoemaker benrecht kendraschaefer centralization mentalhealth psychology china us saschaaltmandubrul rationality rationalism objectivity human humans llms ai politics policy technology luhangabel pandemic covid-19 coronavirus optimization irrationality humanism pierpaolopasolini capitalism tidiness fascism control louis-jacques-mandédaguerre photography meaning meaningmaking encyclicals catholicchurch catholicismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f11702e7c92b/Xia Jia: The AI Story Is Not Done | The MIT Press Reader2026-06-11T23:04:08+00:00
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/xia-jia-the-ai-story-is-not-done/
robertogrecoxiajia 2026 writing howwewrite ai artificialintelligence listening confiding psychology counseling liucixin technologyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:48018ea3c6cf/How needing others became a source of shame for Americans | Psyche Ideas2026-06-11T22:19:47+00:00
https://psyche.co/ideas/how-needing-others-became-a-source-of-shame-for-americans
robertogrecous interdependence self-reliance individualism psychology susanmatt 2026 society shame chatbots ai artificialintelligence ruggedindividualism lukefernandez technology loneliness rebeccadickinson radio telephones history dalecarnegie normanvincentpeale ralphwaldoemerson thoreau zanfavero daragami replika companionship sociabilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e1f974c6d0da/What is Nick Land’s philosophy of accelerationism really? | Aeon Essays2026-06-11T21:43:57+00:00
https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-nick-lands-philosophy-of-accelerationism-really
robertogrecoaccelerationism nickland ai artificialintelligence computers computing 2026 capitalism technology innovation philosophy benjaminnoys imperialism apartheid southafrica modernity resistance kant humanity hegel jacquesderrida edmundhusserl death nietzsche georgesbataille siliconvalley singularity singularitarianism tescreal doomers williamgibson ijgood gillesdeleuze deleuze guattari félixguattari deleuze&guattari phenomenology globalsouth commoditization immanuelkant francisfukuyama margaretthatcher ronaldreagan denxiaoping cybernetics arthurschopenhauer otherness curtisyarvin darkenlightenment menciusmoldbug markfisher jakechapman dinoschapman heidegger sadieplant kode9 ccru garrytan palantir marcandreessen brentontarrant technocapitalism stargateproject humanextinction georgtrakl authoritarianism vincentlê vincentle freudhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6ab27ca0351e/Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, Episode 78 - Bernie Goes Down the X-Risk Rabbithole - DAIR-Tube2026-06-10T01:36:34+00:00
https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/jV5u1DVL4bGuy9vm46KSWw
robertogrecoai artificialintelligence doomerism 2026 berniesanders existentialrisk aihype policy nathaliemaréchal emilybender alexhanna effectivealtruismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c8c8ec92b09f/"Tech-Driven Prosperity & Right-Wing Racist Politics": Quinn Slobodian on Elon Musk and SpaceX IPO - YouTube2026-06-09T21:55:54+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPMzjr39F1g
robertogreco2026 quinnslobodian elonmusk spacex power wealth ideology politics us rightwing farright governance government democracy infrastructure technofascism ai artificialintelligence business technology tescrealhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8eec5576a11c/Opinion | My Students Can’t Read2026-06-09T07:17:42+00:00
https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-students-cant-read
robertogrecotylerjagt reading education highered highereducation colleges universities ai artificialintelligence academia attention teens literacy smartphones research society 2026 chatbots llms chatgpt thinking howwethink howwereadhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5539612f7925/Opinioni | Educare è un atto politico | Corriere.it2026-06-09T07:15:18+00:00
https://www.corriere.it/opinioni/26_maggio_22/educare-e-un-atto-politico-8a22c14f-d58c-4a60-b3cf-807949c16xlk.shtml
robertogrecoschools schooling education democracy francescoprofumo 2026 politics reggioemilia society covilsociety civics politicaleducation polarization war fragmentization cohesion complexity difference differences diveristy conflict dialog citizens publicspace socialmedia reactionaries reflection simplification purpose inequality collaboration respect community inclusion inclusivity pedagogy howweteach teaching lorismalaguzzi ai artificialintelligence empathy criticalthinking cooperation responsibility culturalcriticism culture socialcohesionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0e68dd3bd533/Trauma is a Time Machine: A Cinematic Primer with Kwasu D. Tembo - YouTube2026-06-08T05:32:55+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1-hhZUcGJY
robertogrecoKwasu D. Tembo unites approaches from disciplines as wide-ranging as physics, mathematics, cinema, philosophy, and media theory to pose critical questions concerning time, change, and (un)becoming in contemporary time-travel cinema.
In his analyses of 21st-century cinematic time-travel narratives, Tembo situates human life in time as a palimpsest, with time acting as scriptor and stylus. A time machine, then, functions as a fantasy that allows for this pace to be slowed or accelerated so as to appear entirely suspended, with the potentials of the “Now” (re)opened to the traveler.
As the manipulation of time lends the traveler increased agency-and perhaps the conditions to see themselves more clearly amid a claustrophobic sea of information and content-Tembo contends that we must carefully consider the psycho-emotional affectivity of both the motivations and the potentially traumatic consequences of such a jarring shift in perspective. The results lend critical insight into human understandings of how we experience time and, ultimately, what these understandings permit and disallow in terms of how (it is) to be in time.
Phasmid Press: https://phasmidpress.org/ "]]>timetravel film fiction sciencefiction scifi trauma acidhorizon 2026 kwasutembo philosophy death temporality therapy experience healing lajetée chrismarker agency freewill determinism nihilism physics filmtheory value chronomics responsibility capitalism longnow accelerationism charlesdickens now present labor work nostalgia backtothefuture gillesdeleuze deleuze robertasparrow donnydarko enternalsunsetofthespotlessmind twelevemonkeys coherence inception interstellar primer runlolarun upstreamcolor horsegirl looper minorityreport mrnobody thejacket momento anotherearth predestination meetcute everythingeverywhereallatonce thebeast projectalmanac timecrimes timelapse safetynotguaranteed darkcity tenet sourcecode itfollows chronologicaltime continuities continuity discretion memory change individualism choice improvisation contingency disruption looping quantumphysics stephenwolfram loops repetion complexity luddism neoluddism evolution henribergson andreasmalm wimcarton future entropy computing computation ghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:98ea222f781e/The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun2026-06-08T04:14:48+00:00
https://syndekit.substack.com/p/the-butlerian-jihad-has-begun
robertogrecocharlesmcbride syndekit butlerianjihad ai artificialintelligence computers computing 2026 danielmoreno-gama opeanai samaltman pauseai stopai resistance popeleoxiv magnificahumanitas dune frankherbert technology technoracy luddites luddism neoluddites neoluddism power corruption oppression humans encyclicals catholicchurch catholicism rerumnovarum popeleoxiii workers work labor industrialization industrialrevolution dehumanizationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:18ba6c5f97d0/Is AI Profitable Yet?2026-06-07T20:48:15+00:00
https://isaiprofitable.com/
robertogrecoai artificialintelligence economy money business economics google anthropic circularfunding amazon microsoft openai nvidia deepseek cohereai mistralai xai spacex oracle metahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1b39c6fcbf9b/Pluralistic: Refining humanity (05 Jun 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow2026-06-07T00:57:07+00:00
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/05/defining-humanity/
robertogrecoBlackadder: Let's start at the beginning, shall we? First: 'A.' How would you define 'A'?
Prince George: Ohh…'A' (continues this in background). Oh, I love this! I love this! Quizzies! Erm, hang on, it’s coming. Ooh, crikey, erm, oh yes, I’ve got it!
B: What?
PG: Well, it doesn’t really mean anything, does it?
B: Good. So we're well on the way, then. "'A'; impersonal pronoun; doesn't really mean anything."
I mean, what does "A" mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has more than a dozen definitions, and just the first one runs to more than 1,500 words:
https://archive.org/details/the-oxford-english-dictionary-all-volumes_202208/The%20Oxford%20English%20Dictionary%20Volume%201%20-%20A%20to%20B/page/n25/mode/2up
Now, normal life involves a lot of explaining things to other people. You have to explain your problems to customer service reps, who have to explain why they can't solve those problems to you. You need to explain to your loved ones why you want to leave your toothbrush in the shower, and they have to explain why they hate having your toothbrush in the shower. These explanation-exchanges teach you as much as they teach the person you're locked in dialog with. The reasons for leaving your toothbrush in the shower may seem totally obvious to you, and your partner's inability to understand this reveals the assumptions you've never even considered.
For the past four decades, an increasing proportion of the population have spent an increasing proportion of their lives explaining things to machines that have no assumptions or shared context: computers. What we call "programming a computer" is really "breaking down a thing that seems obvious to you into increasingly simple instructions that will be followed to the letter."
Computers are like the genies of legend, bloody-minded literalists who will do exactly what you say, in the way that is perversely furthest from what you mean. To get a computer to do anything, you must first understand it to a degree that far exceeds the understanding needed to explain something to any other human, even a small child.
To take just one example: yesterday, I was on a plane, and the seatback video started cycling through its video-on-demand offerings. All of the movie titles that began with "the" were rewritten to put "the" at the end of the title (for example, "The Sting" was written as "Sting, The"). It's obvious why the system's designer had done this: we expect to find movies whose titles begin with "The" alphabetized under their second word ("The Sting" should appear between "Star Wars" and "Story of a Love Affair"; not between "The Godfather" and "The Untouchables").
I remember when I learned this from my elementary school's teacher-librarian, when I was seven and my class got a tutorial on the school library's card catalog. The librarian explained this principle to us in a matter of minutes, as part of a longer set of instructions, and still, it stuck with me forever.
But here we are, 48 years later, and we still haven't standardized a way to get computers to grasp this foundational principle of alphabetization. Many different databases handle this, to be sure, but it's so inconsistent across so many platforms that someone at the head-end of the video distribution system that feeds American Airlines' VOD system decided, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna put the 'The' at the end of these titles."
Computers are stupid, in other words, which means that the people who program them have to have smarts enough for both of them. Unfortunately for our entire species and civilization, the software industry has historically valued skill at writing efficient and reliable software over writing software that adequately reflects reality. There is an entire genre of lists that illustrate the problem with this; the "falsehoods programmers believe" lists:
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
From "names of people" and "street addresses"; from "prices" to "time"; from "email addresses" to "phone numbers"; the "awesome falsehoods" lists are awesome because they reveal how much subtlety and complexity is lurking in these seemingly simple and intuitive concepts. This subtlety and complexity might never emerge through the process of trying to teach a person about them, but when you try to teach a computer about them, you have to confront them in all their awesome fuggliness.
That's because humans have context, agency and flexibility. Sure, the person who designs a form with a blank for "name" might never have met a Malagasy person whose first name is Randriamananjararadofabesata, but in the pre-digital world, when Madagascar Slim met a public official who had to transcribe his name onto a paper form, that official could simply draw an arrow in the margin next to the "name" blank, turn the form over, and write out all 28 characters on the reverse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Slim
Computers can't do this. If the programmer doesn't know about Malagasy first names, the computer doesn't know about them either, and the only person who can "teach" the computer about these names is a programmer with access to the code for the database, who has to manually alter the code, compile it, and distribute it to everyone who uses it.
This is partly why digitization has been accompanied by a rise in people asserting that they exist on spectrums rather than in binaries. There were always people whose names, genders, races, and other biographic "immutables" changed, or failed to fit within the blanks on the forms. When those people's realities ran up against failures in the system's abstractions, they could petition a bureaucrat to turn the paper over and write an explanatory note, or to write really small to fill in a blank:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes
Getting a human official to turn the paper over and write something that didn't fit in the blank is a personal challenge. It requires that a subject convince the person who controls the form to make an exception. This isn't always easy, but officials on the front lines necessarily deal with reality, and they can't get their jobs done unless they're capable of interpreting the necessarily incomplete procedures they operate under to fit things as they really are.
But a computer doesn't have any agency or context or flexibility. If the computer says your name isn't valid, you can't argue the computer into accepting it. The only way to get a digital world to acknowledge your existence is to campaign for systemic change. A trans person might (with great difficulty, to be sure) convince the regional registrar to white-out an old X on one "gender" box and mark a new X in the other box. But the only way to make that change in a software system that has been programmed to treat the "gender" field as immutable is to change society itself.
In this way, computers are machines for teaching us what we don't know about ourselves. They require that we interrogate and faithfully recreate our personal tacit knowledge, and they require that our societies interrogate their tacit presumptions as well. When you are forced to turn your tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, you're also forced to confront how many broken assumptions lurk inside your reasoning. At best, it's a clarifying process.
Computers don't just clarify what we know and how we organize our society: they also clarify what we are. There are lots of things that we have supposed that a computer would never do, because we believed that these things required something that only humans could do.
Take chess: there are more possible chess games than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe, so brute-forcing chess by running all possible games is a technological impossibility. The best human chess players do something we don't quite understand, mixing their recollections of previous games with rules-of-thumb about the best strategies, with "creativity" (whatever that is) that lets them spontaneously develop new strategies. We can easily get a computer to memorize all the known-good chess sequences and all the rules of thumb, but we don't know what "creativity" is, so we can't encode it as a series of instructions.
But thanks to breakthroughs in machine learning and its successor, "deep learning," we have created chess-playing software that can beat every human, partly by assaying gambits that we would term "creative" if they originated with a human player.
What we make of this new fact is controversial. For many people (myself included), this is a refinement: it tells me that behaviors that are indistinguishable from "creativity" can, at least some of the time, be created by mechanical processes, and the mere fact that a machine does something that appears "creative" doesn't mean that machines are human.
For others, the fact that a mechanical system can evince a behavior that we would call "creative" in a human doesn't mean that we defined "creativity" too broadly, it means that we defined "human" too narrowly, and now we have made a machine that is, at least partially, a person.
I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw, for reasons that Ted Chiang sets out with luminous brilliance in a recent Atlantic article entitled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious":
https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/
(If you're hitting the paywall on that one and you're on Firefox, you can try my favorite trick: switch to "Reader Mode" and hit "reload" – your mileage may vary.)
For all the reasons Chiang articulates, I think that drawing the "personhood" line to include machines is a technical mistake, but it's worse than that. Admitting machines to the "personhood" club is a tactical mistake, on par with the mistake we made when we admitted corporations to the personhood club. We should absolutely consider expanding personhood to incorporate living things, including animals and ecosystems, but at the same time, we must purge these dead, artificial constructs from the club:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration
There is a way in which the recognition of new capabilities in machines parallels the recognition of new capabilities in animals other than ourselves. When those animals manage to do things that we once thought were the exclusive province of humans, we (should) take that as an opportunity to refine our conception of humanity. We're not "the animals that use tools" or "the animals that make plans" or "the animals that recognize themselves in mirrors," because there are other animals that do those things. We are an "animal that uses tools"; not the animal that does so.
Likewise, if we thought that some activity was unique to humans, or to living beings, and we manage to get a machine to replicate that activity, we should revise our view of the activity – not our view of the machine. Creative breakthroughs in chess are not "a thing that requires a human mind," they're "things that can be done by human minds and by machines."
Edsger Dijkstra once famously asked "can a submarine swim?"
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html
Submarines and fish and humans and dolphins all propel themselves through water by different means. But when an animal swims, it does something that is different from what a submarine does. The submarine has no intention, while (complex multicellular) animals swim to pursue goals. Building machines that propel themselves through water is very useful, but it's not the same thing as creating life. In some ways, it's better than creating life: for one thing, we owe other living things moral consideration that is not due to machines. Harnessing a machine to accomplish our own goals is more morally clear than controlling living things to achieve those goals. By the same token, creating machines that can do some of the tasks that we ask of other humans can be the superior moral course. I'd rather have a machine remove mines from a minefield than getting humans to do it.
But beyond this moral relief, creating machines is a fantastic way to learn more about ourselves – making explicit our tacit knowledge, our implicit social assumptions, and the limitations of our conception of what sets us apart from the rest of the universe.
One way in which AI is exceptional is in how it undermines this principle. Conventional software techniques struggled to produce a program that could identify objects in photographs. It turns out that defining all the visual correlates of "cat" is even harder than defining the letter "A." Deep learning techniques solved this previous insoluble problem by relieving us of the job of making explicit all the implicit factors that we deploy when distinguishing an image of a "cat" from an image of a "dog" or a "tiger" (or a "tractor").
Instead of forcing humans to engage in introspection until we'd made a list of every factor we use to identify cat pictures, we simply identified pictures of cats and fed them to a program that tried to find the commonalities among them. The more pictures we fed to that program, the better it got at identifying cats. Today, we have programs that can reliably distinguish an image of a cat from an image of a tiger cub!
This represents a major breakthrough in the power of computers to perform useful work for us, but it's also a huge regression in computers' role in forcing us to make our tacit thought processes explicit through systematic introspection. That's probably fine: we didn't create computers to make us introspect, we created them to do useful work for us. All things considered, it might be better to have genies who grant our wishes according to the spirit of our words, not their letter.
AI may not force us to render our implicit thoughts as explicit instructions, but it absolutely forces us to reconsider and narrow the realm of the numinous. Our own creativity is still delightful and important, but the fact that this squishy, amazing process can (sometimes) be replicated by procedural machines changes the definition of living things. We're "a thing that can produce creative outcomes" but not "the things that can produce creative outcomes." The machines aren't being creative (any more than a submarine is swimming) but they're outputting things that we used to only achieve by means of creativity.
An AI that does something that used to require creativity is fulfilling my favorite of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has not done before":
https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
Just as bosses fantasize about AI bringing about a worksite without workers, and Zuckerberg is trying to build social media without socializing, and politicians want a bureaucracy without bureaucrats, we can sometimes use AI to produce creative outcomes without creativity:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb
That isn't to say that AI art is any good. AI may produce things that are aesthetically interesting, but it can't produce things that mean anything:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/02/must-we-pretend/
But art isn't the only realm that we apply creativity to. There are plenty of outcomes that we've always believed we couldn't bring about without applying creativity. AI – like all software – is making us realize that an ingredient we once deemed uniquely essential turns out to have substitutes. AI can sometimes accomplish things without us explaining how we do them. That relieves us of a useful but difficult chore – but in so doing, it forces us (yet again!) to revisit what sorts of things are needed to do the things that matter to us, and therefore, what makes us special."]]>corydoctorow 2026 humanity rowanatkinson blackladder samueljohnson explanation computers computing literalism alphabetization databases civilization software digitization systems systemsthinking binaries spectrums agency context flexibility society societies chess creativity deeplearning ai artificialintelligence consciousness redchiang personhood corporations corporatism animals tools. submarines language morality introspection brianeno peterschmidt obliquestrategeies markzuckerberg social socializing socialization art generativeai genaihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:81331b45a7d7/AI, Argentina and the Antichrist: Thiel’s Vision Blooms2026-06-07T00:51:08+00:00
https://www.thenerdreich.com/ai-argentina-and-the-antichrist-thiels-vision-blooms/
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